She didn’t have one off the top of her head, so we hung up. I did try to go back to sleep. It was still hot, but I was on a hanging bed on a porch outside my grandmother’s room, draped with vining flowers and thin shimmery netting that had been imbued with a gentle spell encouraging mosquitoes to go elsewhere and dragonflies to come near: they darted around, the swaying lamp shining iridescent off their bodies, and the fountain gurgling was distantly audible, one courtyard over. It wasn’t like Wales at all, except it was just like it, just like being in the yurt. There wasn’t any evil lurking down beneath my feet.
I was still so exhausted that my skin felt scraped-tender, but my brain was humming as if the dragonflies had got inside my skull. The real answer to Liesel’s question was, I hadn’t the foggiest clue what I was going to do next. I had only just barely grasped what was going on. When I destroyed the maw-mouths, I wasn’t just destroying the monster. I was undoing the grotesque lie of deathlessness that had created them in the first place, the lie that anchored the enclave foundations into the void. And so…down went the enclave, and all the enclavers with it, from the most guilt-stained council member to the most innocent child. Sudarat, that poor kid, telling me her story last year in the gym: I took my grandmother’s dog for a walk and when I came back, everyone was gone. Her grandmother, her mother and father, her little brother, her home. I’d done that to her, left her standing alone in the street with a small dog, utterly bereft in a world full of things that wanted to devour her.
But I couldn’t be sorry for it, could I, because my other choice had been standing by while the maw-mouth that kept her home standing devoured dozens of equally innocent freshmen and piled them into the endless agony of feasting going on and on inside its belly. Maw-mouths never got full. They never stopped hunting. Nothing killed them. Except me.
But now if someone called to beg my help with killing one, I’d know that I was taking out an enclave along with it, and everyone inside. I’d savagely resented enclavers at school, but they were still just people. And even if an enclave had been started on a heap of malia, I didn’t see what the use was in just smashing the whole place apart. It wasn’t the fault of the buildings, or even of most of the people inside them. I’d been caught by the dream of London’s fairy gardens, even though I was also the one who had wrecked their wards by frantically ripping lives out of Fortitude at graduation: the maw-mouth they must have tucked inside the Scholomance to feed.
I wasn’t sorry to have saved their gardens; I wasn’t sorry Beijing and Dubai were still standing, now with more people safe inside them. And I was sorry about Salta and Bangkok. But I also wasn’t sorry I’d destroyed the maw-mouths. The people who’d died in Salta and Bangkok had only died. They weren’t being endlessly tortured to death so someone else could live in luxury on their graves. Death was what you hoped for, if you were inside a maw-mouth. Death was your only chance of escape.
So what did all of that mean? I knew what Mum’s answer would be: first, do no harm. But that answer didn’t work for me. If someone called me in desperation, trapped with a maw-mouth coming for them, I couldn’t let it get them. But if I destroyed it—I’d be sending an entire enclave tipping off into the void, and very likely with every last person in it. My own personal trolley problem to solve.
I gave up on any more sleep and went to go and sit by the fountain, letting the sound of the water fill my ears. I opened the sutras, turning the pages and looking at them without trying to read them, just seeing them as art, the sweeping beautiful lines and the gleam of gold and vivid jeweled colors in the ink. A shining promise of safety that people were ready to buy with murder. And they wouldn’t stop making that bargain, because they couldn’t get it any other way. I couldn’t build enclaves for all of them, I couldn’t even fix all their enclaves, and they wouldn’t want my enclaves anyway. Surely there were already people in London and Beijing and Dubai who were starting to feel resentful and angry about the space they’d lost, the power they’d have to share. Wizards who knew the secret of building enormous enclaves, who knew all the spells, and could cast them again. I didn’t know how to stop any of it.
The sky was coming on towards dawn, birdsong rising, and Deepthi came slowly out of the inner courtyard and sat creakily down with me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk to her. She’d shaped my entire life with a handful of words, and even if she’d done it to save me from horror, I couldn’t quite make myself be grateful. I didn’t want her doing it again.
She didn’t say anything though, just sat with me, being with me the way Mum did, and slowly a sense came growing over me that she’d gone through this before. All her life, she’d had to choose for the people she loved, knowing she might kill the love in them while she did it. My grandfather hadn’t walked out of the house last night after all, but he hadn’t forgiven her. He’d known that her prophecies sometimes came true slantwise, but he hadn’t been able to imagine that she’d say those words, condemn his son’s only child, if they hadn’t been true in spirit and not just in the letter. He would have taken you up the mountain and holding you in his arms, leapt. That was the only answer he’d found inside himself, the only way he could have borne to save the world from me.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to forgive her either. Like Sudarat might not forgive me, when she knew the truth. Like the seniors from Salta, who’d escaped the Scholomance only to find their home destroyed and their families gone.
“How do you stand it?” I asked Deepthi abruptly.
“Sometimes I didn’t,” she said. “Sometimes I’ve tried to make others choose, even when I knew that would be enough to take the choice away. And when I did that…I lived with what I had seen, when it came to be in the world. So, when I cannot bear to do that, I choose. And then I hope I have done well.”
That wasn’t especially comforting, as a road map. At least all Deepthi was doing was saying words to people; they still went off and made their own choices. I was going to be tearing down enclaves with my own hands, every time I took out a maw-mouth. Could I make up for it by putting up new ones?
I handed Deepthi the sutras and let her hold them on her lap; her mouth shaped the words of the Sanskrit as she turned the pages. “Arjun dreamed of them,” she said. “Even as a boy. Ever since he heard the story of our old home. Aaji, one day we will live in a golden enclave again. If I put him to bed, he would ask me if I had seen it. If I told him no, he would say, not yet.”
“I’ll make one for you,” I said, my throat tight.
She closed them and stroked the cover as reverently as I could have asked, although her eyes were wet. But then she reached out over them to take my hand in both of hers. “But not with this,” she said softly.
I looked down: she was holding my left hand. The one with the New York power-sharer on it. I swallowed. I hadn’t really been pulling from it. I’d put Dubai and Beijing up with their own mana, not mana taken from New York. I’d got to Mumbai on my own mana. And I’d killed the maw-mouth with my own, too. It wasn’t hard to kill them anymore, with my own new spell. Really I was just pointing out an obvious fact. Of course they were dead; they’d been crushed into jelly. Just like of course you couldn’t build a house in the void. It was a transparent lie, the same lie on both sides: the lie of deathlessness.
But…I hadn’t taken the power-sharer off, either. I’d had it there in case I needed it. Even now that I knew what Ophelia had done to help fill the mana store that was feeding this one. I slowly unclasped it and took it off my wrist. I held it in my hands, and then I flicked it out of existence. It wasn’t hard. A jerk of my hand and barely a whisper of mana and it was gone.
Deepthi gave a small sigh that was relief, as if she’d watched me get safely over a hurdle she hadn’t known for certain I would take. “Our family has mana saved,” she said. “We will build more. And when we have enough, if the universe wills, you will come back and raise it for us.”