“She consented,” I said. “She agreed up front not to tell anyone anything about whatever is happening.” And as soon as I said that, I knew the rest. Enclaves are built with malia, Mum had said to me. “It’s the enclave spells. Beijing gave them the enclave spells, under a compulsion of secrecy, and there’s something awful in them, but Liu can’t tell us about it.”
I was almost sure that Liu wanted to cry harder, but the compulsion was tidy and proper: she couldn’t even do that. She just kept looking at us and the tears and snot kept coming exactly as before. It didn’t matter, though; I knew I was right. The problem was that I didn’t see what to do about it. I could get on a plane to Beijing and sail into the midst of the ceremonies and disrupt things, me with my handy New York power-sharer, but then what? Beijing would collapse, we’d have an enclave war for sure, and someone else would start some other enclave somewhere else. I couldn’t stop anyone from ever building another enclave.
Then I looked down at the sutras in my arms, and I said slowly, “Liu, you can’t talk to us—but can you talk to your family? I’ve got another way to build an enclave. Maybe I can use it to save Beijing. If they’re willing, I’ll come and give it a go. And if it works, I’ll make you an enclave, too. It won’t be a skyscraper or anything, but it won’t take malia, either. Will you tell them?”
“She can’t tell you if she agrees or not!” Liesel said. “She would be confirming your guess. It would be too easy to get information out of someone if the compulsion was so incomplete.” She looked at me, frowning, and then added with decision, “We will go to Beijing and go to a hotel in the city, and text her from there. If they have agreed, she’ll be able to talk to us then.”
I didn’t like ending the call with Liu still sitting there looking at us, still in tears, but we weren’t doing her any good by staring at her and running out the battery on her mobile. So I told her, “Just hang on, we’re coming,” and Aadhya hung up.
My bag was already packed behind me, and when I turned round to get it, Orion was standing there, holding it: he’d been listening. “We’re going to help Liu,” I said, even though he’d just heard me.
But it was a question, and he swallowed and answered it. “I’ll come with you,” he said—but for just a moment, he looked afraid again: the same fear he’d had on the threshold of the hut, before he’d gone inside.
I was a lot more functional on this journey, more amazing jet lag notwithstanding, so I balked at yet another luxury hotel, much to Liesel’s annoyance and even Aadhya’s muted protests. “Someone’s paying for it, if it isn’t us,” I said. I wasn’t really inclined to take anything from any enclave right now. It was one thing to know in a more or less academic way that enclaves were built with malia, feeling it churning under my feet as I walked through their halls, and another to know that all of them were built on something horrible enough to put that misery in Liu’s face.
Obviously I was still wearing that power-sharer from New York, but consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, so I dragged them all to a hostel, which was the only kind of hotel Mum ever booked us into, although we almost never stayed in one for more than a day before we were being invited to stay at someone’s house. I suppose, technically speaking, that was more or less what happened to me as well, only with appropriate differences.
We got ourselves a room and texted Liu’s phone and then sat exhausted in the courtyard drinking lemonade and didn’t discuss the excellent question of what we’d do if no one came to get us. None of us knew where the entrance to Beijing enclave was, and my one year of Chinese was distinctly inadequate for getting round. I was absolutely fluent in at least thirty different ways to tell someone to dodge something that was about to kill them, so I’d be ace if I happened to spot someone walking out in front of a lorry, but the only reason I’d managed to successfully get directions to the aforementioned hostel was because we were in a tourist zone, and everyone I’d spoken to had answered me in English.
Fortunately, I suppose, the question didn’t arise. A woman set up a stringed board instrument in a corner under the gate and began playing soft harmonious music, and it was hot and muggy, and we had just been on an aeroplane for eleven hours—not in business class either, this time—and we all started drifting off until Precious squirmed out and bit my ear, and I lurched back up to my feet wide awake with eighteen wizards making a circle round us, armed with long tubes the shape of plumbing pipes.