“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I already knew what I found wasn’t going to be pretty. “Thanks, Yancy. Sorry for…”
Yancy eyed me, then shook her head. “I won’t say sorry myself. I poke bears: it’s how we live down here, and if I could stand to do it any other way, I wouldn’t be here in the first place. But every once in a while you have to expect to see some claws and teeth. Just do me a flavor and don’t come back through our doors. It’s not the place for you.”
“Where is?” I said, sour as turned milk, and I turned my back on her and headed down the tunnel, past the sign with the arrow pointing EXIT.
It was a good ten minutes’ walk through the tunnels and round and round and round the stairs until the building finally spat me and Liesel out near Belsize Park station. We weren’t heaving for breath or anything, as we were still in sprinting-for-the-graduation-gates trim, but it wasn’t a delightful stroll either. At last we were out in the July night air, late enough now that all the posh cafés and restaurants around us were closed, a few very faint stars or satellites glittering overhead.
I stood on the corner blankly. Not out of indecision: I was full of perfect certainty. I knew exactly what I had to do, bright and clear and utterly necessary. I had to get to the Scholomance doors, and I had to go in, and I had to kill Patience. Only I hadn’t the faintest idea how to start on that project in any practical way. I’d spent the last four years of my life in a single building—a bloody big one, but still there hadn’t been anywhere in the place I couldn’t get to by walking, and the meals were terrible but they were provided for me, and I know how to set off supervolcanoes and destroy castigator demons and murder ten thousand people at a time, but I didn’t have a passport or a mobile or a tenner in my pocket. And for that matter, I didn’t even know where I was going. I looked at Liesel ungraciously. “Can you ask Alfie for me where the Scholomance doors are?”
“No, of course not. If I contact Alfie from here, while he is in the enclave, his father’s enemies will be able to trace us, and then we will have done all this,” she waved with vivid disgust at the squat round turret we’d emerged from, “for nothing. Anyway, what good would that do? Yancy said it would take mana. London is still in no position to help you with that at the moment. We must go to New York.”
I had several different competing reactions to that statement, most prominently the intense desire to demand when I had become we, and also why, but unfortunately the well-honed strategic bits of my brain pointed out that Liesel was in fact perfectly right. The only people in the world who could give me the kind of mana I’d need to get back into the Scholomance and kill Patience, and who would do that, just to save Orion from screaming in the void for however long it took the school to really go, were in fact his mum and dad, in New York.
And I hadn’t any idea how to get there on my own. There’s a terribly impressive Trans-Atlantic Gateway between London and New York, but with London’s mana store flobbing about like jelly, I wouldn’t have bet on it being stable enough to use at the moment even if I could have gone sailing back into the enclave I’d just gone to great effort to sneak out of. That left the prosaic but reliable method of getting on a plane, and that meant I couldn’t afford to ask Liesel why, because if she didn’t help me, I’d land myself in the clink for inadequately forging a passport and stealing a plane ticket, and that was if I wasn’t shoved into deep dark detention somewhere.
Of course, Mum doesn’t have a passport or a mobile either. She’d have told me to just set off into the world and trust it to get me where I’m supposed to be. That always works for her, but the world has given me the strong impression that it thinks I’m supposed to be in a dark fortress on top of a mountain somewhere, wreathed with storms and lightning cracking down as I laugh maniacally, so I didn’t really trust that approach myself.
But I was still wary about taking Liesel’s help. I’d already turned down her offer, so now I didn’t have any idea what she thought she was going to get out of shepherding me around the world like a wayward hurricane she’d have liked to aim, and that made me uneasy since I was absolutely certain she did think she was going to get something out of it. What if it was something I didn’t want her to have? It could have been something as simple as wanting to get herself in good graces with Orion’s mum, who was in line to be the next Domina of New York, but flying across the Atlantic seemed like a fairly large outlay for the small chances of that return.