Annaka is very tired. She's had like a hundred conversations since they determined the murderer isn't Masozi but totally is a maleficer who is on the loose and murderous, and it feels like all of them went TERRIBLY, and everyone in New York is behind on their homework and the next week's going to suck. But she needs to talk to Masozi because she needs to know whether not-on-a-truth-potion he's a ticking time bomb on the scale of a week or just a ticking time bomb on the scale of a year. She's been politely encouraging people not to assassinate him literally this very week, they have the other freshman maleficer to find and stuff and it looks super embarrassing for Shanghai, but if she should reassess that then better to know!

She circles back to the room half an hour before curfew. She skipped dinner, which is less awful than it sounds because it's an excuse to break out New York's backup supplies and make herself a really good meal, spaghetti Bolognese and garlic bread and a Caesar salad and a creme brûlée, when usually she can't justify spending mana on something like that.

But she hasn't made the meal yet so she's really hungry.

She knocks.

Masozi answers it.

”- Oh.” He tenses a little when he sees who it is, but mostly keeps his composure. “I - sorry I couldn’t think properly before. When you were asking me questions.”

He takes a deep breath. He’s rehearsed this over and over in his head, but it’s still nervewracking to say. “I - I had some things I thought after that I wanted to say, because I - I understand why New York was so scared? And - why I have to be a different shape of person here, than I had to be to survive on my own. And I think I can do that.”

Oh good, he is much less of a disaster when not drowning in potion, that's a relief. She was worried he was just generally off his rocker. Of course, maybe he is but now Lan Xichen has coached him - but even if all he can do is handle himself when coached that's better than if he can't do that.

She sits down. "Mind magic tends to have a lot of side effects," she says. "I noticed it was affecting you badly." 

“- it wasn’t just that. I - I think if you wanted me to do it again now I could, better, because I’m - less confused and less scared, and - because it was really hard to think new thoughts that I had to think for anything to make sense. But now I thought them. And I know I - can trust New York to be trying to figure out what’s true instead of just killing me because it’s convenient and you can?” Shrug. “…I didn’t know it could be like that. I don’t think it worked like that in Malawi, not if you’re…someone like me or my family, someone poor who doesn’t matter.”

New York sets the Scholomance seat allocations and Malawi gets, uh, none, and Annaka has certainly heard the argument, since she was eight, that this is, you know, just murdering people because they're poor and don't matter, though when she was eight it was couched half in parable, with her mother only admitting afterwards that the argument was a real thing, one she would hear. 

She has no idea what she thinks about it, as an argument, because there's a time and a place for solving ethics and it isn't here and now. Kids in Malawi who aren't wise-gifted mostly die of, like, malaria, and malnutrition, and once you start being clever about the obligations of people in New York you kind of land there, and in fact the main reason New York doesn't kick a couple million dollars a year towards malaria eradication is that it'd look like they were trying to buy forgiveness for the seat allocation thing, which isn't something they can afford to look like they want to do, and that, too, is a problem for adults, the sort of problem you can have if you live.

The kid doesn't know any of that but Lan Xichen certainly does and he must have coached the kid. 

"Everyone matters," she says, rather than say any of that. "Our concern is whether you're a danger to other students, not whether you are rich or poor on the outside." Annaka is of the school of thought that it is better to be a hypocrite than to just, you know, be evil and consistent about it.

He looks her in the eye. 

“I don’t think I was ever a danger to any other students in here. …I guess unless they were trying to kill me first, but even that - I’ll promise under Truth Spell never to pull malia again even then, because I - because it’s not just that choice by itself, and whether it’s better or worse. It’s…what’s stable, between all the people - the world is big and there’s Shanghai and New York and they need to share the same school, and, and - and it could be stable this way or it could be stable with everyone needing to have maleficers to keep up? And that’d be worse. Because maleficing makes you crazy eventually and makes you think hurting people is fine, and it’s addictive and makes you worse at using mana - for most people, I don’t think that happened to me at all and I don’t know why it’s different…”

"People might vary in how much damage rats do them, it hasn't exactly been systematically studied. But I am glad to hear that, because a maleficer working for Shanghai is a very dangerous thing for everyone in the school, for the reason you said, that if anyone has a maleficer then everyone needs to do it."

