She’d more or less turned herself into the Scholomance. The school hadn’t cared—hadn’t been able to care—about any of us one at a time. The numbers had been its only implacable concern, and so it had marched us ruthlessly through an inhuman triage process, doing the best that it could. Only Ophelia didn’t even believe the stupid unbelievable lie that the school had swallowed, the mad ambition written too effectively into its steel and brass, the one that had sent it grabbing for the chance that Orion and I had provided: to protect all the wise-gifted children of the world. She wasn’t going to try to do that. She perfectly understood that some children had to die.
Ophelia sighed. She put aside her glass of cool clear water and stood up again and came towards me, my whole body clenching at the approach, but she stopped at arm’s length, looking up into my face. “El, you’re clearly a very nice girl,” she said, possibly the first time in my entire life that anyone had said that to me sincerely, and wasn’t it delightful to find someone speaking from a vantage point that made it possible. “I’m glad Orion met you. You won’t believe me, but I do love him. I always wanted him to be happy. If I could have made him happy—I would have.” Her face wavered oddly, almost more bewildered than sad, as if she found it hard to believe herself. “But that’s part of the problem, of course. We’re all greedy, but children make it easier to be. We feel it’s only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else’s mouth.”
Then she held out a small flat square box to me, about the size to hold a makeup compact: a box she hadn’t had in her hands a moment before, with the enclave’s symbol on it, the gates with the starburst behind them. “I can’t make you go back to the Scholomance if you won’t. But I can give you the mana, and I can give you the location. And no one else will go. So it’s up to you.”
* * *
What I ought to have done, which I knew perfectly well, was shove the box back at her and run away and give up on the whole idea. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get Orion away from Patience, and I couldn’t get him away from Ophelia either. I couldn’t rewrite his whole life, snatch him out of his cradle and carry him across the ocean to Mum, or just to some decent person. I couldn’t even take back every rude and nasty thing I’d ever said to him. I would have done that, if I could have; the memory of every word stung in my brain like bees. He’d only liked me in the first place because I hadn’t been trying to make up to him, but I could have simply been nice, without wanting anything of him, and surely that would have worked, too. But it was too late. The only thing I could do for him anymore was kill him, and everyone else trapped inside Patience along with him. So I had to do that. I had to do the only thing I could do for him.
Horribly, I almost had to be glad that he hadn’t made it out, because he wouldn’t have come to me. Ophelia wouldn’t have kept him with love and appeals to his loyalty and conscience. She’d just have kept him by any means necessary—a compulsion or a collar or anything it took. He was one of those more efficient solutions, after all. You couldn’t have asked for better. A brilliant engine of a maleficaria-killer, who dumped the power back into the enclave share after? I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe she’d have made Orion happy if she could have. I could believe, at a stretch, that she’d have liked him to be happy on the side, and had been sorry that she couldn’t find a way to make him so, with her toys and obedient friends and flash cards. But not that she’d have chosen to make him happy, if it had really been a choice between his happiness and having the use of him.
Otherwise surely she wouldn’t have got him in the first place. A slayer of monsters who’d put himself on the line for every stranger who came into reach; who’d been, besides that, a good boy, who’d tried to please his mum and dad and be kind and polite to other children even when they blatantly only wanted to use him—I’d been absolutely certain that his parents and his enclave had programmed it into him, but Ophelia surely hadn’t cared about anything of the sort. It had all been Orion, after all. Just like Mum, who with her infinite kindness had got herself a sullen wrathful death-sorceress child for her pains, Ophelia had got a selfless noble hero, who’d never made a single calculated move in his life, who’d saved children indiscriminately and without the slightest consideration of how he’d throw off the balance by doing it. Who’d been kind even to the girl who’d snapped his head off for daring to save her.