There wasn’t a sloshing rush of flesh and rot: Ophelia’s efficient maw-mouth didn’t need to keep the bodies round, having a better one of its own. But I still felt them going, like one single enormous sighing out. And the mana went with them. The mana extracted from all those lives, which had even to this moment been holding up enclaves all over the world, and the Scholomance itself, and the life of one boy; it all went draining away, and Orion’s body shuddered under my hands like the deck of a rolling ship, or the waves beneath it. The ground underneath our feet shuddered and rolled the same way, the bronze doors of the Scholomance groaning horribly. There were cries and shouts from the platform as all the cracks Ruth had mended began to open up again and widen, the whole room wavering. Rocks were coming down from overhead; this cavern had slid halfway into the void itself, connected to the Scholomance, and it wasn’t going to survive the school coming down.
Orion was almost sliding out of my grip, as if I was trying to hold on to something just as impossible, a different magical wonder built into the void. But I didn’t let go. I held on, to Orion, to the Scholomance, to the teetering distant enclaves that I couldn’t see, all of that magic built on top of a tiny single-celled place in the void where the maw-mouth had been. “You’re already dead,” I said. “But stay anyway. Stay with us, and shelter all the wise-gifted children of the world,” and made all three of the spells into one: the terrible murderous truth I had to tell the maw-mouth, and the sutras’ longing plea for golden shelter, and the beautiful lie that the Scholomance had been built upon, and into that working I poured all the mana that Shanfeng had given me, the mana that had been saved up to build a school to save the lives of children. The work that Orion had tried to make his own.
I repeated the incantation in Sanskrit from the sutras, the incantation that really just meant “stay,” and then Liu joined in, saying it in Chinese, the version she’d used in Beijing, and Aadhya said it with me the next time in English, “Stay and be shelter,” and even as we were speaking I felt more jolting sparks going through me: Miranda and Antonio and Eman and Caterina had joined our human chain too, behind Khamis, and then there was a thump through us all like a lightning strike: Li Shanfeng had joined the chain behind them.
I gasped with the surge and said it again, stay, even though I couldn’t hear myself speaking anymore; more hands and voices were coming, everyone on Shanghai’s side streaming to join in, power crackling through the line into me, and then Liesel’s voice was calling out over the noise, “Not in a single line! Get closer and spread out!” and she pushed in next to me, putting a hand directly on my back, another supporting branch. Alfie was right next to her, reaching to touch me as well with Sarah gripping his free hand. In another moment, his father was there too in a line behind him. Wizards from both sides were crowding in now, all of us saying it together: “Stay,” getting louder and louder even as the Scholomance and Orion both shook from their foundations.
He was getting heavier and heavier in my grasp, as if I was trying to hold him up, along with the entire school and all those other enclaves loaded up on his shoulders, against the dragging undertow of all the sloshing power of stolen mana draining away from under them. But everyone behind me was trying to help, trying to hold them—and then Ophelia and Balthasar were there, too. But they didn’t join the chain: instead they came all the way up and put their own hands directly on Orion, next to mine.
And then Aadhya, my darling Aad who’d taken that first mad flyer on me, gritted her teeth and put her hand on Orion too, and other people started to grab on to them, spreading out the weight, pouring in more mana. We were all holding on to him and just saying it over and over, stay, in all the languages of the world, and beneath our feet a golden light was rising up out of the widening cracks in the carved inscriptions, filling them in, starting to make them whole, and there was light all around us, warm, full of hope, as Orion lurched forward under my hands, like someone who’d just been pulled back onto solid footing. He gasped and reached out to me, reached his hands out to cup my face, and he said in a ragged, broken voice, choosing, “I’ll stay. El, I’ll stay,” and kissed me, through our tears.
The taxi dropped me and Mum at the gates at the end of the drive, a cloudpuff of small green birds going up out of the trees as we stopped. We waited until the car had driven away before we opened the gates and walked down to the compound together, between the high walls and the jungle singing on either side. It was drizzling a little, but we didn’t open our umbrellas, the mist and breeze cool and pleasant on our skin in the heat. We didn’t rush. Mum had got more and more quiet as we came, and she’d closed her eyes to meditate a few times in the car on the way. She didn’t stop now, but she took my hand, gripping it a little too tight.