"Naima, I am very very very tired picking the reasonable option We're going to graduate in a month and two days and if I make it out I plan never to be reasonable again." 

"...okay. Well. I guess we better make it out, then. Not that I wasn't planning to get out before! Although - I was maybe slightly less invested in it five minutes ago. I guess."

"Then I'm really glad we had this talk! I want the whole team to be completely 100% enthusiastic about not dying on graduation day." 

"Yeah."

Honestly she can still barely even think about what's just been established, but - it doesn't all end, either way, in the graduation hall, anymore, there's now the possibility of going on to keep doing things. The possibility of being something more than a lion. 

" - thanks. That's - not really nearly enough to say about it, but - thank you. And thank you for telling me ahead of time. Even if it technically opens up the possibility of you having been a jerk."

He squeezes her hand. 

"Ah, dammit, there's the book I need." Right at eye level with a bright red morocco-leather cover; how could he possibly have missed it? "I should probably look through this. Remember, tomorrow morning we have that appointment with Raghav to talk about interaction effects from some of the potions – " 

"Yep, I'll be ready. You need any help working through the Old Persian?"

"I'll let you know if I do; all ancient Indo-Iranian languages kind of look the same to me at this point. See you at breakfast?" He asks, like it's a real question.

"Yeah, for sure."

When she heads to her room, that night, she asks the void for a spellbook. Not a spellbook about stealth, or protection, or combat, not this time. She asks it for something in the forgotten language, the one that only she knows, because no one else was crazy enough to let themselves get stuck with it. The one she'll never be able to find again on the outside. 

The void gives her a large clay tablet, and she sits down on her bed to work through it. 

None of the spells here are going to help her get out of here. That's not the point of this exercise. The point of it is to feel in her bones that there will still be work to do in one month, work that only she can do, and to desperately want to get to do that work. To reach for the gates with more than indifference, or the desire to prove a point, or even out of loyalty to Julian and Malak. The point is to be able to access the full abilities of the human mind and body, those levels of mad and apparently impossible achievement that humans only reach when every piece of them knows that it is needed. She means to reach that, and then she means to reach beyond it.