She notices him after a moment and peers down to look at him. "Hello there."

"Hello," he says. "What are you doing here?"

"Well," she says, "it turns out the person I was here to meet is gone, so I'm passing the time until I can get a flight the next place I had in mind."

"...Yes, actually. Some of my friends told me that he'd - civilized the streets."

"Achilles was a figurehead. The idea was mine," says the tiny child in a perfectly flat voice.

"It's hard for people to believe I could be useful, but I don't understand why. The crew wouldn't feed me if I wasn't."

"There are other reasons to feed people."

"Not before, there weren't. Now everyone can get into the soup kitchen, so everyone can afford to be nice. But I wouldn't have lived long enough to see it if I hadn't been the one who made it happen."

"How did you make it happen, then?"

"They were supposed to get a bully alone, knock him down, and threaten to kill him unless he guarded them and helped them. They made a bad choice. It should have been someone strong but easy to convince. But Achilles worked out all right. His bad leg made people pity him, which got us the best spot in line until all the other bullies went and found groups of smaller children too."

"I heard the soup kitchen gets enough donations to feed all of you now, though, because people think that's so nice the way you've all organized."

"Yes. It's useful. What did you want to talk to Achilles about?"

"Your idea," says the nun, "since I thought it was his, and how he came up with it, and what he was going to do next."

"Why?"

"It was a very smart thing to come up with, and it would have been hard to convince enough people to get it going the way it has. That sort of talent is useful."

"Useful for what?"

"Well, anything, really; it would depend on what he most wanted to do. I talk to a lot of schools and try to find students for them in places they wouldn't usually look."

"Do you think you would like to go to school?"

"Yes."

"Well," she says, "I did bring a lot of tests with me that will tell me what sorts of things you're best at, if you would like to take them."

"That sounds like fun," he says, continuing to smile.

"Do you need to tell your friends where you're going, or meet me later...?"

"I don't have friends."

"Your crew, then."

"Where are the tests? How long do they take?"

"I can proctor them right upstairs in this building and they will take all day."

"Ready? Have you eaten yet today?"

"Yes."

Perhaps she will notice her mistake when she is halfway through the first sentence and he is already halfway down the page.

Well, then, he can continue blazing through this test in peace.

She will trade him for another test when he's done.

Good.

This is not going to take him all day. There are a lot of tests, though, so it will last long enough that she will ask him if he wants lunch.

"Yes."

So she brings him down the stairs and they both get a bit of lunch from the soup kitchen friends and eat it in the back and then go up again for the last bit of test.

The tiny child is a tiny genius. There are things he doesn't know, but astonishingly few of them for his upbringing, and quite a lot he can figure out given the vaguest facsimile of a hint.

"My name is Oat. I don't like it."

"...I see. Would you rather I call you something else?"

"I don't have anything better."

"All right. I'll hear back from the schools I send results to by tomorrow morning. Would you like to stay here with me or go back to your crew for the night?"

"Stay here. Less dangerous."

Oat curls up on the inflatable mattress, so tiny it's hard to tell he's even there unless you stare very hard at the folds of the scrunched-up puffy blanket. He has probably never had a puffy blanket to scrunch up before in his life.

It's adorable. Especially compared to the total blank of facial expression or the subsequent little lawn-gnome smile. ...Sister Carlotta reminds herself that he is one of God's children. She goes on the couch and sleeps.

A closet door opens, revealing Oat standing on a box to reach the doorknob. He gets down off the box.

"There you are! What were you doing in the closet?"

"I couldn't sleep. I like small spaces."

"...Oh. Well, I hope you slept well." She sets about deflating the mattress. Lieke goes down to the soup kitchen and Carlotta gets herself and Oat... oatmeal. (It's what Lieke has.)

Oat does not comment on the nominative determinism of the meal.

"Yes."

"They'd like to put you through some different tests - mostly physical tests - and see if you might be a good fit for them. Does that sound good?"

"Yes."

So they depart the soup kitchen building and go to a much nicer part of the city and Carlotta gets a hotel and an extremely dubious I.F. proctor puts Oat through obstacle courses and similar.