Why is the thing he wants to say, here, so hard to put into words…

“So I - I think if it were just the one choice, by itself, it - would be better, to kill one rat and save Wen Ning and Nie Huaisang and - and as many of all the others as I can…” His breath catches. “But - it’s not that one choice by itself. Because the world is big, and, and all the pieces touch each other? And - so it’s better - it saves the most people, it makes it the most likely I can help Shanghai - if I can promise now that I won’t ever use malia again. And…I can make that promise. I’m willing to make promises to do the right thing, if I know why it’s the right thing, because - because you can do that, here? And that’s better than Malawi and it makes everything better and it’s stable and so I’d never want to break it… But it makes sense if you don’t trust me, why would you, so - you can ask me again later with the truth potion, if you want. And then if I don’t die I can show you I mean it.”

"I - think I believe that you mean it now. We'll see, if you stick to it later. 

Do you understand what you did on Thursday and Friday that scared us?"

“I think - I understand more of it? I - it’s important that you can predict what other people will do. And I was being confusing. …And I didn’t do deference to New York? Because I - didn’t know that was a thing. And then I was rude and you thought that was threatening. Especially because of the thing where I had a maleficer aura and maleficers usually go crazy and get addicted and want to murder people? I didn’t know that before but I know that now.”

"If you happen to get off on being rude to New York there are ways to do that which aren't terrifying. There was a kid in my year who made a point of saying 'ah, I see the colonizers have joined us' every time we entered the room and it didn't make him many friends but New York didn't have emergency meetings about him either. But - if you interrupt people in the hallway, you're dividing their attention when they can't afford to have it divided, and if you run right up to Orion while he's scouting, that's distracting to him, and if people say 'go away' and you don't go away, then they don't have further options they can reasonably expect to work aside from resorting to violence."

“I didn’t want to be rude! That wasn't what I..." 

He stops. Takes a deep breath.

"I - everyone I ever knew who couldn't divide their attention died? So I - guess I wasn't tracking that as, as something important. And I...didn’t know about people working in groups, before - I never had anyone to do that with - but it makes sense, that you’d have a system and interrupting would hurt it, even if - to me from the outside it looked like no one knew how to be careful enough. ….My parents and my siblings didn’t know how to be careful enough and they all died. And then I saw... Julia, I think that's her name? With this group, going down? And I didn't - I thought it'd be more dangerous than it was, traveling from Malawi to Johannesburg there were ten or twenty times as many mals as that coming after just me - and I was so scared - some mundie kids from Chicago were with them too - I was so scared they wouldn't be careful enough and someone would die and it would be my fault for not trying to help..." 

 "In New York, we train kids to do patrols in groups of more than five, with everyone responsible for a specific direction. With enough people, some of them aren't responsible for looking for mals and can handle other threats, like students stalking the group or Shanghai adopting a maleficer. When I travel, I don't look for mals, the people on my flank do that; I look for people, because people are very dangerous, too, if you don't know what they'll do.

The people here are not less careful than you. Well, I guess a couple of them probably are and those ones will get eaten.

But most of the people in here have spent their whole lives training to come here and survive. They are being more careful - they are pointing their carefulness more effectively, at the things that put them at the greatest risk. If you notice yourself looking at sixteen hundred kids whose parents have been training them to survive this place since they were two years old, and it looks to you like those people are being silly, you should consider that you are probably missing something. I - do you want to read some of their interviews about that interaction and how they perceived it?"

".......I didn't know anyone's parents had been training them since they were two? I -" it's incredibly stupid to say that feels deeply unfair. "I - my parents hadn't ever heard of the Scholomance. I...know I was coming here not knowing almost anything, and - trying to take what I did know but it was wrong half the time. ...Sure, I can read them. If they're in English. I can only read Mandarin a bit right now and it takes me a long time, I'm still learning." 

"Most of our parents went to the Scholomance. It's how my father got into New York, he was a gifted alchemist and impressed the New York students and they wanted him on their team."

And she hands him - just two of the transcripts, she thinks, maybe Silas and Frank, she feels sort of weird about giving him the one that's a debate about whether the students found Masozi creepy due to internalized racism and classism and she feels intensely protective of Julia's, because she does not want to hear from random indie kids that Julia should have had to grow up even faster than she is going to have to. 

________

"He followed us out of the cafeteria and to the stairs; it was ambiguous, at first, if he was following us or just trying to stick to a crowd, but as we started heading down the stairs it was less ambiguous. I was trying to get Julia and Zeke's attention, to make sure they knew we were being followed, but Julia noticed herself, and told him, you know, 'we're not going to the library or the dormitories, we're going down to the senior dorms and you don't want to go there without an escort'. - I know Julia's not diplomacy track, so to speak, but she didn't sound hostile or anything, just - she thought he was confused about where we were headed, and she wanted to give him a heads-up. 

