Aadhya’s grandmothers kept bringing more amazing snacks out in waves. There wasn’t really a break between teatime and dinner, we just migrated from our lounge chairs to sit at the large outdoor table in the yard under golden hanging lamps, and Aadhya’s dad came home—he was working in Boston enclave that week; he’d literally got in the car and driven home the whole way just to have dinner with us—and he’d brought her cousin from Kolkata enclave who was training in Boston with a senior specialist in computational artifice. He was a handsome strapping lad of twenty-two that they made a point of mentioning by the way wasn’t engaged yet, when they seated him next to me, and asked me about my mum and hoped I would bring her for a visit sometime.
Aad rolled her eyes dramatically at me behind her mum’s back during this process and mouthed an apology, but it didn’t feel like aggressive matchmaking or anything to me. They didn’t really expect me or him to suddenly want to start dating one another, they were just—showing me a door, telling me that if I wanted to walk through it, I’d have been acceptable, and that still wasn’t something I expected enough to be able to find it annoying. And he smiled at me and even flirted a bit, in a way that would probably have stunned me into amazement, or maybe even delight, another time. Liesel making me her offer had been its own surprise, but at least she’d had some sort of rational ulterior motive. I wasn’t really prepared for a complete stranger showing signs of wanting to know me, for no particular reason whatsoever.
Other circumstances, I would have gone fumbling through hardly believing it was happening, then flirting back awkwardly, perhaps giving him my squeaky-new number, maybe even making plans to meet him for a coffee in some magnificently ordinary way. If only Orion were alive, and I could have firmly informed him that I wasn’t tying myself down just yet, and I expected him to see other people a bit too, and be sure it wasn’t just a school romance, or anything like that, and all those sensible things that I thought on principle were a good idea but which hadn’t really seemed like an option I needed to bother considering. I’d imagined myself with Orion, or alone; never anything else. And of course it was good and healthy and wonderful for me to imagine myself with someone else, to imagine myself with Liesel or with Aadhya’s cousin or with someone I hadn’t even met, but I could do that, and Orion couldn’t, because Orion was dead and screaming.
So instead of having a nice ordinary conversation, I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom and lock myself in to breathe deeply a few times and wash my face, and after I dried it off, I finally took Ophelia’s box out of my pocket and opened the lid. It unfolded and kept unfolding until it was nearly six times the size, lined with black velvet, and inside there was a power-sharer. It looked a bit like a pocket watch on a strap, the lid engraved with the enclave’s symbol. Just like the one Orion had used to wear, only obviously this one would let me pull. A small scrap of heavy paper with rough edges was laid out next to it, with a set of GPS coordinates written down, and labeled underneath Sintra, Portugal.
Precious hauled herself out of my other pocket a bit groggily—she’d gorged herself on the puffed rice out of the snack mix, which I hoped wasn’t going to give her indigestion—and jumped over to the counter, next to the box. She put a paw on the power-sharer as if to bar me from it, and looked up at me with her bright-green eyes and squeaked anxiously: she hoped I knew what I was getting into.
“You and me both,” I said. She drew her paw back and watched unhappily as I put the power-sharer on, and then gave a small shiver and crawled back up and got into my pocket again.
I put the paper from Ophelia in my other pocket, like a counterweight, and went out to say goodbye.
I faced objections almost immediately. “First of all, I’m coming with, and second of all, we’re going in the morning,” Aadhya said, as soon as I pulled her aside. “You look like someone went over you with a Zamboni a few times.”
“We will look worse if there isn’t enough mana in the Scholomance when we try to go inside,” Liesel said, disagreeing, having come over and horned in; she was already poking at her phone. “The best flight will be in four hours. We should go to the airport at once.”
After Liesel started drawing actual charts to explain all the horrible things that would happen to us if too many enclaves pulled their mana out while we were inside the school, Aadhya gave in on the departure time, but she insisted on my coming upstairs to her bedroom while she packed. “Okay, seriously, what is Liesel’s deal?” Aadhya demanded, while she hurriedly threw things into a large trunk. She’d hardly been back a week, but the closet was already full of clothes, and I had to navigate a minefield of posh shopping bags to get to the bed to sit down, explosions of tissue paper scattered everywhere around, evidence of a massive spree. “Why does she want to come along? Why is she even here in the first place? Isn’t she a London enclaver now?”
“If you get an answer out of her, let me know,” I said. “I expect she would like to hurry things up, though; Alfie’s waiting in London, and she has a plan to get herself onto the council.”
“And she’s running around after you anyway?” Aadhya said. “El, that makes zero sense. She’s got to have something else going on, and if she’s not telling you about it, you’re not going to like it. Is there some reason you haven’t ditched her?” I couldn’t help but squirm inwardly, which delayed my answer long enough that Aadhya turned around from packing and stared at me with narrowed eyes. “Is there a reason?” she said, in dangerous tones.
“Well,” I said feebly. I’d known it was coming, and that I didn’t have an acceptable excuse.
“Okay, no,” Aadhya said. “Liesel?”
I groaned and flopped backwards on the bed and covered my face with my hands. “It was a moment of weakness?” I said, muffled.
“A moment of total insanity maybe!” Aadhya said. “That’s even more awesome. El, Alfie is her ride. He got her into London enclave, now he’s going to get her on the council? No way she would risk cheating on him unless she had a crazy good reason!”
“She’s not cheating,” I muttered. “He knows about it.”
“Great, because it’s all part of some kind of plan to get at you,” Aadhya said, unmercifully.
And even if I’d turned down Liesel’s alliance offer, Aadhya was fundamentally right, and I knew it. I still couldn’t be sorry; even now I felt almost pathetically grateful to Liesel for the ocean-deep relief of physical release and dreamless sleep she’d given me, not to mention getting me here. But I should absolutely have made her tell me what she was looking for in return now, instead of just letting her keep tagging along after me, being helpful, as though that was all she wanted. That wasn’t what anyone wanted, and Liesel wasn’t even the doormat sort of person who’d pretend it was for any length of time. She was the highly strategic sort of person who was just waiting to hit me with an appropriately large demand right when I was most vulnerable, and I should absolutely have known better. Even if the Scholomance hadn’t taught me better, my entire life was an object lesson in the dangers of not getting the price tag up front.
“I’m warning you right now that if you move into London enclave and start a ménage with Liesel and Alfie, I’m hunting you down with chains,” Aadhya said. “Also if the Scholomance wasn’t literally a time bomb waiting to go, I would be chaining you up right now. El. It wasn’t your fault.” I dragged a breath in, painful in my too-tight chest, and sat up to hunch over it.
Aadhya came over and sat next to me on the bed and put her arm around me. “You didn’t get Orion killed,” she said. “The plan worked. You were at the doors. All he had to do was jump out. I don’t know why he didn’t, but you’re acting like you left him behind, and I don’t need to have been there to know for sure that is just not a thing that you did. And he wasn’t stupid, so he never thought for even a second that you’d want to.” She snorted. “Why would he shove you out if he thought you’d go? He knew you wouldn’t.”