The compulsion faded, and a low murmur started, rising louder all around the chamber as people turned to their neighbors: Did you know, I didn’t, I didn’t know, all of them telling each other that half lie. I was disgusted with it and hoping for it all at once. I needed them to want that lie enough to agree, to try another way.
But one of the council members abruptly said to me, “We’ll let Guo Yi Liu out, and you can go—”
“No,” I said, in a howling that echoed off the walls of the little room, like a pack of wolves ringed round him. He shut up. “Those are your choices. Don’t bother looking for a third. I’m not letting you do it to Liu, and I’m not leaving you with this tidy pile of bricks to do it to someone else. If you don’t want me to try saving the place, you can dump them down that sewer and evacuate for all I care.”
“Most of the stored mana is ours,” a different council member said—a middle-aged woman, young relative to the others. “We chose to use it to help Beijing and not just to make our own enclave, but we are not going to give them the work of our entire family for generations—”
“You took the work of your entire family for generations and chose to use it to make a maw-mouth, so shut it!” I said, but that was only a seething of outrage bubbling up and over from the simmering pot; I knew there had to be a real answer. “And fine, if it’s not Beijing’s to give, then I suppose if they want me to have a go, they’d better make you a decent offer.”
It was still mostly an explosion, but a useful one; I imagine they’d spent most of the last week, with Liu sitting locked alone in that room waiting for this to happen to her, negotiating urgent points like how many council seats went to the original Beijing team versus the newcomers, who got to live in the fanciest bits of the joint enclave, how many places they’d make for new wizards and who would get to hand them out. So now I’d put them on comfortably familiar territory, even if I’d also taken away half the spoils they had to haggle over.
They started to discuss hurriedly amongst themselves, huddled in low voices, but then someone stood up abruptly in the amphitheater: a boy I recognized from the Chinese obstacle-course runs, Jiangyu, one of the Beijing enclave seniors. He’d been one of the very last kids to join up, less because he’d thought I was secretly trying to kill everyone than because things were not going according to the rules, about which he had extremely passionate feelings. Even after he’d finally come round and done a first run in our chummy little group of five hundred, he’d come up to me and Liu afterwards to complain that our tactics went against the advice in the graduation handbook—which had been completely useless for several months by then. We’d eyed him sidelong and another of the Beijing enclavers had shown up and towed him away with an air of weariness, but now he got up and said stolidly, “I wish to say that if there is not enough room for all of us, then if Xi’an will agree to save Beijing, I am willing to give up my own place.”
His mum, sitting next to him, was grabbing for him with an alarmed expression, but nine other kids stood up with him, all the rest of the senior Beijing enclavers, and started declaring the same offer, and as if they were a cork popping out of a bottle, all of a sudden the room dissolved into a quiet but general pandemonium. Beijing enclavers were standing up, looking round for anyone from Liu’s clan and talking to them directly—they outnumbered them, nearly three to one, and there could be enough room for all of them, surely.
Assuming the enclave didn’t just come down in a heap when I tried. But I couldn’t be fussed about the possibility if they gave me the chance to try it. It was the only way out of here for me at all. Because I meant it; I couldn’t walk out of here knowing they’d do this to someone else, but I also couldn’t walk out of here and become a destroyer of worlds. I wasn’t going to. If I had to bring this enclave down, if I had to fulfill that much of the prophecy to stop this from happening on my watch—my watch was going to have to end here, too. And maybe that wasn’t any real solution; Liesel would tell me I was being an idiot, and if I was going to let all the other enclaves in the world off, I could simply choose to do that instead of throwing myself into a pit. But fine, I’d have to be an idiot, because I couldn’t do anything else. I’ve spent my whole life fighting as hard as I could not to fulfill the prophecy, not to turn into a monster, and I wasn’t going to give up now.
The council members had all stopped negotiating amongst themselves and were staring out at the rest of the wizards in dismay, the reins slipped out of their hands. Which meant there wasn’t anyone who could turn to me and say all right, we agree, go ahead, but there was a faint grinding noise from the pit: the disk had risen a bit. I tried one of the bricks again, and I managed to pick it up: not easily, not like a simple ordinary brick, but at least like a brick made out of lead instead of a brick made out of black hole, and I gave a heave and let it go flying off, then went for another. The crash made everyone jump and look, and as I kept going, hurling bricks out, the remaining ones got lighter and lighter, everyone coming round, until Liu’s mom could take one off too, and then Jiangyu and some of the other Beijing seniors came in to help, with the rest of Liu’s family, and we got the last one off and I put my hands on the disk, risen back to the top—