"Hi!" he calls from his position on the floor of the sewing room. Then he gets up, walks through the broad arch to meet her at the bottom of the stairs, and hugs her.

Bella hugs him back and pets his hair. "So have you put your sewing room to any use yet?" she asks.

"Not yet," he says. "Haven't figured out if I want to use a pentagon or not."

"I'd say not," Bella says. "If you care about the process, why wouldn't you learn it the usual way? And if you care about the results, actually sewing is redundant - you can just wish clothes into existence." She gestures at her wish-jeans. She's worn no non-wish jeans since she learned she could do that.

"I love you," says Alice. "You make so much more sense than me."

"Yes, yes I do," says Bella merrily, drifting over to the chair in the corner and plopping into it. "It's good that you know that."

Bella pets him some more. "I mentioned to Finch that you asked me to call you Alice, by the way."

"Dunno. I guess she'll surprise us. I downloaded some college applications today," she remarks.

"Cool. Which ones?"

"All the Ivies - I have preferences among them, but any I can get into this year is noticeably preferable to any that won't take me until next year if at all - and the public universities here and in Florida, since I could claim residency in either now that my mom and Phil moved to Jacksonville. And MIT, because that's good in its own right and right near Harvard. I might not send in applications for all of them; I'll have to take a second look at the requirements and the average test scores and stuff."

"All kindsa places we might end up," Alice says contemplatively. He likes the uncertainty of it.

"Enh, it's mostly concentrated in New England," Bella says. "It's possible I should throw in Stanford though. Why can't all the useful people go to one place?" she sighs.

"Where would be the fun in that? Anyway, betcha you'll find enough useful people, wherever you end up."

"It's not all about a critical mass of useful people - it's also bad to have any major useful-people gaps. If I go to Harvard and then someone from Stanford with whom I have no mutual friends makes more money than God, I'm in trouble; if I go to Yale and someone from - from the University of Tokyo invents a proprietary technology that interacts badly with magic and I have no way to get in touch with them and influence that nonmagically, then I'm also in trouble. But I can't be everywhere yet and the world is big."

"There's already lotsa people you don't know who have more money than God, though," says Alice.

"Yes, I know. I hope to meet people who know their cousins' kids or something," Bella says.

"...You know my mom," he observes. "And my mom knows a lot of rich people."

"That's potentially useful, yes, but does she have parties where I could sidle up to same and comment on the hors d'oeuvres and then say hey, have you heard about this project I'm helping to run?"

"Maybe! Who the fuck knows what she's gonna do now?"

"Fair enough," Bella laughs.

"You could always suggest it to her and see what happens."

Bella nods. "Next time I see her. How have things at the house been?"

"Good! Man, I did not know how much fun life could be without that asshole in it."