"It was after Orion killed a mal he pointed out that Julia said if he didn't touch anything or go in the room that he could come along, I think. Uh, I don't remember them saying anything but Zeke and his girlfriend were also there?"

"Did it seem to you like Julia changed her mind abruptly or for no reason, or did it seem pretty natural given how the interaction was going -"

"It seemed pretty natural? But I only met Julia recently, I'm probably not the best one to tell."

"Did you notice a vibe, from the kid?"

"He smelled awful," he says immediately. "And he looked like he'd stolen his clothes off a drunk hobo. He had some creepy vibes, but I wasn't sure how much of that was really there and how much of it was ingrained racism and classism."

Blinkblinkblink. 

She transcribes that faithfully. "Did you notice him paying attention to anyone other than Orion in particular?"

"No, he was mostly looking away from the group, presumably for mals."

"Did you see him use any magic?"

"Not that I remember."

"Thanks so much. I'm sure you're busy. I'll walk you back to the library. We're not making this public at this time, but if you hear anything else about Masozi, or have any more interactions with him, you can write down a summary for us and I might talk with you more."

"Okay. Should I assume everyone from New York knows about this--I wouldn't want to bother anyone with a summary they have no reason to think means anything--"

"They know to pass stuff about Masozi on to us."

"Okay, thanks. I won't talk about it in public or to anyone who wasn't there. --Or to Masozi, obviously."

"Thank you." And she walks him back, waves him off, vanishes again.

"I think I said 'we're going to someone's private room, and he didn't invite you, just me and the people I can vouch for'. And he kind of shrugged. And then - no, I guess he must've said something, because I said 'we have lookouts' - yeah, so, he said, 'you need lookouts' and I said 'we have lookouts' - it was absurd, there were ten of us, and he was claiming he knew what Orion was capable of - what would happen, if someone succeeded at maleficing Orion - you know what I mean, with his mana capacity -"

         "No one outside New York knows about that," Annaka says in a very clipped voice. "- does anyone outside New York know about that."

" - no! We got a lecture from the Domina before we came in, that it's a secret, that it's the kind of thing only the seniors would know, ordinarily, except of course we were all there for -" gesture - "you didn't answer my question."

          "And you're doing a terrible job of answering mine."

"- that's why you guys are so freaked out, isn't it. Because Orion - he can handle himself, you know -"

         "He has no special immunity to poison or mind control."

"And if a maleficer took him the maleficer might just immediately explode from having way more malia than a person can handle or might - what - spontaneously turn into a horrifying mal?

         "Julie -"

"Don't Julie me! I've known Orion since we were babies and I don't want him to get maleficed into Evil Orion who eats the whole school at all."

        "Julie," says Annaka, "the reason I am on this, instead of preparing for graduation and leaving it to the juniors, is because I have a kid sister getting followed on supply runs and in a Monday morning shop run with what might be a harmless weirdo or might be a maleficer who'll go right back to it when he's next cornered or might be a sophisticated actor who - I talked to Johannesburg. He showed up, asked, but they told him they didn't have any spare slots. And then a mal attacked, deadlier than they usually get in the middle of a mundane city, and killed one. He heroically rescued some of the younger kids from it. Got the spot."

"Oh," says Julia.

"Hi," Annaka says, barely friendly at all, very tiredly. "We're trying to learn more about Masozi, I'll tell you more later but we want to ask the questions before biasing them. When did you meet him?"

"Masozi is the - African kid who got a jump on not showering very often before coming?" asks Bella, fidgeting with her pen. "Uh, I went on a supply run on the first day with a Sacramento kid, Raleigh, and their Canadian bag-holder, Shannon, and Raleigh had picked up Masozi and also some girl with a hat for some reason, and said Masozi's affinity was finding mals so it might be safer to bring him along. Bobbie, the one who showed up naked, tagged along too."

"What was your impression of Masozi?"

"Uh, he seemed... ...I want to say wrong-genre-savvy? He did in fact find mals, there were sleeping baby quattria in a bin, I peeked at them after he pointed them out. Anyway he approached me with some fairly incompetent flattery and then asked me what was so bad about maleficing and I - if you want a more exact rendition I'd need to go back to my room for the notebook with that in it, is memory sufficient for your purposes?"

" - if you have a notebook with detailed notes that'd be really valuable, actually. Elsewhere we're trying to triangulate with lots of accounts, but - notes would be better."

"I guess I'll tell them to deal me out of the next few card games, shall I." When she's handled that she leads Annaka to her room for her notebook. "Okay, so he asked me what was so bad about maleficing, as though he'd never heard it was at all objectionable in the least before that day, and I asked him if he was thinking about quitting. He said maybe, it depends whether bugs count, but that it shouldn't since getting it from bugs doesn't hurt and bugs don't have feelings. I told him bugs weren't a big deal but that if he'd done smarter animals before it might be he'd already done enough damage that he'd have to go stricter to let it heal. He was confused about how it could possibly be damaging, compared it to a broken arm. I told him there were mundane mental illnesses, he appeared to have never heard of the concept, I explained that brains can break same as arms and then don't work as well. I made an analogy to sunburn, short exposures don't burn people at all and long exposures might make them sensitive to short additional exposures, but I don't actually know a lot about how to cheat conservatively after a history of maleficing, you know -" She waves at her pile of terrarium supplies. "Those are going to be for agglos, for the record."

Annaka enters that into the record. "He said getting it from bugs doesn't hurt in - contrast with his experience of getting it from mammals?"

"He said he learned to pull from rats without hurting himself," she says, scanning ahead in the notes.

- nod. "Sorry, go on and I can clarify when you've finished."

"He was specifically curious about whether maleficing could damage empathy, as opposed to just being stupider. I told him, you know, basic scary campfire story maleficer facts, they go off the deep end and start shlorping malia just so they can get through the fight with the next target. Bobbie compared it to drugs, Masozi said he thought drugs were supposed to feel good, I said that was not essential to the mechanism of addiction and asked if he had trouble building mana normally - I've heard that's a problem with habitual maleficing. He didn't think so and speculated that it's safer here, fewer mals and more people fighting them, but said he wouldn't have made it to Johannesburg without, as aforementioned, learning to pull from rats without hurting himself."