I didn’t know anyone else, but we were coming to the very end of the line, and the last group of enclavers, going to Argentina; they’d drawn one of the lowest numbers of the lottery, but they hadn’t kicked up a fuss and demanded to be jumped ahead, or else; and because they hadn’t, none of the other unlucky enclavers had been able to complain. There were four of them, and they went through single-file and fast, one after another, except the last one recoiled screaming—the first screaming I’d heard for a while—as a maw-mouth came rolling in through the gates.
There wasn’t any question about where it had come from, horribly. The boy from Argentina who’d just gone out of the portal was caught, struggling and screaming, begging for help, for mercy, to be let out, in absolute and familiar terror, as the maw-mouth went on gulping up his body, even as it came through.
I must have stopped singing. I don’t think I could’ve kept singing. It wasn’t a very big maw-mouth. It might even have been smaller than the last one, the first one, the only one I’d ever seen or touched before—the one that would keep living in me for every last minute of the rest of my life. It only had a cluster of eyes, almost all of them brown and black, fringed with dark lashes, horribly like the eyes of the boy being swallowed, and some of them were still conscious enough to be full of horror. Some of its mouths were still whimpering faintly, and others sobbing or gagging.
But it was going to get bigger. It caught three other mals even before it was all the way inside, and reeled them in and swallowed them—even before it had finished engulfing the boy, despite their own thrashing; they didn’t have enclaver-quality shields to hold it off. And the boy would go too, soon enough; as soon as the last of his mana ran out.
“Tomas, Tomas!” the Argentine girl was sobbing, but she wasn’t trying to reach out to him. No one tried to touch a maw-mouth. Not even other mals, not even the mindless most-hungry ones, as if even they could sense what would happen to them if they did.
There was bile climbing up my throat. Liu was still playing; she’d thrown a quick horrified look up at me, but she’d kept going. Alfie was still holding the aisle, with all the London kids behind him, even though surely all they wanted was to flee out the gates, to run for more than their lives, because the worst thing a maw-mouth did was never kill you.
I’d asked them all to help me, and they had; I’d asked them to be brave, to do the good thing that they had a chance of doing, and I hadn’t the right to ask them to do it if I wasn’t going to do it myself. So I had to go down to the maw-mouth. I had to, but I couldn’t, except past it, far down the hall, at the barricade, I could see Orion’s head turn round. If I didn’t go down, he’d come. He’d leave the barricade, let the tidal wave of mals come in behind him, and come for the maw-mouth, because Tomas was screaming, screaming in rising desperation, as the maw-mouth’s tendrils began to creep inquisitively up his chest, towards his mouth and eyes.
I stepped down from the platform and crossed the dais. The last kids in the queue parted to let me through, staring at me as I went, and the shimmer of the alchemical wards ran like water over my skin as I went through it. The mals were still coming through the portal, but they were parting in a wide circle around the maw-mouth, which had paused perhaps for a little digesting, and to feel around inside the scorched outline that Patience had left behind, as if it was considering where to make itself at home. It was like a tiny little inkblot inside that monstrous outline. It couldn’t have had that many lives inside it yet. And I had my own shield up, Mum’s simple brilliant shielding spell that she’d given away to everyone in the world who wanted it, and all it took was mana that you’d built yourself, or that a loving friend had freely given, and Orion was still pouring power into me like a waterfall.
I had to shut my eyes so I wasn’t looking at it, and then I pretended that the gates were in front of me, the gates with Mum on the other side, Mum and my whole future, and that was true, because I couldn’t get there until I’d gone through this, because the bloody horrible universe wanted me to suffer, and I jumped forward into the maw-mouth. Even as the horrible surface of it closed over me, I cast La Main de la Mort with all my rage and the mana of a thousand mals behind it, and I cast it again, and again, and again, my whole face and body clenched tight, and I don’t know how long it was, it was forever, it was three seconds, it was my entire life stretched out to infinity, and then it was over and Liu was yelling at me, “El! El, look out!”