El changes into it (and pats her homemade poncho shirt and promises to sew it into more of a shirt shape with this slack).

Lucia starts organizing their haul. LEDs over there, the stuff for Aadhya by place on the list... 

And eventually it is time to head to the cafeteria to welcome the incoming freshmen. 

Boy are the incoming New York freshmen in for an unpleasant surprise, if the New York seniors didn't explain things quickly enough

Induction is a sort of cheerful time, as times in the Scholomance go. Everybody comes together to give all the nauseated kids water and get their mail. El isn't expecting any mail but it's what they've got that passes for a holiday so she goes.

The New York freshmen are in fact very unpleasantly surprised that Lucia has decided to quit! After some unpleasantly surprised milling-about, one of them decides to come over and give her her letter from her mother anyway, which she accepts gracefully. 

El, quite to her surprise, gets a letter.

She reads it, and then promptly shreds it to illegible bits and gives out a piece to everyone who has ever been remotely decent to her including the kid who delivered it. "Eat it," she says.

Lucia accepts her shred and puts it on her tongue and--

It's not like the put-yourself-right spell. It's good in a completely different way, something external to the self instead of internal to it. 

El does not look great, despite this Really Nice Thing that has just happened, which probably means there was something upsetting written on the message? Lucia knows this one! Do not: pry. Do: hug. 

Hug.

They meet Liu's cousins, who are very cute, fresh-faced and tiny. 

The shadow stays over El's expression the rest of the day, and Lucia worries. 

And then the next morning comes, with it homeroom assignments, and El is directed to a classroom with a handful of other seniors and a gaggle of freshmen, including a Bangkok enclaver and one of Liu's little cousins. 

Well, that's bizarre, but, sure, hi Liu's little cousin, etcetera.

Lucia swoops by to compare schedules, blinks at the odd classroom setup, waves at the little cousin, and then actually shows El her schedule. 

El compares schedules with Lucia and leverages this to get a look in at the other seniors in the room's options.

They don't mostly end up in the same classes, because, seniors, but they can rearrange a few things usefully. Lucia swoops off again to see Aadhya and Liu. 

At breakfast, she says, "So, if you want to try doing the killbox thing again once we've got more mana storage, I salvaged a whole bunch of the movable barricades." 

"Are they in good shape?"

"The ones I grabbed were! Several of the others were not." 

"Well, maybe I can get credit for patching them up. They say senior year the school picks up more on what you're interested in working on."

"I think some of them have already been scavenged for parts, but there are probably some left that are patch-up-able." 

Liu comes and sits with them, looking pensive.

"Bangkok's gone," she says softly, after picking through her fruit salad to make sure it's all food.

"--The enclave?"

Liu nods. "A few weeks ago. My cousins told me. No one knows how."

"Okay, wow, that's--maybe I should go over to the Shanghai table and make a gesture of good faith to show that I really sincerely cut ties with New York."

"We should buy their power sharer."

"Oh, man, we totally should--dangit, I left my flashcards in my room--" she starts looking around at tables to identify Bangkok. 

"There," says El, inclining her head in a direction. "Those are the Bangkok seniors, but their juniors are sitting halfway across the cafeteria..."

"Thaaaat's interesting--you think the seniors cut everyone else off?"