“Looking for more efficient uses of malia, is that it?” I said, nauseated. I didn’t want to believe she was in earnest, but there was something hideously plausible about it all. A New Yorker really didn’t need malia. She’d got rid of her own anima on purpose, probably for some sort of horrible massive working, or maybe just so she could work with malia without the distraction of getting hurt. And she surely rationed her malia usage as carefully as Liu ever had, never taking more than precisely necessary, refusing all the side benefits on offer. It explained why she didn’t look like a maleficer, in either direction.
She’d more or less turned herself into the Scholomance. The school hadn’t cared—hadn’t been able to care—about any of us one at a time. The numbers had been its only implacable concern, and so it had marched us ruthlessly through an inhuman triage process, doing the best that it could. Only Ophelia didn’t even believe the stupid unbelievable lie that the school had swallowed, the mad ambition written too effectively into its steel and brass, the one that had sent it grabbing for the chance that Orion and I had provided: to protect all the wise-gifted children of the world. She wasn’t going to try to do that. She perfectly understood that some children had to die.
Ophelia sighed. She put aside her glass of cool clear water and stood up again and came towards me, my whole body clenching at the approach, but she stopped at arm’s length, looking up into my face. “El, you’re clearly a very nice girl,” she said, possibly the first time in my entire life that anyone had said that to me sincerely, and wasn’t it delightful to find someone speaking from a vantage point that made it possible. “I’m glad Orion met you. You won’t believe me, but I do love him. I always wanted him to be happy. If I could have made him happy—I would have.” Her face wavered oddly, almost more bewildered than sad, as if she found it hard to believe herself. “But that’s part of the problem, of course. We’re all greedy, but children make it easier to be. We feel it’s only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else’s mouth.”
Then she held out a small flat square box to me, about the size to hold a makeup compact: a box she hadn’t had in her hands a moment before, with the enclave’s symbol on it, the gates with the starburst behind them. “I can’t make you go back to the Scholomance if you won’t. But I can give you the mana, and I can give you the location. And no one else will go. So it’s up to you.”
* * *
What I ought to have done, which I knew perfectly well, was shove the box back at her and run away and give up on the whole idea. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get Orion away from Patience, and I couldn’t get him away from Ophelia either. I couldn’t rewrite his whole life, snatch him out of his cradle and carry him across the ocean to Mum, or just to some decent person. I couldn’t even take back every rude and nasty thing I’d ever said to him. I would have done that, if I could have; the memory of every word stung in my brain like bees. He’d only liked me in the first place because I hadn’t been trying to make up to him, but I could have simply been nice, without wanting anything of him, and surely that would have worked, too. But it was too late. The only thing I could do for him anymore was kill him, and everyone else trapped inside Patience along with him. So I had to do that. I had to do the only thing I could do for him.
Horribly, I almost had to be glad that he hadn’t made it out, because he wouldn’t have come to me. Ophelia wouldn’t have kept him with love and appeals to his loyalty and conscience. She’d just have kept him by any means necessary—a compulsion or a collar or anything it took. He was one of those more efficient solutions, after all. You couldn’t have asked for better. A brilliant engine of a maleficaria-killer, who dumped the power back into the enclave share after? I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe she’d have made Orion happy if she could have. I could believe, at a stretch, that she’d have liked him to be happy on the side, and had been sorry that she couldn’t find a way to make him so, with her toys and obedient friends and flash cards. But not that she’d have chosen to make him happy, if it had really been a choice between his happiness and having the use of him.
Otherwise surely she wouldn’t have got him in the first place. A slayer of monsters who’d put himself on the line for every stranger who came into reach; who’d been, besides that, a good boy, who’d tried to please his mum and dad and be kind and polite to other children even when they blatantly only wanted to use him—I’d been absolutely certain that his parents and his enclave had programmed it into him, but Ophelia surely hadn’t cared about anything of the sort. It had all been Orion, after all. Just like Mum, who with her infinite kindness had got herself a sullen wrathful death-sorceress child for her pains, Ophelia had got a selfless noble hero, who’d never made a single calculated move in his life, who’d saved children indiscriminately and without the slightest consideration of how he’d throw off the balance by doing it. Who’d been kind even to the girl who’d snapped his head off for daring to save her.
And if he’d made it out, and he hadn’t come to Wales…I’d have written him off, in my selfish guarded pride, and told myself I didn’t mind it, pretended that I wasn’t sorry. I would have abandoned him to her, to the enclave. He couldn’t have trusted me to come and save him.
Maybe he’d known, on some level, what he was going back to, if he went. Ophelia had surely put on a good show for him, and Orion hadn’t been able to tell a maleficer from a doorknob. But he’d lived with her all his life. Maybe he’d guessed, by the end. The Scholomance is the best place I’ve ever been, he’d said to me. Now I knew why that was true. And so now I felt, with a horrible sharp stab, that maybe—when the moment came—he’d chosen not to go home. He’d chosen a final blaze of self-sacrifice, turning to fight the indestructible monster, to avoid going home to the one he couldn’t bear to fight. I didn’t know if that was true, but it felt nauseatingly possible, in a way that filled in the question I still couldn’t answer, hadn’t allowed myself to ask: why hadn’t he come out?
But I hadn’t asked that question partly because it was useless. It didn’t matter why, not anymore. I hadn’t got him out. I couldn’t save him now. But I still had to go and do the last little thing for him that I could. And after that—I’d have to decide if I needed to come back here and try to destroy Ophelia. I was more than halfway convinced she was the one destroying the enclaves at this point. If her problem with enclaves was getting enclavers to share, then terrifying them all with the threat of some mysterious indiscriminate maleficer who was going to destroy their enclaves without warning would be an excellent strategy. Was that justification for killing her? If she was responsible for killing everyone in Bangkok enclave, everyone in Salta, all the people who’d died in London and Beijing? Even if I couldn’t be sure, she was certainly going to do something absolutely horrible, sooner or later.
I could just see Mum reaching out to put her hand on my forehead to make that thought go away, to make all those thoughts go away. But Mum wasn’t with me, and I couldn’t even call her, because if I did, she’d tell me what I already knew, that I shouldn’t take anything from Ophelia. And I couldn’t bear to hear it exactly because I knew it was right. But I still couldn’t make myself hand back the box that held the only chance of the last scraggly miserable thing I could do for Orion.
Ophelia had waited for a bit, I suppose to be sure I wasn’t about to throw her box at her head or out through the windows, but after I didn’t do that for long enough, she decided that I was keeping it, which apparently I was. She nodded politely to us all and went to give Balthasar a quick kiss, exactly like an ordinary loving spouse, and told him, “I’ve got to get back to the council,” and then she left the flat without another word, or looking back at all.