I wanted to scream questions at him, but I couldn’t, not with that look on his face, gutted of hope. I’d have been pretending I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand, but I did, with horrible clarity: this was what Ophelia had done to him. The monster that couldn’t be killed, the monster that all the other monsters feared. The monster that extracted every last ounce of power from its victims. She’d found a way to put that horrible devouring power into a person—and then she’d taught the person to feed the malia he gathered back into her enclave—where it superficially became mana again, purified by the act of being freely given. Beautifully efficient.
It was like I was back, we were back in the Scholomance, in those final moments just before the gates, with the worst horror in the world bearing down on us. I’d been yelling at Orion to run, I’d told him we had to run, and he—he’d been staring up at Patience, the whole time. He’d never fought a maw-mouth before; he’d never even seen one before I don’t think, not that close, not in range. He’d gone hunting for the one in our junior year, but he’d never found it. I’d killed it before he ever got there. But in the graduation hall, he’d come face-to-face with Patience, and he’d seen—something he recognized. A mirror held up before him.
And when I’d screamed at Orion that we had to run—that there was nothing to do with a monster like that, with that unkillable horror, but leave it to fall away into the void—he’d agreed with me. So he’d shoved me out the doors, and stayed behind. As if I’d told him to.
He was looking at me now the same way he’d looked at me then: as if for the last time, storing the memory of me up inside, getting ready to shove me out the doors again. And I was already falling, falling into horror, but Aadhya had been right. I hadn’t left Orion behind. That wasn’t a thing that I would do. No matter what. I couldn’t speak, but I took a step towards him, reaching for him.
But Orion didn’t let me touch him. He backed away a step, tensed up for flight. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t. I’ve got to go. I have to.”
“Listen to me,” I said, raggedly; my throat was swelled up choking-tight, but I forced the words out. “Orion, listen to me. As long as I can remember—I’ve had the power to do the most monstrous things I could imagine. And all I’ve ever wanted, all my life, is for someone to tell me—that I was in the clear. That I’d never do something so horrible I couldn’t walk away from it. But there’s no one. There’s no one who can hand you a badge and make you all right. The only way to be all right is to keep on being all right, as best you can.”
“I can’t be all right,” Orion said flatly, and silenced me. “El, you can’t look me in the face and tell me there’s anything I can do that can make me all right. Not like this. You know what maw-mouths are. What they do to people. And that’s what I did—that’s what I’m doing—to those people in Beijing,” and for a moment I was back on my knees in that narrow chamber hearing the screaming again, the unbearable screaming of people being taken by a maw-mouth—only a maw-mouth that didn’t need to bother hanging on to their eyes and mouths, because it had eyes and a mouth and hands of its own—hands that could even cast spells.
“I thought—after your mom helped me, I thought—maybe I could control it,” Orion said. “I thought I could just keep hunting mals, and that would be okay. But I can’t. I can’t be all right. I don’t even know if—” He swallowed. “I ate—Patience. And I don’t think…I don’t think that destroyed Patience. I think all those people are still—”
He stopped, but he didn’t need to keep going, because I did know, in horrible detail, what maw-mouths were. All those people, all those devoured lives, were still in him, still screaming, being shredded to exhaustion and still not allowed to die, because that was what maw-mouths did to people, and he was right; I couldn’t say anything. For all I knew, one of those screaming people inside him was my dad.
Maybe the horror of it was in my face. I hope it wasn’t. But Orion said rawly, “El, if my mom can’t undo this—”
I didn’t want him to keep going. “If she won’t,” I snarled.
“Either way,” he said. “If she doesn’t—”
“It’s not your fault,” I said, just a howl into the universe, which cared as much as it ever did. He hadn’t been asked for permission any more than I had, but here we were, still stuck with the consequences: a maw-mouth and a maw-mouth killer, and I knew what Orion was trying to ask me, and I couldn’t bear to let him.
He didn’t try again. He shut his eyes, and then he took one small lurching step towards me, moving so fast I didn’t even have a chance to clutch at him, and he caught my face in his hands and kissed me, tears sticky between our mouths, and then my fingertips were just catching at his arm and sliding off as he went away from me, through the security gates, and was gone.
* * *
I was sitting on a bench in the concourse, staring into space when Aadhya eventually turned up and towed me back to the enclave. Not the new section; Liu’s family had set up shop in the sage’s house. There seemed to be a tacit agreement to leave it to them, even though the rest of the enclave was fairly crowded now: all the former enclavers were having to give up hard-won rooms in their flats and divide up the working space to make room for the newcomers who’d provided all the mana.
And Liu did need to be inside the enclave. Three of the top healers were working on her, taking it in turn round the clock to keep her hovering in some kind of complicated healing spell in the middle of the courtyard. It took me aback when Aadhya led me back in. I wasn’t paying much attention until then, but when we came inside, the whole house was different: the fountains had been refilled and the water was running again, a soft gurgling over rocks, and the trees and shrubs had all grown new leaves; a narrow vine was putting out flowers. And Liu was floating three feet off the ground in a glowing cocoon that one of the healers was spinning round her.
“It’s okay!” Aadhya said, when I pulled up in alarm. “It’s a regeneration spell.”
The cocoon was made of filaments of water coming up out of the stream, which were being interwoven with thin lines of fine powders coming out of two dozen porcelain jars arranged in the courtyard. Some were enormous waist-high things that I could almost have climbed inside, and others were the size of a sugar bowl, and one tiny casket made of solid gold emitted a single glowing-red grain every ten minutes out of a minuscule opening in the top. It was certainly impressive, and when I went up as close as I could and peered through the translucent shell, Liu already looked better: her shoulders and hips had straightened out, and her skin was glowing faintly and evenly all over, the livid marks gone.
I made the mistake of trying to ask one of the healers’ apprentices how much longer the treatment would take, and got an exhaustive explanation that I couldn’t understand at all. It was given to me in English, not in Chinese, but that didn’t help. The Beijing healers weren’t like Mum; they were the kind of healers who’d come out of the Scholomance, went straight for advanced mundane medical degrees, then apprenticed for another ten years to a senior healer. Anyone who emerges from the process talks in jargon so rarefied that I doubt any other human being could understand them except other wizard healers. Occasionally those sorts come to see Mum to try to understand her work, and usually go away again seething in frustration after a few days.
Except in one way it turned out they were exactly like Mum. I finally gave up on understanding what they were doing and just demanded to know specifically what hour, day, week, or year Liu would come out of the chrysalis, and they said, When she is ready.