"Russian. I'm trying to get all the most popular languages. I already have English and Mandarin so I'm trying to get Russian, Spanish, Hindi and Arabic to complete the set."

"Cool. I no know very Russian," Wei Wuxian says in badly accented Russian.

"I don't know even that much yet." She says in Mandarin. "I figured it was safer to follow the school's curriculum than try to teach myself."

"Why?"

"Mother said getting spell blocked is very dangerous and that if you're learning a language from the school that usually doesn't happen."

"Oh, if I get spell blocked I figure I'd just learn the language faster."

"Do you have a particular talent for languages then?"

"I'm good at things," he says in pretty much the same way you'd say "I like broccoli."

"That's fortunate. I can usually succeed at things when I try but sometimes they go horribly right."

"You should have thought about it at all before you decided to be good at things," Jiang Cheng snaps. "If you're in advanced senior-level math now what's going to happen next year? You're going to be in a one-person class and die?"

"You'll just have to study harder, a-Cheng."

"If you're good at things, perhaps that includes protecting yourself from Mals."

"If you find any human bones lying around I'm going to carve one into a flute the song of which repels mals."

"I'll let you know if I see any."

"Well, not this early in the year, anyway. --I'm not creepy or a maleficer or anything, my affinity's just dead bodies."

"The only person I know of to have died is the girl from the Toronto Enclave who went into the void and didn't come back. No bones to be had from that."

"Oh, wow, that's a lot of deaths so far. --I guess we don't know Song Lan is dead."

"He's not dead. They just couldn't induct him for some reason."

"One of the people you expected isn't at the school?" Her mind goes back to the last corpses she saw but those were in Canada totally unrelated.

"Our martial brother-- uh, enclavemate. He-- was present at the Shanghai induction. Then he didn't show up at the cafeteria."

"That sounds strange. I don't know what could interfere with an induction," short of death she doesn't say. "Has anyone from your enclave checked for vacant freshman dorm rooms?"

"I think we got an indie to do it?"

"How many open doors did they find?"

"Well, I don't think they're done yet."