El is communing with her book! It is the loveliest book and she is so glad to have it and can't wait to show it to everyone and she will make it its very own case!

This does not make Lucia less curious!!!

She laces her fingers together tightly and doesn’t say anything. But she’s going to sit right here until El tells her to leave or what the book is. …Or the curfew bell rings.

"Have you got Arabic, or Sanskrit?" El asks after tucking the book back in her shirt like she fully intends to sleep with it.

“…I’m starting Sanskrit for the mortal flame? But I’m not good at it yet.”

"Well, if you want to speed up a bit on that one," says El, "I've the Golden Stone sutras, with no library stamp."

“The—the—“

She bolts to her feet, staring down at the book for a second before slamming her eyes shut.

”Should I start Arabic too, do you think—El, that’s—the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard—“

"I think the spells will all be in Sanskrit, it's the scribe's notes that are in Arabic." Pet the book. Pet pet pet. "Isn't it the most beautiful book you ever saw?"

“It is.” She eases down into a crouch to speak to the book: “El is the person I respect and trust most in this school. She’s really cool. She’s going to take really good care of you.”

"You'll make me blush," she mutters, but she continues cossetting the book till the bell rings.

Lucia dashes out of the room when the bell rings, and goes straight back to her room, where a mostly-neglected Sanskrit textbook is lying on her desk. 
For the first time in her Scholomance career, she stays up for hours past curfew studying instead of hunting mals. 
When her eyes start swimming, she reluctantly closes the book and belly-flops onto her bed. 
She hums Simple Gifts to herself and goes to sleep right with herself.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," Lucia hisses to Chloe the next morning, on the way to breakfast, while everyone else is oohing appropriately over El's book. "You think I had something to do with this? You seriously think that if I had a line on the Golden Stone Sutras, I wouldn't have started Sanskrit freshman year?" 

Chloe flounders. "I mean--it's not like you need them," she mutters. "Your dad is going to be Dominus. You could get your hands on the modern spells if you wanted to. " 

"You must be joking. You think Dad would let me go that easily?" 

Chloe looks away. 

"Dad wants what the rest of you want. Me, as the shining jewel of New York's arsenal. So don't tell me what I don't need." 

And then they get to the cafeteria, and Todd Quayle is sitting alone. 

Todd Quayle, New York senior, is sitting alone. Seniors never sit alone; freshmen and sophomores will take the opportunity to cluster around them if they can't find other seniors to sit with. New Yorkers--and people from other big enclaves--never sit alone; somebody will always take the opportunity to get an in (unless you're Lucia and deliberately picking the worst possible spots).

Lucia taps the shoulder of a passing freshman. "Hey, quick question, what the fuck?" she asks, gesturing at Todd. 

The freshman does not look happy. "He poached." 

WHAT. 

"What would he bloody need a better room for?" says El incredulously.

"Let's find out." 

"Good luck, Detective," snorts El, getting in the food line.

She marches over to his table and slams a fist on it so hard the whole thing rattles. Flecks of juice spatter up into Quayle's face. 

He looks up at her, more out of reflex than volition. 

"Explain," she hisses. 

(She is trying not to think--no. She is thinking: I don't want to have to kill another human being.)

"Fuck you," he snarls back, which is awfully bold of him, in her opinion. "You think you get to push me around because you're such a big hero? The mals you've killed are nothing compared to what's waiting in the graduation hall, and they're hungry. The mals you kill don't go back with full bellies to feed the rest, and they're coming up. They've been crawling past my room so I can't sleep!" 

She's seriously considering slapping him. 

"A fucking maw-mouth went past my room yesterday!" 

She stills. She wasn't especially moving before, but now all her muscles lock in place.

"Didn't get that one, did you, hero?" 

Lucy jerks, starting to turn to the side to race out of the cafeteria, to find it and end it, but freezes again before she can so much as take a step, all the color draining from her face. 

The layout of the school unfolds in her head. Supposing a maw-mouth oozed its way up the school, all the way to the library, where would it come out? 

On the other side of where El had been from the main reading room. 

The horrible blood and worse substances that she had found El surrounded by flash in her mind. 

No. Lucia didn't get that one. 

Hash browns. Scrambled eggs. Milk. Two apples, since Lucia's not obviously going to feed herself.

She bolts. 

She doesn't know if El doesn't want anyone to know she killed a maw-mouth, or if she just doesn't want to talk about it, but if Lucia wasn't pretty sure that the maw-mouth was already dealt with, she would definitely bolt to try to go deal with it. 

When she doesn't find it, people will probably assume Todd Quayle was lying, which serves him right, considering the poaching thing. 

After the first couple of minutes running aimlessly through the halls, trying to find anything worth killing, she remembers her priorities and starts muttering lists of Sanskrit vocabulary under her breath. 

She surfaces in time for lunch, which is good, because she's ravenous. 

"Sorry for running off like that," she says, uncharacteristically subdued. 

"I'm not the one you starved over it." She has the apple in her pocket and adds it to Lucia's tray.

"Blesh you," she says, simultaneous with crunching into the apple. 

After she's gotten some food into her, she asks, "--Do you think he was right. That I'm making the graduation hall worse." 

"Maybe, but to hell with him, he shoved a kid into the dark and told himself it was barely murder because Mika would have died in a week anyway, nothing gives Todd bloody Quayle more right to live than Mika or any of the kids you've saved." Hot dog. Chomp.

"--Well. Yeah. I'm not wondering if I should stop, I'm wondering if next time I get into an argument about whether I should sneak down to the graduation hall early to thin the herd, I'll finally win." 

"That's the kind of argument you have? You're a nutter, how would you get out again? Normally kids only escape because they proper vanish when they hit the gates."

Shrug. "However I managed to get in? Mals bigger than me get into the school all the time." 

"Yeah, and if ninety percent of them get eaten up on their way to trying it's no skin off our noses."