But it shouldn’t have made a difference. We were looking for something that none of us wanted to find. In the Scholomance, that ought to have made it bog-easy. We should have turned a corner and there Patience would be, waiting for us, with Orion’s eyes and mouth staring out at me right at eye level. Half of what made the search agonizing was the certain knowledge that I was going to find exactly what I was looking for. Even if Patience was putting an enormous effort into hiding from us, even a modest effort on our side ought to have won out. Only we kept looking, and we kept not finding it.
“I’ll have to summon it,” I said finally, as we went down the last stairway, back to the workshop level.
“Well, that sounds amazing,” Aadhya said. “How can we have to summon a maw-mouth? That literally sounds like what you’d offer if you were trying to summon something good. Universe, bring me a basket of soma, and in return I’ll face the world’s biggest maw-mouth! Maybe you should try it that way.”
“It will not work either way,” Liesel said, savagely, and threw her pry bar down with a clang. We both paused and looked at her. “It isn’t here! We would have found it if it were here. It is not in the school.”
“Oh, okay, so now you think it’s worth considering the possibility that it did get out,” Aadhya said, dropping hers too, and putting her hands on her hips with a glare of outrage.
“No!” Liesel said. “If Patience could get out, the others could get out, too. None of them got out. The school lingers, but the maleficaria are gone. They spent their malia to survive as long as they could, but they dwindled and faded into the void. They are gone, and Patience is gone.”
She said it with the aggressive confidence of someone trying to impose their own truth on the universe, only in this case, I understood at once that she was trying to impose it on me. She didn’t really believe that all the horde and Patience had just quietly gone into the void. She’d only decided that, to her fury, something she didn’t understand in the least had happened to the mals and to Patience, and so we weren’t going to find Patience no matter what we did. And she didn’t want me trying to do a summoning, because she was concerned about what I would offer, to set Orion free. She was right to be concerned. I’d have to offer enough to break through whatever hideous thing had happened to all the mals, which was presumably even worse than all of them lumped together.
“I’m going to try,” I said flatly, answering what she was really saying. “We’ll go back down to the doors first, and you can both go out before I try it.”
“Don’t be foolish,” Liesel said. “Listen to me—”
“Sorry,” I said, meaning fuck off, and didn’t. I walked away from her down the corridor to the gym, where the other maintenance shaft would be waiting to take us back down to the graduation hall. I knew Patience wouldn’t be there. But I kept prying up floor tiles on the way, and when I got to the big doors, I pried them open, too, and I was right; Patience wasn’t there. Even though half the school had fallen apart, and the rest was threatening to follow, the gym artifice was still running in full form: trees heavy with late-summer fruit and the horribly beautiful smell of perfectly ripe peaches on every breath, a winding stream gurgling over rocks and crossed by a charming little bridge, branches entwined to frame the pagoda building in the distance like a picture.
And Orion was sitting on the porch, looking off into the distance.
I just stood there in the doorway at first. You might think I’d have entertained at least one fantasy, one tiny little dream of finding Orion alive and well and really properly rescuing him, but I hadn’t. The Scholomance trains you out of expecting miracles. The only miracles we ever received were the ones we made ourselves, and we paid for every one in advance. I hadn’t hoped for it at all.
Just about when I’d have screamed my throat raw and run at him, Liesel grabbed my arm with both hands and leaned back with all her weight, which she needed to hold me. Even as I tried to wrestle loose, Aadhya was gripping my other arm to help and putting her hand over my mouth, and Liesel hissed at me, “It’s not him! It’s a trap for you!”
It would have been a jolly good trap, too, and I’d have gone straight into it in a second, only before I could heave them both off, Orion turned his head and saw us. He stood up and came at us through the peach trees.
Liesel and Aadhya both froze into complete stillness, like a prey animal realizing it’s exposed to a hunter in full view. I felt it through their hands, still locked on my arms. I felt it in my own shriveling gut. Orion was looking right at me, and I wish it had been a trap, I wish I’d been able to imagine for even a moment that it wasn’t him, but it was. It was him. The real difference was that I wasn’t me, not in his head. He was looking at me with absolutely nothing but the utterly focused calculation that filled him when he was hunting mals, where the only thing in his head was what he had to do next.
I could have vomited or screamed, but I couldn’t, because he was coming at us, and what I mean was, he was coming to kill us. Liesel scrabbled at Aadhya behind my back until she let go of my other arm, setting me loose, as if she thought I was going to have to fight Orion. And the worst part was, I thought so too. “Orion,” I said. “Orion, it’s me, it’s El!” my voice rising to a yell, but he didn’t even break a single stride. Just as if he’d been locked up alone with all the mals in the universe, with the worst mals in the universe, and he’d killed and killed and killed until there was nothing left in him but killing, and the power of wanting anything, of doing anything, besides hunting mals, had been stripped out of him. Exactly what everyone else in the world had ever wanted out of him.
I couldn’t imagine actually fighting him, but I also couldn’t imagine standing here and letting him kill us. So I did the only thing I could: I shoved Alfie’s evocation of refusal into Orion’s face. I didn’t even cast it properly; I just pushed it out and said, “No. No, thank you,” with all the absolute profound revulsion in me for the horrible killing machine he’d been turned into.
Orion ran straight into it and was halted in his tracks. He paused for a moment, stymied, but then he put both his hands on the surface of the dome and my whole stomach heaved over, because it felt like Patience. It was just Orion, just his two hands, but that touch felt exactly like a maw-mouth enveloping my shield, trying to get through to me, oozing over the surface and pushing on it to test for weaknesses.
There weren’t any. My entire being was behind that dome, a solid unbroken wall of no, with the endless vat of New York’s mana behind me. Except for one small opening: I was looking through the faint golden glitter of the spell at Orion’s face, and I did want him. I wanted Orion to come straight to me and let me howl at him for being a colossal idiot before I let him pull me into his arms so I could wail against his chest for a month or so. And the Orion on the other side prodding the wall of my shield, the Orion that I didn’t want even a little, paused, his gaze narrowing. And then he put both his hands on the dome again and started to push his way through on the strength of that longing, which I couldn’t have helped if my life and the lives of everyone I loved depended on it.
Not that far off from the current circumstances. “El!” Liesel said through her teeth, but I didn’t need a bloody reminder. I would have closed up the vulnerability if I could, but I might as easily have popped open my rib cage and taken my heart out for a bit. Mana was pouring through the New York power-sharer and out of me into the dome, holding off the grotesque sucking hunger on the other side as hard as I could, the hunger that wasn’t Orion, as if he’d somehow killed Patience and then had become Patience.