"Yeah, there is that too. I don't know what to think about it, honestly, except that a lot of what the mals have was originally generated by some kid doing jumping jacks, who then got eaten. I don't know if mals eating things technically counts as maleficing--I mean, it's what I do, basically, and your crystals hold the power just fine."

"Yeah, it's squeaky clean by the time you're through with it, I'm just suddenly noticing that if the Void spat out a spellbook at me that told me how to slurp the mana out of an argonet I don't think it would be super good for me to try it."

"I completely agree with you. I have no idea what's going on with me. Maybe when we graduate I will wring the answers out of my dad." 

"Maybe all he ever wanted was for you to take all his malia and put it back so he can start over," says El, rolling her eyes.

"Wouldn't work, his anima is completely fucked."

"If it has been your whole life plus some dev time, he's plugging along longer than most people can with a completely fucked anima."

"He's very--I have no idea what he was like before, how he was damaged, but he's very calculating. He doesn't have the whole supernatural beauty thing going on, and he hasn't withered, he just looks like a dad. He pulls malia off of consenting colleagues, not hapless victims, and he doesn't do stupid maleficer things. Maybe he had this great well of compassion before and he lost it, I don't know, but he didn't lose being smart." 

"How does it work to pull malia off consenting colleagues?"

"In practice? Fuck if I know. But the impression I get is that it's sort of like their passing him mana, except it gets turned into malia in the process?"

"Which process he reverse-engineered to turn you into a laundromat, I suppose?"

"Maybe? I feel like it can't be that simple." 

"Well, obviously it would at least be very complicated to stick this process into a baby. I don't know how much research to suppose he did here beyond having the cursed idea in the first place."

"I probably wasn't actually a baby yet at the time, I was an in-vitro fertilization." 

"How does your mom feel about all this?"

"Uh, she doesn't know all of this. Dad gave her some other reason for why he wanted to do in-vitro, and I'm sure she's figured out it has something to do with why I'm weird, but I never actually shared the 'I'm a mal' hypothesis with her because I didn't want her to worry. So from her perspective there isn't actually anything wrong with the way I'm weird--I had a very unusual childhood, but not an unhappy one--and so her plan to have a kid who wasn't going to die by marrying an enclaver succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. I'm going to have to sit her down and explain all the philosophically disquieting stuff when I graduate, and I expect at that point she'll want to divorce my dad and leave with me? But I haven't tested it yet." 

"I have no idea what he'd have had to do to make you the way you are but I think that you being the way you are is - awesome? Like, if your dad didn't have to slay a dozen people at the witching hour for it or whatever I would consider having a whatever you are whenever I got around to having kids. If you're technically a mal that's just the word 'mal' doing a weird thing in a weird situation."

"The thing I'm really concerned by is that if there isn't some giant hidden downside then why didn't he tell us." 

"'Cause it would sound bad? I mean, there probably is some hidden downside! But, like, if there isn't one, you seem fine."

"If it turns out that I'm the prototype of a new race of wizards higher than mals on the food chain, and the only reason Dad didn't tell anybody was because he didn't want to get everyone's hopes up before I graduated, then I will hug him and apologize and encourage him to open a fertility clinic." 

"Let's not get our hopes up either."

"I'm not." 

"Understood."

"Anyway, even if Dad did, uh, track down the Hands of Death and slorp all the malia out of them to make me, or whatever, I can't undo that, I can only use my abilities constructively going forward."

"You are very on top of that." El pats her arm.

"Thanks." 

The next time they're in a room with Liu, Lucia gives her a rundown of the entire incident, from the auction through the conversation about not getting their hopes up about Hyperpredator Wizard Fertility Clinic.