And the eight people in this room—who wouldn’t meet my eyes when I looked at them, who’d known what they were really doing—they’d told themselves a different story: Ophelia’s story. The story that every council member in every enclave had been telling themselves for thousands of years, since the very first time someone had built an enclave out of death instead of gold. It was their responsibility to do the terrible thing for everyone else. To bear the scars of it like a burden, as if there was something noble in doing something so horrible that most people couldn’t stand doing it, for the sake of those squeamish people.
I wanted to sweep all of them off the face of the earth. But they were just ordinary people, after all. The people in this room weren’t any worse than the enclavers I’d known at school, and they hadn’t been any worse than the losers I’d known at school, except that they’d been enclavers, and that hadn’t been their choice, not really, or at least not a human choice that ordinary people made. The enclavers had been born enclavers, and the losers had been born outside, and I was more or less the only loser in the world who had chosen not to be an enclaver.
And that was a choice I hadn’t wanted myself. I’d tried not to make it. It was Mum’s choice, and I knew that at the heart, that was the choice to care about, to forgive, even the Philippa Waxes and Claire Browns of the world; even the Ophelias; the most horrid and miserable people, who didn’t deserve to be forgiven, because otherwise no one deserved to be forgiven.
And if Mum hadn’t made that choice—if she had ever chosen not to forgive someone, if she’d chosen to refuse healing and care to someone because they had been just too awful—then the worst thing that would have happened was, that one person would have gone off into the world, sick and desperate. But for me—my choice was to find some way to forgive these people, these horrible people, or sail out and start blasting the whole world bare. Because enclaves all over the world, every enclave built for thousands of years, had been made this same way. Enclaves are built with malia, Mum had said, and how right she’d been. If I was going to eradicate this one, why wouldn’t I keep going? The people in this room weren’t any worse than the people in the cold polished vaults of London, the ones who’d been so grateful for my help to fight off a maw-mouth at their gates, after they’d made one of their own and sent it roaming the world.
So why wouldn’t I go back to London and rip it down, with every man, woman, and child inside its walls? Why wouldn’t I head to New York straight after, and go down the line from there, bringing death and destruction to all the enclaves of the world, right on schedule? Just because I hadn’t watched their ceremony firsthand, just because they hadn’t picked on my own friend? That would make me exactly like these people in the amphitheater, hiding behind their comforting wall.
But I was like those people, surely. The only difference was the wall. I didn’t have one. I had to hold the power and I had to commit the act, both, inside my own body and mind. I couldn’t hand a tidy bit of mana over to someone else to do the dirty work, and I also couldn’t tell myself that I was just doing what everyone else wanted me to do, and if I didn’t, someone else would. I had to look my own selfishness in the face, each and every time. And I didn’t like doing it, did I? The wall wasn’t for nothing, after all.
And that didn’t mean they wouldn’t still do the wrong thing if they had the chance. They could tell themselves, after all, that everyone else in the world had done the same wrong thing. But I made myself look up at their faces, and look at the tears and the horror, and believe in it enough to give them a choice, the only choice I could think of.
“I’m not letting you do it,” I said. “Not if I have to bring the rest of this enclave down with all of us in it. I did it to the Scholomance and I’ll do it here. And you can’t stop me.” My voice echoed off the walls and around the massive space, ringing through the enforced silence. Nothing else broke it. I gestured to the circle of bricks, that horrible weight. “Or you can take these off her, and I’ll try to save this enclave for you. I don’t know if it’ll work. But if you’ll give the mana to me instead of using it for this, I’ll try.”
The compulsion faded, and a low murmur started, rising louder all around the chamber as people turned to their neighbors: Did you know, I didn’t, I didn’t know, all of them telling each other that half lie. I was disgusted with it and hoping for it all at once. I needed them to want that lie enough to agree, to try another way.
But one of the council members abruptly said to me, “We’ll let Guo Yi Liu out, and you can go—”
“No,” I said, in a howling that echoed off the walls of the little room, like a pack of wolves ringed round him. He shut up. “Those are your choices. Don’t bother looking for a third. I’m not letting you do it to Liu, and I’m not leaving you with this tidy pile of bricks to do it to someone else. If you don’t want me to try saving the place, you can dump them down that sewer and evacuate for all I care.”
“Most of the stored mana is ours,” a different council member said—a middle-aged woman, young relative to the others. “We chose to use it to help Beijing and not just to make our own enclave, but we are not going to give them the work of our entire family for generations—”
“You took the work of your entire family for generations and chose to use it to make a maw-mouth, so shut it!” I said, but that was only a seething of outrage bubbling up and over from the simmering pot; I knew there had to be a real answer. “And fine, if it’s not Beijing’s to give, then I suppose if they want me to have a go, they’d better make you a decent offer.”
It was still mostly an explosion, but a useful one; I imagine they’d spent most of the last week, with Liu sitting locked alone in that room waiting for this to happen to her, negotiating urgent points like how many council seats went to the original Beijing team versus the newcomers, who got to live in the fanciest bits of the joint enclave, how many places they’d make for new wizards and who would get to hand them out. So now I’d put them on comfortably familiar territory, even if I’d also taken away half the spoils they had to haggle over.
They started to discuss hurriedly amongst themselves, huddled in low voices, but then someone stood up abruptly in the amphitheater: a boy I recognized from the Chinese obstacle-course runs, Jiangyu, one of the Beijing enclave seniors. He’d been one of the very last kids to join up, less because he’d thought I was secretly trying to kill everyone than because things were not going according to the rules, about which he had extremely passionate feelings. Even after he’d finally come round and done a first run in our chummy little group of five hundred, he’d come up to me and Liu afterwards to complain that our tactics went against the advice in the graduation handbook—which had been completely useless for several months by then. We’d eyed him sidelong and another of the Beijing enclavers had shown up and towed him away with an air of weariness, but now he got up and said stolidly, “I wish to say that if there is not enough room for all of us, then if Xi’an will agree to save Beijing, I am willing to give up my own place.”