Ophelia was smiling too, until she came round and saw my face, and then she paused and said, “Well, I guess that makes things easier for me,” in a brisk tone, the smile folding up and packing itself away like a raincoat made unnecessary by a change in the weather. “But you’re probably freaked out. Do you want to go somewhere more public?”
What I wanted more exclusively with every passing second was to get as far away from her as I possibly could. She wasn’t like Jack. Jack had been a tiny pathetic worm of a parasite just trying to gnaw himself a way to survival. She was a pillar of darkness in a clear sky, the promise of mushroom clouds billowing, with all the power of New York enclave behind her. She was what I’d been trying not to become, my whole life, and I couldn’t imagine anything I could do against her. I desperately wanted an ocean of mana; if Alfie had offered me the London power-sharer again in that moment, at the cost of having him tag around behind me his entire life, I’d have taken it in a heartbeat, yes, just give it to me; yes, please, hurry.
“Take a few breaths,” Ophelia advised, when I didn’t answer her. “I’m not looking to start a fight in my living room. In my worst-case scenario, you’d destroy my enclave. In the best case, you’d be dead. And I don’t want you dead. Why don’t you sit down? Would you like some tea?”
She delivered all of this with the air of a mildly beleaguered teacher in a junior school—not the slightest hitch when proposing either that I might destroy New York enclave, or that she might kill me. The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn’t really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do. It was even reassuring, in an odd way. But not enough for me to want to sit down and have a cuppa, pretending there wasn’t something worse than a maw-mouth across from me.
“Have you been destroying the enclaves?” I blurted out, a brief shade away from panic.
She tilted her head. “You mean that, don’t you?” I just stared at her. “No, I haven’t been.” She didn’t even try to say it in any kind of convincing way—not indignant or even urgent. She simply said it, and left me with the dampening impression that I was being a silly goose: what use was it to make her say anything about it? If she had been, and she didn’t want me to know, she would just have lied without the slightest difficulty. For that matter, if she’d told me she had been doing it, that might have been a lie just as easily, for her own reasons. I wasn’t getting any information out of her; she was just making noises to be polite.
And what if she was the one smashing enclaves apart? I could certainly have believed it. She wouldn’t have batted an eye at ripping London open just to make it look less likely that New York was behind it when she went after Beijing. But so what? Was I going to loudly declare that I was going to stop her wicked plans? In my best case, if I managed to convince her that I meant it, she’d come at me immediately, of course, and I was standing in the middle of her enclave, in her very own house, with a significant fraction of all the people in the world I cared about—and bloody hell, Liesel had somehow joined that group, which would teach me to shag people I didn’t want to like—in range. I couldn’t come up with a single idea for how to get us out of here if Ophelia meant to stop us, at least not any idea that didn’t include my turning into her, or even worse.
She waited long enough to let all of that sink in, more or less forcing me to quell my own nascent panic, then added, “Balthasar tells me that you’d like to go back into the Scholomance.”
And I did still want that, but I wasn’t taking anything from this woman. “I’ll manage it on my own,” I said. “We’ll just be going.”
She gave a very faint sigh. “I don’t think you will. You don’t have much time, and you’re not getting the mana anywhere else.”
I would’ve told her I wasn’t taking a drop of anything she called mana, but Liesel broke in on us. “Why do we not have time?” she demanded, and that did stop me, because it was clearly something I needed to know.
Ophelia turned away and went to the nearest couch and sat down; she reached out a hand and a glass of water was waiting on the small table next to it for her, cold enough to dew the sides. “Keeping the Scholomance going takes about fifty lilims per day, per seat.”
The number sounded like nonsense. We don’t measure mana on an individual level; it’s too wobbly for that. The same thirty push-ups that build you a shield spell’s worth of mana one day won’t build you enough to light a candle the next. You just build as much as you can, and when you need to cast a spell, either you have enough mana or you don’t. But on the major enclave level, you can start to average it out over the two thousand wizards working for you, all day every day, and then make yourself a budget, and plans. And in that kind of a budget, fifty lilims is roughly equivalent to the mana you’d let a hired wizard take home in a year—the amount that’s twice what they could manage to raise on their own working outside an enclave. So she was talking about ludicrous amounts, vats of mana just pouring into the school, every single day.
“And your plan worked,” Ophelia went on. “Every maleficaria survey in the world is reporting a giant drop in sightings over the last week, since graduation. The big one in Tokyo just came out this morning, showing a drop of ninety-two percent from the week before graduation. With these enclave attacks happening, a lot of people want to ditch the school permanently and keep all their mana at home. We’ve already got fifteen minor enclaves who haven’t put in their contributions for the month.” She shook her head as if it disappointed her. “Fortunately, the major enclaves can’t pull out that easily. Anyone with more than five seats had to sign on to the long-term contracts, and they can’t stop the flow unless the Board of Governors votes to close down the school. But the way things are going right now, about half of the school’s mana supply will be gone by next week.”
She didn’t have to spell it out further: if the Scholomance needed that much mana to function, every single day, then I couldn’t possibly raise enough mana on my own to get back inside. I wouldn’t even be able to try and fail, change my mind, and come back here to ask her for it after all. Not even New York enclave could give me enough to open it up again, once everyone else pulled out.
But that didn’t mean the whole thing would be gone, either. If it was mana and belief that kept places from falling away into the void, then pockets of the Scholomance would be lingering on for years if not decades. And Patience would ooze its way into one of those pockets and sit there as long as it lasted, digesting slowly away.
“I’ve been trying to put together a team to go inside myself,” Ophelia continued. “I’m having a hard time getting one, and I’m already flat-out offering seats on the open market at this point. So I really don’t want to have a fight with you. I want you to do exactly what you want to do anyway.”
“Why?” I said. If she had the gall to tell me it was because of Orion, because she loved Orion, and wanted to save him pain—
She didn’t. She only tilted her head slightly, a clear-eyed raptor examining a potential bit of prey. “Does it matter?” she asked me, and what she was asking was Do you need me to tell you another story about it? My gorge rose. I wished she had told me that it was for Orion, after all.
I might have said, No, thanks, give me what I need and I’ll be on my way, just to get away from her, from the horrible understanding that this had been in Orion’s life, the poisoned ground he’d had to grow in. I wanted to go and do something clean and simple like fight my way through a horde of maleficaria and kill the world’s largest maw-mouth. But I couldn’t do that.