Page 40 of The Golden Enclaves
“It’s okay!” Aadhya said, when I pulled up in alarm. “It’s a regeneration spell.”
The cocoon was made of filaments of water coming up out of the stream, which were being interwoven with thin lines of fine powders coming out of two dozen porcelain jars arranged in the courtyard. Some were enormous waist-high things that I could almost have climbed inside, and others were the size of a sugar bowl, and one tiny casket made of solid gold emitted a single glowing-red grain every ten minutes out of a minuscule opening in the top. It was certainly impressive, and when I went up as close as I could and peered through the translucent shell, Liu already looked better: her shoulders and hips had straightened out, and her skin was glowing faintly and evenly all over, the livid marks gone.
I made the mistake of trying to ask one of the healers’ apprentices how much longer the treatment would take, and got an exhaustive explanation that I couldn’t understand at all. It was given to me in English, not in Chinese, but that didn’t help. The Beijing healers weren’t like Mum; they were the kind of healers who’d come out of the Scholomance, went straight for advanced mundane medical degrees, then apprenticed for another ten years to a senior healer. Anyone who emerges from the process talks in jargon so rarefied that I doubt any other human being could understand them except other wizard healers. Occasionally those sorts come to see Mum to try to understand her work, and usually go away again seething in frustration after a few days.
Except in one way it turned out they were exactly like Mum. I finally gave up on understanding what they were doing and just demanded to know specifically what hour, day, week, or year Liu would come out of the chrysalis, and they said,When she is ready.
Liesel and Aadhya both asked me—with differing degreesof tact—what had happened with Orion, what was wrong with him. I couldn’t tell them, not even Aad. I couldn’t put the words into the world. If I didn’t say them, if I didn’t think about it, I could put myself back into the story I’d already written for myself, well before graduation: a jilted girl, the school romance come to an end, ordinary and expected. Orion would be alive in New York, choosing to be there of his own free will. And I could go on with my life after all.
I suppose on some level I already knew that as soon as I tried, I’d find fairly quickly that I couldn’t. But I didn’t know what there was to be done, and I had still less idea of whatIcould do. Ophelia deserved to have her entire brain taken out and shredded like cabbage, but Orion was right: if she couldn’t undo whatever she’d done, no one could. Mum had already tried, and I didn’t believe there was any healer in the world who could do more for him. And I couldn’t see any way for me to be of any use at all. The only thing I could have done was the only thing I could do to any maw-mouth, and I wasn’t going to do it to Orion. He was alive, hewas,and he deserved to live if anyone ever had, and I wasn’t going to look him in the face and tell him he was already dead.
But I didn’t know what else I could do. I ended up just sitting in the courtyard with Zheng and Min and Liu’s grandmother, watching the cocoon turning gently round and getting more and more angry, like a supervolcano building up pressure deep underground, ready to erupt in one direction or another. Aadhya and Liesel had both been taken off by Liu’s uncle and father to go help negotiate various terms with the rest of the new and old enclavers—as proxies for me, I gathered, which was probably just as well for everyone concerned, since seething rage doesn’t really make negotiations go smoothly.
Out of the back of the sage’s house, there were faint warmgleams of light coming out of the shutters of every house along the alleyway, and the red lanterns had dimmed, but deliberately. Everyone had been tucked into some corner or another for the night, and the enclave was starting to settle, a general quiet descending. There were even a few crickets making soft singing noises together in the courtyard, as if they’d snuck in or been brought in. You couldn’t tell what had almost happened here. Except for Liu, still floating, eyes closed, still not ready to come back out of what everyone in this place had tried to do to her.
“There was a lottery,” Jiangyu had told us, with perfect serious earnestness, and looked perplexed when I’d brayed a laugh in his face. There hadn’t been a lottery, or at least not a real one. Oh, surely there had been some nicely arranged set dressing, but it hadn’t been random at all. I knew that, because now that I’d cast the final incantation, I knew why it had been Liu. Because the person touching the void for everyone, the single voice asking the void tobe shelter,had to be strict mana. They couldn’t be even a little bit of a cheat, they couldn’t have any anima scarring at all. The mana had to flow perfectly smooth.
And even though Liuhadbeen a reluctant maleficer for three years, she’d done it out of love for her cousins, and then she’d been the involuntary recipient of a really bang-up spirit cleanse, thanks to me. She’d stayed strict mana ever since. For a whole year in the Scholomance, even under all the weight of fear and graduation: it had probably been the equivalent of physiotherapy for her anima.
It must have looked like a golden windfall to the council members. It’s not that easy to find a wizard who’s strict mana. Almost everyone cheats a bit, now and again. I would guess most of the time they have to use someone who’s strict mana by accident rather than design: a loser kid fresh out of theScholomance, one of the kind that don’t have enough power of their own to steal anyone else’s mana when the only available targets are other wizard kids, who just barely squeak out on the minion track by building mana of their own frantically, getting lucky enough that they don’t have to use it themselves, and then letting other people have it for graduation.
