Page 23 of The Golden Enclaves
“Looking for moreefficientuses of malia, is that it?” I said, nauseated. I didn’t want to believe she was in earnest, but there was something hideously plausible about it all. A New Yorker reallydidn’tneed malia. She’d got rid of her own animaon purpose,probably for some sort of horrible massive working, or maybe just so she could work with malia without the distraction of getting hurt. And she surely rationed her malia usage as carefully as Liu ever had, never taking more than precisely necessary, refusing all the side benefits on offer. It explained why she didn’t look like a maleficer, in either direction.
She’d more or less turned herself into the Scholomance. The school hadn’t cared—hadn’t beenableto care—aboutany of us one at a time. The numbers had been its only implacable concern, and so it had marched us ruthlessly through an inhuman triage process, doing the best that it could. Only Ophelia didn’t even believe the stupid unbelievable lie that the school had swallowed, the mad ambition written too effectively into its steel and brass, the one that had sent it grabbing for the chance that Orion and I had provided:to protectallthe wise-gifted children of the world.She wasn’t going to try to do that. She perfectly understood that some children had to die.
Ophelia sighed. She put aside her glass of cool clear water and stood up again and came towards me, my whole body clenching at the approach, but she stopped at arm’s length, looking up into my face. “El, you’re clearly a very nice girl,” she said, possibly the first time in my entire life that anyone had said that to me sincerely, and wasn’t it delightful to find someone speaking from a vantage point that made it possible. “I’m glad Orion met you. You won’t believe me, but I do love him. I always wanted him to be happy. If I could have made him happy—I would have.” Her face wavered oddly, almost more bewildered than sad, as if she found it hard to believe herself. “But that’s part of the problem, of course. We’re all greedy, but children make it easier to be. We feel it’s only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else’s mouth.”
Then she held out a small flat square box to me, about the size to hold a makeup compact: a box she hadn’t had in her hands a moment before, with the enclave’s symbol on it, the gates with the starburst behind them. “I can’t make you go back to the Scholomance if you won’t. But I can give you the mana, and I can give you the location. And no one else will go. So it’s up to you.”
What I ought to have done, which I knew perfectly well, was shove the box back at her and run away and give up on the whole idea. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get Orion away from Patience, and I couldn’t get him away from Ophelia either. I couldn’t rewrite his whole life, snatch him out of his cradle and carry him across the ocean to Mum, or just to some decent person. I couldn’t even take back every rude and nasty thing I’d ever said to him. I would have done that, if I could have; the memory of every word stung in my brain like bees. He’d only liked me in the first place because I hadn’t been trying to make up to him, but I could have simply been nice, without wanting anything of him, and surely that would have worked, too. But it was too late. The only thing I could do for him anymore was kill him, and everyone else trapped inside Patience along with him. So I had to do that. I had to do the only thing I could do for him.
Horribly, I almost had to be glad that he hadn’t made it out, because hewouldn’thave come to me. Ophelia wouldn’t have kept him with love and appeals to his loyalty and conscience. She’d just have kept him by any means necessary—a compulsion or a collar or anything it took. He was one of those more efficient solutions, after all. You couldn’t have asked for better. A brilliant engine of a maleficaria-killer, who dumped the power back into the enclave share after? Ididn’tbelieve her. I didn’t believe she’d have made Orion happy if she could have. I could believe, at a stretch, that she’d have liked him to be happy on the side, and had been sorry that she couldn’t find a way to make him so, with her toys and obedient friends and flash cards. But not that she’d have chosen to make him happy, if it had really been a choice between his happiness and having the use of him.
