"Yeah. You can tell your alliances you'll have a golden enclave, if me and the sutras and Lucia make it, or just me and the book but you'll have to put in mana for it then."

This is an extremely sweet deal. They set about figuring out how many power sharers they have; the new kids usually bring in their own, and their only freshman to make it in didn't have hers, so they just have one per living Bangkok upperclassman plus one they took off a kid when he died sophomore year and three spare for alliances. Which is enough to give Lucia et all each one, if they don't give the freshman one -

"Don't be horrid, give us three and let her have one. We can slosh mana around amongst ourselves, we live on the same bloody hall." Plus Lucia can't wear an unmodified one.

"We do have other mana storage. It's not enough to keep up, but it'll keep one person at a time fine." Thank you El for not mentioning Lucia's embarrassing mana control handicap. 

This is obviously an even better deal than it would be if they had to cough up four. Someone runs off to find Sudarat and give her the good news; another couple seniors peel off to retrieve the spare sharers; the artificer of the group offers to take Liu and Aadhya to see the power sink and learn to operate it.

"I do love a good positive-sum exchange." Even if the seniors were being total jerks about the idea of not supplying Sudarat. 

"See you later!" chirps Aadhya, accompanying the Bangkok kids to their hiding place for their sink.

"--Okay, now that that's accomplished, I think I am in fact going to try to talk to Shanghai." 

"D'you want me along for that?"

"Yes, please, I'm only mostly sure they won't try to kill me." 

El accompanies her.

The Shanghai table gets quieter fast as the two approach. 

"Hello," Lucy says. 

"Hello," says Hu Zixuan, with perhaps a hair less coldness than Lucia tends to turn on New Yorkers who are blatantly fishing to get her back. 

"I'm not going to let New York use me as a weapon," she says abruptly, lifting her chin. "That's part of why I left." 

"You left because Todd Quayle and Magnus Tebow were behaving badly," he says neutrally. 

"That's why I left now. I was planning to wait until after graduation. I was never going to stay." 

"And what would you have done, after leaving New York, before the Golden Sutras," he nods politely to El, "came along?" 

"The same thing I do in here: kill things." 

"And do what with the mana?" 

"You know it's not a good idea to make too many plans for the future, in here." 

He doesn't look impressed. 

She sighs. "I don't know, give it to random indies trying to keep their kids safe? I certainly wasn't going to keep my New York power-sharer, if that's what you're asking." 

"I wasn't thinking of anything specific," he says mildly. She gives him a flat, unimpressed look, which actually has the corners of his mouth turning slightly upwards. 

But only for a moment. 

"And if New York does start--has started--a war of aggression," he says mildly, "will you stand by, then? Attempt to stay neutral?" 

"I don't like it when people die," she says quietly. "I've killed one person, ever, and he was in the middle of attempting to kill my best friend, and I still didn't like it. If killing the Dominus of New York--the current one, or my father--I could probably do that. If defeating New York meant doing something to the enclave itself--to all the innocents inside, children and non-participants and all--I can't. Not won't, can't." 

"Not even to save another enclave, also full of innocents?"

"Can't," she repeats. "Not without--I don't know what it would make me into. I don't know that the world would be less safe, with a power-mad New York in it, than with me if I killed children. There are too many things I don't understand about what I am and how I work. It's not about what would be better, it's not about whether it's ethical to pull the lever in the trolley problem. It's just a bad idea for me, personally, to pull that lever."

He stares at her for a long minute, unblinking. Eventually he breaks her gaze, and says, "Let us all hope it does not come to that." 

"Agreed." 

And then she motions to El and turns and walks away. 

El didn't understand any of that because it was in Chinese, so she is tragically unable to have unmanageable amounts of fuzzy feelings about the words "best friend".

"Well, that went better than it could've." 

"They're not going to start doing murders?"

"I guess they didn't technically promise not to but I didn't get the most murder-y vibe off them. They were about as impressed with me as I am with New York, which I can't say is unfair...Hu Zixuan in particular was, uh, he seemed...sort of skeptical but not all the way to calling bullshit? I was seriously concerned that he would call bullshit and have done with it." 

"Huh. Well, I guess 'unimpressed but not calling bullshit' is relatively safe as a place to start from."

"He wanted to know if I'd take out New York if that was the only way to stop a war." 

"How would you even know a thing like 'that's the only way to stop a war' to begin with?"

"Good question. I think what he actually said was, like, if New York were unambiguously pursuing a war of aggression." 

"Then you could assassinate the council, you don't have to kick the whole enclave off into the void about it."

"Yeah that was approximately what I said." 

"I think the school's going to stick me with Mandarin next and I'm still painfully slow at Sanskrit," sighs El.

"Sorry about the Mandarin." 

"It's not you in particular, just little things that keep coming up."