Maybe I was being unfair. Balthasar could instead have been thinking about my chances of success, and whether it was worth sending me in, whether I could really save Orion from agony. But there was some kind of calculation going on behind the stilling lines of his face. And I’d just spent an hour talking about Orion with him, cutting paper-thin slices of my heart to lay out on a plate, and I’d hated every minute of it, but he’d cared, he’d really truly cared, and it had, after all, made me feel better to have shared it with him, to have been able to grieve Orion with someone else who’d loved him. I didn’t want him to say anything that would make me despise him.
“That’s the only reason I’ve come,” I said, before he could say anything at all. “If the Scholomance is still there, if it can be reached, Patience is still in there. And everyone it’s ever devoured is still screaming. It won’t end for them unless I stop it. It won’t end for Orion. That’s why I’m asking. I don’t need a circle, and I don’t need help. All I need is mana and a map.”
He didn’t tell me any more reasons why I couldn’t do it, and he didn’t, thankfully, drop any hints about enclave seats. Instead, after a moment, he only said, softly, “You’d better come talk to Ophelia.”
* * *
I knew that New York had its front door in Gramercy Park, a private gated garden square that was somehow—yes, somehow; I’m sure the enclave hadn’t anything to do with it—still hanging on in the middle of Manhattan. Orion had made a point of showing it to me on a map, as if he’d wanted to be sure I could find it. The enclave owned a shifting assortment of the surrounding townhouses and flats—they sold and bought new ones every so often, following the vicissitudes of the housing market; one of the many perfectly mundane ways New York arranged to have what I gathered was a blazing amount of money even by enclave standards—and a substantial stake in an insanely expensive hotel on the corner, whose rooms were quietly borrowed whenever they were empty.
But presumably that entrance was barricaded at the moment, under the circumstances. Instead Balthasar took us uptown on the subway to Penn Station—a massive and hideous low-ceilinged place filled with noise and grime and cheap fast-food shops—and in the back of a cramped newsstand, where the woman on the cash register nodded to him, he opened up a tiny door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, and we stepped through and went down a short dark corridor.
My whole body was still tight with misery and the remains of anger. So I didn’t even notice at first, but with every step down the corridor, the sensation got stronger until my stomach was full of it: a low queasy seasick feeling just like in London, only not quite as bad, and I slowly realized that it hadn’t been their mana store, sloshing around. I’d just felt it more strongly over there, maybe because of the damage. This was what Mum had meant, the feeling of the malia that enclaves were built upon, only I couldn’t understand how they couldn’t feel it, all the time; how they could stand it. “Do you feel it?” I whispered to Aadhya, low, but she only looked back at me puzzled, and when I explained it, she shut her eyes and stood for a moment, frowning, and then she said, “Maybe? It doesn’t really feel like being on a boat to me. It’s like driving, maybe, with the engine going.”
Chloe had turned round from an open archway at the other end to wait for us anxiously. We slowly went to her, and the archway deposited us in an astonishing entrance hall on the scale of Kings Cross, a gargantuan vaulted ceiling mounted on stone pillars, full of lamps and arches. It was the exact opposite of the carefully crafted layout of London’s fairy garden with all its deft concealed angles that let the space move to where it was needed. Twenty-six enormous archways led out of the hall just as if they were going to trains, only they were full of the pallid grey clouds of an overcast sky, churning with possibility: New York’s famous gateways. The one going to London stood pitch black, completely shut down.
The hall was certainly imposing and dramatic, but I hadn’t any idea why anyone had built it inside an enclave, with the attendant waste of space. It wasn’t as though New York City had loads of room going begging. But by the time we’d got halfway across the stubborn floor, which persisted in being exactly the size it was, exactly like the endless corridors in Heathrow, I’d realized they hadn’t. This was a real place. Someone had literally built this whole enormous building solidly on the outside, and they’d just—moved it in. It was equal parts amazing and outrageous: how had they done it without anyone noticing?