"I don't know off the top of my head if there was anyone not New York but Clarita. I'll ask her. --Maybe tonight at dinner I should pick a handful of other enclaves to dump mana on so it doesn't look too much like I'm still associated with New York even if I won't wear a power-sharer." 

"You know you can sell mana, right? You can buy maintenance shifts and stuff that way off anybody."

"Yeah, but you see, I have now given New York mana for free. --You're right though, my pride isn't worth the price." 

"To compensate them for the loss of that toerag."

"I don't think I knew that epithet but I like it, it's evocative." 

Lucia asks Clarita about other teammates that afternoon before they start the next killbox. Clarita gives her names. 

And then they get to perform again. 

(A couple of non-Clarita people dare to poke their heads in to briefly gawk, but disappear before either El or Lucia has a chance to notice.) 

Lucy is back up to a (metaphorical) million watts by the time they're through--brighter than the last time, even, because they're completely out of empty crystals. 

"Time to go shopping," she says, looking at her arm. 

"I could probably hold a little more if you want some help with that." Thus telegraphed: tug tug.

Lucia's eyes go wide, and she sways slightly. 

"Did you just--was that--you can--that easily?"

"- I didn't take any but, yeah, that's out of the goodness of my shriveled blackened heart?"

She kisses her. 

El seizes her by the hair and pulls her off. "Have you lost your bloody mind?"

"--Sorry! Sorry, sorry--"

"Your bewildering maleficer kink is possibly not the strangest thing about you but it's up there," El grumbles.

It's a little hard to tell through all the light, but she's looking at El like men sometimes look at El's mother. "It's not a maleficer thing!" she protests. "Jack Westing couldn't have done squat to me even if I hadn't got the drop on him. And it wouldn't be the least bit appealing if he could, because he would. The goodness of your shriveled black heart is the difference between terrible and beautiful."

"I think you're high on excess mana."

"I mean, maybe? I wasn't planning to tell you I liked you until after graduation." 

"Mental," mutters El, and she gets up and stalks back to her own room.

Lucia meets up with her and the others at dinner, no longer glowing and with a bunch of miscellaneous objects in her arms. 

"It turns out that there are--or, rather, were--as many as several seniors at the bottom of the pecking order low on mana, willing to trade part of their mana storage for filling the rest." 

"Oh, good. - oh that one's nice."

She passes her the ivory donkey, and Liu a little marble statuette of a mouse. 

"Awww," says Liu. She shows the mouse to Xiao Xing, who sniffs it and then decides it is uninteresting.

Aww. 

"I'm really sorry for kissing you without your permission. I don't--want you to think--that I only like you because of, of a kink."

"You kissed her?"

"She was high on excess mana."

"That's no excuse for being inconsiderate." 

"If you say so."