But the council here hadn’t had to do that. They’d had a witch with real power, who consciously refused to sneak even a drop of unearned mana—which always means stolen from some other living thing—and they’d deliberately taken her and made her their conduit for the void. That probably would only have made the spell work better, too. That Liu was someone like that, and that they’d chosen to do it to her. And no one had stopped them.
Except me. I’d stopped them. I’d stopped them, but I hadn’t done it by killing them; I hadn’t done it by destroying their enclave. I’d done it by giving the ordinary, mostly decent people, the ones who hadn’t been able to watch,another way.I hadn’t destroyed Beijing. I’dsavedBeijing, just like I’d saved London. Ihadmade Mum’s choice, every time it mattered. I’d made it here, and I’d made it in the Scholomance with Jack’s knife deep in my belly; in the library corridor, watching a maw-mouth go after a hundred helpless freshmen. I’d made it over and over, all through senior year, with graduation looming closer every day, and I was never going to turn into the monstrous vile destroyer of worlds that my however-great-grandmother had said I would, because if I was ever going to, I’d havedone it already.
And that meant that much to my rage and sorrow, I couldn’t go to New York and destroy Ophelia, who deserved to be destroyed if anyone in the world did, and since I couldn’t do that, gradually I realized that what I could do, what I wasgoing to do, was go and beat down the doors of Deepthi Sharma’s bloody compound and make her look me in the face and admit thatshe’d been wrong.
I started trying to use my phone to work out how to get from Beijing to Mumbai. That went as well as you’d expect given that I’d literally never used one until a week before, until Zheng, who was sitting next to me, couldn’t bear watching my incompetence anymore and took it from me and started showing me the flights. I couldn’t actually book any of them, since I still didn’t have any money or a credit card, but I’d just decided that I’d go back to the airport and muddle through it somehow, when Liesel and Aadhya came back in from the alleyway, and Aadhya immediately said, “Don’t freak out.”
Obviously the first thing I wanted to do wasfreak out,but before I got a word out, Liesel said, “No, the enclavers have not done anything!”
“Yeah, no, it’s not anything here,” Aadhya said. She held up her phone. “Ibrahim’s texting me from Dubai. Jamaal asked him to help get hold of you. He’s begging you to come out there. He says they’re going to be the next enclave attacked.”
“What do you mean,goingto be?” I said. “And since when do people think I’m on call to every enclave in the world?”
“Excuse you, you’renoton call to every enclave in the world,I am,” Aadhya said, pointedly.
“And since seven hours ago, when you have now savedtwoenclaves from collapse, that is when,” Liesel said, equally unmerciful.
“Well, I’m not going to be,” I said. “If theyknowit’s coming, they can all clear out and go live like ordinary people.”
“But they won’t do that,” Liesel said. “They will empty the mana store, and take all their most valuable artifice and theirbooks, and their money, and when the enclave is destroyed, they will take all the space which they already own, in the mundane world, and the enclave-building spells which they already have, and they willmake a new enclave,” which was so patently true that I couldn’t argue with it in the least. Even if I broadcast the truth all round the world, told every single wizard what the enclavers were doing to make their snug little pockets in the void, it wouldn’t stop anyone, not for long. People would hesitate, they’d recoil, and then little by little they’d reconcile themselves to the idea. Because they’d look at everyone else living in their own tidy enclaves, each one of them made the same grotesque way, and they’d saywhy not me,and that was a fair question, after all. Whynotthem.
I got up and stormed out of the enclave and into the temple grounds. All the tourists had gone; it was well after dark. It was still sweltering-hot outside compared with the cool dimness of the enclave, but a breeze was whispering through the green growth everywhere, and I found a bench and sat sullen and seething. After about fifteen minutes, Aadhya came out and sat down next to me.
“You’re going to Dubai,” she said. She sounded a little bleak.
“I’mnot,” I said ferociously. “I’m going to—” She was holding out her phone. I took it out of her hand and looked at the last messages on the screen.
Please, tell El, she’s got to come,Ibrahim had texted.We don’t know anything else, but we know it’s going to happen. The warning came from the Speaker of Mumbai.
I stared at it, mounting rage swelling up in me. It made sense of their panic: as far as I know, of all the many, many prophecies made by the Speaker of Mumbai since she was four years old, the one she made aboutmeremains the single solitary exception that hasn’t come true yet.Yet:the shadowthat I’ve lived my entire life inside, ever since she’d prophesied that I was doomed to bring death and destruction all over the world. It was like she’dheardme thinking about coming to yell at her, and she’d found a way to get someone else to grab me by the ankles and slow me down.
I shoved the phone back at Aadhya. “I’m not going,” I said. “I don’t want to go!”
She didn’t argue with me. She just put her arm round my shoulders, and I turned in and hugged her, and she hugged me back, hard, letting me hold on.
“I’ll stay with her,” Aadhya said, holding my hand tight as we stood and looked at Liu, still floating in the cocoon, still notreadyto come out. “I’ll let you know as soon as she’s okay.”
