And then Khamis was there too, heaving himself forward with his whole face clenched up with the same determination he’d worn when he’d faced me down at school, and he snarled at me, “Do it! Do it and get it over with, you stupid girl! What else are you going to do, leave him like that? You might as well feed him to Patience yourself.”
I could have punched him in the face; I could have kissed him in gratitude, for the single spark of rage lighting up in me, burning off despair in clean hot fire. “No,” I said savagely, to Khamis, to Orion; to Ophelia and to Shanfeng. “No. I’m not going to leave him like that,” full of a sharp-edged golden clarity like the shining letters at my feet, the prayer from the Scholomance doors: Malice, keep far.
But malice had been inside the Scholomance from the beginning. Those doors had been built on another maw-mouth, a maw-mouth that had refused to be sent away, because there was no better hunting ground in the world. Patience. And it was still here. Orion hadn’t destroyed Patience. The Scholomance was still standing. He’d devoured Patience, the way Patience had devoured Fortitude, the way that between them they had devoured a century of children’s lives. And all those children were still in there, still screaming, still suffering. I couldn’t leave them like that. I couldn’t leave any of them like that.
I had to kill Orion Lake.
I put the chain with Shanfeng’s massive power-sharer over my head, and then I slung my bag forward and took out the sutras. I opened them and held them up, let the book rise up from my hands, the golden incantations shining. I reached out on either side to Liu and Aadhya, squeezed their hands tight, felt their love and strength in their answering grip.
“Keep hold of me,” I said. “Don’t let go. Please.” Orion had almost made it through the shield, and I could feel their terror, too; their hearts beating through their hands. It wasn’t fair to ask, but I asked it anyway. “Please.”
“We’re here,” Liu whispered, and Aadhya said, shaking, “We won’t let go.” They put their hands on my shoulders, just like when we’d started coming down the well, and after a moment, Khamis put his hands on their shoulders, the contact running through to me like an electrical spark.
Orion broke through the dome. It shattered and went falling away like shards of thin ice, vaporizing before they even hit the ground. He came towards me, and I didn’t step back. I reached out and took hold of him and gripped him in my hands, all of him: the horrible seething hunger and all the works built on top of it, everything that required that endless fuel. The school that Sir Alfred Cooper Browning had built to save the children of enclavers; the expansion that London had made to let in so many more. The many dozens of enclaves whose maw-mouths had crept into the Scholomance looking to feed, and been swallowed up by Patience and Fortitude in their turn. And Orion. The child that Ophelia had sacrificed to try to stop a rising tide of maleficaria, and I said to him softly, gently, with all my heart, “You’re already dead.”
It barely took any mana at all. I was just telling the obvious truth, telling all of those devoured children the truth: Orion, and everyone who’d gone into the Scholomance and hadn’t come out, and the crushed sacrificial victims under every maw-mouth that Patience had swallowed up. They were already dead, and that was horrible and unfair and agonizing, but it was the truth, and it did, actually, set them free, as the maw-mouth that had devoured Orion, the maw-mouth that was holding Orion up, heard me, and recognized that yes, of course, it too was already dead.
There wasn’t a sloshing rush of flesh and rot: Ophelia’s efficient maw-mouth didn’t need to keep the bodies round, having a better one of its own. But I still felt them going, like one single enormous sighing out. And the mana went with them. The mana extracted from all those lives, which had even to this moment been holding up enclaves all over the world, and the Scholomance itself, and the life of one boy; it all went draining away, and Orion’s body shuddered under my hands like the deck of a rolling ship, or the waves beneath it. The ground underneath our feet shuddered and rolled the same way, the bronze doors of the Scholomance groaning horribly. There were cries and shouts from the platform as all the cracks Ruth had mended began to open up again and widen, the whole room wavering. Rocks were coming down from overhead; this cavern had slid halfway into the void itself, connected to the Scholomance, and it wasn’t going to survive the school coming down.
Orion was almost sliding out of my grip, as if I was trying to hold on to something just as impossible, a different magical wonder built into the void. But I didn’t let go. I held on, to Orion, to the Scholomance, to the teetering distant enclaves that I couldn’t see, all of that magic built on top of a tiny single-celled place in the void where the maw-mouth had been. “You’re already dead,” I said. “But stay anyway. Stay with us, and shelter all the wise-gifted children of the world,” and made all three of the spells into one: the terrible murderous truth I had to tell the maw-mouth, and the sutras’ longing plea for golden shelter, and the beautiful lie that the Scholomance had been built upon, and into that working I poured all the mana that Shanfeng had given me, the mana that had been saved up to build a school to save the lives of children. The work that Orion had tried to make his own.
I repeated the incantation in Sanskrit from the sutras, the incantation that really just meant “stay,” and then Liu joined in, saying it in Chinese, the version she’d used in Beijing, and Aadhya said it with me the next time in English, “Stay and be shelter,” and even as we were speaking I felt more jolting sparks going through me: Miranda and Antonio and Eman and Caterina had joined our human chain too, behind Khamis, and then there was a thump through us all like a lightning strike: Li Shanfeng had joined the chain behind them.
I gasped with the surge and said it again, stay, even though I couldn’t hear myself speaking anymore; more hands and voices were coming, everyone on Shanghai’s side streaming to join in, power crackling through the line into me, and then Liesel’s voice was calling out over the noise, “Not in a single line! Get closer and spread out!” and she pushed in next to me, putting a hand directly on my back, another supporting branch. Alfie was right next to her, reaching to touch me as well with Sarah gripping his free hand. In another moment, his father was there too in a line behind him. Wizards from both sides were crowding in now, all of us saying it together: “Stay,” getting louder and louder even as the Scholomance and Orion both shook from their foundations.
He was getting heavier and heavier in my grasp, as if I was trying to hold him up, along with the entire school and all those other enclaves loaded up on his shoulders, against the dragging undertow of all the sloshing power of stolen mana draining away from under them. But everyone behind me was trying to help, trying to hold them—and then Ophelia and Balthasar were there, too. But they didn’t join the chain: instead they came all the way up and put their own hands directly on Orion, next to mine.
And then Aadhya, my darling Aad who’d taken that first mad flyer on me, gritted her teeth and put her hand on Orion too, and other people started to grab on to them, spreading out the weight, pouring in more mana. We were all holding on to him and just saying it over and over, stay, in all the languages of the world, and beneath our feet a golden light was rising up out of the widening cracks in the carved inscriptions, filling them in, starting to make them whole, and there was light all around us, warm, full of hope, as Orion lurched forward under my hands, like someone who’d just been pulled back onto solid footing. He gasped and reached out to me, reached his hands out to cup my face, and he said in a ragged, broken voice, choosing, “I’ll stay. El, I’ll stay,” and kissed me, through our tears.