Page 41 of The Golden Enclaves
“Text me every day,” I said.
Even sitting in the taxi on the way to the airport, I was still giving serious thought to getting a plane to Mumbai instead. But Ibrahim had managed to wheedle my number out of Aadhya, and halfway there he phoned me directly. It was the first phone call I’d ever received, actually, which was why I answered. The ringtone came yammering out of my pocket at full volume, loud inside the car, and I pulled it out and pushed and swiped until the noise stopped and then Ibrahim’s voice was coming out of it tinnily, “El?” and he sounded almost on the verge of tears.
I put it to my ear and said, “Yeah,” grudgingly.
He hadn’t an excuse to be sniffling. He wasn’t eveninDubai enclave. But obviously this was his chance, a precious once-in-a-lifetime crack at an enclave place, and—even though any sixteen hundred people you asked would have universally agreed that he was infinitely more likable than meand far better company—he was only getting that chance because he could get me on the phone.
“Thank you, El, so much,” he said, as if I’d already agreed to go. “I know you don’t like enclaves. I even warned Jamaal, I didn’t think you’d do it. But he begged me to ask. His sister’s about to have a baby. They’ve already moved their whole apartment out of the enclave, but the healers can’t work nearly as well outside. She’ll have to go to hospital. And everyone here is really scared.”
I’m sure they were. I half wanted to tell him how they’d built the enclave he wanted me to rescue, and ask him point-blank ifhe’dhave chosen to do it at the price. But why should I have made Ibrahim feel bad? I knew without asking that the answer was no in any practical sense, not because he was pure and selfless, but because he’d never in a thousand years end up in the position of having to make the choice. None of us talked about our plans for the future in the Scholomance, nothing specific, but we did share our dreams and fantasies in sidelong ways:wouldn’t it be nice,orif you had to chooseorthe best day would be,and all of his fantasies had more or less been sitting peacefully in a beautiful place with three or four friends and chocolate ice cream. He’d never get near a council seat; he didn’t want power. He just wanted tolive.
“If they want my help, they can have it,” I said instead, and cut him off when he started bursting into thanks, “but that’sif.” And then I told him that they’d have to chuck out everyone on the council, and then recruit enough wizards to get the mana I needed to replace their foundation stone. They were going to be even more crowded than Beijing after, since they didn’t have a convenient clan nearby who had spent several generations saving up.
“But you can tell them at least they won’t need to findanyone strict mana,” I added, savagely. He didn’t understand my anger, but he did understand that I meant it; he didn’t even try to argue, just said he’d pass the requirements along, and get back to me.
I half expected not to hear from him again. I imagine if he’d been deputized directly by the Dubai council, I wouldn’t have. But Jamaal’s grandfather and his three wives, a team of gateway builders, had joined the enclave as founding members some forty years ago after a bidding war. They weren’t on the council itself, but they had a great deal of influence in the enclave and couldn’t simply be shut up. I suppose they and everyone else considered ditching the council members a reasonable price to pay.
In any case, Ibrahim had sent me plane tickets before we’d even got to the kiosks, and when they came through, I stared at them and Liesel said, “Well?” with an air of impatience, and I clenched my jaw and made Mum’s choiceagainand said, “Fine, we’re going.”
The tickets were first-class, naturally. Liesel was still monumentally irritated with me, and vice versa, but after we got on board and the flight attendants showed us the elaborate private shower cabin on the way to our seats, we both sat silently through takeoff, without exchanging so much as a sidelong glance, and then she got up and went. After a moment of debate with myself, I slipped Precious out of my pocket—she gave me an up-and-down look and then burrowed into the blanket without further commentary—and snuck off after her.
It was the sort of stupid prank I’d have rolled my eyes at, if someone had tittered about it to me. Why would you want to cram yourself into an aeroplane loo when you could just wait to be on the ground? But actually being on the plane, in this strange and transient bit of the world, made it easier.And Liesel was right: it helped to feel good in my body, her hands and the water running over my skin reminding me that I was whole, even if I didn’t feel that way, telling me I was still all in one piece at least on the outside.
Liesel predictably tried to pry some information out of me afterwards; we were toweling off when she asked abruptly, “Nowwill you tell me what happened? Why did Orion go?”
And it turned out that was the real reason I’d done it. It was easier to tell her here, and I did have to tell her. Because I didn’t know what I could do for Orion, and that meant I was going to have to ask for help to do it: the lesson I’d had thumped into me properly last year in the Scholomance.
So I sat down on the lid of the loo and told her right there, with the roaring of the plane going all around us, trying not to listen to the words I was dragging out of myself. I wanted desperately for her to sniff and tell me I was an idiot, overlooking the manifestly obvious thing to do. Instead when I was done, she went and sat down herself, on the narrow bench inside the shower stall, and just stared at the wall for a while with her brain ticking away, and then she shook her head and said briefly, “Ophelia is very clever,” in something too much like admiration. Then she got up and patted me on my shoulder, a bracingnothing to do but carry onkind of pat, and said, “We should go and sleep.”
Ibrahim and Jamaal met us at the airport, both of them fretting themselves ragged with anxiety. My appearing didn’t lift their spirits—it rarely does—and only added the extra layers of faint hope and unease. We didn’t speak much on the way, except I asked Ibrahim about Yaakov, and Ibrahim looked down and said, stifled, “I’ve heard he’s all right,” so I might as well have jabbed him with a hot poker instead. That might even have been why he was so desperate to find a way in. I’d found it too large an ask to make myself, invitingsomeone to come away from his home and family to yours. I’d tried to run away from Orion even making the offer in the other direction. It was too much, a debt you could spend the rest of your life trying to pay off, and that was even before you got to Ibrahim and Yaakov’s additional problem that unless they went it totally alone, then whichever family side they lived with, the other one of them would face suspicion and possibly even hatred, from the surrounding mundanes if not literally the other’s relations.
