Aadhya’s grandmothers kept bringing more amazing snacks out in waves. There wasn’t really a break between teatime and dinner, we just migrated from our lounge chairs to sit at the large outdoor table in the yard under golden hanging lamps, and Aadhya’s dad came home—he was working in Boston enclave that week; he’d literally got in the car and driven home the whole way just to have dinner with us—and he’d brought her cousin from Kolkata enclave who was training in Boston with a senior specialist in computational artifice. He was a handsome strapping lad of twenty-two that they made a point of mentioning by the way wasn’t engaged yet, when they seated him next to me, and asked me about my mum and hoped I would bring her for a visit sometime.
Aad rolled her eyes dramatically at me behind her mum’s back during this process and mouthed an apology, but it didn’t feel like aggressive matchmaking or anything to me. They didn’t really expect me or him to suddenly want to start dating one another, they were just—showing me a door, telling me that if I wanted to walk through it, I’d have been acceptable, and that still wasn’t something I expected enough to be able to find it annoying. And he smiled at me and even flirted a bit, in a way that would probably have stunned me into amazement, or maybe even delight, another time. Liesel making me her offer had been its own surprise, but at least she’d had some sort of rational ulterior motive. I wasn’t really prepared for a complete stranger showing signs of wanting to know me, for no particular reason whatsoever.
Other circumstances, I would have gone fumbling through hardly believing it was happening, then flirting back awkwardly, perhaps giving him my squeaky-new number, maybe even making plans to meet him for a coffee in some magnificently ordinary way. If only Orion were alive, and I could have firmly informed him that I wasn’t tying myself down just yet, and I expected him to see other people a bit too, and be sure it wasn’t just a school romance, or anything like that, and all those sensible things that I thought on principle were a good idea but which hadn’t really seemed like an option I needed to bother considering. I’d imagined myself with Orion, or alone; never anything else. And of course it was good and healthy and wonderful for me to imagine myself with someone else, to imagine myself with Liesel or with Aadhya’s cousin or with someone I hadn’t even met, but I could do that, and Orion couldn’t, because Orion was dead and screaming.
So instead of having a nice ordinary conversation, I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom and lock myself in to breathe deeply a few times and wash my face, and after I dried it off, I finally took Ophelia’s box out of my pocket and opened the lid. It unfolded and kept unfolding until it was nearly six times the size, lined with black velvet, and inside there was a power-sharer. It looked a bit like a pocket watch on a strap, the lid engraved with the enclave’s symbol. Just like the one Orion had used to wear, only obviously this one would let me pull. A small scrap of heavy paper with rough edges was laid out next to it, with a set of GPS coordinates written down, and labeled underneath Sintra, Portugal.
Precious hauled herself out of my other pocket a bit groggily—she’d gorged herself on the puffed rice out of the snack mix, which I hoped wasn’t going to give her indigestion—and jumped over to the counter, next to the box. She put a paw on the power-sharer as if to bar me from it, and looked up at me with her bright-green eyes and squeaked anxiously: she hoped I knew what I was getting into.
“You and me both,” I said. She drew her paw back and watched unhappily as I put the power-sharer on, and then gave a small shiver and crawled back up and got into my pocket again.
I put the paper from Ophelia in my other pocket, like a counterweight, and went out to say goodbye.
I faced objections almost immediately. “First of all, I’m coming with, and second of all, we’re going in the morning,” Aadhya said, as soon as I pulled her aside. “You look like someone went over you with a Zamboni a few times.”
“We will look worse if there isn’t enough mana in the Scholomance when we try to go inside,” Liesel said, disagreeing, having come over and horned in; she was already poking at her phone. “The best flight will be in four hours. We should go to the airport at once.”
After Liesel started drawing actual charts to explain all the horrible things that would happen to us if too many enclaves pulled their mana out while we were inside the school, Aadhya gave in on the departure time, but she insisted on my coming upstairs to her bedroom while she packed. “Okay, seriously, what is Liesel’s deal?” Aadhya demanded, while she hurriedly threw things into a large trunk. She’d hardly been back a week, but the closet was already full of clothes, and I had to navigate a minefield of posh shopping bags to get to the bed to sit down, explosions of tissue paper scattered everywhere around, evidence of a massive spree. “Why does she want to come along? Why is she even here in the first place? Isn’t she a London enclaver now?”