The had left him alone with no more questions for a while, before Lan Xichen came back in. 

Masozi doesn't really know what's happening, and his thoughts are still pinned down in tight grooves, but there's a little more space to let them finish when he's not being interrupted constantly. 

And...he thinks he managed to say the true thing, which is that he didn't kill Sophie and he didn't kill the children in Johannesburg. And on reflection he - doesn't think that the extent to which he was causally involved, there, when he had five seconds to decide which way to run, is...something that even New York could disapprove of? No one was expecting him to care about other people's lives. 

It would be simpler if he didn't care, in a lot of ways. Because then he could follow the rules and it wouldn't be giving up so much. He...can't change the fact that he does care.

But he can be less stupid about it. He can try to understand how the world works, here, a world so much bigger and stranger than he ever knew was possible - and better, gloriously so, but endlessly complicated - and then he can figure out how to make plans that will actually work. 

So he can survive. So he can take as many others with him as possible. So that, someday, when he's grown up, he can go back for his baby sister. And for other people's children. 

There are stars, outside. He wants to live to see them again. 

...He's not a shape of person that Annaka knows how to trust. She thinks he's going to hurt people. He - has to explain, somehow, has to convey why she can trust that he won't hurt her people, which means that - needs to be true - and it might not have been true of Masozi-three-days-ago, Masozi-three-days-ago had hurt people when his life or his family's lives were in danger from them, because he saw a tradeoff and he made it. But that scares the enclave kids, here, and if they're afraid of him then he dies, and so he has to...be different, be something and someone they can understand, and that means he needs to understand them... 

(All of these thoughts are scattered and spread out and not quite verbal, struggling against the limits of the truth potion, it keeps feeling meaningless to be a different shape of Masozi because that's not what's-already-true-now, but it - he knows there's a future - he can try to hold onto that the way he would hold onto math, manipulating the logic of it, seeing what the answer would be, and that can be true enough to allow...) 

Math is reassuring, actually. It helps steady him. 

He multiples numbers in his head for a while until the door opens again. 

"We know you don't kill Sophie or Johannesburg children so we don't kill you. You stay ally to Shanghai enclave because I keep promises."

.....That wasn't at all what he was expecting. It doesn't make sense. They're still scared of him and that's why they want to kill him. So he won't hurt their people in the future. 

But - maybe he wasn't understanding something right, again. He doesn't think that Lan Xichen is lying. 

"I -" He swallows, his mouth painfully dry. "I - want to say - why I, I want to - not be dangerous - not hurt people - I, I don't understand things here but I - want to - I want to, to not break anything -?" 

He is again running into the problem where all his thoughts that are about expressing plans or intent are getting splintered against the rocks of what's-already-true-now. 

"I think truth potion take you very badly and you wait until it wears off before saying anything."

Meng Yao runs in, bows, and says, "Tintin."

"What?"

"--Tintin. Freshman. We sent him to go investigate the death of Song Lan"-- he turns to Annaka to explain-- "not expecting him to find anything, really, just trying to see how competent he is at a real job-- anyway, he's dead and his gun has disappeared."

- Masozi freezes, panic like ice water suddenly flooding through his veins again. 

"....I didn't!" No one's asked him but he can still think true thoughts, right now, and they'll know he's telling the truth. "I didn't kill him! I don't know who he is!" 

"--Of course not, there's a freshman maleficer targeting Shanghai and they framed you."

(Does he know this is true? Eh. But it sure would be convenient.) 

Annaka stands up and presses her power-sharer. “I don’t think you’re suspected in the murder of Song Lan either,” she says to Masozi, much more calmly than she feels. “But there is something up, we do not lose freshmen at this rate in a normal year - and it almost has to be a freshman because they’re too brazen for much of a life expectancy-“

"It has to be a freshman, Song Lan was never inducted." They killed him for his induction spot. "--I wonder if they're trying to start a war-- obviously our reckless behavior is also involved here but they're seizing the opportunity--"

“There’s a dead Toronto enclaver too, first night, we thought it was suicide. Christ.”

"--I think we should avoid doing anything to change the status quo until we find this maleficer and figure out who they're working for and what they want."

“Point taken,” Annaka says tightly. And she looks over at Jaipur’s representative to see how they take it.

"The Jaipur freshman who informed us that there had been a murder said that she noticed - Masozi's - maleficer aura on day one, but failed to report it to her superiors because several other freshmen also seemed off to her, and she thought that it was more likely that her gut was wrong than that there were multiple maleficers in the freshman class. Last I saw, she was making a list of those other freshmen, in case she wasn't wrong about them, either. That's one place to start, if you think you have an uncaught murderer in the freshman class."

"We can also send teams to stake out freshman classes looking for maleficers. Sino and Anglo so everyone's looped in."

“Yeah. If we watch every shop class and stop the kids with an aura we’ll have them by Thursday. Though at this rate that’ll be four more dead kids, so faster would be better.”

"I tell Sino freshmen and you tell Anglo freshmen to be careful."

Masozi wants to offer to help but every single time he's tried to help anyone since arriving at the school, it's ended in disaster. 

(Except for with Wei Wuxian. That one - briefly, at least - earned him allies.) 

He shivers quietly and doesn't interrupt. 

"I think we meet somewhere that smells better in an hour once we have time to talk to our associates."

“Yeah, all right.”

Meng Yao bows and leaves.