“Here, have one,” Yancy said. I lifted my head. Liesel had sat down on the floor herself and was leaning back against the opposite wall with her eyes shut. Yancy was unwrapping a packet of small square wafer biscuits. She pulled one out and crunched into it, and handed the packet to me: they smelled of lemon and vanilla.
“What’s this?” I said, feeling what I think was reasonably wary.
“A biscuit,” Yancy said, with a snort of laughter. “Go on. It’ll settle your stomach.” Liesel lurched up to get one herself. They were real too, plain ordinary sugar and flour and artificial flavorings that were absolutely natural by comparison; we reduced the whole packet to crumbs in a few minutes. Better than licking rusty cabinets.
Yancy watched us devour the biscuits. I hadn’t quite finished gobbling when she said, a little airy, “Well, that was interesting. That tunnel’s usually an hour’s walk with people who all know the way. Mind telling me how you did it?”
The sweet powdery wafer dust on my tongue had a faint aftertaste. I was a Scholomance graduate, so my brain had both noticed it and already classified it as not going to kill you, which meant it was safe enough to eat in desperation, and I had been as desperate for it as I’d ever been for a slice of stale toast with only one spot of mold or a brown apple slice or a bowl of noodles fished out from one end of a pan with a miasmic wriggler on the other. So I hadn’t stopped eating, but now that the biscuits were down, I knew there had been something on them, nothing really nasty but a quiet little nudge that would only last a few minutes at most: go on, tell old Yancy what she wants to know.
Knowing that you’ve been enchanted doesn’t stop it working, necessarily, but in this case Yancy had asked me a really unfortunate question, because it dragged me straight out of the overwhelming physical relief of being in the real world and smashed me back into the reason why I’d been able to get out: the questions I didn’t want to ask and had to ask. “It was there!” I said, my voice fraying like rotting cloth. “The enclave shoved those places off into the void, but they were there. Why aren’t they gone?”
Yancy spread her arms, smiling. She wasn’t even lying, really; she was just saying sorry, not telling you my most valuable secrets. “How should I know? I know they’re there, that’s good enough for me.”
“Not for me,” I snarled, taking a step towards her, and the whole tunnel washed over with green underwater light, the air clenching into a cold fist around us.
I didn’t have any coherent intention in mind. What I did have in my mind was the visceral sickening pressure of a maw-mouth trying to get in at me, the pulsing wet hunger all around me, something that wouldn’t ever be satisfied, couldn’t be satisfied, that wanted to crush me into living putrescence and feed on my agony forever. Only it wasn’t me, it was Orion. If the Scholomance wasn’t gone, if the Scholomance was there, then I was going to have to go back into it. Not to save him; I’d missed my chance to do that. Instead I was going to have to find Patience, and I was going to have to look at Orion’s eyes looking back out at me from that horrible endless crushing mass, hear his mouth say, Please, El, please let me out, and then I’d have to tell him that he was already dead, so I could make that true, because there wasn’t anything else you could do for someone who’d gone into the belly of a maw-mouth.
Yancy took a step back from me and lost her smile, the bland mocking smile that had been meant for the four-year-old kid she’d remembered from the commune, easy to transfer to the teenage witch with her little enclaver buddies, coming to ask her for a way out. It hadn’t annoyed me before. She’d mocked the Dominus of London to his face in the middle of his enclave; I imagine she’d have smiled at anything less than a maw-mouth.
But I wasn’t anything less. I was the thing that maw-mouths ran away from in the dark, and I suppose whoever the maleficer was, destroying enclaves left and right, they might be hiding from me, too, or trying to suck up power to fight me with, as if they’d caught a hint of me coming out of the Scholomance before I’d even made it out the gates.
And Yancy would have tweaked Sir Richard’s nose for him, but she wasn’t stupid. She stopped smiling at me and pulled her hands up into a defensive casting position that wouldn’t have done her any good, because the ground beneath my feet was real, but it was also a little bit part of London enclave, and I’d given back the power-sharer, but I didn’t need a power-sharer. The power-sharer had made the mana a gift, freely offered, but I could have reached out to the still-sloshing oceans of power and grabbed away as much as I wanted, and tipped over the whole reeling enclave most likely and smashed the whole shelter into pieces while I was at it.