Otherwise surely she wouldn’t havegothim in the first place. A slayer of monsters who’d put himself on the line for every stranger who came into reach; who’d been, besides that, agood boy,who’d tried to please his mum and dad and be kind and polite to other children even when they blatantly only wanted to use him—I’d been absolutely certain that his parents and his enclave had programmed it into him, but Ophelia surely hadn’t cared about anything of the sort. It had all been Orion, after all. Just like Mum, who with her infinite kindness had got herself a sullen wrathful death-sorceress child for her pains, Ophelia had got a selfless noble hero, who’d never made a single calculated move in his life, who’d saved children indiscriminately and without the slightest consideration of how he’d throw off the balance by doing it. Who’d been kind even to the girl who’d snapped his head off for daring to save her.
And if he’d made it out, and he hadn’t come to Wales…I’d have written him off, in my selfish guarded pride, and told myself I didn’t mind it, pretended that I wasn’t sorry. I would have abandoned him to her, to the enclave. He couldn’t have trusted me to come and save him.
Maybe he’d known, on some level, what he was going back to, if he went. Ophelia had surely put on a good show for him, and Orion hadn’t been able to tell a maleficer from a doorknob. But he’d lived with her all his life. Maybe he’d guessed, by the end.The Scholomance is the best place I’ve ever been,he’d said to me. Now I knew why that was true. And so now I felt, with a horrible sharp stab, that maybe—when the moment came—he’dchosennot to go home. He’d chosen a final blaze of self-sacrifice, turning to fight the indestructible monster, to avoid going home to the one he couldn’t bear to fight. I didn’t know if that was true, but it felt nauseatinglypossible, in a way that filled in the question I still couldn’t answer, hadn’t allowed myself to ask:why hadn’t he come out?
But I hadn’t asked that question partly because it was useless. It didn’t matter why, not anymore. I hadn’t got him out. I couldn’t save him now. But I still had to go and do the last little thing for him that I could. And after that—I’d have to decide if I needed to come back here and try to destroy Ophelia. I was more than halfway convinced shewasthe one destroying the enclaves at this point. If her problem with enclaves was getting enclavers to share, then terrifying them all with the threat of some mysterious indiscriminate maleficer who was going to destroy their enclaves without warning would be an excellent strategy. Was that justification for killing her? If she was responsible for killing everyone in Bangkok enclave, everyone in Salta, all the people who’d died in London and Beijing? Even if I couldn’t be sure, she was certainly going to dosomethingabsolutely horrible, sooner or later.
I could just see Mum reaching out to put her hand on my forehead to make that thought go away, to make all those thoughts go away. But Mum wasn’t with me, and I couldn’t even call her, because if I did, she’d tell me what I already knew, that I shouldn’t take anything from Ophelia. And I couldn’t bear to hear it exactly because I knew it was right. But I still couldn’t make myself hand back the box that held the only chance of the last scraggly miserable thing I could do for Orion.
Ophelia had waited for a bit, I suppose to be sure I wasn’t about to throw her box at her head or out through the windows, but after I didn’t do that for long enough, she decided that I was keeping it, which apparently I was. She nodded politely to us all and went to give Balthasar a quick kiss,exactly like an ordinary loving spouse, and told him, “I’ve got to get back to the council,” and then she left the flat without another word, or looking back at all.
Balthasar saw us out; he even offered to let us use one of the gateways. “No,” I said flatly, without even bothering to open the box and find out where I was going. All I wanted was to getoutof this place, at once, and if that meant a thirty-hour intercontinental flight in my future, so what?
Chloe trailed along with us, darting deeply anxious looks towards me. I imagine she had quite a lot of questions about her own future Domina to ask me. But she didn’t get a chance. They saw us back to the exit, and just inside, Balthasar said, “They’ll be locking down the perimeter shortly. El—thank you so much for coming. I’m very glad to have met you.” He hesitated, and then added, “I know this has probably been very confusing—”
I turned and walked out on him and Chloe at that point, before he could get round to explaining to me earnestly how Ophelia meant well, and how he’d like to tell me more about her very important and excellent plans for the world. I was sure he’d have meant every word with full sincerity, too. He had to be a true believer: he’d already been an enclaver, and a powerful one, so it wasn’t that he’d married Ophelia and gone along with her plans just because he’d been desperate for an enclave spot.
