Ibrahim didn’t look up. “I don’t know if he’s even got the message.” His voice was a little ragged, thready, and then Nadia gave a cry, “Ibi!” and he turned and was running down the alleyway, dodging people left and right: Yaakov was coming in with the very last three people. A frail ancient man, bent almost double, was creeping precariously balanced between Yaakov’s arm and a spindly walking stick whose carved inscriptions weren’t powerful enough to keep him upright alone. An only ordinarily old woman with exhausted eyes was on his other side, carrying a small child limply asleep on her shoulder. Ibrahim stopped just short of them all, and then Yaakov reached out his free arm and they had buried their faces against each other’s necks, standing together.
For just a moment: everyone was impatient with fear, longing to hurry them up. I couldn’t help but feel it too: the old man’s every creaking step stretched out agonizingly long, even with Ibrahim helping on his other side now, and I had rotten sinkhole ground beneath my feet and the weight of a thousand innocent lives on my shoulders, all the people who’d come here because I’d told the enclavers to let them in. I could see Jamaal’s grandfather glancing at me, wanting to tell me to go ahead and get on with it, wondering if I’d do it, and before he could ask so I’d have to find out, I went to the almost gone heap of tower bits and grabbed a chunk and started dragging it on the ground round the iron disk, making chalky circles like places to stand, as if I were getting ready for a casting, even though it wasn’t necessary, while Yaakov and his family got their paving stones.
Liesel either realized what I was doing or couldn’t resist the golden opportunity to organize something into better order; she started corralling some of the enclavers and telling them where everyone ought to stand, and having them establish a tidy traffic pattern so everyone would flow out of one lane to make the next circle, and then away into another. “In Beijing,” Liesel said to me abruptly, after everyone had got the idea and was on their feet and queuing up. “You said at the end, replacing the foundation, they put the last bricks in together.”
I nodded. “I couldn’t have lifted them by then.”
“Why not all the stones at once, then?” she said.
So I didn’t touch a single brick with my own hands; instead, Liesel and her helpers counted off a precisely calculated number of people in from the lane and had them form up in a circle round the iron disk with their own paving stone. Then each of them cast a little bog-simple hover spell on the thing, parents casting them for children too small to do it themselves, and left it floating there in midair just a few inches above the ground. Then off they all marched down into the other lane, making room for the next group.
It was a tidy way to keep from making the stones grow unbearably heavy along the way, and then at the end, five of the loudest-voiced men bellowed out a count, just like they had in Beijing. Everyone ended their hover incantation at once, and the paving stones came down like an inverted explosion, the outer ring landing first and each inner one coming down with more and more force, until the innermost ones smashed down onto the iron disk, burying it somewhere far beneath, and together we all called out the final incantation—a better translation this time, since I’d been able to give it to some professionals with a bit of warning—and the shining spell welled up in brilliant glowing from underneath to a massive ululating chorus of voices calling in unison, stay, be shelter, be home for us.
* * *
The banquet did get eaten, afterwards. The doors and courtyards were all flung open to celebrate, all the newcomers invited in somewhere by one enclaver or another. Dancing and music spilled out into the alleyways, everything from traditional songs to modern pop from seventeen different countries, while people rapidly got drunk on liquor and enchanted vapors and relief.
And for once—I was wanted. Ibrahim and his allies reaching out to put their arms round me and Liesel, wanting to take us back with them to Jamaal’s family compound, a massive courtyard house right there at one end of the right lane. I would have been so desperately glad to join in the massive catharsis, to find release somehow. Liesel took my hand and looked an invitation at me, and I wanted to stay, but I couldn’t.
Because it was still there. We’d built the enclave a new foundation now, a wide round plaza full of those beautiful stones—but the old one was still there, a spongy mass beneath that I could still feel even when apparently no one else could, a horrible version of the princess and the pea.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, brutal and crass, and I pulled my hands away and forced my way through the lane, past all the joyful press of bodies that kept wanting me to join them. People whose faces I’d only glimpsed for a moment were looking at me and smiling, reaching out, and I couldn’t reach back to any of them. I just put my head down and bulled on through to the other end, which was just as crowded, and there managed through sheer desperate insistence to make the way out open up for me, a low hatch falling open in a wall when I banged on it. I ducked through and came stumbling out of the door, a janitorial closet tucked away behind the impersonal marble lobby of the office block. The security guard did a double take when I burst out past him, and got up frowning as if he half thought of coming after me, but he could see I wasn’t carrying anything, and I was moving fast, so he gave it up for a bad lot and sank back down in his chair.
I kept going bang out of the doors and into the sweltering heat of the Dubai afternoon. It dragged me to a stop sooner than I wanted; I had to stagger into a massive mall the size of a small city itself and sit down by a fountain just to breathe. I was feeling too many things at once: the ferocious joy of the foundation spell, the power and longing of all those people’s hopes still running through me, and my own recoiling from the deep horror beneath, both of them twisted up with my own longing for Orion, who was out there in the world living with that same horror buried under his own skin, impossible to escape. My body was shaking with exhaustion and heat and energy, and my mobile buzzing madly in my pocket until I just turned it off. I sat there for fifteen minutes getting my breath back and letting everything else settle, until one single feeling came up to the surface above all the rest, and if you can’t guess which one it was, presumably you’ve only just started reading at this particular point in the story.
The attack, the prophesied attack, hadn’t come. It hadn’t come before I’d got here, and it hadn’t come during the casting, and now it would never come. Why would it? I’d buried the vulnerability beneath that new foundation plaza built of mana, mortared with hopes and dreams and love, and there wouldn’t be any chance to steal mana from the place. Why would any maleficer bother wasting their time attacking it? So that was two prophecies that hadn’t come true, now. Like the one thing my great-grandmother couldn’t properly foresee was me and my choices; as though her gift was assuming the worst of me, the same way everyone else in the world always had.
I got up and went out to the taxi stand. I’d noticed on the way in from the airport that loads of the drivers here seemed to be Indian, come over to work for the mundane version of enclaves. Three of them were standing outside together smoking, and I said to them in English, “I need to go to Mumbai.”
“I’d like to go to Mumbai,” one of them said, wistfully. “Are you from Mumbai, pretty girl?”
“My father was,” I said, in Marathi.