It was nine hours all told before I made it to the compound. If you’re thinking maybe that was enough time for me to cool down, you’d be wrong. I was only angrier and angrier with every step of the last three miles, which I had to walk, a litany of rage running over and over inside my head. I didn’t know what I’d say to Deepthi, to any of them, except to call her a liar, a monstrous liar who’d weighed my whole life down with false prophecy, and tell her I wasn’t having any more of it.
I knew where the compound was, because Mum still had the letter from Dad’s family, the one they’d sent her all those years ago, asking us to come. It was tucked inside the small flat box, waterproofed with beeswax, where she kept our birth certificates and all the notes Dad had written to her on the inside, and the sketch she’d made of him after graduation, the paper worn down in places because she’d had to erase and try again and again, on paper she’d cried over, trying to make a memory that she could give me when I was born. I never looked in the box, except for all the times I went and looked in it; I never read the letter, except for all the times I took it out of the envelope and read the false promise of it, We will love you and her as we loved Arjun, and tried desperately not to wish that I was someone else, someone to whom they could have kept that promise.
And now I was someone else, someone who had proved that Mum had been right all along, right to save me, right to love me, the way they’d chosen not to; now I was someone who had proved them wrong, because I was saving people, even saving enclaves, one after another all round the world, and I was going to rub their faces in it and make my great-grandmother admit that she’d been wrong about everything to do with me, over and over again.
I promised it to myself with every step, panting up the drive walled in on either side with the lush chirping of vegetation and life, cicadas and birds and small monkeys squabbling with one another all round, a surrounding jungle of protection from the skeptical eyes of mundanes. My head was pounding at the temples with fury, and I was ready to get to the gates and smash them to pieces, tear them apart and make them listen, only I came over the final crest and then had to stop, because I was second in line.
There was a maw-mouth at the gates.
It hadn’t made it through the warding yet. There was a faint golden glimmering over the surface of the doors and the walls to either side, tracing each of the tentacles splayed out across them. Everyone inside the walled compound had to be casting together, holding up the shields as long as they could. But that wasn’t going to be for much longer. The golden light was pulsing and fading all along the line, a sense of struggling and growing weakness. The maw-mouth had been at it for some time, patiently working away on the lock. It wasn’t in any hurry. It would get through eventually.
You’d have thought that a great prophet would have been able to warn her own family that they needed to move house, or else they’d all go into the belly of a maw-mouth. And the only reason they wouldn’t was because I was here to rescue them, the child they’d betrayed for nothing but a false prophecy: she will bring death and destruction to all the enclaves of the world, and now here was a maw-mouth at their gates that one of those enclaves had sent out into the world to roam freely, and if I hadn’t been here to destroy it—
I stood there a long, blank moment staring at the maw-mouth as it probed at the gates, trying to poke its way inside. It wasn’t anywhere as big as Patience, or even the one I’d killed in London, but it was bigger than the one I’d killed in the library. Loads bigger than the little one I’d killed at graduation. But then, Bangkok and Salta had been young enclaves. There probably hadn’t been more than two hundred wizards in Salta when the whole place had gone down, taking all of them with it.
I took my phone out of my pocket and turned it back on. It started piling up notifications in stacks, but I ignored them all and called Ibrahim. “El!” he said, picking up instantly; I heard a background babble of voices pick up round him at once. “El, where are you? We’ve all been worried, are you all right? Everyone wants to thank—”
“The attack’s about to happen,” I said. “I don’t know how well the new foundation will hold. You’ve got half an hour to get clear.”
“What?” he said. “El, how do you know? El!”
“Sorry,” I said. I hung up and turned the mobile off again, and sat down on a rock to wait for half an hour before I destroyed the maw-mouth, the maw-mouth that had been made forty years ago, in the dark, in Dubai enclave.