He said, well, I'll be a lookout, he said he's good at spotting mals. Julia said that the reason there were ten of us was so there'd be plenty of lookouts, and that we had enough of them, and that we were going to a private dorm room and the whole school wasn't invited, just people she could vouch for. 

He said "I won't go in the room, then". And then he ran right into the pack, past Julia - she kind of backed off - and right up to Orion and said "hey, Orion, want me to be in front? I'll point out mals!" Orion said "uh, do I know you -" I was pretty panicked at this point, he had a maleficer vibe and he'd charged right into the middle of us and - and there's the question of what a maleficer could do with Orion, right - some of the kids had backed off and were pressing themselves against the walls in a way that would itself have been super dangerous, week 7 - Julia said "look, kid, other people are as dangerous as mals, if you can't trust them. We don't trust you. Go away." He ignored her completely, he kept talking to Orion, who - you know Orion, he's faceblind, I think he wasn't totally sure the kid wasn't New York, never mind that none of us are black - anyway, the kid ...maybe did a bit of magic, standing right there in the middle of us? Don't - don't put that down as a sure thing -"

"On Orion? The kid did magic on Orion?"

"I don't know! I pressed the button on my power-sharer, for 'if I stop holding this down then assume there's an emergency at my location', and the kid goes "look! A mal! At the bottom of the stairs!!' and Orion charges off - that's not uncharacteristic, Orion really likes fighting mals, but then we're all just standing there frozen without Orion and Julia'd roped in two of the poor Chicago mundies, not that six of us shouldn't have been sufficient to keep an eye on them but our scout positions had gotten all messed up by everyone who knew things trying to be out of grabbing radius - I'm still holding the button down, and I inched ahead to try to keep Orion in my field of vision without losing sight of the kid either - we all just stood there dead silent, watching him, while Orion impales this little thing and comes back up -"

"Did the boy do more magic?"

"I don't think so."

"Why didn't you summon help -"

"I didn't want to overreact!! All he'd done was - well, everything I just said -"

"Follow you, repeatedly not leave when asked to leave, ignore Julia telling him that his conduct was threatening, run right up to someone and do magic, disrupt your formation in the middle of the hallway -"

"I'm not sure if he did magic. I had my finger on the button. Anyway, Orion came back, and we were all standing there, and one of Julia's girls said 'your affinity is mal-sensing?' and the kid said 'yeah' and then Julia told him - that he could follow along ten feet behind and tell Orion about mals, if he wanted - it was kind of that or, like, get into a potentially deadly fight? I was just glad that he wasn't in a central position but I was worried - that's not enough consent for a maleficer, is it -"

"'you can follow ten feet behind' shouldn't be, no."

"I switched off the emergency summon trigger. I took the back so I could keep an eye on him. We proceeded down the stairs and made it to Frank, who noticed the maleficing aura - none of us had been sure - and told the kid to scram. Frank can probably tell you that part better than I can."

__________

"I mean, they're freshmen. They came down the stairs all chipper and started sorting through the stuff. And then they mention sort of casually that a maybe-maleficing kid bullied his way into the group and followed them downstairs, so I step outside to check him out and - 

- he's skinny, tense, back to the wall, nearly sure but not 100% sure he was doing a spell, 100% sure he anticipated the jaculi who drop out of the ceiling - it was, like, five of them, not a big deal, except that I was distracted from being sure if he was doing a spell or not.  I can tell the difference between 'stinks to high heaven' and 'maleficer'. I am, in fact, willing to bet our lives he'd drawn from mammals, but I wasn't surprised the freshmen couldn't tell. Anyway, I said to him 'get the fuck out of here, stay off the New York freshmen', and he turns around and stares me down and says 'the girl who wants the rug wasn't looking where she was going - Julia wanted a rug and presumably had sixth position, in a group of ten, so she wouldn't have been on mal-scouting, though their formation was in fact a little weird and we should maybe check that they're not overriding good sense for dumb social reasons -"

"Silas said he took the back to watch Masozi. And they're watching a couple of the Chicago mundies, I think Zeke's been having Rebecca on his center."

"Oh! Okay, then I have no complaints. Anyway,  I have no idea if 'Julia Sanderson doesn't watch her back' was meant as a threat but the kid is definitely staring me down, with his arms folded like this, and so I'm thinking maleficer and already at the point where you stop thinking whether you should pick fights and only think what you're going to have to suck dry to win them. I said 'New York does not consort with maleficers, get out of here, you are lucky I am letting you run".

