The attack, the prophesied attack, hadn’t come. It hadn’t come before I’d got here, and it hadn’t come during the casting, and now it would never come. Why would it? I’d buried the vulnerability beneath that new foundation plaza built of mana, mortared with hopes and dreams and love, and there wouldn’t be any chance to steal mana from the place. Why would any maleficer bother wasting their time attacking it? So that was two prophecies that hadn’t come true, now. Like the one thing my great-grandmother couldn’t properly foresee was me and my choices; as though her gift was assuming the worst of me, the same way everyone else in the world always had.
I got up and went out to the taxi stand. I’d noticed on the way in from the airport that loads of the drivers here seemed to be Indian, come over to work for the mundane version of enclaves. Three of them were standing outside together smoking, and I said to them in English, “I need to go to Mumbai.”
“I’d like to go to Mumbai,” one of them said, wistfully. “Are you from Mumbai, pretty girl?”
“My father was,” I said, in Marathi.
They told me to wait until one of them got a ride to the airport, and then he let me sit up front with him and ride along. After Iqbal dropped off his passengers, he took me over to the terminal with the cheaper regional flights. I lay down on a bench in a quiet corner and catnapped until it got late, the whole place going quieter and quieter. When the security lines were empty, I went into the loo nearest to the gates, where I was now the only person. There was a cleaning cart inside. I took the spray bottle of blue cleanser off and used it to make a dripping outline of an archway on the back wall, and then I balled my hands into fists and rested them on the wall inside, shut my eyes, and recited a useful modern American spell: “Get ready, get set, and go, go, go,” thumping on the wall along with the punctuation, and on the last one I dropped my hands to my sides and just walked straight through and out the other side, into the facing loo on the other side of security.
There was one flight to Mumbai on the board. I went to the gate and waited until everyone had boarded, and then I asked the people on the desk if there were any seats left, and if I could have one. The woman attendant started telling me officially how I was to get on a standby list, but I stopped her. “I know I’m not allowed,” I said. “I haven’t got a ticket and I haven’t got any money. If there’s a seat empty, and you’ll let me go sit in it anyway, I’d be grateful, that’s all.”
She and the other two people at the desk all stared at me in confusion. “Is this some sort of joke?” she said.
“I just need to get to Mumbai,” I said. “How would you do it?”
“I’m going to call security,” she said.
“Why?” I said. “You can just say no. I’m not going to punch anyone and shove my way on board.”
I think she was about to do it anyway, but one of the people hanging round the desk was an attendant; he laughed and said, “Wait, no,” to stop her, and then went inside the plane for a quick conference with the captain. Apparently one person had called in sick, so now they were shorthanded, and they quietly snuck me on board in exchange for helping out in the galley during the flight. I wasn’t surprised, somehow. It almost felt like the way things worked out for Mum, when she wanted to go somewhere. It hadn’t occurred to me that she paid for that help, all the time, giving away her own work and help to anyone who asked her. The way I’d helped, now; in London, in Beijing, in Dubai. Even to the people I didn’t want to help.
And the universe wasn’t giving me back a ride on a private jet, but I didn’t mind that. I preferred hanging out in the galley and working with the crew to having to be nice to the owner of a private jet, and for that matter to sitting in a first-class seat without anything to do but think, and absolutely nothing tried to kill me on the way, which put it well up on the many times I’d been on maintenance duty in the Scholomance.
On the other end the attendant who’d brought me on board said to me half apologetically, “I’d better take you to security now and sort out where you belong.”
That would have been a tall order. I looked at him and said, “Thanks, but you’re better off forgetting I was ever on board,” and it wasn’t a spell exactly, but I put some mana behind it, and the statement was so obviously true that his brain got on my side and helped; he turned away a moment frowning in thought, and I slipped into the stream of people disembarking and out of his memory at the same time.