“No,” I told the bird, honestly. It tilted its head and said, “Nǐ hǎo,” and then, “El?” again, and then it said, in my voice, “No. No. No.” Abruptly it took wing and darted away into the trees.
We’d had an agreement, me and Aadhya and Liu: I was going to go and get my hands on a phone, as soon as I made it out, and text them both. They’d made me memorize their numbers. But that had all been part of the plan, and I couldn’t make myself do any of it.
It had been a perfectly good plan. I had the Golden Stone sutras all ready: they were snugly bundled together with all my notes and translations inside a soft bag I’d crocheted out of my last threadbare blanket, to pad them inside my painstakingly carved book chest, which had itself been bundled into my waterproof shower bag. I’d slung it on my back when the gears first started to turn. They were the only thing I’d taken out with me, my prize—the one truly wonderful thing I’d got out of the Scholomance. I would have swapped them for Orion if some higher power had made me the offer, but it would’ve taken me two heartbeats instead of one to agree.
The plan was, if I made it out alive, I was going to hug Mum half a million times, roll around in grass for a while, hug Mum some more, and then take the sutras and head to Cardiff, where there was a decent-sized wizard collective near the stadium. They weren’t powerful enough or rich enough to build an enclave of their own, but they were working towards it. And I’d have offered to take the mana they’d saved up and build them a little Golden Stone enclave outside the city instead. Nothing grandiose, but a space good enough to tuck their kids in at night and keep them safe from whatever stray mals had been left behind by the purge.
Orion hadn’t been part of the plan. Yeah, it had occurred to me that he could find me in Cardiff, if he came looking. But he would have been landing in his own parents’ arms and the wider embrace of the united New York enclave. They’d all have fought him leaving with every clinging vine of sentiment and loyalty they could wrap around him. So I really sincerely hadn’t expected Orion to come: I’m good at pessimism. And I hadn’t needed him to come, either. I’d been ready to go on with my own life.
I don’t know that I’d even needed him to make it out alive. I had been fairly sure before we began on our objectively lunatic plan of escape that I’d end up dead myself, and at least half the people I cared about along with me, with Orion topping the likely list. If our plans had gone pear-shaped, if the maleficaria had broken loose from the honeypot illusion and started slaughtering us, and we’d all had to run for it, and in the chaos he’d been one of the people who hadn’t made it out, I think I’d have cried and mourned him and gone on.
But I couldn’t bear this. I couldn’t bear that he’d been the only one who’d died getting all of us out. Getting me out. Even if he’d chosen on his stupid own to turn round and face Patience, even if he’d chosen to shove me away, still being the hero he thought he had to be to be worth anything. I couldn’t bear for that to be his story.
So I wasn’t okay. I didn’t go and get a phone, and I didn’t try to call Aadhya and Liu. I didn’t go to Cardiff. I just sat around, inside or outside the yurt mostly at random, and kept trying to change it in my head, play the whole thing out again, as if I could change what had happened by finding some better set of things I should’ve done.
I can say from experience that it was very much like when you’ve been humiliated in the cafeteria or the bathroom in front of a dozen people, and because you couldn’t think of any clever comebacks at the time, you keep daydreaming about all the viciously witty things you might have said. As Mum had pointed out to me several times during my childhood, really what you’re doing is bathing yourself endlessly in the humiliation all over again, while your tormentor sails on perfectly unaffected. She was right, and I’d known it even then, but knowing had never stopped me before. It didn’t stop me now. I stayed stuck, going back and forth on the rails, trying to find a way to shove the train that had already arrived off the tracks somehow.
After a few more days of trying to rewrite history on the inside of my own head, I came up with the magnificent and highly original idea that maybe I could do it on the world instead. I went into the yurt and dug up one of my old notebooks from primary school that Mum had saved in a box, and I found a blank page towards the back and scribbled a few lines down, something something l’esprit de l’escalier. The idea felt very French, just like my best and most elegant killing spell, and if that doesn’t sound like a recommendation to you, I can’t imagine why.