Liesel and Aadhya were hard on my heels, which was just as well, because I didn’t slow down even though I didn’t really know where I was going in the stinking dirty train station, the one that had taken the place of the marble halls the enclave had stolen. I just headed for the nearest red sign markedEXITuntil I found daylight. When we finally emerged blinking from the depths, Aadhya marched us to the nearest convenient waiting point, not even a café but just a tiny frozenyogurt stand with a handful of rickety uncomfortable metal chairs scattered over the pavement vaguely in the vicinity. She told Liesel, “Don’t let her goanywhere,” as though I needed a keeper, who snapped back, “Come quickly.”
Aadhya went to fetch her car from the parking space—another convenient bit of magic; she’d found one with no trouble, less than a block away—and as soon as she had us in it, she began driving without any discussion. By some sort of instinctive and unspoken agreement, none of us said anything until we’d got through the tunnel and back into New Jersey, as if we needed to get running water between us and the monster on the other side, but then we came out from under the river and Liesel immediately said, “She is amaleficer?” at exactly the same time as Aadhya said, “Okay, El, what thefuck.”
“Yes,” I said, which was the answer to both of them.
“Do you think they…know,” Aadhya said, but it stopped being a question by the time she finished asking it. Of coursetheyknew, wheretheywas everyone who mattered: the rest of the New York council, the senior wizards of the enclave. It was afeaturefor them, surely, not a bug. A fantastically controlled dark sorceress, capable of anything and willing to do worse yet—of course any enclave would grab at her with both hands. That had been my own strategy for getting an enclave place, after all, and an excellent strategy it was; it had only broken down on my being willing to execute it. No wonder Ophelia was a shoo-in for the next Domina. In fact, it was probably her own choice not to have taken the position yet.
I had Ophelia’s small box cupped in my hands—not protectively, more like making sure it didn’t go off in some way—and I spent the rest of the way just staring at it, until Aadhya was pulling up in front of what I assumed at first was somesort of club or restaurant, a vast hulking mansion of pink brick that was only a tiny bit shy of London’s monstrosity, only it hadn’t been allowed to collapse in on itself. The plantings were absolutely stupendous, what seemed like the entire garden in bloom. But she left her car in the drive and led us to the door, so I said cautiously, “This isn’t your house?” half expecting her to laugh at me, only she said, “Yeah, sorry, I’m throwing you to the wolves,” before she opened the door.
The wolves were her entire family, who indeed descended on us in a pack; her mum sailed straight to me, grabbed my face in her hands and kissed me on both cheeks and then held me back a bit so she could smile at me fiercely, her eyes wet. “Aadhya told us all about you,” she said, her voice thick. I swallowed hard.
It wasn’t anything like the vague fragments I remembered from that one catastrophic visit to my father’s family. The gigantic American house was full of slightly wrong architectural details and every imaginable mod con, aggressively mundane. That was how Aadhya’s family had protected their last remaining child: they’d hidden all the magic away into small rooms upstairs, a workshop down in the basement, behind locked doors, and threw the rest of the house open to the mundane friends she made at the local middle school and turned it into a warm welcoming feast of a place for them, so mals wouldn’t come anywhere near.
And they hadn’t shut the doors after she’d gone away. While we were all sitting round the pool in back with tall cold glasses of iced tea full of fruit and a bowl of freshly made snack mix that I couldn’t stop eating by the handful, a mundane neighbor dropped by unannounced with a whole basket of glowing ripe tomatoes; she said they were overflowing her vegetable patch, exclaimed with surprise and delight to see Aadhya all grown up and home from boarding school, wasbeamingly friendly to Liesel and only wobbled a little when she came to me, with a vague expression of unease crossing her face that she hurriedly papered over with an even more determined smile before making a slightly awkward excuse to leave rather than sit down and have a drink.
