"Room 404."

"I'll be there."

"Mhm." She's already packing up her bag. 

Australia and New Zealand have corners in the main reading room so he has to be more oblique. "Emergency, need you to send a rep or maybe several down to 404."

Some wordless glances and raised eyebrows are exchanged and one senior each from Sydney and Auckland stand up and head for the stairs. Winston, the Auckland senior, lingers a bit to see who else is being told.

London! Paris! Miami! Santa Barbara! DC! Seattle! Sacramento!

But not Shanghai or Kyoto or Seoul or Kiev or Istanbul or Damascus or São Paulo. Interesting. Down the stairs to 404.

Sacramento has their own small reading room. Thanks to Larisa's convenient affinity, she even has a portable ward-fortification, linked to a tasseled silk cord with fine copper and gold wire woven in. She brings it in with her every day and sets it up across the door. 

She's currently sitting in an overstuffed armchair with her feet propped up on the table, a book arranged loosely over the arm, and Vanya curled up at her feet; she flips pages with one hand and occasionally strokes his hair with the other. 

When she hears someone approaching, she looks over. "What." 

"Hi. We need to talk. Annaka says you'll say you're busy and she says she's sorry, it can't wait."

Larisa pats Vanya's hair again and doesn't move. "Sure. Let's talk." 

"Alone."

"Seriously?"

But Larisa shifts and stands up. "Cassie, Killian, Tristan, all of you duck out." She tugs Vanya to his feet, squeezes his shoulders. "You too. It'll just be for a minute." 

Cassie glowers at the interloper and then loops back to take Vanya's hand and nudge him out of the room. 

"Okay. What." 

"There's a freshman maleficer suspected of two murders - uh, one is an ambiguous case because the girl's not dead yet, just - for all my mana halfway life drained. I'm sorry. And Shanghai just announced that they're adopting him and we have to figure out what to do."

"Fuck," Larisa says, with no particular intonation. She drags a hand through her short hair. "Right. For fuck's sake, again? What sort of freshman is murdering people three days in?" Groan. "Okay. What's the plan, then?" 

"Get everyone on the same page. Before the Shanghai thing we were probably going to kill him once we had confirmation on the murder, now we have to figure out whether to expect Shanghai to retaliate if we do that. And - they're not idiots, so if they're doing this they have a reason - Annaka thinks it might have something to do with Chicago somehow - just come on down, she'll present what we've got -"

"Can I grab Landon for it too." This is politics, and politics is really not Larisa's thing even slightly. 

"Yep, absolutely."

"When and where." 

"404, now."

"Okay. Fine. 'Now' had better mean 'in five minutes' because I've got to make sure Vanya's taken care of for the next god knows how many hours before I can head over." 

"I still have some enclaves to hit up. I am sorry. But - we act fast enough maybe it doesn't happen again, right -"

"Yeah. I'll...be right down." 

Larisa's internal monologue right now consists almost entirely of Russian swearwords, but she nods firmly to Asher and then leaves the room to coordinate things with the juniors and find out where Landon is. 

Room 404 is a classic classroom, with a blackboard and little individual desks with attached chairs. Annaka's pacing and greeting people as they come in. She wanted to hand out copies of transcripts but she doesn't have those, everything happened too fast.

Eventually she's pretty sure every enclave she expected to send someone has someone here, and time is valuable, they all need it to prep for graduation if they're not about to all die, so she launches into it. 

"Chronological order. Two months ago a solo indie from Malawi, named Masozi, shows up in Johannesburg; he'd heard rumors of the Scholomance and wanted a spot. He claims to be just starting to learn English, have no Mandarin, but have survived on his own for a while at that point. They were full. He left the enclave, but hung around the area. A short time later a kvenlik attacks, kills one of Johannesburg's inductees. Masozi saves some younger kids. They offer him the spot.

Thursday afternoon, New York freshmen were heading down to our senior dorms to pick up stuff left behind by the graduating class when he's spotted following them. I have this conversation from six different perspectives but they basically agree: my kid sister Julia tells him 'hey, we're not going back to the dorms, we're going down to the senior level and it's not safe for you to go there alone'. He says 'I'll be a lookout'. Julia says 'we have enough of those already'. He runs right up into the middle of their formation, past Julia, to Orion who has point, and says 'I can spot mals, hey Orion, remember me, I spotted a mal in the cafeteria.'

Orion says 'do I know you?' Julia says 'kid, people you don't trust are as dangerous as mals, and we don't trust you. Go away'. He ignores her and tells Orion 'there's a mal at the bottom of the stairs!'. Witnesses, who are all freshmen and barely know what they're doing, disagree on whether he did some kind of minor spell as he said that. Orion runs off. The kids all stand there glaring at each other until Orion comes back, at which point someone asks Masozi 'so, your affinity is spotting mals?', he says 'yes', and Julia tells him he can follow if he stays ten feet behind. New York's witnesses are unanimous in thinking this was just Julia wanting to avoid a confrontation, nothing influenced.

They get down to Frank's dorm and mention this to Frank as a funny story, he thinks he's a potentially serious story, steps outside and is distracted by some attacking jaculi from figuring out what spell the kid is standing there casting. Kid's a maleficer; it's subtle, but Frank was involved in last year, he's sensitive to it at this point. Frank tells him that New York doesn't associate with maleficers and to clear out and stay away from the New York freshmen. Masozi says 'they weren't looking where they were going, I just want to make sure no one gets hurt". Frank tells him to seriously clear out and he stalks off, not in a rush at all.

This is enough for us to plan on warning the freshmen off him at breakfast Friday, but before breakfast Friday, something weird happens during homeroom. The kid leaves his homeroom and runs over to the homeroom of another of our freshmen to ask if anyone is in Monday morning shop class."

Deep breath. 

"Breaking chronological order to share something I was specifically ordered by the Domina not to share, but which is important to our reaction here. Orion Lake is one of New York's freshmen. He has an affinity for killing mals. And he does not have a mana capacity limit that we have been able to find. When first hooked up to a New York power-sharer he drew the whole enclave's reserves. He put it back. But he's a goddamned fucking superweapon in the wrong hands, and I am doing absolutely everything I can to not give the slightest indication we're the wrong hands. He will have nothing to do with this, if we need to take action. He will never have an enforcement role in New York. He likes killing mals, he's good at killing mals, we aren't pointing him anywhere else. 

He's in Monday morning shop. All the New York freshmen are in Monday morning shop, because he can keep them safe and they arranged it among themselves and thought they were very clever.

And Masozi asked our freshman who wasn't in the supply run and hadn't been warned off him, got told about Monday morning shop, and placed himself in there too. That is how we started investigating him."

She pauses there for questions.