So I sat down on the lid of the loo and told her right there, with the roaring of the plane going all around us, trying not to listen to the words I was dragging out of myself. I wanted desperately for her to sniff and tell me I was an idiot, overlooking the manifestly obvious thing to do. Instead when I was done, she went and sat down herself, on the narrow bench inside the shower stall, and just stared at the wall for a while with her brain ticking away, and then she shook her head and said briefly, “Ophelia is very clever,” in something too much like admiration. Then she got up and patted me on my shoulder, a bracing nothing to do but carry on kind of pat, and said, “We should go and sleep.”
Ibrahim and Jamaal met us at the airport, both of them fretting themselves ragged with anxiety. My appearing didn’t lift their spirits—it rarely does—and only added the extra layers of faint hope and unease. We didn’t speak much on the way, except I asked Ibrahim about Yaakov, and Ibrahim looked down and said, stifled, “I’ve heard he’s all right,” so I might as well have jabbed him with a hot poker instead. That might even have been why he was so desperate to find a way in. I’d found it too large an ask to make myself, inviting someone to come away from his home and family to yours. I’d tried to run away from Orion even making the offer in the other direction. It was too much, a debt you could spend the rest of your life trying to pay off, and that was even before you got to Ibrahim and Yaakov’s additional problem that unless they went it totally alone, then whichever family side they lived with, the other one of them would face suspicion and possibly even hatred, from the surrounding mundanes if not literally the other’s relations.
But everything would change if Ibrahim could offer instead a place in Dubai enclave, which is big and modern and firmly aboard the tolerance train, meaning they’ll welcome anyone, regardless of their religion or their nationality or who they like to go to bed with, and let them live exactly as they like, so long as they’re either spectacularly powerful in some way or have twenty years’ worth of mana to buy their way in with.
The entrance to the enclave was in a mid-height office building on the other side round of the fantastic view of the Burj Khalifa; half the doors we passed along the corridor were unlabeled, and you had the sense that if the building had been a boat, it would have tipped over from the weight of everyone hanging on the opposite rail.
Except right now all the unlabeled offices were crammed with enclavers, sweating and scared in the dark. They’d returned all the space they could back to the real world, and come out to hide in it, but of course they didn’t bother having electricity or water in the offices they borrowed, and they also had to keep quiet or else risk the mundanes in the rest of the building nosing in to find out what was going on.
Jamaal took me to the big conference room at the very end of the corridor, where the senior wizards of the enclave had gathered—minus the former council members. The room was stifling-hot, despite two banks of palm-frond fans in carved wooden handles that heaved back and forth on their own.
They welcomed me with what I got the sense they considered to be an unforgivably abbreviated hospitality, the splendid table creaking faintly but literally with the weight of food spread upon it, a banquet that the massed company couldn’t have polished off in a week. Not a single one of them were actually eating any of it, though: your enclave is about to come crashing down had stifled their appetites. But they pressed me and Liesel urgently to have some, and poured me a cup of tea out of a beautiful antique pot that smelled faintly of a be well disposed to me charm. I pushed it aside and said rudely, “I’m not here to waste my time.”
Predictably they moved on to asking if I’d really meant everything I’d told Ibrahim, and surely there were some alternatives to this or that piece of the plan. I remained my usual disappointing self. “And you can’t just hire the recruits, either,” I said. “It’s got to be their home that they’re building.”
“Dear child,” Jamaal’s grandfather’s eldest wife—his grandmother was the third—said, “surely your method could be used to simply reinforce the existing foundations of the enclave, at much less cost in mana.”
“You’ll do it without me, then,” I said, and Liesel sighed noisily and interrupted to tell them how their existing foundations had been made. I got up and went to the loo while they talked, so I didn’t have to listen to either the explanation or everything I assume they said: the appropriate displays of shock and horror, the delicate inquiries about whether I was really intractable on the subject.
I assume Liesel and Ibrahim and Jamaal managed to satisfy them on that point; in any case, no one else made me any other clever suggestions when I came back. And lucky for them, they’d been making the preparations in advance anyway: motivated by the alarming consciousness that the warning hadn’t specified when the attack was going to come, and the even more alarming consciousness that when it came to age and stability, their forty-year-old enclave was far closer to Bangkok and Salta than to London or Beijing, and it was good odds that the whole place would go.
It hadn’t been hard for them to recruit help, even without any assurances: there’s a very small chance we’ll be offering enclave seats at the cost of two years’ mana is the kind of announcement that will have a thousand eager wizards queuing up at your gates quick as winking, just the way they had come running to London’s gates on a rumor. They only had to decide to go ahead and do it, which took them much more time than I would have liked, and much less than they would have liked, since after fifteen minutes of urgent discussion, I got fed up and said, “I’m not sitting round here for hours waiting for you to decide whether you’d rather share your enclave with the plebs than have it knocked off into the void. If you don’t want me, I’ll be going.”
At that point, Jamaal’s grandmother—the youngest wife—burst out, “We must stop arguing! The attack could come at any moment, and we will all have to go inside to perform the casting.” It was a potent argument, as was their very obvious lack of any better alternatives than me, for which they’d surely have given a great deal.
So finally they led me inside, through a blazing-hot server room full of flat narrow computers stacked up in metal racks and the uncomfortable blasting of fans, and into a small back door marked Electrical in English and Arabic. It opened to reveal a long panel covered with rainbows of thin wires, and that pulled open to reveal a small opening in the wall, just barely the height of my shoulder. I had to duck my head down to get through, and I straightened up a hundred years in the past, or at least it felt that way.
Jamaal’s grandfather took us through a narrow lane between the smooth unbroken golden-brown walls of houses rising up on either side. Sail-like shades hung overhead between the buildings, high enough and overlapped so you couldn’t see between to whatever artifice they were using to bring in the sunlight. You couldn’t see into any of the houses: the dark wooden doors were all shut up tight, the windows shuttered; the few courtyards we passed were curtained off with heavy opaque hangings.