Her own family probably felt that sensation too, since everyone does. But they didn’t let on if they did. They weren’t mundanes, and I wasn’t just a friend from school: I was Aadhya’s ally. I had got their daughter out of the Scholomance, and she’d got me out. For most of us, the loser kids who don’t have an enclave ready to take us in when we graduate, that’s the most important relationship in our lives short of marriage, and sometimes beyond it. I’d needed most of last year to wrap my head round the idea that anyone had been willing to be my ally at all, my ally and my friend, and not just someone using me at arm’s length, warily. I’d never thought about what it would be like having that relationshipaftergetting out. And this was what it was like: I waswelcome.
So it was, after all, like that visit to the compound outside Mumbai, only it was just the first shining moments of that visit, which had stuck with me all these years, warm and golden,family,and this time the beauty didn’t stop. And I didn’t sayI need to get going,even though if I was going, I did need to go. It was like having cool balm applied to the searing pain of meeting Ophelia, of looking at Orion’s life.
Aadhya’s grandmothers kept bringing more amazing snacks out in waves. There wasn’t really a break between teatime and dinner, we just migrated from our lounge chairs to sit at the large outdoor table in the yard under golden hanging lamps, and Aadhya’s dad came home—he was working in Boston enclave that week; he’d literally got in the car and driven home the whole way just to have dinner with us—and he’d brought her cousin from Kolkata enclave who wastraining in Boston with a senior specialist in computational artifice. He was a handsome strapping lad of twenty-two that they made a point of mentioning by the way wasn’t engaged yet, when they seated him next to me, and asked me about my mum and hoped I would bring her for a visit sometime.
Aad rolled her eyes dramatically at me behind her mum’s back during this process and mouthed an apology, but it didn’t feel like aggressive matchmaking or anything to me. They didn’t really expect me or him to suddenly want to start dating one another, they were just—showing me a door, telling me that if I wanted to walk through it, I’d have beenacceptable,and that still wasn’t something I expected enough to be able to find it annoying. And he smiled at me and even flirted a bit, in a way that would probably have stunned me into amazement, or maybe even delight, another time. Liesel making me her offer had been its own surprise, but at least she’d had some sort of rational ulterior motive. I wasn’t really prepared for a complete stranger showing signs ofwantingto know me, for no particular reason whatsoever.
Other circumstances, I would have gone fumbling through hardly believing it was happening, then flirting back awkwardly, perhaps giving him my squeaky-new number, maybe even making plans to meet him for a coffee in some magnificently ordinary way. If only Orion were alive, and I could have firmly informed him that I wasn’t tying myself down just yet, and I expected him to see other people a bit too, and be sure it wasn’t just a school romance, or anything like that, and all those sensible things that I thought on principle were a good idea but which hadn’t really seemed like an option I needed to bother considering. I’d imagined myself with Orion, or alone; never anything else. And of course it was good and healthy and wonderful for me to imagine myself with someone else, to imagine myself with Liesel or withAadhya’s cousin or with someone I hadn’t even met, but I could do that, and Orion couldn’t, because Orion was dead and screaming.
So instead of having a nice ordinary conversation, I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom and lock myself in to breathe deeply a few times and wash my face, and after I dried it off, I finally took Ophelia’s box out of my pocket and opened the lid. It unfolded and kept unfolding until it was nearly six times the size, lined with black velvet, and inside there was a power-sharer. It looked a bit like a pocket watch on a strap, the lid engraved with the enclave’s symbol. Just like the one Orion had used to wear, only obviously this one would let me pull. A small scrap of heavy paper with rough edges was laid out next to it, with a set of GPS coordinates written down, and labeled underneathSintra, Portugal.
Precious hauled herself out of my other pocket a bit groggily—she’d gorged herself on the puffed rice out of the snack mix, which I hoped wasn’t going to give her indigestion—and jumped over to the counter, next to the box. She put a paw on the power-sharer as if to bar me from it, and looked up at me with her bright-green eyes and squeaked anxiously: she hoped I knew what I was getting into.
