Page 17 of The Golden Enclaves
I’d like to think I wouldn’t have done any of that, but I’d have donesomething,even if it was only to grab Yancy by the shoulders and scream into her face to tell me, tell me, tell me. What I wanted more than anything was for her to say that they’ddonesomething, someone before her had done something all the way back then to save those old places from falling off into the void, and otherwise they would have been gone, only I don’t think I’d really have believed her if she’d told me that.
But Liesel said to me, “Stop that!” in a crisp peremptorytone, and snapped at Yancy, “We broke the Scholomance away into the void. You’ve heard this, yes?”
Yancy didn’t take her eyes off me. There was a flush of purple-pink color standing in her cheeks and glowing through the skin a bit, something coming to the surface. “I’ve heard a lot of things, the last week. Wasn’t sure what to believe.”
“You haven’t noticed that more than half the maleficaria are gone?” Liesel said tartly.
Yancy shrugged a bit. “We hole up underneath the enclave so wedon’tsee mals, love. It’s been better, yeah. Doesn’t mean I was ready to swallow the idea that the Scholomance got booted off the world. We get a lot of backwards stories, listening to whispers, and the ones that come straight out of the enclave are mostly just better lies. We couldn’t work out any reason why New York and London would’ve done it. But they didn’t, did they,” she finished softly, still looking at me. “Youdid it.”
Liesel scowled in irritation, and to be fair, I certainly wouldn’t have got far on my own. But I wasn’t giving a bloody speech, was I, so I didn’t care about correcting Yancy and sharing the credit. I just stared at her, waiting, and Yancy gave a small huff. “Your mum must be proud.” I could’ve slapped her, only I couldn’t; if I’d let myself act with that much violent intention, probably I’d have set her on fire. She saw my expression, I suppose, and rolled her eyes and spread her hands as if to ward me off. “I’m serious! Bloody hell.”
Maybe Yancy had been serious, but I couldn’t help but think of Mum seeing me like this: down in London’s underbelly with a cold malicious green wave gathered round me, threatening someone who’d only helped me, trying to bully her into telling me the secrets she and her people used to survive. So I shut my eyes and did my best to stop wanting to set Yancy on fire, and Liesel, forcing me to be grateful she’dcome along, said, “We did it, yes. But one boy was left behind. Can you tell us how to get back in?”
Yancy didn’t say anything at first. I opened my eyes again. The mirk had faded away from around us, and the tunnel lights were basting us in their gloriously mundane fluorescence again. She was studying me like puzzling out a book in a new language. “Is the door still there?” she asked after a moment. “The outside one, I mean—the way in.”
“I don’t know,” I said, calming a bit; she was telling me something, at least. “I was standing at the gates when I cast the spell to break it off. I don’t know if it would have hit—”
“Did you go to the door in the real world, smash it up completely, brick up the hole, build a wall over it, brick up the nearest passage too, and then cast four curses of forgetting over the place?” Yancy interrupted, prosaic.
“Right, no,” I said.
She nodded. “Then there’s not much trick to it. If the door’s still there, you just open it and go through the usual way, whatever that is. And if you remember the place on the other side well enough, and it’s got enough mana left in it and you give it a bit more, and you’re lucky, then you might be able to convince it to be there, long enough for you to be in it. Or you might not. When it’s the Scholomance—I don’t know, actually. Could go either way. Either it was so bloody big that it burned up all the mana left in the place in a flash, and the whole thing just went, or it was so bloody big that it’ll be centuries crumbling away. If I had to guess—it’ll linger a while, in bits and pieces at least. There’re a lot of wizards out there with the place burned into their brains. But as for going round inside the place—” She shrugged. “You’d just have to try it and see.”
She hesitated a moment, and then added, “And you’d better think about whether you want to. How long has it been,more than a week? We try to poke our heads out every few days. Longer than that, and you start sliding off yourself. And that’swithour little helpers.” Yancy opened a flap of her coat to show the flask sitting in an inner pocket, the lizard peeking out around it. She let the coat fall shut again. “We run into the others sometimes—people who’ve gone too long, or fallen off somewhere. It’s not pretty.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I already knew what I found wasn’t going to be pretty. “Thanks, Yancy. Sorry for…”
Yancy eyed me, then shook her head. “I won’t say sorry myself. I poke bears: it’s how we live down here, and if I could stand to do it any other way, I wouldn’t be here in the first place. But every once in a while you have to expect to see some claws and teeth. Just do me a flavor and don’t come back through our doors. It’s not the place for you.”
“Where is?” I said, sour as turned milk, and I turned my back on her and headed down the tunnel, past the sign with the arrow pointingEXIT.
It was a good ten minutes’ walkthrough the tunnels and round and round and round the stairs until the building finally spat me and Liesel out near Belsize Park station. We weren’t heaving for breath or anything, as we were still in sprinting-for-the-graduation-gates trim, but it wasn’t a delightful stroll either. At last we were out in the July night air, late enough now that all the posh cafés and restaurants around us were closed, a few very faint stars or satellites glittering overhead.