But everything would change if Ibrahim could offer instead a place in Dubai enclave, which is big and modern and firmly aboard the tolerance train, meaning they’ll welcome anyone, regardless of their religion or their nationality or who they like to go to bed with, and let them live exactly as they like, so long as they’re either spectacularly powerful in some way or have twenty years’ worth of mana to buy their way in with.
The entrance to the enclave was in a mid-height office building on the other side round of the fantastic view of the Burj Khalifa; half the doors we passed along the corridor were unlabeled, and you had the sense that if the building had been a boat, it would have tipped over from the weight of everyone hanging on the opposite rail.
Except right now all the unlabeled offices were crammed with enclavers, sweating and scared in the dark. They’d returned all the space they could back to the real world, and come out to hide in it, but of course they didn’t bother having electricity or water in the offices they borrowed, and they also had to keep quiet or else risk the mundanes in the rest of the building nosing in to find out what was going on.
Jamaal took me to the big conference room at the very end of the corridor, where the senior wizards of the enclave had gathered—minus the former council members. The roomwas stifling-hot, despite two banks of palm-frond fans in carved wooden handles that heaved back and forth on their own.
They welcomed me with what I got the sense they considered to be an unforgivably abbreviated hospitality, the splendid table creaking faintly but literally with the weight of food spread upon it, a banquet that the massed company couldn’t have polished off in a week. Not a single one of them were actually eating any of it, though:your enclave is about to come crashing downhad stifled their appetites. But they pressed me and Liesel urgently to have some, and poured me a cup of tea out of a beautiful antique pot that smelled faintly of abe well disposed to mecharm. I pushed it aside and said rudely, “I’m not here to waste my time.”
Predictably they moved on to asking if I’d really meant everything I’d told Ibrahim, and surely there were some alternatives to this or that piece of the plan. I remained my usual disappointing self. “And you can’t justhirethe recruits, either,” I said. “It’s got to betheirhome that they’re building.”
“Dear child,” Jamaal’s grandfather’s eldest wife—his grandmother was the third—said, “surely your method could be used to simply reinforce the existing foundations of the enclave, at much less cost in mana.”
“You’ll do it without me, then,” I said, and Liesel sighed noisily and interrupted to tell them how theirexisting foundationshad been made. I got up and went to the loo while they talked, so I didn’t have to listen to either the explanation or everything I assume they said: the appropriate displays of shock and horror, the delicate inquiries about whether I was really intractable on the subject.
I assume Liesel and Ibrahim and Jamaal managed to satisfy them on that point; in any case, no one else made me any other clever suggestions when I came back. And lucky forthem, they’d been making the preparations in advance anyway: motivated by the alarming consciousness that the warning hadn’t specifiedwhenthe attack was going to come, and the even more alarming consciousness that when it came to age and stability, their forty-year-old enclave was far closer to Bangkok and Salta than to London or Beijing, and it was good odds that the whole place would go.
It hadn’t been hard for them to recruit help, even without any assurances:there’s a very small chance we’ll be offering enclave seats at the cost of two years’ manais the kind of announcement that will have a thousand eager wizards queuing up at your gates quick as winking, just the way they had come running to London’s gates on a rumor. They only had to decide to go ahead and do it, which took them much more time than I would have liked, and much less than they would have liked, since after fifteen minutes of urgent discussion, I got fed up and said, “I’m not sitting round here for hours waiting for you to decide whether you’d rather share your enclave with the plebs than have it knocked off into the void. If you don’t want me, I’ll be going.”
At that point, Jamaal’s grandmother—the youngest wife—burst out, “We must stop arguing! The attack could come at any moment, and we will all have togo insideto perform the casting.” It was a potent argument, as was their very obvious lack of any better alternatives than me, for which they’d surely have given a great deal.
So finally they led me inside, through a blazing-hot server room full of flat narrow computers stacked up in metal racks and the uncomfortable blasting of fans, and into a small back door markedElectricalin English and Arabic. It opened to reveal a long panel covered with rainbows of thin wires, andthatpulled open to reveal a small opening in the wall, just barely the height of my shoulder. I had to duck my headdown to get through, and I straightened up a hundred years in the past, or at least it felt that way.
Jamaal’s grandfather took us through a narrow lane between the smooth unbroken golden-brown walls of houses rising up on either side. Sail-like shades hung overhead between the buildings, high enough and overlapped so you couldn’t see between to whatever artifice they were using to bring in the sunlight. You couldn’t see into any of the houses: the dark wooden doors were all shut up tight, the windows shuttered; the few courtyards we passed were curtained off with heavy opaque hangings.
This place wasn’t tipping off into the void, like Beijing had been, but I almost would have preferred it otherwise. Instead I felt it under the soles of my thin sandals, the grotesquely soft support beneath, yielding and fleshy.Enclaves are built with malia. You can feel it when you’re there, if you let yourself.And now I knew what I was feeling, what I’d felt in New York, in London. I had to feel nauseatingly sorry now about having howled at Mum, when I’d been a kid, begging her to take me to the safety that any enclave would have given her for the asking, to have her healing inside their walls. Once she’d even gone to visit an old enclave, famous for their own healers, and she’d come back before the end of the day and told me she couldn’t do it; she couldn’t give me what I’d asked her for. And I’d raged and screamed at her for weeks, because she hadn’t been willing to live on top of a putrefying heap of murdered corpses.
