“Wait, what do you mean, nobody from your house?” Aadhya said. “It’s not just Liu missing?”
“Liu and her parents, and Ma and Baba, none of them came back,” he said. “Everyone else from Xi’an, the rest of our family, they all came back to the hotel. But not them. And nobody will tell us what’s going on.”
His brother Min and Liu’s grandmother were waiting for us in a little park a few blocks away from their hotel, and the myna was perched on the branch of the tree above them. It hopped to a higher branch as we came close and tipped its head, a bright black eye fixed on Orion, even though he was behind the rest of us.
Liu’s grandmother was tiny as a doll, frail and grey-haired: she’d sent six children to the Scholomance and got two back—beating the odds, but they’d been her two youngest. She’d started late, after a long run of working flat-out for her family, and then she’d run into the one-child policy, which meant she’d had to wait until each child had gone off to the Scholomance and effectively vanished off the face of the earth to have the next one without attracting too much attention. So she’d been in her fifties when she’d had Zheng and Min’s father, and in her sixties when she’d had Liu’s; if you’re thinking there was magic involved there, you’re right, and undoubtedly it was why she looked so fragile now, part of the price she’d paid. But there wasn’t any shortage of fire in her eyes, and she reached out her gnarled hands to me and Aadhya and gripped ours. “Tongzhimen,” she said. She didn’t speak English, but she didn’t need to; all of us knew the word for allies in almost every language spoken in the Scholomance.
“We’re going to get Liu out,” Aadhya told her. She nodded when Zheng translated.
“Can you ask her if she’s got any idea where they’re keeping Liu?” I asked, urgently, but she slowly shook her head and told us, low, that the rest of the family had all been summoned back to Beijing enclave a few hours ago, which wasn’t a good sign. By now, whoever had Liu penned up knew that their ambush hadn’t worked. If we were unlucky, they were going to rush into whatever sickening plan they had. And it had to be something really monstrous, because it wasn’t just Liu objecting. Liu’s mum and dad had deliberately sent her off to the Scholomance with a cageful of mice to become a tidy small-scale maleficer; they weren’t going to be turning up their noses at some modest use of malia.
Liesel made a grimace when I said as much, and when Aadhya and I both immediately gave her narrow looks, she said sourly, as if she didn’t like admitting it, “The process of building an enclave must need a sacrifice. They are going to do something to Liu, or perhaps one of the others, and the rest of the immediate family objected. That is why they all had to be restrained.”
My gorge rose, but I was instantly bog-certain that she was right. That was what I’d felt, the horrible nauseating squish of malia underneath my feet, in the beautiful gardens of London, in the shining vast halls of New York: a sacrifice. And of course they’d do it, they’d all do it. What was one life, after all, compared with all the lives that an enclave would save? Ophelia wouldn’t have batted an eye. Enclaves have their own unique costs.
“But why one of them?” Aadhya said. “It doesn’t make sense. Liu’s parents are high-octane in the family, and her uncle’s in the running for council. Even Liu—maybe she didn’t tell them she’s seeing Yuyan, but they must know she’s made friends in Shanghai! Not to mention you. If there was some kind of human sacrifice involved, why would the family pick any of them?”
Liesel shot me a glance that made me fairly certain that she had an idea why, but she only shrugged and wouldn’t speculate. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Are you questioning that something bad is going to happen?”
I didn’t question that at all. “Could you lead us to her?” I asked the myna, in Chinese, but it only cocked its head at me and said, “Liu! Liu! Liu!” in three different human voices that all sounded like cries of horror.
“We do not need to be led,” Liesel said. “We know what they are doing, and there is only one place they can do it.” She looked at Zheng. “Does your grandmother know where there is an entrance to Beijing enclave?”
* * *
It was a long ride to Tanzhe Temple, and every minute felt twice as long as it was, stretched out and cold and blank. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Liesel’s plan was tidy: just get through the gates of Beijing, and then tell them that if they didn’t hand Liu and her family over straightaway, I’d give the whole enclave a good whack and send it sliding the rest of the way into the void.