Bella accepts her table from Suze as usual; Suze tells her how to find the Atlanta reading room New Orleans has a corner of, so Bella can join her there in the library later. Bella has chicken and hummus and half a baguette and a tongsful of salad and assembles them into a weird hoagie, saving her square of deflated-looking chocolate cake for afters, and awaits The Group.
If this had happened this morning Annisa knows she would have panicked because this sort of did happen this morning, and she totally did panic. But she's older than she was this morning, and it takes more to make her panic. "I don't know about in America but in Indonesia it's actually kind of rude," she says, "to tell someone that you're planning to commit suicide and they can have your stuff, it sounds like a trick of some kind. Or a test."
"No, It's pretty rude in Canada too, Chantal just did not know this because she had the heart of a very depressed angel and any sane process would have kept her home to take her chances in the enclave but, alas, instead of sane processes we have politics. So! Do you still have access to her spellbook? Because if you do, I want to trade you for copies of all the spells. At a fairly steep but not utterly outrageous discount, because it's my clavemate's spellbook but she did, after all, deliberately give it to you."
"I don't have it, but I probably have better than average chances of finding it again" since it's in Malak's room. "What're you offering?"
"I'll trade you a decent spell I learned in the enclave. Freezes things, English, variable input but it gets stupidly inefficient if you power it up enough to cover anything much bigger than an apple. I'm betting that her spellbook will have at least one thing that's at least that good plus a bunch of stuff that isn't, and I'll find you a second spell of similar caliber if there's something in there that's really genuinely good besides the layered ward I already know about."
"I did get a couple of her shirts. Is there going to be any trouble, if I wear them, or for the buyers if I sell them?"
"I'd recommend not wearing them around her mother but her mother isn't here. No, there won't be any trouble."
"Thanks, that's all I was after. Nice meeting you. Enjoy the bread."
She gets up and leaves.
"So the suicidal girl willed you her stuff?," he says to Annisa. Not talking about the thing where apparently Canadians can get into the Scholomance even if they don't want to go. The world is unfair, news at eleven.
"I guess I owe you all an explanation," she says, trying to sound sheepish but not exactly guilty. "Yeah. She - uh, I had had a baffling conversation with Edmund Pevensie, London, and I saw her come away from a conversation with him looking all annoyed, so I said 'oh, is he confusing you too' and she was like 'oh, he was trying to talk me out of suicide'. And then she said she was going to walk into the Void and I could have her stuff, she only wanted me to check in the morning and tell people if it worked, so they knew they had a way out. And I had absolutely no idea what to say to any of that! I figured she was probably just - I thought she'd probably change her mind, and also that isn't supposed to be possible, right -"
"Well, nobody could blame you for taking her up on it. I'm just surprised her enclave isn't insisting on restitution in full."
"That would suck because I don't, in fact, have everything, or at least I suspect not, her door was already open when I got there in the morning and she was telling everyone she was suicidal and there wasn't mana storage, magic items, anything obviously valuable and less identifiable than the clothing. Maybe they're not sure what I've got and don't want the embarrassment of a protracted fight about it in which everyone's reminded they sent a suicidal kid? The, uh, the spellbook's French, so the Scholomance clearly got the last laugh here."
Julian makes a mental note to ask Annisa about this later when it's just The Group. She might still lie to them, of course, she's only known them for a day, but there are still some things you don't want to talk about in front of enclavers and making off with an enclave's magic items is one of them.
" - I got a bunch of French in language lab, despite not knowing a word of it that isn't also English," she tells Bella for context. "Anyway, in the morning the door was open and the room was empty and someone'd been through it and it occurred to me that it might look kind of like I'd poached an enclaver on the first day of class and I realized belatedly that a couple shirts weren't worth that. ...though they're lovely shirts. If, uh, anyone wants them."
"...it shouldn't even look bad to keep somebody home in the enclave, you just, like, say 'she has an untenable disability' or 'she's ill and we aren't sure she'll recover quickly enough to manage school without adult care' or something."
"The clothes are probably enchanted, are you sure you don't want to keep them? You could wear them under other clothes."
"For us – uh, sino wizards – it's really embarrassing to not have your kid make it in. But that's probably different in places that don't do tests."
"What do they do about untenable disabilities or serious illness, then?"