Annisa set her alarm for 5:45 but actually woke up at 4:30, heart pounding. She's going to need to train herself out of that habit promptly. But if she's up, she's up, so she'll check her room over (not that it's likely there's anything, and there isn't, but you don't want to get lulled into a false sense of security by the first few weeks of school), do some core exercises, memorize the number on the slip of paper under her door that tells her her homeroom -

- she's procrastinating actually thinking, isn't she, and she can't afford to do that.

Yesterday mostly went as expected. There's whatever bizarre thing happened in Chicago, and there are some kids who do not seem up to the task, but that's not surprising, really, when she thinks about it. Her brothers hadn't been up to the task; her parents hadn't realized how serious, how relentless, they would have to be to have a living child. Probably Syech didn't commit suicide or throw a public tantrum on the first day of school, and they know Ien made it to senior year, but still. General principle. Some kids don't have what it takes, and those kids will be winnowed out soon enough and then everything will be exactly what she was trained for. Daria is a very convenient next door neighbor and looks to be a solid training partner and Annisa is going to squash down the stupid temptation to make friends with people, though she does appreciate having been warned about it, in advance she hadn't even expected the temptation would exist. And Malak is competent, and clever, and -

- and what they're doing this morning, if they're doing this, if Malak comes - is dangerous. It would be smarter not to do it, to have an alibi and go to homeroom and let Toronto find Toronto girl's stuff, if she's dead, which she probably isn't. But - 

- but playing it safe would make perfect sense if 75% of students made it out, if all you had to do was not be one of the idiots. But 25% of students make it out. Less than 10% of full independents, like her, like Malak. It's not enough to play it safe. You need an advantage -

- which she might have. She has arguably the best affinity you can get. She has excellent neighbors. If she doesn't get spellblocked and she doesn't get unlucky she can impress an enclaver enough for an alliance, senior year, and if she does get spellblocked extra supplies won't help -

- except they might. She can trade for things. Better wards, better potions, she could have paid Daria in supplies instead of in mana and then she'd have this next month and a half building mana for herself rather than for Daria. They might, and her odds are not good, and if she pulls this off they'll be better, and - it seems like the Annisa who makes it out of here has this competence, even on the first day of school. 

Plus if they pull it off that is practically an alliance, with Malak, who can make a tray of food safe every day, who has older siblings -

- probably the girl will have changed her mind and all this agonizing will be pointless -

- Annisa rehearses her plans in her head, anxiously, until they all sound doomed, and then keeps rehearsing them until it feels like they happened already. While she does that she does situps, and planks, and leg-lifts, because she is in Daria's debt and wants her knife back.

When there's a knock on the door she races right to it. She's a bit sweaty. 

"Can I come in? Ran here. Need to catch my breath. Rather not wait in the hallway."

"Yeah, come on in." The room looks like practically all of the rooms; void floor. (She gets extra mana for the situps because they hurt her back so much.) She did everything you're supposed to with the furniture, but she obviously sucks at carpentry. The shelf is crooked and the desk looks splintery.  

"Thanks." she smiles sheepishly. "I'm pretty out of shape. Stategic, more mana from getting fit than staying fit. Didn't expect urgent morning business on the opposite side of the school."

"I'm in, by the way. She was very. Obvious about it. Toronto won't be suspicious."

Annisa is out of shape too, for the same reason. She nods tightly. Takes a deep breath.  "She's in 105A. This ring of dorms, about forty rooms down, past the nearest main hallway and the bathrooms. If she's alive and well, I'm just going to continue on to homeroom, I'm in 222 which I think is a classroom right below the cafeteria? If she's alive and not well, I'm going to take her to Toronto for help, leaving the door open, you can grab whatever, someone will, I'll contact you for my share later. If she's gone - we leave the door open, keep walking to your room, negotiate a split there?"

"I thought you were going to run and tell Toronto right away if she was gone? And - hold on - " She takes a map out of her pocket and looks it over " - She is on almost the exact opposite side of the school as me. Your room's much closer but if Toronto is suspicious at all they're more likely to check here - well she probably doesn't have anything too bulky and... I will just have to jog more to make it back to my room and then to homeroom without being noticeably late." Sigh.

