“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 to be 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 Liu had been 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 the Scholomance, 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’d saved Beijing, just like I’d saved London. I had made 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 have done 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 was going 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 that she’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 was freak 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, going to be?” I said. “And since when do people think I’m on call to every enclave in the world?”
“Excuse you, you’re not on call to every enclave in the world, I am,” Aadhya said, pointedly.