Liu had been born into that project, and she was expected and expecting to contribute. And anyone she so much as dated was absolutely going to be evaluated as a potential part of it, too. Her family might not be planning to get actively involved with the process, but they’d certainly be pleased if she brought home an impressive candidate. Which an artificer from Shanghai who was already good enough to whip up a reviser in school certainly would be.
“So is that…good?” I prompted.
Liu stared at me with a half-bewildered expression, as if she didn’t know what it was, then looked over at him and then back. “He’s—he’s nice? And he’s very cute?” as if she were asking me. She’d never had a crush that I knew of; I suspect she’d considered it as much a long-shot as I had, all those years she was on the maleficer track. Maleficer relationships tend to go Bonnie-and-Clyde or Frankenstein-and-Igor: not very appealing. So now she was opening a newly delivered box and peeking under the lid for the first time.
“I see,” I said, solemnly, so obviously I stuck round until the very end. I felt it was my job as her friend to observe closely and also my chance to revenge a lot of giggling at my expense.
Liu might not have been sure about Zixuan, but she was definitely sure that I should go away and stop making her squirm and kept whispering that I could leave. I kept pretending not to understand her while the crowd very slowly ebbed away from round Zixuan, until he managed to politely detach from the last few hangers-on, at which point I casually edged back from Liu but not so far away I couldn’t hear as he came over and asked her to walk to the library with him.
Liu did turn to me and ask, “El, are you coming?”
“You go ahead,” I told her, and beamed at her as obnoxiously as I could. She turned red again and made a quick face at me, then smoothed herself down to calm dignity before she turned back to him. I was smiling the whole time as I watched them walk away; it was just—so normal, an ordinary fumbling towards a future outside this horrible place.
I suppose you could say the same of my own complicated dating situation, but it felt a lot more uncertain and dramatic and fraught when I was the one inside it, not to mention more impractical, seeing as me dragging Orion off to join a quixotic project of building tiny enclaves round the world was a lot less likely to be acceptable to his family. This was a happy ordinary human thing I could actually enjoy, and it felt like the perfect period to that magical run.
For the first time, I almost felt that I could even let myself believe in the plan—so much that when they’d gone out of sight, I gave a huff of laughter out loud and turned back to the gym doors and said exultantly, “Still think you’re going to stop me? You’re not. I am getting them out. I’m getting them all out, and nothing you do is going to make me leave any of them behind. You’re not going to get a single one of them. I’m going to beat you, I’m going to win, do you hear me?”
“Who are you talking to?” Sudarat asked.
She gave me a bad start, which I entirely deserved since I’d been so enthusiastic about my stupid ranting that I hadn’t noticed her, and when I’d calmed down my racing heart and shoved down the sixteen different killing spells that had instantly leapt to mind, I said with an attempt at being cool and collected, “Nothing, I was only thinking out loud. What are you doing down here?”
Then I looked at the little bundle she was carrying with the end of a loaf of bread poking out of it, and realized, appalled, that she was of Orion’s mindset about picnics in the gym. “You’ve got to be joking,” I said, revolted. “Didn’t I yell enough? You’re only going to mess your own head about, if you don’t get yourself killed. You’ve been in here long enough by now, you must’ve started to understand. It’s not the real thing.”
She just stood there and took the lecture, small with her shoulders hunched forward, gripping the handle of her little carrysack with both hands, and then she said softly, “My mother used to tell me for a graduation present she would take me to see the cherry blossom festival in Kyoto. But I will never see it now.”
I stopped talking, stopped breathing more or less. She paused, but when I didn’t say anything else, she said, “In my school—in the enclave—they taught us how to pick out the smart kids, the good ones, the best ones to help us. So I know what the good ones are like. And I’m not very good. And nobody wants to be my friend. The enclave kids are all afraid. They don’t know what happened in Bangkok. And I don’t know, either. Everyone thinks I’m lying, but I don’t. I took my grandmother’s dog out for a walk and then we came back and the door—the door to the enclave didn’t work anymore. It was just a door to an empty apartment. And everyone was gone.” She swallowed visibly. “My auntie was working in Shanghai, she came home and took care of me. She gave me everything she could spare. But it isn’t enough to save someone who isn’t very good, that nobody likes. I know it’s not.”