She's made it. She's going to the Scholomance. She's made it.

She wants to take some time off to celebrate before she leaves, but her mother says quietly that she shouldn't do that, and for just a second it's like a curtain parts or a mask slips and Misaki can see her mother's mingled terror and grief. It scares her to see it, like if her mother is afraid then Misaki has to be afraid too. Like if they're all afraid then she really is going to die.

That's not something she's thought about much. People die eventually. Some people die in their teens. She has more immediate things to worry about and always has. And it's not something she wants to start thinking about, so instead she takes advantage of her last few days of computer access to brush up on her Mandarin while that doesn't require navigating a paper dictionary. She'd rather go for a walk. It's not safe safe but in a crowd of mundanes she could be fine. She asks, and her mother says no. She asks her father, later, and he says no too but he helps her enchant her clothes. That's not he treat she was hoping for but it's useful and the time together is nice, or at least it's nice till she notices him watching her with this pained, longing smile, and then it's not nice at all.

She's been working as hard as she can for - she can't remember when she started. Feels like it's been forever. She speaks two dialects of Japanese, Kansai and Tokyo; she sort of speaks two dialects of English but they're sort of jumbled up, so she says zucchini and sweater but she also says revise for exams and look round. She already knows algebra and geometry and most everything on the Scholomance history curriculum. She composes poetry in three languages and reads it in four. She's been learning German - started later than Mandarin and English, and she can read a newspaper if she can look things up and take her time but she can't carry on a conversation. She runs and she practices martial arts and she knows dozens of spells weak enough to cast at her age. She went to school at one point but she wasn't learning fast enough there. She had friends at one point, mundanes, and her parents encouraged that because their disbelief kept her safe, but the sheer amount of stuff she couldn't talk to them about got to be too much a while ago and anyway she's going away to boarding school far away and not going to write to them so what does it matter anymore. She's always walking on eggshells around other wizard kids, because if one of them doesn't like her that's a much bigger deal, so she never has had a real wizard friend.

She and her parents ruthlessly optimize her luggage, enchant a lot of it, consolidate as much packaging as is feasible and safe, and make sure she's not accidentally wasting weight on crumbs or lint. She's bringing in outside foods, dry outside foods because there's water inside and no sense wasting weight allowance on it and because dry things keep better so she can sell them in a few months when there's not a glut of treats for sale.

She gets packed up and weighs herself and makes some last-minute adjustments and weighs herself again and tells her mother goodbye and... waits, because it turns out she's three minutes early, but that's better than being late.