"You can probably do it in the evening. The evening also works fine."

But he has things to do in the evenings too! 

....Okay, nevermind, Masozi is not in the mood to have arguments right now. 

"- Anyway I think probably Wen Ning is way smarter and better at things than anyone thinks he is? And he's just - the ways that he's scared because of bad things that happened to him before are inconvenient for helping him look smart or good at things?" 

"That seems like a dumb problem for a person to have."

"I know! I bet he hates it too! ....I mean, it's a dumb problem for me to have that I don't know how to not offend New York and make them think I'm a scary murderer? But that happened anyway." 

Wen Ning is better at learning math than he or Jiang Cheng thinks he is, but still not very good--

and OH RIGHT there's a source of math problems, thank you Fibonacci class. "Yeah. Just because a problem is dumb doesn't mean it isn't a real problem. Okay, so Masozi, imagine a sequence of numbers that starts with zero and one, and you get the next number in the sequence by adding the last two together, how many items long is the sequence before the numbers are bigger than a thousand?" 

"....Oooooooooh! That's a really good one!" Masozi doesn't know how to answer it yet, but it's making his entire brain sparkle. 

"- Okay so. If I'm doing street fighting math then I wanna - do it far enough to figure out the pattern and then jump ahead so I don't have to do all of the steps one at a time? One is zero, two is one, three is - also one? Four is...two? Five is...three, I guess. Six is five? Seven is - eight? Nine is...thirteen? Ten is - um - twenty-one? ....Okay it's almost like the one where the next number is double the number before it? Except it's double for every two steps, not every one step." Masozi isn't sure if that makes sense outside of his head. "So....how many times would I have to double twenty to get to a thousand. Forty is one, eighty is two, 160 is three, 320 is four, 640 is five - and then next one would be a bunch over a thousand. So that's five and a half times doubling it. But twice as many steps. E....leven steps. On top of ten because that's the one in the sequence that was about twenty. I....think you'd have to go twenty-one steps into the sequence probably before you'd get to a thousand?" 

"Pretty close! It's," ah fuck she knew this yesterday when she was doing homework "eighteen, you weren't off by much."

"If you think about it," Nie Huaisang says, "you like fighting math, so it's basically another kind of liking fighting."

“- Huh! I guess some of the assumptions I made to make the problem easier wasn’t actually true, and were - all pushing in one direction of being wrong? Twenty one is actually way too big, right - my assumption was wrong so it’s probably not off by multiplied-by-two but maybe multiplied by 1.5? ….I wonder why.” Masozi stops walking in the middle of the hallway. “Do you have paper, I wanna draw a graph.”

"I do not have paper, and also c'mon, we need to get you back to your room so I have time to get everyone before curfew.

If you draw a graph tonight I'll show you a cool thing the numbers do tomorrow, though."

“Okay! I have paper in my room, I can do that! ….I like you. You have really good math questions! The person from the singing room next to us had a really stupid question but your question isn’t stupid at all!”

She vaguely wonders what math question New York would have asked. She also sort of suspects she can guess the approximate shape of the answer.

"Thank you! I'm glad you like my math questions."

Masozi beams at her! And then stumbles against Nie Huaisang again, he’s so tired. 

Fortunately, they have reached Masozi's room.

"Goodnight! I will see you tomorrow and explain the cool numbers thing."

“Thank you! I like you!”

And Masozi will smile at Ayako and shut his door and flop on his bed.

….With paper nearby, and, ooh, he has a pen right here and the math puzzle is so interesting….

After Masozi goes back in the room, Nie Huaisang says, "you have great tits."

She does not crack up laughing out loud in the hall.

"...thank? You? I think?" 

"I wish I had tits like yours."

What the hell do you say about thaaaaaaaaat

"I bet with magic that's doable? And I think mundanes can do it too?" 

"I am pretty sure that would look weird."

"...yeah, it kind of would. Sorry." 

"At least I get to admire yours!"

If Nie Huaisang were a girl, this would be her cue to ask if she was free this weekend. If Nie Huaisang were a girl, making out with someone from another enclave still wouldn't be the best of choices, but it would be bad in a way where it makes you a little more prone to bad decisions about how much to trust someone down the line, something where it's a little riskier than she'd be advised but still perfectly possible to do while being careful.

Nie Huaisang is not, in fact, a girl, and in the world that exists, that wouldn't be the kind of decision she'd be teased for. It's the kind of decision that would get her pulled away from the Shanghai table, informed that they all thought better of her than this, and maybe she just shouldn't be doing this sort of thing at all if she's going to take risks like that. 

"I guess you can."

Nie Huaisang is drunk enough to be oblivious to all of this. "They're a very nice shape. I guess that might be the clothes? I'd ask to see how much it's the clothes but I feel like that's probably getting close to territory that would make me want to have sex with you."

(He is, for obvious reasons, navigating using the wall.)

"It's any the clothes. —If you were a girl I'd offer, I meant it when I said you were pretty, but in fact."