This is precisely what Annisa requested and she hates it passionately.

She goes through the cards and reads the words. She's mispronouncing the French, presumably.

Doesn't matter, right now, not what this test is about.

"Now shuffle them, put them back in the box, and one by one, read the French aloud and try to guess what the English word on the other side is. Anything you get right goes in the second box."

Naima manages to make being helpful look like an act of absolute cold self-interest. She's so cool. 

Annisa will do this. She actually gets most of them, it hasn't really had time to slip out of her memory.

Oh good, she's not going to need to do a test involving three cards.

"Okay. Now go through the ones that are still in your box until you guess right, and then put them with the others."

Sure, she can get the ones she didn't get the first time, there's only ten of them and only three left.

"Now we wait five or so minutes. Anyone have additional plans for today?"

"I've got German study group after this, and then I was going to get a jump on math and metallurgy for next week." 

"How do you get a jump on - oh, have you already had those?"

"Yeah, yesterday morning. And – " oh, this is an opening, isn't it. "it looks like I'll have plenty of time to get ahead, since Shanghai no longer requires my services." 

Julian thought about this last night. He needs to tell the group something, but it sounds a lot better if Shanghai rejected him than if he rejected Shanghai. He's obviously not specced to be a bodyguard. Everyone involved in this scenario acted rationally. He doesn't even need to start impressing people until junior year. And then – there's the other thing. 

"Well that sucks. Condolences?"

"I'll be fine." He'll probably be eaten by something that crawls into his room by December and it serves him right. "They don't need me anymore now that they've adopted their pet maleficer, so maybe it's for the best." 

what.

"what."

"Now that what?"

"The creepy African kid. They're going all-in on him, everything short of a formal alliance. I heard from Wen Ning, the kid I was guarding, and then I asked his sister who's a junior and she says it's true. The line they're feeding everyone is that he only maleficed because he didn't know any better and of course they'll stop him if he does it in here, but – " 

Julian is trying to sound like this is casual and he's not some ungodly combination of guilty and self-righteous and piss-your-pants terrified, but deception isn't exactly his strong suit. "I don't know. They're Shanghai, so they have to know how it looks, they – they just have to think they can get away with it."  

"So he really is a maleficer? What - do they know how much he's done? What exactly he's done?"

"...And here I thought this year was starting well. God damn them, this'll start a war there's no way it won't."

"He really is – or at least he was. That's what the Shanghai junior told me. It has to be at least mammals, right, or they'd just deny it – honestly, I don't understand why they're not just denying it. They really seem to believe that everyone is going to buy their story, that he only did it because he's a poor tragic orphan or something, and I keep thinking, they're the second most powerful enclave in the world and I've been here for 48 hours so maybe there's something I'm missing....

...But there isn't, is there? There's no way out of this for them."  

"Okay, if you really think there's going to be an out and out - conflict - inside the Scholomance this year, do we - do the middle eastern enclaves know, should we be telling them - ?"

This is mostly addressed at Malak, since, well.

"I mean I assume Shanghai knows something we don't because we don't know anything but - but right now the maleficer's just a freshman and doesn't change the balance of power and by senior year he would so you - have to kill him? Maybe Shanghai's just arranging to make the western enclaves kill him and then they'll, I don't know - we should just stay well clear of it -"

"I have no idea if they know, this is the first I've heard of it and - it sounds like Julian heard this earlier than most people - If we tell the enclaves that's - not taking a side, but it's getting involved. Which might be bad for us."

"They're not trying to hide it. At least not from the Sino kids, I don't know how much people know if they don't speak Mandarin." 

"I don't think you tell anybody anything. I think you - thank God that Shanghai fired you, honestly -"

"I guess it'll come out on its own eventually. If they're being open about it."

And suddenly the weight is gone. It's okay. He is back among sane people, and they agree that Shanghai must be planning to burn the world down. Maybe it even is a good thing that he's out of it. Maybe he made the right choice. Maybe he can afford to be a little bit honest.

"I – I'm kind of relieved, yeah. This looks like it's going to get really ugly, and I want to be far away when it does. And when I think about working for them and knowing what they were willing to do – " too far. He'll just trail off, and breathe, and breathe, and breathe.