* * *
Mum looked at me with worry and sorrow when we came back to the yurt. There wasn’t any great mystery about what we’d been doing; the dress was going to need a good laundering, and so were the two of us, really, glowing and sweaty. But I could forgive her, because she was worried for us both, and she even smiled at me a little when I asked her how she was. “I’m better, love,” she said, and when I told her my plans, our plans, she still looked sad, but she nodded and didn’t tell me it was a terrible idea.
I brought the box with the sutras to the fireside and opened it up, and they were still in there, the gilt and leather shining richly, and I put my hand on it with a lump in my throat. I brought out the leather oil Mum had on her shelf and some rags and gently cleaned and buffed the cover, every inch, just as I’d promised them ages ago, and I told them softly, “Sorry for leaving you alone so long. I won’t do it again. We’re for Cardiff soon—maybe even the day after tomorrow,” and then Aadhya said, “El, get over here,” from the other side of the fire, where she’d been on her phone. Her face was stricken.
“Something’s happened to your family,” I said, horror gripping me—Ophelia had gone after them? Why hadn’t I thought of that, why—
“No, it’s Liu, and something’s seriously wrong,” Aadhya said, and I scrambled over to the other side of the fire with the sutras still in my arms, and Aadhya put Liu on speaker.
It didn’t really help. She was crying softly, small gulps over the line, wordless. “What’s happened?” I said, panicky, still thinking of Ophelia. “Has New York come after you? The war’s started—？”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Aadhya said. “I talked to her on the drive from Portugal. She was in Beijing. Her family made the deal, Beijing enclave was going to give them all the enclave-building spells they still needed, and they were going to put up their new enclave attached to what’s left of Beijing enclave and shore it up.”
“Then what’s gone wrong?” I said. It was certainly a good plan for Liu’s family on the face of it: they were based around Xi’an, so they’d have to collectively move away from home, but that’s nothing compared with saving the thirty years of work and the healthy ration of luck they’d have needed otherwise to finally get up their own enclave.
“I don’t know!” Aadhya said. “She literally hasn’t said anything! I’ve called her twice in the last two days, she didn’t pick up, and this time she answered but she’s just crying!”
Liu still didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sobbing uncontrollably; it was barely more than breathing, tiny soft gasps that sounded oddly far away, and then Precious jumped out of my pocket and squeaked shrilly at Pinky, who came out too and ran up Aadhya’s arm to the phone and put his paw out to press the button to start a video call. A moment later the video came up, with Xiao Xing’s pink nose almost filling the screen; he pulled back a moment later, and behind him we could see Liu, her face tear-streaked and reddened, looking back at us. I thought the phone must have been propped up on a desk or a table somewhere; she was sitting across from it on a wooden bed with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped round them. The room had a certain bare uninhabited quality, but it didn’t look like a prison, and she wasn’t bleeding or beaten or chained up. But she still didn’t say a word; she didn’t even make a gesture. And it wasn’t that she didn’t know we were there, calling. She was looking straight back at us, tears spilling over.
“Okay, what the actual fuck is going on!” Aadhya said, staring at her.
“She is under a compulsion, obviously,” Liesel said, having come to peer over our shoulders. “She cannot tell you anything or ask for help.”
“There’s no one in there with her!” Aadhya said. “Is there, Xiao Xing?” Xiao Xing could talk, or at least squeak in what sounded like confirmation to us all; Precious and Pinky both set up their own chorusing squeaks of agreement. “I’ve never heard of a compulsion spell that can stop anyone from even whispering help while you’ve just let it keep going from another room.”
As it happens, I knew seven, but it wasn’t any of those, because all of them essentially turned the person into a mindless zombie minion. That said, Aadhya wasn’t wrong about the basic principle. It’s really difficult to both completely compel someone and yet let them keep their own feelings on display. If you’ve left them that much control over their own face, they usually can manage at least a whisper, or for that matter pushing a button to pick up the phone, or some other clever little workaround. This wasn’t like that. Liu’s own brain was working for the enemy, and there’s only one way to get that kind of a hold on someone.