"I guess that means we should get going right away. I'm also 222 for homeroom, we'll sit separately and make new" (probably worse) "acquaintances and not acknowledge each other more than is typical for people who had orientation dinner together and have not done any conspiring since."

"I realized I don't know where anyone else in Toronto is and I can't run to the cafeteria to tell them if we're doing it at this hour instead of after homeroom like I imagined originally. I'll have to tell them at breakfast." The stuff about ignoring each other at homeroom is obvious but she's glad Malak spelled it out anyway; it wouldn't do to have any misunderstandings on something like this. "Let's go."

" - Wait one second! If you lose track of me don't worry, I know the plan and am sticking to it. My room is 656B if you need to meet me there. Cover your ears."

Annisa obeys.

And a little bit of greek chanting and a lot of mana later they are both Very Boring and leaving Annisa's room and walking down the hallway.

- Annisa has probably lost track of her already, Malak has not used this much mana on this one before and she's having trouble tracking Annisa. It's easy when she thinks to look for Annisa, but unless she's actively looking for her the other girl just doesn't seem worth paying attention to. And if she thinks about something else it can be hard to remember that she was trying to keep her eye on someone. And Annisa has a lot less practice with this. Well. Malak can walk to 105A and wait for someone to show up to check on the Toronto girl.

Wow, she does not have a lot of experience reasoning around mind-affecting magic and she should maybe get good at that fast. There's some question that's surprising and confusing but all she can remember about it is that she'll be able to think about it later. 

She gets to the door in question. Knocks on the door. "Good morning? Hello?"

And she tries the door. Rooms aren't magically locked, if the school thinks there's no one in them.

Malak was watching the door and notices when someone knocks on it and remembers that, right, she's doing crimes with Annisa, she can watch Annisa until they know if the room is empty or not.

The door swings open.

The room has a void floor, like Annisa's does. The hatch is closed. The bed does not look slept-in.

There's a backpack, fully packed, with a spellbook peeking out.

There's no one in the room.

Annisa feels suddenly sick and dizzy, which she wasn't expecting. So Toronto girl did it. That's fine. There's no reason for a person who didn't even know her to have feelings about that. Toronto girl - Chantal - didn't even like it when people had feelings about it. She asked for one favor, which was to tell people that it had worked. Annisa can figure out how to do that without risking herself. 

There's nothing to be sad about. There's not even a body that she might be disconcerted by. There's just something, that happened, to Annisa's advantage, and someone who sees an advantage and feels sad is as dead as Chantal. She can't see Malak and is only halfway aware there ought to be a Malak but she bets Malak, who is competent, isn't sad. She has a plan. She should do her plan. She should do her plan and use her advantage and live live live live and there's so little space, here, there's none at all for childishness, and none at all for grief. Some strong kids make it. No weak ones do. Chantal was weak. That's all there is to it and she's not going to think about it anymore.

She looks where the backpack was, because that's easier than looking at the person who she expects to have taken the backpack. 

There's a backpack, and a notebook tied to the handle. She checks the notebook for a suicide note or something but - it's just an inventory. How insanely courteous. She grabs the backpack and starts jogging off toward her room.

She - thought she'd be more affected, actually. It took her a long time to get back to normal after hearing about Aishah and Azat. Or after a soul-eater got her neighbor Mehmet, even though she'd not really known him beforehand. This girl - she'd talked to her yesterday, not twelve hours ago. Maybe - Malak had never learned her name. Or maybe it's the void. Just a face and a conversation about death - no name to attach to it, no drained husk to stare at, no mangled corpse to imagine. No connection but common membership in a class of 1600.

Once she's back in her room she unravels the spell on herself. No need to be aggressively boring on her way to homeroom. She starts reading and checking the inventory while she waits for - something important to happen, which isn't coming to mind easily, which means probably something she hid, which means an accomplice because if she hid an object or place she wouldn't be waiting for it to show up, which means - Annisa, Annisa's the person she'd be most likely to conspire with and - yes, yes, it's Annisa she's waiting for.

Annisa knows there was a next step, and that it had to do with the backpack, and the person who took the backpack, who did so with Annisa's permission, and isn't memorable because - because they don't want to get caught, right - but even once she's painfully reconstructed all that, remembering Malak's room number is completely impossible, until suddenly it isn't. At that point, she jogs over.

