“And since seven hours ago, when you have now saved two enclaves from collapse, that is when,” Liesel said, equally unmerciful.
“Well, I’m not going to be,” I said. “If they know it’s coming, they can all clear out and go live like ordinary people.”
“But they won’t do that,” Liesel said. “They will empty the mana store, and take all their most valuable artifice and their books, and their money, and when the enclave is destroyed, they will take all the space which they already own, in the mundane world, and the enclave-building spells which they already have, and they will make a new enclave,” which was so patently true that I couldn’t argue with it in the least. Even if I broadcast the truth all round the world, told every single wizard what the enclavers were doing to make their snug little pockets in the void, it wouldn’t stop anyone, not for long. People would hesitate, they’d recoil, and then little by little they’d reconcile themselves to the idea. Because they’d look at everyone else living in their own tidy enclaves, each one of them made the same grotesque way, and they’d say why not me, and that was a fair question, after all. Why not them.
I got up and stormed out of the enclave and into the temple grounds. All the tourists had gone; it was well after dark. It was still sweltering-hot outside compared with the cool dimness of the enclave, but a breeze was whispering through the green growth everywhere, and I found a bench and sat sullen and seething. After about fifteen minutes, Aadhya came out and sat down next to me.
“You’re going to Dubai,” she said. She sounded a little bleak.
“I’m not,” I said ferociously. “I’m going to—” She was holding out her phone. I took it out of her hand and looked at the last messages on the screen.
Please, tell El, she’s got to come, Ibrahim had texted. We don’t know anything else, but we know it’s going to happen. The warning came from the Speaker of Mumbai.
I stared at it, mounting rage swelling up in me. It made sense of their panic: as far as I know, of all the many, many prophecies made by the Speaker of Mumbai since she was four years old, the one she made about me remains the single solitary exception that hasn’t come true yet. Yet: the shadow that I’ve lived my entire life inside, ever since she’d prophesied that I was doomed to bring death and destruction all over the world. It was like she’d heard me thinking about coming to yell at her, and she’d found a way to get someone else to grab me by the ankles and slow me down.
I shoved the phone back at Aadhya. “I’m not going,” I said. “I don’t want to go!”
She didn’t argue with me. She just put her arm round my shoulders, and I turned in and hugged her, and she hugged me back, hard, letting me hold on.
* * *
“I’ll stay with her,” Aadhya said, holding my hand tight as we stood and looked at Liu, still floating in the cocoon, still not ready to come out. “I’ll let you know as soon as she’s okay.”
“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 even in Dubai 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 me and 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 if he’d have 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, or if you had to choose or the 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 to live.