What I needed was someone to convince both of us that he was still alive, that he was still somewhere in there, smothering under the weight of a million maleficaria. And the only person I knew with any chance of that was Mum.
“And how are we going to get him there?” Liesel snapped, deeply irritated by my ongoing refusal to negotiate with reality. “Will you take his hand and lead him along? Will you be taking him on an aeroplane perhaps? How will we even remove him from this tourist park?”
I hadn’t answers for any of these really excellent questions. I looked at Orion, his eyes bright and glossy and fixed on me, and I took a step away towards the doors of the gym. His head turned to follow me. I swallowed and took a few more steps, tensed throughout my body, and I barely managed to keep from letting out a whimper when he went into motion again; Liesel and Aadhya both scrambled to stay ahead of me. But he only came a few steps more and stopped again, just out of reach again. I needed a lot of deep breathing before my heart stopped thumping, and I was leaking tears while it did. It was wrong, wrong wrong wrong to be standing here afraid of Orion. No one in their right mind would ever have been rude to this thing wearing his face.
“I don’t care,” I said, when I could get words out. “I’m taking him to Wales even if I have to walk there.”
* * *
Lucky for me and probably a lot of other people, after I made my grand pronouncement, Liesel gave up on trying to persuade me to do anything sensible and instead put her brain on solving all the problems she considered unnecessary that I was nevertheless creating for myself and by extension her. She led us back to the workshop, and Aadhya cobbled together a spell holder for her out of the bits and pieces left around. Fortunately, those included several bits of maleficaria, and Aadhya’s affinity was in working with exotic materials. She put together a pendant out of the teardrop-shaped eyecase that had come off a chitter, surrounded by fragments of the shells of at least half a dozen mournlets tied on with sirenspider silk, and Liesel put a spell of obfuscation into it, and then handed it to me. “Put it on him,” she said.
Orion had stayed at exactly the same distance the whole time, following me here, that precious arm’s length of space between us. Having to go closer was as bad as having to go down a tunnel to a waiting maw-mouth. But when I tried, when I took a breath and took a step towards him, he stepped back. I paused, and then tried again, and he did it again, as if he didn’t want me to come any closer either. I stopped, wanting to burst into tears all over again, and then I said, “Just put it on yourself, then!” and set it on the workbench nearest me—well, the half a workbench that was still standing—and moved back. He came by and slowly turned his head to look down at the pendant, and after a moment, he did pick it up and put it on.
I saw him under it in a way I hadn’t before. The pendant was sitting incongruously glowing over the remains of his old T-shirt with the Transformers logo across the front, reduced to tatters hanging on between the bands round the neck and the arms, the edges browned with dried blood. His trousers were torn up too, gaping holes across the legs from seam to seam and both back pockets ripped open and the shredded remnants dangling. His trainers looked more like gladiator sandals, a loop round his ankles and the metal-capped toes all that were keeping them on his feet. He’d only been sitting there in the pavilion; he could have mended them. He hadn’t been able to care. “You’re a mess, Lake,” I said, because I would have said exactly that to him under any other circumstances, only after I did, I burst into tears, and I couldn’t even put my hands over my face, because I couldn’t stand to take my eyes off him, in case he came closer.
“Do I need to put one on you?” Liesel said, caustically.
“Are you serious?” Aadhya said to her, in irritation, but I was grateful. I scrubbed my arms over my face in opposite directions and then accepted a rag from Aadhya to honk my nose and get the worst of the tears and snot off myself.
Then we left the Scholomance and went back to the hotel.
I’m going to leave it at that, because I don’t remember most of it, actually. I got through it one minute at a time, and let each one go as soon as I’d got through it, because here came another one. They were all the same minute anyway, the minute where I could feel Orion alive and at my back, just a few steps behind me, and that feeling was the most horrible sensation in the entire universe, and I had to keep pushing on through crowds of people, mundane ordinary people on holiday, hot and sweaty and laughing or bored, children whinging for drinks, and I knew if I turned round and looked at Orion even once, seen him among that sticky noisy living throng, I would see that he was dead so vividly that he would have been, so I couldn’t look around. I had to keep going, to let him keep following me and my wide open back.