The problem has been scrubbed and her hair brushed and her clothes changed out for ones that haven't been patched a hundred times, and lies in a shimmery field of magic in her parents' home. They're being run ragged; eighteen year olds who can defend themselves aren't that tasty to mals, but eighteen year olds who can't are delicious. There's a gaping hole in her chest and a puncture in two chambers of her heart; blood stopped reaching her brain about the instant of induction, and they had an initial, partial version of the stasis spell up about a minute and a half after that.

This healer says she thinks she can do it, but she'll need to design something to prevent brain damage the instant the stasis collapses.

 

She thinks it will take at least a few months, and she would want payment up front.

 

 

 

 

We do not expect we can keep Annisa alive for another few months, and do not have payment. I do appreciate your efforts.

She wants to yell at them for trying to give up, yell at the healer for not being faster, yell at the world for making the process of getting her allies out of the Scholomance alive take months longer than it was supposed to. She doesn't.

How much money does she want? If the problem with the wait is just guarding her we can move her into the enclave, it'll be safer there.

In between emailing healers, Marcy has been looking into the wizarding job markets--and the wizarding loan market. There aren't a ton of jobs for eighteen-year-olds, but she's a relatively well-qualified eighteen-year-old. She could get something as a junior artificer, or join one of the teams guarding enclave gates or disabled teenagers. With parents willing to contribute directly and co-sign a loan for more she should be able to spend her first few years' salary up front, and so should everyone else in the squad.

She prefers payment in mana not money

32000 Itir, not sure what that amounts to in the American measurement system

the stasis will last indefinitely but mals are drawn to her

if you can move her into the enclave that would fix that

We'll move her, then. I'll get back to you with the details.

She looks up Itir. The four of them can't generate 32,000 Itir in three months, and Annisa will need expert guards even inside the enclave, so waiting until they have it is a bad plan. She emails the Boston mana management office asking about a loan, and then looks up renting a plane and a team of guards.

At first the wizard with the pilot's license says he's booked all the trips he wants to take for the next month and a half. Telling a sob story to a man she's barely met feels terribly undignified, by Scholomance rules, but the actually pathetic thing would be failing in her mission because she was afraid of looking pathetic. 

We'll be there to get her a week from Saturday. Does she need any special precautions or equipment to be moved safely?

She's going to be on the plane herself, of course. It's not that she doesn't trust the guards she's hired, and it's not as though Annisa's parents will see her as a familiar face. She certainly doesn't think Annisa will know or care who's with her. But she's spent four years not relying on anything that she or Abigail or Franklin or Kevin isn't personally right there looking at. 

The field can move with her fine. It needs to be fed but not that much. There's a interface for transferring mana to it indirectly if transferring mana direct to an unfamiliar working is not something you are comfortable with. 

 

Thank you.

The enclave agrees to loan them the mana. Their usage is going to be audited every month until they've paid it back, which will take the next year if they all get jobs paid in mana and spend every spare moment generating more. Marcy is already spending every spare moment down on the practice range with the children and the off-duty guards, throwing knives and spears and shuriken at paper targets with pictures of mals, building mana with her perfect aim and her sore arms and the anger standing between her and despair.

They iron out a few more details, and the following Friday she gets on a plane to Indonesia.

She was warned about the potential for claustrophobia, and agoraphobia, and panicking at the loss of control, but it turns out what gets her is the turbulence. It feels exactly like being in the tank as the senior dorms descend to the graduation hall, and when she takes the pills she brought to deal with this sort of thing her brain goes fuzzy and comes unglued from itself and it's even harder to remember that she isn't really there. It ends up being a blessing that the flight's so long, because by the time they land it's out of her system and she's almost pulled herself together.

Annisa's parents look like people who haven't slept in a month, and they do a double-take at Marcy, perhaps because they imagined Annisa's powerful American allies less Korean and less eighteen. Overawed tiny Annisa siblings peek out from a door down the hall. 

