Feeling like you might live is weird. You're not supposed to plan for after, which she feels like she kind of doesn't approve of, but it's easy to manage when 'after' feels like it's sort of an unchanging and unchangeable landscape of barren nothingness. Barren nothingness where everyone speaks French.

The alliance is all very thoroughly outfitted with an incredibly impressive array of stealth enhancement and protective gear, she's traded for about a dozen tightly guarded stealth incantations, and they're planning to have a bunch of additional buffs in the form of alchemical potions, mostly traded for from people with relevant affinities. She's mostly trading what remains of her vast quantities of stored wealth to other students in exchange for extra mana and anything else that might still give them more of an edge. There's a sense in which it's soul-exalting and a sense in which it involves entirely too much talking to people and not even close to enough learning anything, but it's what needs to be done, so she's doing it for about half of her waking hours, these days.

Objectively, they're in very good shape, which is, her personal ambivalence about After aside, a very good thing, because at least it means her friends will probably get out.

They've been doing their post-mortems in the New York reading room. When they're done, Julian pulls her aside. 

"I'm having trouble finding a book I need in Old Persian. Give me a hand?"

" - sure." Honestly she misses doing more work in Old Persian, if that's what needs to be done it sounds great.

He is actually interested in Achaemenid spell seals as a source for yet another protective enchantment – but, also, the Old Persian stacks are always completely deserted and it's been so long since they've had a minute alone. 

"It should be somewhere in here, Signs and Seals of the Kings of Xšāça. No rush, though. There's, uh, something I wanted to talk to you about."  

"Sure, anything," she says, but she's also totally scanning the stacks for the book and not looking at him, because that's what he said they were doing, and the idea of something not being a rush does not entirely compute at this point.

"I've been thinking. A lot. About New York. I know it's tempting fate, but I've tried and I can't not think about it, we're less than a month out and it's that or contemplate what's in the graduation hall which I already do at least twelve hours a day. And so, I've been thinking – I can ask them to take my brother and sisters, or I can ask them for a hundred million dollars." 

"What do you need a hundred million dollars for?" she asks, still scanning the shelves.

"I – you. I'd need it for you."

His heart is hammering a little. He knows he shouldn't be saying this, because whatever else happens if they get through the gates Naima will live, which is more than he can say for Choi-fung and Ka-fai and Man-yuk. But he hasn't seen them in so long – he barely knows them – and he's doing alright for himself – and, more to the point, he couldn't live with himself if he didn't ask. Of course, he won't be able to live with himself if she takes him up on it. Lots of living, he's positing today. 

She stops scanning the shelves and looks at him.

" - what?"

And it takes her a second to realize that he's talking about her after, not just his, and she can feel herself gearing up to have a really stunning amount of emotions about that, only then she remembers the rest of the sentence. " - I mean, obviously you ask for your siblings, right?"

"Yeah. Obviously. Only – there might be some way I could make it work? I'm not sure I'm worth that much to New York, but I'm probably worth that much to somebody, and it seems so pointless to send you off to god-knows-what without trying to think of something." 

She feels like a bunch of her ability to participate in this conversation is still stuck on the idea that they're having it at all.

"Uh - I guess haven't really thought about it. What are you - what would you even do about it?" she asks, before it can occur to her that this is obviously a pretty stupid question.

"Pay off Paris, what else? They think nobody's going to call their stupid bluff, but that's all it is, a bluff. Even if it's an insane amount of money, we're both capable of making insane amounts of money." 

"I don't actually have any way of checking prices in here." Also she's - she wants to say that she's not even sure that a hundred million dollars is a real amount of money, but that's silly, obviously there exist entities that deal with those numbers. "Do you - I guess if you're planning to sell enclaves, then - you're probably the sort of person who could do it - "

"I think so. I'm not sure. I've never done it before, right, I don't know exactly what I can do or how much of a value add I'll be. But – honestly, I think it's a lot."  

Nod.

"You have to pick your siblings. When you talk to New York. Because it's urgent, and because it's - people don't sell enclave slots for money."

He loves her so much. 

"I know I do. Thank you. And we will get the money. It's important to me that you know that." 

Oh. Yeah, there are the feelings. 

"You know there are lots of other things you can buy with that kind of money, right?" She doesn't really have a great model of why she's saying this, but apparently that's what she's decided to say.

"What on earth would I need money for? I'll be living in New York, I assume if they want anything they just ring a bell and it appears." 

"Well I don't know! I assume there must exist things that cost amounts of money that New York would notice, or you wouldn't have the intuition that you can't just ask them for a hundred million dollars! - and also you're aware that there are other people in the world, right, like, as many as several of them who are probably interesting and don't have weird contracts with Paris - "

She's not crying, but she's suddenly worried that that might be a temporary state. It doesn't feel that far off.

Oh no. Is that really what she thinks of him? 

"It's not – it doesn't – and you could meet someone in Paris you like better than me! It doesn't matter! It's one thing to pay for a Scholomance slot, but no fourteen-year-old should be forced to sign the rest of their life away. I don't care – I mean, of course I care what you do afterwards, I care a lot what you do afterwards – but this is slavery and I won't stand for it." 

She's pretty sure she's not going to cry, now, but it's taking more ongoing effort than it should, and it's kind of embarrassing that this might also be visible. That's - probably not the most important thing to be thinking about now but the thing she ought to be thinking about, which is whether and how much he means it, is kind of hard to think about at all, right, like, how do you begin to assemble all of the evidence that should go into a judgement like that - 

"You mean it?"

Naima is very careful about physical touch. They've never kissed. They haven't even hugged. When they study together in his room late in the evening, they sit primly on opposite ends of the bed. So when he reaches out to take her hands, he's very slow, and very careful to make sure she can see exactly what he's doing. And he holds on tight. 

"I mean it. I've – thought about this a lot, actually. There's this voice in my head that sounds like Annisa, and it says that in the world where your contract doesn't exist, Paris just sold the slot to a rich indie family that probably doesn't live in Egypt or have thirty kids. And you'd be dead. And that world is obviously worse than this one. So, we keeping going back and forth on this – my inner Annisa and I –  and I don't know what to tell her, except – so what? I'm already going to spend the rest of my life working to make this place big enough for all the counterfactual Naimas. I'd be doing that anyway. And back here in the real world we actually live in, no human being should be forced to sign away their freedom to a deranged Frenchman on a power trip. I'm excited to get out of here for about eight hundred million reasons and one of the ones near the top of the list is that I'll be able to help the people I love without demanding anything from them in return, or, you know, looking like a suicidal idiot, and I love you, and – yes. I mean it. Of course I mean it." 

She squeezes his hand back, after a second.

"You understand that this is the kind of thing you can't take back after this conversation. Or - actually I guess you can, in the sense that there wouldn't actually be any important consequences at all if you did, but - it would make you a jerk. Objectively."

"You know I always try not to be a jerk. You complain about it." 

"Well, yeah, that's why I'm giving you the heads up, because it wouldn't be being a jerk to just leave it, right, because your inner Annisa kind of has a point, and I know it's not a normal thing to expect someone to solve for you, no matter how much they care about you, and I know it's not wise to expect someone to want to be with you if you can't be a part of the life they want to have, so it's - I'd understand, I wouldn't think less of you - actually maybe I would think a little less of you but mostly in a way where I would be being the unreasonable one - and it just seems like you might want a heads up before picking the option that opens up the possibility of having been a jerk, right - this is such a ridiculous thing to be saying in response to this and I don't know why it's what's coming out instead of, I don't know, any of the several thousand more reasonable options that I'm sure exist - "