Which wasn’t an excuse for being nasty to a miserable lonely kid, and just because I understood their reasons didn’t mean I was ready to forgive them. I should’ve enjoyed it so much, I should’ve spoken to them with contempt: That’s right, I’m back, and I’ve grown; have any of you accomplished anything in the last four years besides horrible gossip? Mum would have sighed when she heard about it, and I wouldn’t have cared. I’d have floated out of the bathhouse on a cloud of mean greedy pleasure.
But I couldn’t do it. Apparently, if I wasn’t going to be angry at Orion, I couldn’t be angry at anyone.
I didn’t say anything to them, and they didn’t say anything to me, or to each other. I turned and dried off with their silence behind my back and put on the clothes Mum had left for me on the hook next to my shower stall: actual new cotton knickers fresh from the cellophane, and a linen shift with a drawstring at the neck, big and loose enough to fit me; one of the people in the commune made them for medieval reenactors. A pair of handmade sandals from one of our other neighbors, just a flat sole cut out of wood with a leather cord. I hadn’t worn anything this clean in four years, except the day I’d first put on Orion’s shirt. The last clothes I’d grudgingly bought were a couple of pairs of lightly used underwear off a senior at the start of my junior year, when there just wasn’t enough left of my last pair to cast make-and-mend on them. New underwear went for insanely exorbitant prices inside: you could’ve bought an all-round antidote potion for a pair of unworn pants, and now here I was with untold riches.
I couldn’t enjoy them any more than I could enjoy a round of delicious payback. I put them on, because it would have been stupid not to, and of course it felt better, it felt wonderful, but I looked at the ragged filthy ruin of Orion’s shirt, which wasn’t fit for anything but the bin, and feeling better felt worse. I tried to make myself chuck it along with the rest of my old things, but I couldn’t. I folded it up and put it into one of my pockets—it was so worn thin, half made of magic at this point, that I could get it to the thickness of a handkerchief. I cleaned my teeth—new toothbrush, fresh minty paste—and walked out. It was dark outside by then. Mum had a small fire going outside the yurt. I sat down on one of the logs next to the pit and after a bit, I cried some more. It wasn’t original or anything, I realize. Mum came round and put an arm around my shoulders again, and Precious climbed into my lap.
* * *
I spent the next day sitting blankly by the dead firepit. I was clean, I was fed, I was sitting outside in sunshine and a brief shower—I didn’t move—and sunshine again. Mum puttered around me quietly, handed me food to eat and tea to drink, and left me alone to process. I wasn’t processing. I was trying very hard not to process, because there wasn’t anything to process except the raw horrible truth that Orion was somewhere off in the void screaming. I could almost hear him, if I thought about it too long: I could almost hear him saying, El, El, help me, please. El.
Then I looked over, because it wasn’t just in my head anymore. There was a small odd bird standing on the log right next to me: purple-black, with an orange beak and bright-yellow marks around its head, and a big round beady black eye it tilted up towards me. “El?” it said to me again. I stared down at it. It stretched its head out long and made a sound like a person coughing, then straightened up again. “El?” it said again. “El? El, are you okay?” and it was Liu’s voice: not exactly the same sound maybe, but the accent and the way she’d have said the words; if it had spoken from behind me, I’d have thought she was there.
“No,” I told the bird, honestly. It tilted its head and said, “Nǐ hǎo,” and then, “El?” again, and then it said, in my voice, “No. No. No.” Abruptly it took wing and darted away into the trees.
We’d had an agreement, me and Aadhya and Liu: I was going to go and get my hands on a phone, as soon as I made it out, and text them both. They’d made me memorize their numbers. But that had all been part of the plan, and I couldn’t make myself do any of it.
It had been a perfectly good plan. I had the Golden Stone sutras all ready: they were snugly bundled together with all my notes and translations inside a soft bag I’d crocheted out of my last threadbare blanket, to pad them inside my painstakingly carved book chest, which had itself been bundled into my waterproof shower bag. I’d slung it on my back when the gears first started to turn. They were the only thing I’d taken out with me, my prize—the one truly wonderful thing I’d got out of the Scholomance. I would have swapped them for Orion if some higher power had made me the offer, but it would’ve taken me two heartbeats instead of one to agree.
The plan was, if I made it out alive, I was going to hug Mum half a million times, roll around in grass for a while, hug Mum some more, and then take the sutras and head to Cardiff, where there was a decent-sized wizard collective near the stadium. They weren’t powerful enough or rich enough to build an enclave of their own, but they were working towards it. And I’d have offered to take the mana they’d saved up and build them a little Golden Stone enclave outside the city instead. Nothing grandiose, but a space good enough to tuck their kids in at night and keep them safe from whatever stray mals had been left behind by the purge.
Orion hadn’t been part of the plan. Yeah, it had occurred to me that he could find me in Cardiff, if he came looking. But he would have been landing in his own parents’ arms and the wider embrace of the united New York enclave. They’d all have fought him leaving with every clinging vine of sentiment and loyalty they could wrap around him. So I really sincerely hadn’t expected Orion to come: I’m good at pessimism. And I hadn’t needed him to come, either. I’d been ready to go on with my own life.
I don’t know that I’d even needed him to make it out alive. I had been fairly sure before we began on our objectively lunatic plan of escape that I’d end up dead myself, and at least half the people I cared about along with me, with Orion topping the likely list. If our plans had gone pear-shaped, if the maleficaria had broken loose from the honeypot illusion and started slaughtering us, and we’d all had to run for it, and in the chaos he’d been one of the people who hadn’t made it out, I think I’d have cried and mourned him and gone on.
But I couldn’t bear this. I couldn’t bear that he’d been the only one who’d died getting all of us out. Getting me out. Even if he’d chosen on his stupid own to turn round and face Patience, even if he’d chosen to shove me away, still being the hero he thought he had to be to be worth anything. I couldn’t bear for that to be his story.
So I wasn’t okay. I didn’t go and get a phone, and I didn’t try to call Aadhya and Liu. I didn’t go to Cardiff. I just sat around, inside or outside the yurt mostly at random, and kept trying to change it in my head, play the whole thing out again, as if I could change what had happened by finding some better set of things I should’ve done.