Next were half a dozen texts from Liesel, all telling me to stop behaving like a child and to call her back if I wasn’t in a hospital with heatstroke. But the last one was hours after the others, and it just said: So now you know. I stared at it, and then I called her back.
“Yes,” she answered, as if she’d expected me to call, which I suppose she had.
“How long have you known?” I demanded, a bit waspishly. “Didn’t occur to you to mention?”
“It was better not to mention,” she said, very pointedly, and fair enough; I didn’t actually want all the enclaves of the world to know that I was the one blowing them up. I didn’t think they’d care that I hadn’t been doing it on purpose. “I wasn’t certain anyway until yesterday. What are you going to do now?”
“Go back to sleep,” I said. “After that…I’ve got to do something about Orion.”
“You cannot go back to New York,” Liesel said immediately.
“So I’ve been told,” I said. “Any better ideas for me?”
She didn’t have one off the top of her head, so we hung up. I did try to go back to sleep. It was still hot, but I was on a hanging bed on a porch outside my grandmother’s room, draped with vining flowers and thin shimmery netting that had been imbued with a gentle spell encouraging mosquitoes to go elsewhere and dragonflies to come near: they darted around, the swaying lamp shining iridescent off their bodies, and the fountain gurgling was distantly audible, one courtyard over. It wasn’t like Wales at all, except it was just like it, just like being in the yurt. There wasn’t any evil lurking down beneath my feet.
I was still so exhausted that my skin felt scraped-tender, but my brain was humming as if the dragonflies had got inside my skull. The real answer to Liesel’s question was, I hadn’t the foggiest clue what I was going to do next. I had only just barely grasped what was going on. When I destroyed the maw-mouths, I wasn’t just destroying the monster. I was undoing the grotesque lie of deathlessness that had created them in the first place, the lie that anchored the enclave foundations into the void. And so…down went the enclave, and all the enclavers with it, from the most guilt-stained council member to the most innocent child. Sudarat, that poor kid, telling me her story last year in the gym: I took my grandmother’s dog for a walk and when I came back, everyone was gone. Her grandmother, her mother and father, her little brother, her home. I’d done that to her, left her standing alone in the street with a small dog, utterly bereft in a world full of things that wanted to devour her.
But I couldn’t be sorry for it, could I, because my other choice had been standing by while the maw-mouth that kept her home standing devoured dozens of equally innocent freshmen and piled them into the endless agony of feasting going on and on inside its belly. Maw-mouths never got full. They never stopped hunting. Nothing killed them. Except me.
But now if someone called to beg my help with killing one, I’d know that I was taking out an enclave along with it, and everyone inside. I’d savagely resented enclavers at school, but they were still just people. And even if an enclave had been started on a heap of malia, I didn’t see what the use was in just smashing the whole place apart. It wasn’t the fault of the buildings, or even of most of the people inside them. I’d been caught by the dream of London’s fairy gardens, even though I was also the one who had wrecked their wards by frantically ripping lives out of Fortitude at graduation: the maw-mouth they must have tucked inside the Scholomance to feed.
I wasn’t sorry to have saved their gardens; I wasn’t sorry Beijing and Dubai were still standing, now with more people safe inside them. And I was sorry about Salta and Bangkok. But I also wasn’t sorry I’d destroyed the maw-mouths. The people who’d died in Salta and Bangkok had only died. They weren’t being endlessly tortured to death so someone else could live in luxury on their graves. Death was what you hoped for, if you were inside a maw-mouth. Death was your only chance of escape.
So what did all of that mean? I knew what Mum’s answer would be: first, do no harm. But that answer didn’t work for me. If someone called me in desperation, trapped with a maw-mouth coming for them, I couldn’t let it get them. But if I destroyed it—I’d be sending an entire enclave tipping off into the void, and very likely with every last person in it. My own personal trolley problem to solve.
I gave up on any more sleep and went to go and sit by the fountain, letting the sound of the water fill my ears. I opened the sutras, turning the pages and looking at them without trying to read them, just seeing them as art, the sweeping beautiful lines and the gleam of gold and vivid jeweled colors in the ink. A shining promise of safety that people were ready to buy with murder. And they wouldn’t stop making that bargain, because they couldn’t get it any other way. I couldn’t build enclaves for all of them, I couldn’t even fix all their enclaves, and they wouldn’t want my enclaves anyway. Surely there were already people in London and Beijing and Dubai who were starting to feel resentful and angry about the space they’d lost, the power they’d have to share. Wizards who knew the secret of building enormous enclaves, who knew all the spells, and could cast them again. I didn’t know how to stop any of it.