My read on him once I said that was that he was, uh, contemptuous? Pretty sure we were nothing, next to him? If I'd known the stuff about Johannesburg I probably would have killed him but I just stood there until he walked away - he took his sweet time about it, strolling like he hasn't a care in the world, it felt like he was trying to wait me out - and then I went and gave Julia a lecture about how if you've decided you don't want to walk with someone, you cannot let them bully you into it. She took it pretty well. I don't think he'd done anything magic to her, I think she was just weighing the costs in - enclave solidarity and embarrassing New York with a physical fight on the first day and seeming to her new friends like a paranoid idiot - and not weighing the costs of, like, your formation is guarding its back as well as its front and now people've seen the maleficer travelling with New York and now someone who is willing to force you to use force to make him leave gets to do whatever he wants..."

.....Masozi is thinking that he's doomed and it's - not about anything he did - it's just that he was born in the wrong place at the wrong time and it doesn't matter how smart or careful he is, even Julia is better prepared for this place...

He doesn't say this. What would be the point. 

He reads through the transcripts. Doesn't show any expression, at all, the entire time. 

....Eventually he sets the papers down and looks back up to Annaka. 

"- I wasn't trying to be contemptuous. I - just - in Lilongwe if you ever looked scared of anyone then they'd - know at the very least they could steal all your stuff because you couldn't stop them...? I was scared. And confused. I'm - not as confused now - I'm not stupid and I've been paying attention, to how this place actually works. ...It's better. Than it could be. And I'm glad." 

Even if it ends up being why he dies. He's...still glad. He thinks. 

"Lan Xichen says you're a quick learner." 

"...If I wasn't I'd be dead. Almost everyone in my family is dead. Because they...weren't clever enough and they weren't careful enough...I remember, I knew that even when I was tiny, that - that I'd outlive them... Except my baby sister. She's four. I - found a mundie family, in Lilongwe - I thought maybe if she forgot about me and forgot about magic she - might live long enough that if I survive in here I can go back for her..." 

"You are going to have to learn quickly and be very conservative while you haven't learned, if you are going to survive in here.. Shanghai...might help...but also people will find your conduct threatening because of your Shanghai associations who would have not cared at all, if you were a random indie kid."

"I know."

It doesn't matter that it's not fair. It's never mattered. Reality doesn't care.

"I - I still think my chances are better here. Than they would've been on the outside. ...I tried to tell Lan Xichen that he shouldn't have to stick to a promise he made to me when he didn't know all the things? He didn't listen and I - I don't know if it's for reasons that make sense to him because he's smarter than me, or for bad reasons? I guess maybe it doesn't matter, though, I - it probably wouldn't help by now, not for me, if he said Shanghai wouldn't ally with me after all. So it - only matters for Shanghai, and I - I have to trust Lan Xichen to do the math for that, I guess, just 'cause he knows more things about it than I do." 

"I'm not sure what he's thinking. Breaking a promise of alliance is a very serious matter, and would make people not trust those offers when your enclave wants to extend them in the future, but - but for exactly that reason they are extended senior year. He might mostly be thinking that it looks bad if Shanghai backs down because the English-speakers tell them to, when the Mandarin-speakers don't care. He might be thinking that you will probably die and if you manage not to then it'd be because you are very valuable to Shanghai indeed. He might - not be thinking, honestly. We are all very trapped and very tired and trying to balance too many things, and even grownups doing politics make errors of judgment sometimes. I don't know if you walking away from Shanghai would help anything, though, even if he is making a mistake."

"....Yeah." 

Masozi takes a deep breath, and lifts his head, looking her in the eye. "- I'm sorry. That I - didn't know enough things and did things by accident that scared you and - it must've been a lot of work. Asking all those questions. And it's - hard enough for you trying to keep all your people alive." 

She has this entire rant written to yell at him but - 

- he's still probably going to die, and she mostly just feels tired. "Yes, it is. Good night, Masozi."

Masozi feels like he maybe still didn't convey all the things? Or - no, possibly more like he maybe didn't hear all of the things she wanted to say to him, and that's - useful information...? 

But she's tired, clearly. And...so is he, if he's honest with himself, and Lan Xichen was probably right that it's better if he doesn't try to throw himself headfirst at all of the things he did wrong and understand them, right here and now. Throwing himself at things headfirst is what nearly started a war in the first place. 

"Thank you," he says politely. "Good night."