I’d like to think I wouldn’t have done any of that, but I’d have done something, even if it was only to grab Yancy by the shoulders and scream into her face to tell me, tell me, tell me. What I wanted more than anything was for her to say that they’d done something, someone before her had done something all the way back then to save those old places from falling off into the void, and otherwise they would have been gone, only I don’t think I’d really have believed her if she’d told me that.
But Liesel said to me, “Stop that!” in a crisp peremptory tone, and snapped at Yancy, “We broke the Scholomance away into the void. You’ve heard this, yes?”
Yancy didn’t take her eyes off me. There was a flush of purple-pink color standing in her cheeks and glowing through the skin a bit, something coming to the surface. “I’ve heard a lot of things, the last week. Wasn’t sure what to believe.”
“You haven’t noticed that more than half the maleficaria are gone?” Liesel said tartly.
Yancy shrugged a bit. “We hole up underneath the enclave so we don’t see mals, love. It’s been better, yeah. Doesn’t mean I was ready to swallow the idea that the Scholomance got booted off the world. We get a lot of backwards stories, listening to whispers, and the ones that come straight out of the enclave are mostly just better lies. We couldn’t work out any reason why New York and London would’ve done it. But they didn’t, did they,” she finished softly, still looking at me. “You did it.”
Liesel scowled in irritation, and to be fair, I certainly wouldn’t have got far on my own. But I wasn’t giving a bloody speech, was I, so I didn’t care about correcting Yancy and sharing the credit. I just stared at her, waiting, and Yancy gave a small huff. “Your mum must be proud.” I could’ve slapped her, only I couldn’t; if I’d let myself act with that much violent intention, probably I’d have set her on fire. She saw my expression, I suppose, and rolled her eyes and spread her hands as if to ward me off. “I’m serious! Bloody hell.”
Maybe Yancy had been serious, but I couldn’t help but think of Mum seeing me like this: down in London’s underbelly with a cold malicious green wave gathered round me, threatening someone who’d only helped me, trying to bully her into telling me the secrets she and her people used to survive. So I shut my eyes and did my best to stop wanting to set Yancy on fire, and Liesel, forcing me to be grateful she’d come along, said, “We did it, yes. But one boy was left behind. Can you tell us how to get back in?”
Yancy didn’t say anything at first. I opened my eyes again. The mirk had faded away from around us, and the tunnel lights were basting us in their gloriously mundane fluorescence again. She was studying me like puzzling out a book in a new language. “Is the door still there?” she asked after a moment. “The outside one, I mean—the way in.”
“I don’t know,” I said, calming a bit; she was telling me something, at least. “I was standing at the gates when I cast the spell to break it off. I don’t know if it would have hit—”
“Did you go to the door in the real world, smash it up completely, brick up the hole, build a wall over it, brick up the nearest passage too, and then cast four curses of forgetting over the place?” Yancy interrupted, prosaic.
“Right, no,” I said.
She nodded. “Then there’s not much trick to it. If the door’s still there, you just open it and go through the usual way, whatever that is. And if you remember the place on the other side well enough, and it’s got enough mana left in it and you give it a bit more, and you’re lucky, then you might be able to convince it to be there, long enough for you to be in it. Or you might not. When it’s the Scholomance—I don’t know, actually. Could go either way. Either it was so bloody big that it burned up all the mana left in the place in a flash, and the whole thing just went, or it was so bloody big that it’ll be centuries crumbling away. If I had to guess—it’ll linger a while, in bits and pieces at least. There’re a lot of wizards out there with the place burned into their brains. But as for going round inside the place—” She shrugged. “You’d just have to try it and see.”
She hesitated a moment, and then added, “And you’d better think about whether you want to. How long has it been, more than a week? We try to poke our heads out every few days. Longer than that, and you start sliding off yourself. And that’s with our little helpers.” Yancy opened a flap of her coat to show the flask sitting in an inner pocket, the lizard peeking out around it. She let the coat fall shut again. “We run into the others sometimes—people who’ve gone too long, or fallen off somewhere. It’s not pretty.”