I stood in front of the closed door for a long time. I didn’t want to open it. I didn’t want to open it almost as much as I hadn’t wanted to open the door of the maintenance shaft in the Scholomance and go out into the graduation hall, expecting to see Patience and Fortitude waiting for me. No one was going to make me open this door; the Scholomance wasn’t going to bully me through it. But I opened it anyway, because I couldn’t walk away from it either, so there wasn’t anything else to do.
Orion wasn’t there. In any sense of the word. The room looked almost exactly like one of the pages of the glossy in-flight magazine from the seat-back pocket on the aeroplane, advertising toys for boys: bat, ball, a football, a basketball and a hoop mounted on the back of a door, an American football, a racquet and tennis balls still in the plastic tube, another ball, a fishing rod, two different cameras, a remote-controlled car, three Lego kits and five science kits, a television mounted on the wall with shelves beneath it holding at least four different video game systems, a computer on the desk with a gigantic monitor, neatly filled bookshelves, a row of stuffed animals.
And every last item was as pristine as if it were still in that advert waiting to be shipped off to some lucky happy boy who would use it, just as soon as someone had dusted it off a bit. The kits were still in cellophane.
The only thing in the room that showed any sign of use, besides the bed, was a single large cardboard box tucked away in the corner, fairly battered, and full of weapons. At first glance, they might have been toys, too: the swords sized for a child, the coiled whip, the assortment of maces and flails. But they weren’t toys. Actually some of them still had vivid purple ichor stains, which is what you get when you don’t properly clean the corporeal surfaces of your weapon after you’ve used it to kill a psychic mal, which based on my personal experience of Orion’s dorm room was extremely unsurprising.
It hurt to look at it and see everything he’d ever told me, everything Chloe had ever told me, that I hadn’t wanted to believe. I never wanted anything except to hunt, he’d insisted. Chloe and the other New York seniors had literally offered me a spot in this enclave, their single most valuable bargaining chip to recruit help and resources for graduation, just because Orion had made a friend of me for the span of two weeks. Also they’d tried to murder me, mostly by accident, on the suspicion that I was a maleficer who was enchanting him. But now I didn’t mind that nearly as much as the looming possibility that they’d had some real reason to be worried, after all.
This had been Orion’s life, this awful stale barren room full of plastic and desperation, a mass of sacrificial offerings his parents had made to try and turn him into a normal person, and instead had only managed to make him recognize he wasn’t one. And I’d have liked to comfortably keep on hating them for that, only I couldn’t hate them for that and also hate them for letting a ten-year-old hunt maleficaria. I couldn’t have it both ways, and I had the sinking feeling I also couldn’t have it one way or the other, either.
But if I couldn’t blame them—then there was something I couldn’t understand here, a gaping void between the Orion who’d lived in this room and the Orion I’d known, the boy who’d made a friend of me because I didn’t suck up to him, who’d squabbled with me over the lunch tables when I told him to do his homework and smugly counted points for every time he’d saved my life, who’d listened to me and cared about me and loved me. El, you’re the first right thing I’ve ever wanted, he’d told me, and I hadn’t wanted to believe that, or at most I’d wanted to believe that he’d been trained that way. But if it was true, then I didn’t understand how to put the two halves of his life together, the one his parents and his friends had been holding, and the one I’d held myself. It was a puzzle with an enormous missing piece, and I stared into the room as if I could somehow save him after all, if I only found it now, too late.
“El?” Balthasar said, and I looked down the corridor. He was standing at the other end. I pulled Orion’s door shut—I hadn’t even let go of the knob—and walked back towards the sitting room. It was oddly hard to do, my steps coming slower, one after another, elongating almost as if I were back in the stretching staircases of the Scholomance. It was only a short corridor in a small flat, so I couldn’t stretch it out very far, but I took as long as I possibly could have; I didn’t want to get to the other end, and I didn’t even understand why, until I came into the sitting room and Orion’s mum was standing there talking to my friends. She turned when I came in, and there wasn’t any more difficulty seeing where Orion had come from.