This place wasn’t tipping off into the void, like Beijing had been, but I almost would have preferred it otherwise. Instead I felt it under the soles of my thin sandals, the grotesquely soft support beneath, yielding and fleshy. Enclaves are built with malia. You can feel it when you’re there, if you let yourself. And now I knew what I was feeling, what I’d felt in New York, in London. I had to feel nauseatingly sorry now about having howled at Mum, when I’d been a kid, begging her to take me to the safety that any enclave would have given her for the asking, to have her healing inside their walls. Once she’d even gone to visit an old enclave, famous for their own healers, and she’d come back before the end of the day and told me she couldn’t do it; she couldn’t give me what I’d asked her for. And I’d raged and screamed at her for weeks, because she hadn’t been willing to live on top of a putrefying heap of murdered corpses.
All the while, a cool pleasant breeze came steadily in my face with a faint hint of dampness. It wasn’t like London’s magical sunlamps, either; the sun and the wind were real sun and real wind, the same color and flavor as the outside. We reached the end of the alleyway and I saw the sun and air were coming into the enclave through wind towers—square hollow towers built outside a century ago or more, meant to catch and funnel breezes into the walled streets. When they’d brought the old buildings in, they’d left the tops of them outside, sitting on some skyscraper roof I suppose, and added small enchanted mirrors to coax the sunshine in along with the wind.
I knew it even as Jamaal’s grandfather led us towards the middle one and unlocked a massive iron-banded door: the foundation stone was inside. Some sort of twisted irony, having the lovely comfortable breeze blowing at you, the sunlight glowing above, all of it flowing to you over that piece of hideous work. Of course it wasn’t just irony at work. These towers weren’t magical buildings on their own, like the sage’s house in Beijing; they hadn’t been imbued with power by seven generations of wizards. But someone, some mundanes, had built them with the right passionate intent, with care and love: trying to make shelter, a place of coolness and relief in the desert. The founding enclavers had probably done a mystical survey and settled on them as the perfect spot, just the right place to punch a hole through into the void. Just like finding someone strict mana to put under their stone.
I didn’t go inside. “You’ll have to tear the walls down round it,” I said.
The work went a little slowly at first; not because they weren’t desperate to save their enclave, but because they couldn’t quite believe in the oncoming attack. The enclave was still there, still solid all around them. It was a warning of hurricanes with a clear blue sky above stretching for miles in every direction. Even the senior wizards, who’d already agreed with their own mouths, had a hard time putting their metaphysical pickaxes to the tower and opening it up.
Or maybe they just didn’t want to open the tower up, so they wouldn’t have to see what they’d done. Because once they had fairly started, the first large chunk taken out of the doorway and their borrowed sunlight hitting the smooth round disk of iron set there in the floor, so all of them could see it, the pace began to quicken. And by the time they’d got the last bits down, they were all going full-tilt, pulling it down in massive chunks, leaving them in a great massed heap, dust rising in a cloud all round us. But none of the dust clung to the iron disk. It stood stark and heavy against the warm golden stones, and no one went near it.
The rest of the enclavers had already begun making their building-blocks. They didn’t need me to bring out the sutras for that, though, since they had a piece of artifice to do the job. It wasn’t the same as the massive stamping machine in Beijing—that one had been very expensive, I imagine—and looked more like a small oven. But they had a dozen of them lined up: each wizard stepped up to it and put in a double-handful of the dust and broken chunks from the shattered tower, and they put their hands on the oven and sent the mana in, and when the light faded, they reached in and brought out a single flat stone, all of them in different colors, some smaller and some larger, polished and rough.
It took a few increasingly frantic hours, all the new contributors coming inside one after another down the central lane to get their paving stones and then go line up in the other two lanes, waiting huddled together. Ibrahim came away with a polished green disk barely the size of a pound coin—he hadn’t had enough time out of school to save up anything, but he’d obviously been let in for services rendered in bringing me in, and I couldn’t help but be glad for him. His brother and sister-in-law, who’d both been working for the enclave for years, were there, too, that narrow uneven bargain they’d made suddenly paying off in spades. His parents hadn’t any other children who had escaped the grinding teeth of maleficaria, but his aunt and uncle had come with their ten-year-old daughter and their six-year-old son, who’d never have to go to the Scholomance just for the thin hope of survival. His family had collectively scrounged up all the mana they could, hurriedly selling off a few magical heirlooms and mortgaging years of their work, to get together the two years of mana that the most vulnerable members of their family had to pay to get in.
It was an absurdly low price for an enclave place. Almost any wizard could pull together that much. Of course, there was one other significant price: having to come inside a condemned building. Everyone knew about the warning. The pressure built with every other person coming nervously inside to make their paving stones, then going to line up in the alleyways and wait, tensed and watching the walls around them for the first sign of cracking, for the storm to come rolling in, all of us together in a race we were running against a rival we couldn’t see.
But any wizard would still take the chance at the price, because it was a price they could pay, a reward that would be given, if we all made it to the other side. It wasn’t a lifetime of drudgery and constant fear with nothing but a thin scrap of hope to help you along the way. And to give them this much credit, the enclave could have made more of a bidding war of it, thrown the call open worldwide and driven up the price. Instead they’d come down on the side of letting in people they’d already vetted: all their workers, all the Scholomance allies the recent graduates could ring up, whoever could make it quick enough.
I spotted Ibrahim and Jamaal’s ally Nadia in one of the queues, and before the process had finished, Cora arrived too, fresh from the airport without even a bag, running to hug Nadia and Ibrahim and Jamaal fiercely, wiping tears away, before she got in the queue; and then she saw me and after a moment got out of the queue and came to me. I waited there like a block wondering what she wanted even straight up to the moment when she put her arms round me, too. I managed to behave like a human being and hug her back, my throat tight.
Ibrahim kept watching the last trickle of people streaming in through the central lane while pretending he wasn’t, turning his green stone over and over in his hands, and then he put it away in his pocket and turned his back as the stragglers brought up the end, the last of the enclavers coming back in from outside, the oldest wizards and mums with small kids, going one after another to put a handful of dust into the baking ovens, even the babies bringing out pea-sized pebbles with their mums’ hands cupped round theirs. The houses were thickening up, gaining a sense of solidity as the last of the borrowed space eased back in with them, from all those conference rooms and empty offices.
I looked at Ibrahim, who’d stayed with me by the ruined tower the whole time. “I’ll wait.”