I stood on the corner blankly. Not out of indecision: I was full of perfect certainty. I knew exactly what I had to do, bright and clear and utterly necessary. I had to get to the Scholomance doors, and I had to go in, and I had to kill Patience. Only I hadn’t the faintest idea how to start on that project in any practical way. I’d spent the last four years of my life in a single building—a bloody big one, but still there hadn’t been anywhere in the place I couldn’t get to by walking, and the meals were terrible but they were provided forme, and I know how to set off supervolcanoes and destroy castigator demons and murder ten thousand people at a time, but I didn’t have a passport or a mobile or a tenner in my pocket. And for that matter, I didn’t even know where I was going. I looked at Liesel ungraciously. “Can you ask Alfie for me where the Scholomance doors are?”
“No, of course not. If I contact Alfie from here, while he is in the enclave, his father’s enemies will be able to trace us, and then we will have done all this,” she waved with vivid disgust at the squat round turret we’d emerged from, “for nothing. Anyway, what good would that do? Yancy said it would take mana. London is still in no position to help you with that at the moment. We must go to New York.”
I had several different competing reactions to that statement, most prominently the intense desire to demand whenIhad becomewe,and also why, but unfortunately the well-honed strategic bits of my brain pointed out that Liesel was in fact perfectly right. The only people in the world who could give me the kind of mana I’d need to get back into the Scholomance and kill Patience, and whowoulddo that, just to save Orion from screaming in the void for however long it took the school to really go, were in fact his mum and dad, in New York.
And I hadn’t any idea how to get there on my own. There’s a terribly impressive Trans-Atlantic Gateway between London and New York, but with London’s mana store flobbing about like jelly, I wouldn’t have bet on it being stable enough to use at the moment even if I could have gone sailing back into the enclave I’d just gone to great effort to sneak out of. That left the prosaic but reliable method of getting on a plane, and that meant I couldn’t afford to ask Lieselwhy,because if she didn’t help me, I’d land myself in the clink forinadequately forging a passport and stealing a plane ticket, and that was if I wasn’t shoved into deep dark detention somewhere.
Of course, Mum doesn’t have a passport or a mobile either. She’d have told me to just set off into the world and trust it to get me where I’m supposed to be. That always works for her, but the world has given me the strong impression that it thinks I’m supposed to be in a dark fortress on top of a mountain somewhere, wreathed with storms and lightning cracking down as I laugh maniacally, so I didn’t really trust that approach myself.
But I was still wary about taking Liesel’s help. I’d already turned down her offer, so now I didn’t have any idea what she thought she was going to get out of shepherding me around the world like a wayward hurricane she’d have liked to aim, and that made me uneasy since I was absolutely certain shedidthink she was going to get something out of it. What if it was something I didn’t want her to have? It could have been something as simple as wanting to get herself in good graces with Orion’s mum, who was in line to be the next Domina of New York, but flying across the Atlantic seemed like a fairly large outlay for the small chances of that return.
But I do a lot of things in my life warily, so this time wasn’t particularly novel. I let her summon us a taxi and off we went to the airport. She radiated exasperation when I needed help turning a small notebook from Paperchase into a passport, but she also did it for me, and then had a strongly worded conversation with the ticket machine that persuaded it to meekly hand over two first-class tickets, and once we’d been ushered through security and into the concourse, she dragged me past a bunch of perfume shops that together smelled like an unfortunate alchemy lab section and found a small phone store—tucked in a nook between one shop selling handbagsfor five hundred pounds and another one selling iPads, because after all, what if you just desperately needed an iPad on the spur of the moment whilst passing through—where she got me a proper phone on contract.
I didn’t resist the phone. The instant Liesel handed it over, I called Aadhya. Liu had written me an annoying little jingly song with her and Aadhya’s numbers in it, concluding with the lineAnd El is going to go and get a phoooone!so I hadn’t any trouble remembering it, now that I actually had one in my hands. “It’s me,” I said, when she answered.
Aadhya shrieked, “Oh my God, I’m going tokill you! Aweek! We started calling random communes! Liu calledLiesel!” At the sound of her voice, her voice caring about me, I had to go blindly stumbling off to the side of the corridor, nearly running into people going by in both directions, and turn myself to face the wall so I wouldn’t just go into a fit of blubbing.
Aadhya managed to conference Liu in while I got myself under control. Hearing both their voices prolonged the struggle, though. If I shut my eyes, I could be back in one of our dorm rooms, sitting together eating a mishmosh of snack bar horrors several steps down from the worst fast-food options in the airport around me, and I couldn’t want to be back inside the Scholomance, but I did want to be withthemagain; I wanted the circle of their arms around me, so desperately.
I couldn’t even tell them exactly what had happened: it would have been a bad idea to start talking about maleficaria and enclaves and maw-mouths, or even just Orion dying, there in the corridor with mundanes going past two feet away and a pair of police constables already eyeing me with some skepticism after I’d gone careening wildly across the flow of traffic. But I told them I was going to New York. “And I—have to go back to the school,” I said.
“Canyou?” Aadhya said. “Isn’t it—gone?”
“There’s a way,” I said. “I just need…”
