A girl with pink-and-green-streaked white hair and bushy eyebrows was sitting on the floor in an isolated corner with her eyes closed. She only had on a paper-thin black cotton dress and not a single visible weapon. She was vaguely familiar; after a moment I recognized her as one of the top seniors during our freshman year—not the valedictorian, but she’d still bargained herself a guaranteed spot after the obstacle course had opened that year, by doing a demonstration for several senior enclavers where she’d slaughtered her way through it, all alone. I certainly hadn’t been invited to the demonstration, so I didn’t know exactly how she’d done it, but she had been alchemy track, and there was a small potion bottle on the floor next to her. Her hands were clenched in her lap tightly, so I suspected she wasn’t looking forward to repeating the experience, whatever it was.
But that’s the price for using a tidy trick like that to get yourself into an enclave. They’ll expect you to use it for them again, whenever they need you to. That had been my own plan, or at least I’d thought it had been my plan, those first three years at school: to barter my power for a ticket straight to a major enclave, where they’d take me in and keep me safe the rest of my life, just to have me in reserve when something terrible happened. Something like an enclave war, and I didn’t need to have it spelled out for me in small words that we were on the verge of one.
None of them stopped us. The woman on the bench just said, “Balthasar,” a deep booming, as we went by, and nodded him on with a wave of her hand despite us tagging along behind him.
“Ruth, Grover,” he said, nodding back to them both, without breaking stride. He led us to one of the narrow brass-and-ironwork staircases going down through the floor. Going into the dark out of the brilliant light of the hall left us blinded and blinking for an unsettling moment that cleared up only as we came off the landing below and were in the narrow plush-carpeted corridor of a Gilded Age mansion block. Elegant wooden doors with knobs in the middle took turns with dim green-shaded lamps held up by brass hands, appearing at irregular intervals going down the length.
It wasn’t nearly as real a place as the transport hall above. It only took a few steps before we were at a door marked 33. Balthasar swung it open for us and let us in. I made it a few steps inside before I realized and stopped short, standing just inside the handsome sitting room—he’d brought us to his own flat. I’d assumed he was taking us to some council chamber, some garden or library or something of the sort.
Of course I couldn’t turn round and say no wait let me out. But I wanted to, because this was where Orion had lived, this had been his home, and I was here, and he wasn’t. I wanted to run away at once, and I wanted to go prowling over the whole place, looking for any last scraps and shreds of him I could gather up and squirrel away inside myself, and hold on to him like holding on to one of the lost places.
By mundane standards, it was a cozy little place, the sort that a real estate listing would call charming, meaning not quite as large as you’d like. By enclave standards, it was enormous, and with an almost unimaginable luxury: windows. The short wall of the sitting room was made entirely of panels of one-way mirrors in ironwork, and on the other side you could see a garden, a garden outside in the real world. It looked like the yard of a townhouse, nine feet square at most, but the brick walls were covered with ivy and rosebushes, and all the space was filled with large plants in pots. The windows surely didn’t open—you wouldn’t want an actual opening to the outside world in your enclave home, since dozens of mals would try to get in—but it was still real sunlight and greenery.
One long wall was entirely full of bookshelves and a fireplace, and in front of it a small sofa and two large comfortable chairs were arranged round a rug large enough for a child to sprawl upon, playing. There were photographs scattered over the bookshelves, and I wasn’t close enough to see them clearly, but there was someone in them with silver-grey hair.
“Make yourselves at home,” Balthasar said, an invitation to go on and stab myself in the chest, just as I liked. “I’m going to go get Ophelia. Chloe, would you mind helping the girls with the pantry, if they’d like anything?”
I didn’t want anything I could get in a pantry. I left Chloe showing the others how the sleek antique cupboard in the wall opened up to reveal a bank of illuminated drawers just like the old Automat food carts we’d enjoyed every year on Field Day, if those carts had been full of beautiful food that you’d actually want to eat, and also polished to a high sheen instead of nearly blackened with a century of grime and tarnish. I went down the corridor instead, slowly, to the door at the far end of it, the door that was shut. I passed a sliding door half open, going to what looked like the inside of a garage, the workshop where Orion had told me his dad had tried to keep him busy; there was another door ajar on my right, with a mirror on the wall showing a glimpse of a large canopied bed, hangings of grey velvet and mosquito-netting glimmering faintly with light, and when I paused to look at it, the mirror clouded over uneasily and I think something inside it started to peer back at me, only Precious made an alarmed squeak of warning, and I hurried on before it managed to pull itself together.