“If they want my help, they can have it,” I said instead, and cut him off when he started bursting into thanks, “but that’s if.” 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 find anyone 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 choice again and 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, “Now will 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 bracing nothing to do but carry on kind 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, inviting someone 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.