I had the smooth dome of it up over me and Orion before I finished turning round, which was good, because we very much didn’t want any of the literally twenty-seven different killing spells and deadly artifices that came flying at our heads, five of them backed by a true circle working. I don’t think I could have blocked or turned them all any other way. But none of them could make it through the impenetrable no thanks very much of the globe. Most of them just dissolved. The more elaborate workings slid down to where the globe intersected with the floor, and dissolved into a frustrated cloud of churning smoke in a dozen different colors that ringed us, bubbling and seething, until one after another they finally dissipated.
By then Orion was standing up next to me, staring out of the shimmering wall into the faces of the thirty-two kids who’d just had a really good go at murdering us. I recognized Yuyan at the front, and Zixuan was standing with the circle—all of the Shanghai seniors, in fact, along with their allies, and a dozen other kids I was pretty sure were from Beijing and Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
It didn’t surprise me at all, except that I’d been taken by surprise. I ought to have known it was coming. But Orion just looked confused at first, as if he didn’t understand how they could possibly have made such a bizarre mistake. It took the grim disappointment on their faces as they watched their spells dissolving to drive home the idea that they’d meant it.
I imagine they were very sorry about that a moment later, and so was I, because that made him angry, and it turned out I’d never seen Orion angry before. Not really angry. And I realize I haven’t one metacarpal to stand on here, but I didn’t like it. And I wasn’t even the one he was angry at. For a horrible moment I had the vivid sensation that I wasn’t holding the dome up to protect him anymore: I was keeping him away from them.
“Lake!” I said, trying to make it sharp, but it came out with an awful wobble I didn’t like. I couldn’t help it. His face looked all wrong, his lips peeled back in a snarl and a faint glimmer of eldritch light coming through his eyes, so much mana gathered for casting that you could almost see it with the naked eye, like a fist clenching. I had a clear and terrible vision of him just mowing gracefully through them, the way he did with a horde of maleficaria, conscious thought going entirely out of it until everything—everyone—was dead.
But thankfully, he grated out, “They wanted to kill you,” and despite my visceral horror, I managed a spark of indignation over that, just enough to light up my ever-helpful reservoirs of irritation and anger.
“I don’t seem to have been in any danger!” I said. “What were you going to do, I’d like to know. Probably get your bones dissolved into goo, if you’d had it all to yourself. That’s up to eleven for me, by the way.”
It distracted him from the confrontation, just long enough to crack his own fury a bit. “Eleven!”
“I’ll write out the tally for you later,” I said, managing a decent fa?ade of coolness. “Now let’s pack this up and go and have our picnic in the library, like normal people. What are you going to do otherwise?”
That was a wrong question to ask, because Orion looked back at them and still clearly felt that kill them all was a perfectly valid response—and when I say perfectly valid, I mean that he was an inch away from going at them, and I hadn’t any idea what to do, but the choice was abruptly not mine anymore, because people literally started appearing round me in bunches, starting with Liesel and her crew: Alfie with his face screwed up in strain, holding up his own casting of the evocation of refusal as they flew in through the doors.
It wasn’t just them, though; other teams were all shooting into the gym around us with the bungee quality of yanker spells going off, all of which I realized after an incredulous glance were keyed off the shield holder on my belt. Ibrahim and his team appeared; even Khamis had come, with Nkoyo.
And more to the point, Magnus and his team sailed in, along with Jermaine and his; then a team from Atlanta, another from Louisiana—and in minutes, what any outside observer would’ve said was going on was that the New York and Shanghai enclavers had squared off, with their various allies, all of us ready to tumble down into the open waiting jaws of Thucydides’s Trap together. It would be at least as effective at killing wizards off as a horde of maleficaria, especially once any survivors went home and told their parents that the war everyone was half expecting had started here on the inside.
I had no idea how to stop it. One look told me Orion wasn’t going to be any help: he was going to be the spearhead. Magnus had already led the New York kids to form up behind him. And the only people who weren’t there were Aadhya and Liu and Chloe, presumably because whoever had organized this protective scheme—three guesses, all Liesel—had known that they’d tell me about it in advance, thus denying her the satisfaction of getting to rescue me.