Page 39 of The Golden Enclaves
But Orion was staring at me like I was a drink of water, so I drew a few deep breaths and forced myself calm. “Lake, I know she’s your mum, but she’s amaleficer,” I said, level and measured. “Whatever’s wrong, it’sher fault.She’sdoneit to you. And she won’t fix it for you, either.”
“She’s the only one who might be able to,” he said. “If anyone else could have—” He stopped, and I remembered Mum with her hands on his head, sorrowing, after everything she could do.I couldn’t set him right,she’d said. All she’d been able to do was give him hope. Enough hope that he’d taken himself back out of the despair he’d fallen into, let himself believe that he deserved to live after all, no matter what was wrong—wrongwith him,the words I hadn’t said, but they were in him already.
“You don’tneedfixing,” I said, and tried to mean it. “You’ve spent every minute of your lifesaving people.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve spent every minute of my lifehunting mals.I wanted to—” He looked away, a shine of misery in his eyes. “I wanted to think I was saving people. I wanted to be a hero.”
“Oh, shut it, you absolute block, youarea hero!” I said savagely. “Youdidsave people. You saved bloody all of us!”
“Youdid that,” he said.
“I’d’ve been eaten ten minutes in, along with everyone else in the hall, when the horde came back down!” I said. “I couldn’t have tried it, anyway. I couldn’t have done a thing if you hadn’t been there; we’d never even have fixed the machinery in the first place if you’d just faffed round and took out mals when you were bored.” I was grasping wildly round.“You clearedthe whole Scholomance! You killed half the mals in the entire world—”
“Iatethem!” he burst out.
I pulled up short. “What?”
“I ate them,” he said again, his voice raw-edged. “All those mals in the school. I didn’t kill them. I just—sucked them up. They tried to fight me, and it didn’t do any good.” He looked away, his face twisting with something horribly tense. “I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ve been doing all along. Not killing them.”
“I’ve seen you kill mals!” I said.
“I was doing it the hard way,” he said. “Maybe I needed to—to get through their skins, before, somehow. But I don’t have to anymore. I just have to get hold of them, and then—” He made a horrible gesture like someone slurping up noodles. “I can takeeverything.”
“What, like amaw-mouth?” I said, a howl of protest, and stopped, my whole stomach gone into free-fall.
“Yeah,” Orion said, smiling at me, an awful and utterly mirthless smile. “Just like that.”
I wanted to scream questions at him, but I couldn’t, not with that look on his face, gutted of hope. I’d have been pretending I didn’t understand. I didn’twantto understand, but I did, with horrible clarity: this was what Ophelia had done to him. The monster that couldn’t be killed, the monster that all the other monsters feared. The monster that extracted every last ounce of power from its victims. She’d found a way to put that horrible devouring power into aperson—and then she’d taught the person to feed the malia he gathered back into her enclave—where it superficially became mana again, purified by the act of being freely given. Beautifully efficient.
It was like I was back,wewere back in the Scholomance, in those final moments just before the gates, with the worsthorror in the world bearing down on us. I’d been yelling at Orion to run, I’d told him we had to run, and he—he’d been staring up at Patience, the whole time. He’d never fought a maw-mouth before; he’d never even seen one before I don’t think, not that close, notin range.He’d gone hunting for the one in our junior year, but he’d never found it. I’d killed it before he ever got there. But in the graduation hall, he’d come face-to-face with Patience, and he’d seen—something he recognized. A mirror held up before him.
And when I’d screamed at Orion that wehadto run—that there was nothing to do with a monster like that, with that unkillable horror, but leave it to fall away into the void—he’dagreed with me.So he’d shoved me out the doors, and stayed behind. As if I’dtoldhim to.
He was looking at me now the same way he’d looked at me then: as if for the last time, storing the memory of me up inside, getting ready to shove me out the doors again. And I was already falling, falling into horror, but Aadhya had been right. I hadn’t left Orion behind. That wasn’t a thing that I would do. No matter what. I couldn’t speak, but I took a step towards him, reaching for him.
But Orion didn’t let me touch him. He backed away a step, tensed up for flight. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t. I’ve got to go. I have to.”
“Listen to me,” I said, raggedly; my throat was swelled up choking-tight, but I forced the words out. “Orion, listen to me. As long as I can remember—I’ve had the power to do the most monstrous things I could imagine. And all I’ve ever wanted, all my life, is for someone to tell me—that I was in the clear. That I’d never do something so horrible I couldn’t walk away from it. But there’s no one. There’s no one who can hand you a badge and make you all right. The only way to be all right is to keep on being all right, as best you can.”
“Ican’tbe all right,” Orion said flatly, and silenced me. “El, you can’t look me in the face and tell me there’s anything I can do that can make me all right. Not like this. You know what maw-mouths are. What they do to people. And that’s what I did—that’s what I’mdoing—to those people in Beijing,” and for a moment I was back on my knees in that narrow chamber hearing the screaming again, the unbearable screaming of people being taken by a maw-mouth—only a maw-mouth that didn’t need to bother hanging on to their eyes and mouths, because it had eyes and a mouth and hands of its own—hands that could even cast spells.
“I thought—after your mom helped me, I thought—maybe I could control it,” Orion said. “I thought I could just keep hunting mals, and that would be okay. But I can’t. Ican’tbe all right. I don’t even know if—” He swallowed. “I ate—Patience.And I don’t think…I don’t think thatdestroyedPatience. I think all those people are still—”
He stopped, but he didn’t need to keep going, because I did know, in horrible detail, what maw-mouths were. All those people, all those devoured lives, were still in him, still screaming, being shredded to exhaustion and still not allowed to die, because that was what maw-mouths did to people, and he was right; I couldn’t say anything. For all I knew, one of those screaming people inside him was mydad.
Maybe the horror of it was in my face. I hope it wasn’t. But Orion said rawly, “El, if my mom can’t undo this—”
I didn’t want him to keep going. “If shewon’t,” I snarled.
“Either way,” he said. “If shedoesn’t—”
“It’s not yourfault,” I said, just a howl into the universe, which cared as much as it ever did. He hadn’t been asked for permission any more than I had, but here we were, still stuck with the consequences: a maw-mouth and a maw-mouthkiller, and I knew what Orion was trying to ask me, and I couldn’t bear to let him.
He didn’t try again. He shut his eyes, and then he took one small lurching step towards me, moving so fast I didn’t even have a chance to clutch at him, and he caught my face in his hands and kissed me, tears sticky between our mouths, and then my fingertips were just catching at his arm and sliding off as he went away from me, through the security gates, and was gone.
I was sitting on a bench in the concourse, staring into space when Aadhya eventually turned up and towed me back to the enclave. Not the new section; Liu’s family had set up shop in the sage’s house. There seemed to be a tacit agreement to leave it to them, even though the rest of the enclave was fairly crowded now: all the former enclavers were having to give up hard-won rooms in their flats and divide up the working space to make room for the newcomers who’d provided all the mana.
And Liu did need to be inside the enclave. Three of the top healers were working on her, taking it in turn round the clock to keep her hovering in some kind of complicated healing spell in the middle of the courtyard. It took me aback when Aadhya led me back in. I wasn’t paying much attention until then, but when we came inside, the whole house was different: the fountains had been refilled and the water was running again, a soft gurgling over rocks, and the trees and shrubs had all grown new leaves; a narrow vine was putting out flowers. And Liu was floating three feet off the ground in a glowing cocoon that one of the healers was spinning round her.
