I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything. I just stood on the other side of the dome watching him pushing his way through, with tears running down my face and all the mana in the world dangling at my fingertips, only it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to make a different world.
His fingertips began to work through, and then he closed his eyes and put his face against the dome between them and pushed it through, little by little, the surface separating away from around his nose, and his lips, and his eyes. And as soon as his face broke the inner surface, Orion opened his eyes and looked at me, Orion looked at me, and he said, “El. Please,” and he wasn’t asking me to get him out at all. He was asking me for the only gift I had to give. And if I didn’t give it, that thing was going to come through and it was going to take me, and everyone else behind me, and probably it would go on forever, deathless, undying, until on some distant day it had finished devouring every last scrap of mana in the world and then slowly gnawed itself away after everything else was gone.
“El,” Aadhya said softly behind me, her voice shaky and terrified and full of tears, but there; she was there, reaching out to put her hand on my shoulder. Liu was there holding her other hand, clutching the lute with tears running down her face. They’d come to me, to be with me, even though everyone else was only desperately trying to get away.
And then Khamis was there too, heaving himself forward with his whole face clenched up with the same determination he’d worn when he’d faced me down at school, and he snarled at me, “Do it! Do it and get it over with, you stupid girl! What else are you going to do, leave him like that? You might as well feed him to Patience yourself.”
I could have punched him in the face; I could have kissed him in gratitude, for the single spark of rage lighting up in me, burning off despair in clean hot fire. “No,” I said savagely, to Khamis, to Orion; to Ophelia and to Shanfeng. “No. I’m not going to leave him like that,” full of a sharp-edged golden clarity like the shining letters at my feet, the prayer from the Scholomance doors: Malice, keep far.
But malice had been inside the Scholomance from the beginning. Those doors had been built on another maw-mouth, a maw-mouth that had refused to be sent away, because there was no better hunting ground in the world. Patience. And it was still here. Orion hadn’t destroyed Patience. The Scholomance was still standing. He’d devoured Patience, the way Patience had devoured Fortitude, the way that between them they had devoured a century of children’s lives. And all those children were still in there, still screaming, still suffering. I couldn’t leave them like that. I couldn’t leave any of them like that.
I had to kill Orion Lake.
I put the chain with Shanfeng’s massive power-sharer over my head, and then I slung my bag forward and took out the sutras. I opened them and held them up, let the book rise up from my hands, the golden incantations shining. I reached out on either side to Liu and Aadhya, squeezed their hands tight, felt their love and strength in their answering grip.
“Keep hold of me,” I said. “Don’t let go. Please.” Orion had almost made it through the shield, and I could feel their terror, too; their hearts beating through their hands. It wasn’t fair to ask, but I asked it anyway. “Please.”
“We’re here,” Liu whispered, and Aadhya said, shaking, “We won’t let go.” They put their hands on my shoulders, just like when we’d started coming down the well, and after a moment, Khamis put his hands on their shoulders, the contact running through to me like an electrical spark.
Orion broke through the dome. It shattered and went falling away like shards of thin ice, vaporizing before they even hit the ground. He came towards me, and I didn’t step back. I reached out and took hold of him and gripped him in my hands, all of him: the horrible seething hunger and all the works built on top of it, everything that required that endless fuel. The school that Sir Alfred Cooper Browning had built to save the children of enclavers; the expansion that London had made to let in so many more. The many dozens of enclaves whose maw-mouths had crept into the Scholomance looking to feed, and been swallowed up by Patience and Fortitude in their turn. And Orion. The child that Ophelia had sacrificed to try to stop a rising tide of maleficaria, and I said to him softly, gently, with all my heart, “You’re already dead.”
It barely took any mana at all. I was just telling the obvious truth, telling all of those devoured children the truth: Orion, and everyone who’d gone into the Scholomance and hadn’t come out, and the crushed sacrificial victims under every maw-mouth that Patience had swallowed up. They were already dead, and that was horrible and unfair and agonizing, but it was the truth, and it did, actually, set them free, as the maw-mouth that had devoured Orion, the maw-mouth that was holding Orion up, heard me, and recognized that yes, of course, it too was already dead.