Everyone was sagging, panting for breath, many of them clinging to each other with eyes closed or staring fixedly at the ground, all of them trying not to look at the terrible fissures opening up round us. But back in the other room across the passageway, the room where they’d tried to crush her, Liu had heard me. Very faintly I heard her voice, thready and fragile, calling it back to me.
Other people joined in, voices picking it up all round—the words changing a little as it was passed along, like a children’s game, but that didn’t matter: the meaning was the same, and everyone was saying it together. As it swept through the crowd, all the people round me taking up the chant, I called it out again with them, and golden light came welling up through the loose bricks like mortar, joining them into a single round mosaic. It reached the final border and suddenly shot out at high speed, filling into all the cracks of void and patching them up, the red lanterns coming alight all along the alleyway, revealing second and third stories on all the buildings, and a neon sign above the metro suddenly blinked into improbable existence as lights came on in the stairway going down.
The sutras slammed shut, and I just barely caught them out of the air and then went the rest of the way down with them, not because they had gone heavy but because my legs had simply stopped working without notice. All round us, everyone was crying and laughing and embracing in the drunken relief of knowing they weren’t all going to die and their home hadn’t fallen in on itself. They went pouring back out into the alleyway to find their friends and family, dancing and rejoicing like a massive party-going; some of them even began flinging up fireworks into the void.
Sitting in a cross-legged heap on the solid bricks, I wrapped my arms round the sutras and bent my head over them, hugging them against me, and whispered, “Thank you,” to the book, to the scribe, to Purochana, to the universe; for the gift of being allowed to do this, this, instead of the destruction and the slaughter I’d been destined for.
And then Precious squeaked shrilly, and I jerked my head up. The council members hadn’t gone anywhere. Five of them had now stepped between me and the rest of the crowd, blocking their view, and the other three, their hands joined, were about to hit me with a killing spell.
Unfortunately, the warning wasn’t any help. I hadn’t anything left. I couldn’t even kill them. I could only just watch it coming, my arms tightening round my book, and then they were all screaming, screaming horribly, so horribly I almost could have killed them after all, just to save them from whatever it was that was happening to them, but before I could even move, there was a sort of yanking motion, and all of them were just—gone. Gone as if they’d never been there at all.
Orion was in their place, just behind them. For one moment, his face was blank and utterly unmoving, and then he looked at me, and I should have said, Fine, fourteen for you; I suppose we’re tied again, but I couldn’t say that; I couldn’t say anything like it, and he turned without a word and left, and everyone shocked and staring outside jerked back from him, pushing and shoving at everyone who’d wanted to see what was going on, a wave of empty space rolling with him through the crowd.
I caught him at the airport, thanks to Liesel, who’d grudgingly said, “He is going to New York, obviously!” after watching me all but crawl out of the enclave and start lurching round the temple grounds looking for him. She did first try to talk me into having a lie-down and not worrying about him, but gave in after it didn’t work.
“You’re not going to New York!” I snarled at him, standing between him and the security line. “I’ll start yelling you’re a terrorist and get us taken up, I swear I will. She’s not getting her hands on you again! Are you out of your bloody mind?”
He didn’t shout back. He just went on standing there in the middle of the concourse, looking far better than he had a right to in the still-pristine white T-shirt and jeans we’d got him at the commune, his silver hair artistically floppy; opposite him I looked like a ragged urchin, my clothes filthy with sweat and dust, stained all over with faint red marks from the bricks, torn in a few places. I wasn’t getting him taken up; if I started howling, any policeman would look at the two of us, and I’d only get myself taken up instead, and be locked up somewhere for weeks until Liesel and Aadhya got me out somehow, assuming Liesel didn’t sabotage the process to keep me locked up for her opinion of my own good. People were already giving me sidelong looks.
But Orion was staring at me like I was a drink of water, so I drew a few deep breaths and forced myself calm. “Lake, I know she’s your mum, but she’s a maleficer,” I said, level and measured. “Whatever’s wrong, it’s her fault. She’s done it to you. And she won’t fix it for you, either.”
“She’s the only one who might be able to,” he said. “If anyone else could have—” He stopped, and I remembered Mum with her hands on his head, sorrowing, after everything she could do. I couldn’t set him right, she’d said. All she’d been able to do was give him hope. Enough hope that he’d taken himself back out of the despair he’d fallen into, let himself believe that he deserved to live after all, no matter what was wrong—wrong with him, the words I hadn’t said, but they were in him already.
“You don’t need fixing,” I said, and tried to mean it. “You’ve spent every minute of your life saving people.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve spent every minute of my life hunting mals. I wanted to—” He looked away, a shine of misery in his eyes. “I wanted to think I was saving people. I wanted to be a hero.”
“Oh, shut it, you absolute block, you are a hero!” I said savagely. “You did save people. You saved bloody all of us!”
“You did that,” he said.
“I’d’ve been eaten ten minutes in, along with everyone else in the hall, when the horde came back down!” I said. “I couldn’t have tried it, anyway. I couldn’t have done a thing if you hadn’t been there; we’d never even have fixed the machinery in the first place if you’d just faffed round and took out mals when you were bored.” I was grasping wildly round. “You cleared the whole Scholomance! You killed half the mals in the entire world—”
“I ate them!” he burst out.
I pulled up short. “What?”
“I ate them,” he said again, his voice raw-edged. “All those mals in the school. I didn’t kill them. I just—sucked them up. They tried to fight me, and it didn’t do any good.” He looked away, his face twisting with something horribly tense. “I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ve been doing all along. Not killing them.”
“I’ve seen you kill mals!” I said.
“I was doing it the hard way,” he said. “Maybe I needed to—to get through their skins, before, somehow. But I don’t have to anymore. I just have to get hold of them, and then—” He made a horrible gesture like someone slurping up noodles. “I can take everything.”
“What, like a maw-mouth?” I said, a howl of protest, and stopped, my whole stomach gone into free-fall.
“Yeah,” Orion said, smiling at me, an awful and utterly mirthless smile. “Just like that.”