“No, I’m okay,” he said, although he had to drag his eyes away from the power-sharer when I waved my wrist at him. “I’ve got enough, I just—got used to it, I guess.” He shrugged away the misery of his lot with one shoulder, but he was still staring at the floor, and after a moment he brought out the real problem: “It’s not like there’re loads of mals in New York. In the enclave, I mean,” he added. “Not much gets through.”
I couldn’t help myself. I blurted out, “No one’s chaining you down in New York.”
That was a nice and sympathetic thing to say to a boy who wanted his mum and dad and his own bed as much as I did. But I’d been overwhelmed by an instant éclat of idyllic vision: the two of us wandering the world together, welcomed everywhere by everyone, him clearing out infestations and then watching my back while I put up Golden Stone enclaves with the power from the mals he took out.
You could say I was just offering him a different future, and I had as much right to put that future on the table for him as he did asking me to come to New York, only I didn’t feel as though I did. I’d like to have felt that way; I’d have argued myself breathless and blue if anyone else had tried to tell me I didn’t. But there wasn’t any convenient opponent around to be argued with, and on the inside of my own head, I didn’t really believe I had any right to ask Orion Lake to walk away from a future of safety and ease in the most powerful enclave in the world, just to spend his life as an itinerant bodyguard at my heels.
And even if I could squash that particular squidgy feeling, my vision would still mean asking him to walk away from his family and everyone he knew. He wasn’t saying he didn’t want to go home, he was saying he didn’t like the idea of spending the rest of his life having to go begging to Magnus Tebow every time he wanted a cup of mana. I wouldn’t have liked asking Magnus Tebow for pocket lint. I felt like a selfish beast as soon as the words came out of my mouth.
“If you just set up shop, you’ll get booked to come out and kill the worst mals the world over,” I added, as if that was all I’d meant. “Orion Lake: Maleficaria Hunter for Hire, no mal too large, some too small.”
He huffed a noise that aimed for laughter and stopped at a sigh. “Am I a jerk?” he asked abruptly. “Everyone always acts like—” He made a frustrated wave of his hand in the direction of the legions of his fan club. “But I know that’s just…”
He was being about as articulate as, well, the average seventeen-year-old boy, but I understood him perfectly. He’d been trained to think he was only good if he ran around being a hero all the time. Naturally as soon as he dared think about what he might want, surely that made him a monster. But as someone who’s been told she’s a monster from almost all corners from quite early on, I know perfectly well the only sensible thing to do when self-doubt creeps into your own head is to repress it with great violence. “What do I look like, your confessor?” I said bracingly. “Go and do your homework so I don’t have to cobble you back together out of spare parts, and have your existential crisis another time.”
“Thanks, El, you’re such a pal,” he said, in tones of deep syrupy affection.
“I am, aren’t I,” I said, and left him to it. And then I went to my room and didn’t do any of my own homework. Instead I spent the entire time reading the Golden Stone sutras and translating more bits of it and doodling stick pictures of tidy little enclaves in my notes. Precious scampered around the desk messing my pens about and cracking sunflower seeds out of her food bowl and occasionally coming to inspect my work. She didn’t approve of the bit where I scribbled in a little stick figure with a sword killing mals; when I looked away, she slipped under my arm and deposited a dropping in exactly the right spot so I put my hand right down on it when I started writing again and squished it over my own artwork.
“It’s not like he’s any use in an enclave,” I muttered while I poured half my jug out over my besmirched hand, scrubbing it clean over the room drain. “I expect he’d rather come round the world hunting mals with me.”
But of course she was right; it was an unbelievably stupid thing to be thinking about. There were very good odds that at least one of the small handful of people in the world that I loved only had months left to live, and that one might well be me if I let myself get distracted. I’d lectured Orion about neglecting his work, but at least his hunting was to some reasonable immediate end: he actually got mana out of it, and every mal he killed in the corridors would be one less jumping at our heads at graduation time. But I wasn’t going to be building any enclaves until after I got myself and everyone I cared about through the doors, so I could stop wasting my time on the idea right now.