And if he’d made it out, and he hadn’t come to Wales…I’d have written him off, in my selfish guarded pride, and told myself I didn’t mind it, pretended that I wasn’t sorry. I would have abandoned him to her, to the enclave. He couldn’t have trusted me to come and save him.
Maybe he’d known, on some level, what he was going back to, if he went. Ophelia had surely put on a good show for him, and Orion hadn’t been able to tell a maleficer from a doorknob. But he’d lived with her all his life. Maybe he’d guessed, by the end. The Scholomance is the best place I’ve ever been, he’d said to me. Now I knew why that was true. And so now I felt, with a horrible sharp stab, that maybe—when the moment came—he’d chosen not to go home. He’d chosen a final blaze of self-sacrifice, turning to fight the indestructible monster, to avoid going home to the one he couldn’t bear to fight. I didn’t know if that was true, but it felt nauseatingly possible, in a way that filled in the question I still couldn’t answer, hadn’t allowed myself to ask: why hadn’t he come out?
But I hadn’t asked that question partly because it was useless. It didn’t matter why, not anymore. I hadn’t got him out. I couldn’t save him now. But I still had to go and do the last little thing for him that I could. And after that—I’d have to decide if I needed to come back here and try to destroy Ophelia. I was more than halfway convinced she was the one destroying the enclaves at this point. If her problem with enclaves was getting enclavers to share, then terrifying them all with the threat of some mysterious indiscriminate maleficer who was going to destroy their enclaves without warning would be an excellent strategy. Was that justification for killing her? If she was responsible for killing everyone in Bangkok enclave, everyone in Salta, all the people who’d died in London and Beijing? Even if I couldn’t be sure, she was certainly going to do something absolutely horrible, sooner or later.
I could just see Mum reaching out to put her hand on my forehead to make that thought go away, to make all those thoughts go away. But Mum wasn’t with me, and I couldn’t even call her, because if I did, she’d tell me what I already knew, that I shouldn’t take anything from Ophelia. And I couldn’t bear to hear it exactly because I knew it was right. But I still couldn’t make myself hand back the box that held the only chance of the last scraggly miserable thing I could do for Orion.
Ophelia had waited for a bit, I suppose to be sure I wasn’t about to throw her box at her head or out through the windows, but after I didn’t do that for long enough, she decided that I was keeping it, which apparently I was. She nodded politely to us all and went to give Balthasar a quick kiss, exactly like an ordinary loving spouse, and told him, “I’ve got to get back to the council,” and then she left the flat without another word, or looking back at all.
Balthasar saw us out; he even offered to let us use one of the gateways. “No,” I said flatly, without even bothering to open the box and find out where I was going. All I wanted was to get out of this place, at once, and if that meant a thirty-hour intercontinental flight in my future, so what?
Chloe trailed along with us, darting deeply anxious looks towards me. I imagine she had quite a lot of questions about her own future Domina to ask me. But she didn’t get a chance. They saw us back to the exit, and just inside, Balthasar said, “They’ll be locking down the perimeter shortly. El—thank you so much for coming. I’m very glad to have met you.” He hesitated, and then added, “I know this has probably been very confusing—”
I turned and walked out on him and Chloe at that point, before he could get round to explaining to me earnestly how Ophelia meant well, and how he’d like to tell me more about her very important and excellent plans for the world. I was sure he’d have meant every word with full sincerity, too. He had to be a true believer: he’d already been an enclaver, and a powerful one, so it wasn’t that he’d married Ophelia and gone along with her plans just because he’d been desperate for an enclave spot.
Liesel and Aadhya were hard on my heels, which was just as well, because I didn’t slow down even though I didn’t really know where I was going in the stinking dirty train station, the one that had taken the place of the marble halls the enclave had stolen. I just headed for the nearest red sign marked EXIT until I found daylight. When we finally emerged blinking from the depths, Aadhya marched us to the nearest convenient waiting point, not even a café but just a tiny frozen yogurt stand with a handful of rickety uncomfortable metal chairs scattered over the pavement vaguely in the vicinity. She told Liesel, “Don’t let her go anywhere,” as though I needed a keeper, who snapped back, “Come quickly.”