Annisa is here. She does not appreciate any of this, though.

It's very weird seeing Annisa asleep. She's seen Annisa in just about every other state, from happily absorbed in a shop project to exhausted after a practice run to grumpy about language assignments to mid-shower, but never asleep.

"Thank you for everything. I'll get her back."

"Thank you," Annisa's father says hoarsely, and nothing else, because there's not much else to say.

There really isn't, is there. 

She brought a collapsible wheelchair to push Annisa in, but she's taller than Marcy and a dead weight and it's an embarrassingly clumsy process getting her squared away in it. She can feel Annisa's parents' eyes on her back, and they're total strangers but also something very like her allies and she'd be scared of their judgement if she wasn't far too busy being scared of failure.

"Boston's gonna save Annisa because they're enclavers and can do anything," a tiny voice squeals in the other room and is shushed.

She considers, for an instant, saying something, 'We'll see you in a few months' or 'You bet, kid!', but she doesn't. It's not that she doesn't think they can do it, she thinks to herself. They can and they will. But there are no guarantees. Annisa would want the kids to know that. She pushes the wheelchair out the door like she didn't hear anything and scans for mals like it's a supply run. Today's loot: one mortal vessel.

The mals that have been plaguing this household aggressively for the last month seem scared off by all the professional guards. It's uneventful travel to the plane.

She is not going to have any flashbacks on the plane this time. She is not.

She does.

(The guards politely ignore her aborted attempt to run through the final checks on a collection of nonexistent weaponry. They know how it is.)

The other three are there to meet her at the airport, even Kevin who hates being outside. 

"I said you didn't have to."

"Looking up builds mana. Let's get the fuck home."

They put Annisa in Eliza's bedroom and set everything up for the guards, whose salaries are eating all four of their stipends, Marcy's college fund, and some extra from Abigail and Kevin's parents (who have no more kids under age 14). Marcy emails the healer about delivering the mana and scheduling the procedure and whether there is anything whatsoever that four eighteen-year-olds with their skillsets can do to make it be safer or happen sooner.

The healer is optimistic; if there's brain damage, it'll be because they were too slow getting the stasis set up and there's already brain damage. And magic can heal that, too, with time, it's not her specialty but you can at least get all the tissue back even if you have to build new connections to use it. The first time you use a spell many things can go wrong but she tests on pigs with all her spells. 

It still takes nearly two months for her to be ready.

Kevin gets a job on the enclave maintenance team. It's usually paid in "enclave membership for your children" but he gets paid in mana instead.

Franklin was planning to go into research inventing better wards, but that takes a long time to become lucrative, so he puts it off and sells bags of holding.

Abigail sells potions, and works on learning to bake them into lightweight healing cookies for Scholomance students, and finds excuses to walk past Marcy's house and see that the light is still on in Annisa's room.

Marcy takes shifts training the younger children, teaching them to run and fight and scan a room and identify mals and the hundreds of other things they can't afford to forget even one of. (Was she really that tiny and clueless, once? She must have been.) When the kids aren't around, she does pullups and handstands and horrible wall sits, and remembers Annisa teaching her to horrible wall sit and laughs (because it's that or cry, and she has nothing nothing nothing to be sad about because Annisa is going to be fine and Marcy will pay off the loan and then all her obligations will be cleared and she can rest.)

By the end of the two months, they've paid off about a third of the mana.

The operation takes about four hours; most of that is setting up the spell that'll keep Annisa's tissues oxygenated while it takes ten minutes to rebuild and restart her heart. Once the stasis field goes down it moves quite quickly. The healer lingers about ten minutes after it's done, doing diagnostics, which isn't long enough for Annisa to wake up; magical stasis is more like putting you into a coma than putting you on pause, and it's expected to be an hour or two. 

"She's fine," the healer says regardless of this. "Call me if followup seems necessary, but it shouldn't be."  And she leaves.