There's a knock on the door, which is probably what Malak was waiting for. She opens it, sloowly scanning the hallway until she notices that she's trying to peer around someone's shoulder to check if there's something behind them and then it clicks.

She keeps her eyes locked on Annisa's as the other girl comes in and closes the door and then immediately unravels the other spell before she forgets that that's what she was going to do.

"...OK that proved way more inconvenient than expected, I've never done it with that much mana before."

"Well, I doubt anyone else thought we were suspicious." How much mana would she need to let them just soar on out, on graduation day - no getting ahead of yourself. "What've we got."

"Spellbook which has been told to expect you-in-particular that I have accordingly not touched, and accessories, a compass that points toward danger unreliably, gold and silver leaf, crochet and knitting needles, a craft knife, a silver sharpie, some clothes many of which are probably identifiable, and an inventory."

She hands over the notebook with the inventory

"The list matches what's in the bag, nothing missing and no mals. No mana storage or power sharer which means either she gave those back to Toronto or went into the void with them. Spellbook we can straightforwardly both use if you've got French, if not you should persuade it that I'm a nice person and I'll flag the English spells for you. The tricky thing to split is going to be the compass, but I think we don't want to be seen using it in public right away anyways."

Annisa studies the inventory. Carefully, in case any of its items have been made to seem uninteresting to her.  Gold!! And silver!! Both not actually fantastic material for weapons, and ones she's never had the chance to work in, but very valuable for trade. And she'll work in them once or twice, just for the experience. "I haven't got French but I'll tell the spellbook to like you. Could you trade the compass to your older siblings without too much trouble for something that we could split, if it's out of our year entirely I'd expect it to be less liable to raise suspicions...and you could borrow it back in a couple months if things seem to have blown over thoroughly enough, or if making it permanently uninteresting seems cheap. I'm happy evenly splitting the rest - I want the craft knife - and I'd say we shouldn't trade things on until it's more obvious how Toronto is taking this..."

"Sounds good. Let's pack up your half quickly so we're not too late to homeroom. Making the compass permanently uninteresting would be a lot of mana and a lot of work... and we'd lose it within two months. So not really worth it. I'll talk to my siblings at breakfast, see what they might have to trade for it."

"I realize it's pretty suspicious that there's no mana storage on the list, you can keep the notebook and recheck it after a while or search my room for any mana storage that looks Canadian instead of Turkish if you want but - that's not going to be decisive - I'm not really sure if there's any way I can prove that I didn't hide anything from you."

"We've got four years here. I figure you'll be able to trick me once, if you want to, maybe even twice. I figure you won't be able to make a habit of it, and I hope it doesn't look all that worth it." She starts packing her stuff.

"Oh, it's not worth it in the least. I'm just saying I won't be offended if you want to check, later. We have known each other less than a day, after all."

Pack pack pack.

"Let's go? When we get there I'll go in first so we're not arriving together."

"That'll give me some time to convince this spellbook that you're pretty cool too." She's packed everything else, but it doesn't make sense to bring that, when it's probably the single most incriminating piece and when Malak can use it better than she can. She has seen her mother with spellbooks; she unwraps it carefully and sets it down on Malak's desk. "Wise one, I'm Annisa," she says. "This is Malak, who helped me find you, and helped me bring you here, as we understand Chantal to have desired, and with the intent to see you well-cared-for and well-appreciated. Malak will be a quicker student of your wisdom than I, for she speaks French, and I don't, and she intends to do creative writing, which is your preference as Chantal communicated it to us. I am commending you to her care, because I have witnessed her caution and her intelligence, and I think her worthy of you."

Annisa is just saying that to convince the spellbook not to vanish and Malak should not read too much into it.

(That may be the nicest thing anyone has ever said about her? It's certainly the nicest thing she can remember anyone she respected saying about her.)

"Hello. What a gorgeous tome you are, too, wise and beautiful both. I'm going to take very good care of you, just like you deserve. I don't have a box for you yet but I am going to get on that as soon as I can get some worthy materials from the workshop. We have to go now, and I can't take you with, anyone who saw you might want to steal you and they might not treat you as well as they should, but we will be back later to clean your cover and brush your pages and make sure you're comfortable."

And now they're late for homeroom and should run.