“But they won’t do that,” Liesel said. “They will empty the mana store, and take all their most valuable artifice and their books, and their money, and when the enclave is destroyed, they will take all the space which they already own, in the mundane world, and the enclave-building spells which they already have, and they will make a new enclave,” which was so patently true that I couldn’t argue with it in the least. Even if I broadcast the truth all round the world, told every single wizard what the enclavers were doing to make their snug little pockets in the void, it wouldn’t stop anyone, not for long. People would hesitate, they’d recoil, and then little by little they’d reconcile themselves to the idea. Because they’d look at everyone else living in their own tidy enclaves, each one of them made the same grotesque way, and they’d say why not me, and that was a fair question, after all. Why not them.
I got up and stormed out of the enclave and into the temple grounds. All the tourists had gone; it was well after dark. It was still sweltering-hot outside compared with the cool dimness of the enclave, but a breeze was whispering through the green growth everywhere, and I found a bench and sat sullen and seething. After about fifteen minutes, Aadhya came out and sat down next to me.
“You’re going to Dubai,” she said. She sounded a little bleak.
“I’m not,” I said ferociously. “I’m going to—” She was holding out her phone. I took it out of her hand and looked at the last messages on the screen.
Please, tell El, she’s got to come, Ibrahim had texted. We don’t know anything else, but we know it’s going to happen. The warning came from the Speaker of Mumbai.
I stared at it, mounting rage swelling up in me. It made sense of their panic: as far as I know, of all the many, many prophecies made by the Speaker of Mumbai since she was four years old, the one she made about me remains the single solitary exception that hasn’t come true yet. Yet: the shadow that I’ve lived my entire life inside, ever since she’d prophesied that I was doomed to bring death and destruction all over the world. It was like she’d heard me thinking about coming to yell at her, and she’d found a way to get someone else to grab me by the ankles and slow me down.
I shoved the phone back at Aadhya. “I’m not going,” I said. “I don’t want to go!”
She didn’t argue with me. She just put her arm round my shoulders, and I turned in and hugged her, and she hugged me back, hard, letting me hold on.
* * *
“I’ll stay with her,” Aadhya said, holding my hand tight as we stood and looked at Liu, still floating in the cocoon, still not ready to come out. “I’ll let you know as soon as she’s okay.”
“Text me every day,” I said.
Even sitting in the taxi on the way to the airport, I was still giving serious thought to getting a plane to Mumbai instead. But Ibrahim had managed to wheedle my number out of Aadhya, and halfway there he phoned me directly. It was the first phone call I’d ever received, actually, which was why I answered. The ringtone came yammering out of my pocket at full volume, loud inside the car, and I pulled it out and pushed and swiped until the noise stopped and then Ibrahim’s voice was coming out of it tinnily, “El?” and he sounded almost on the verge of tears.
I put it to my ear and said, “Yeah,” grudgingly.
He hadn’t an excuse to be sniffling. He wasn’t even in Dubai enclave. But obviously this was his chance, a precious once-in-a-lifetime crack at an enclave place, and—even though any sixteen hundred people you asked would have universally agreed that he was infinitely more likable than me and far better company—he was only getting that chance because he could get me on the phone.
“Thank you, El, so much,” he said, as if I’d already agreed to go. “I know you don’t like enclaves. I even warned Jamaal, I didn’t think you’d do it. But he begged me to ask. His sister’s about to have a baby. They’ve already moved their whole apartment out of the enclave, but the healers can’t work nearly as well outside. She’ll have to go to hospital. And everyone here is really scared.”
I’m sure they were. I half wanted to tell him how they’d built the enclave he wanted me to rescue, and ask him point-blank if he’d have chosen to do it at the price. But why should I have made Ibrahim feel bad? I knew without asking that the answer was no in any practical sense, not because he was pure and selfless, but because he’d never in a thousand years end up in the position of having to make the choice. None of us talked about our plans for the future in the Scholomance, nothing specific, but we did share our dreams and fantasies in sidelong ways: wouldn’t it be nice, or if you had to choose or the best day would be, and all of his fantasies had more or less been sitting peacefully in a beautiful place with three or four friends and chocolate ice cream. He’d never get near a council seat; he didn’t want power. He just wanted to live.
“If they want my help, they can have it,” I said instead, and cut him off when he started bursting into thanks, “but that’s if.” And then I told him that they’d have to chuck out everyone on the council, and then recruit enough wizards to get the mana I needed to replace their foundation stone. They were going to be even more crowded than Beijing after, since they didn’t have a convenient clan nearby who had spent several generations saving up.
“But you can tell them at least they won’t need to find anyone strict mana,” I added, savagely. He didn’t understand my anger, but he did understand that I meant it; he didn’t even try to argue, just said he’d pass the requirements along, and get back to me.
I half expected not to hear from him again. I imagine if he’d been deputized directly by the Dubai council, I wouldn’t have. But Jamaal’s grandfather and his three wives, a team of gateway builders, had joined the enclave as founding members some forty years ago after a bidding war. They weren’t on the council itself, but they had a great deal of influence in the enclave and couldn’t simply be shut up. I suppose they and everyone else considered ditching the council members a reasonable price to pay.
In any case, Ibrahim had sent me plane tickets before we’d even got to the kiosks, and when they came through, I stared at them and Liesel said, “Well?” with an air of impatience, and I clenched my jaw and made Mum’s choice again and said, “Fine, we’re going.”
The tickets were first-class, naturally. Liesel was still monumentally irritated with me, and vice versa, but after we got on board and the flight attendants showed us the elaborate private shower cabin on the way to our seats, we both sat silently through takeoff, without exchanging so much as a sidelong glance, and then she got up and went. After a moment of debate with myself, I slipped Precious out of my pocket—she gave me an up-and-down look and then burrowed into the blanket without further commentary—and snuck off after her.
It was the sort of stupid prank I’d have rolled my eyes at, if someone had tittered about it to me. Why would you want to cram yourself into an aeroplane loo when you could just wait to be on the ground? But actually being on the plane, in this strange and transient bit of the world, made it easier. And Liesel was right: it helped to feel good in my body, her hands and the water running over my skin reminding me that I was whole, even if I didn’t feel that way, telling me I was still all in one piece at least on the outside.
Liesel predictably tried to pry some information out of me afterwards; we were toweling off when she asked abruptly, “Now will you tell me what happened? Why did Orion go?”
And it turned out that was the real reason I’d done it. It was easier to tell her here, and I did have to tell her. Because I didn’t know what I could do for Orion, and that meant I was going to have to ask for help to do it: the lesson I’d had thumped into me properly last year in the Scholomance.