Annisa is careful about languages.

 

Annisa is careful about languages because she is bad at them. She spent four years attending the international school in Surabaya and still spoke English with a pronounced accent and read it slowly, at the age where her next-oldest brother was comfortable reading high-school level texts in English and two years into instruction in Mandarin. They'd decided by then not to try to stuff Mandarin into Annisa; the risk was too high she wouldn't get good enough at it. Better to focus on getting her English to effortless fluency, so that she wouldn't be constantly struggling in class. Children learn languages quickly, when immersed in them, everyone knows that, it's why three is the right age to start preparing for the Scholomance. And Annisa didn't start attending the international school until she was six, because the tuition was very expensive and her parents hadn't realized yet that their homeschooling wasn't good enough, and maybe that's part of why, but other kids started at six and were fluent by eight.

When she was little Annisa mostly made friends with the other kids who spoke Javanese, at the international school, and they'd speak it among each other even though you weren't supposed to, until her father found out and beat her for it, and after that she stopped talking to those kids but still had to force herself with all her will to talk to the kids who spoke English fluently, the children of diplomats and rich expats, and she still had an accent, even when no one else in her class did. And after her second-oldest brother died and her third-oldest brother died in short succession her father packed them up and moved them to Canberra for two years, to enroll her in a mundane middle school there, even though she was already at the age where it was a little dangerous, to leave the well-defended family home and live somewhere where there were no other indies they knew and could call on, when monsters were circling. They instead shared a one-bedroom apartment in the tallest building they could find near a school, all seven of them, and Annisa studied English every waking moment and they beat the accent out of her eventually, and moved home when she was twelve. 

 

She speaks English without an accent now, and she does well enough on English vocabulary texts, and she thinks in English when she's doing coursework, but the idea of taking up another language feels about as appealing as the idea of jumping out of the window of their Canberran skyscraper, which Annisa was never tempted by even once, no matter how sore and bleeding from eight straight hours of English practice. 

So she's careful about languages. She hums to herself when people in earshot are speaking in them; she doesn't wonder about other writing systems, she doesn't look up etymologies, she doesn't listen to pop music with the occasional snatches of foreign lyrics. The Scholomance will assign you coursework in any language that it thinks you know, and if you don't know it, then when you start getting spells in it they'll back up in your mind without you being able to cast them, like how if enough debris chokes inner orbit then we won't be able to launch any more satellites, and then you won't be able to learn more, no matter how long you live, which won't be long. 

 

Annisa intends to spend all four years here studying English in language lab. There's lots of English she doesn't know. People have used several unfamiliar words just today. 

 

And she opens her assignment and it's an introductory worksheet for French, and it's like standing at the window of that skyscraper in Canberra and being pushed, and having a very long time to fall but nothing at all to do about it.

 

"I can't learn French," she whispers to the Scholomance. "I can't."

 

The Scholomance doesn't care. Presumably it noticed that she stole a French spellbook this morning and is eating dinner with New Orleans, which she suspects is in the French-speaking American state of Canada, and presumably it thinks that if she's too stupid to learn French then she deserves to die.

 

She can't ask the Group to do her French homework, they will drop her instantly for an incompetence this debilitating and if they didn't then it'd be proof they're not a Group worth being in.

 

 

She is much too old to cry. Instead of crying she takes out her Swiss army knife and presses the flat of the blade to her wrist until the pressure is enough to hurt very badly. It's clarifying, sometimes, when things hurt very badly. 

 

You can only want one thing in life; there will not be enough of your effort and strength and determination to assure success even at your primary objective, and if you try wanting two things you will certainly lose the both of them, dividing yourself between them. Annisa wants to live. If she were assured of that already somehow, by a degree of power that not even enclavers have, then she might want other things, like to have friends, like not to have to force herself agonizing inch by inch through memorizing words that seem to want to desperately fly out of her vocabulary, like to have an assignment she could do without the knife to her wrist reminding her why she's doing it, like to stop standing at the top of that skyscraper and watching the ground swim at its impossible distance in the summer heat, but she does not have space for any of those wants, and now she has a beautiful hour, with her language booth cheerfully singing French in her ears, to dig up all those other stupid wants that had somehow survived their last uprooting, and throw them out, and burn them out, and salt the fields where they grew in her mind.

 

La fille [ vouloir ] vivre.