Oat is tiny and malnourished, but ruthlessly determined to succeed at all costs. He passes the obstacle courses, some creatively, and the various physical fitness assessments, some barely. And there are rules about accommodating disabilities; they can't disqualify him just because he's really short. Maybe he'll grow out of it.

"Yes."

"Even if you do it probably won't manifest for a long time," she says. "For most people it doesn't until they're twelve or thirteen, sometimes even later. Do you know how old you are?"

"I am at least four and probably not more than six."

Nod. "The paperwork needs a birthday; do you want to pick one yourself?"

"I don't care."

"Well," she says, "you've passed all the tests and whether you have the X-gene or not it won't make a difference; you can go to Battle School. How about your birthday can be tomorrow and you can celebrate it properly the once before you go into space? November eighteenth."

"Okay."

"I am Oat," he says.

"It's nice to meet you," she says.

"Is it? Why?"

"...Well, I suppose what I mean is it might be nice, and if it turns out it isn't at least I won't have made that any likelier by insulting you, if I say it is nice."

"Oh." He considers this perspective. "That's reasonable."

"It turns out a lot of things like that people say are sort of reasonable if you think about them."

"But do people normally think about the things they say in that way?"

"No, but they still happened in the first place. People now are just saying 'nice to meet you' because that's what you say but it would have had to make sense before that was what you say."

"It wouldn't have had to be reasonable. People do unreasonable things."

"Like what?"

"Murder is usually unreasonable."

"Well, yes. But it's also pretty unusual."

"Is it?"

"Yeah. Not very many people murder other people."

"What do you mean by not very many?"

"I would have to look up actual statistics but I mean if you go around meeting people all day in some place that doesn't have more murderers than most places you probably won't meet any murderers."

"I am not sure that's true," he says thoughtfully. "You might not meet anyone you could tell was a murderer, but that is different."

"I mean actual murderers," she says. "So I guess maybe we should look up statistics about it if we care when we're off this shuttle. I'm hungry," she sighs.

"What do you mean by hungry?"

"...Well, they said not to eat for a while before takeoff so I skipped some meals and now my tummy's grumbly? Did you just recently start learning Common?"

"Oh," he says. "Comfort-related. That makes sense."

"Are you so little because you didn't have enough to eat?"

"No. None of the other starving children I've met were this small."

"Oh. Are you a mutant, is that why?"

"I am, but I don't know if it's related."

"I am too and I already manifested so I know it's not going to make me look unusual," she says.

"I'm very small and very smart and that's all. Not much of a mutation."

Eventually all of the kids are loaded up and they get a lecture on appropriate behavior in their seats and the ship takes off. Whee.

Oat sits upon his pillows. It would be annoying if he accidentally fell out of his seat and was injured.

The girl next to him does not sit still, but she stays - very precisely - within the boundaries of her seat. "Are you excited about Battle School?"

"No."

"...Oh."

"It seemed like it would reduce the risk of starving to death."

"They will definitely feed you."

"Yes."

"I'm going because regular school was boring," she volunteers.

"Was it?"

Nod.

"How?"

"What do you mean how?"

"How is it boring?"

"...Well," she says, although this does not really clear up the curiosity underlying her question at all, "the work was all really easy and not very important and the other kids weren't very smart or fun to talk to and while you're in school you aren't allowed to go do other things so if you do they get mad at you."

"Oh."

"But everyone at Battle School is supposed to be really smart and they take us so young so we can cram in lots of training and they won't waste our time with anything that isn't important and then we kill buggers."

"What do you mean by important?"

"I mean, like, accomplishing something that needs doing. Something big."

"...That doesn't make sense in context."

"Killing buggers is important, and getting good enough at stuff to do it is important because killing buggers is important. And there's like levels of important."

"There aren't currently any buggers to kill, anyway. If they don't come back, how important will it have been to go to Battle School and learn how to kill them?"

"Since they might come back, it's important to be ready," she says.

"If everyone who can go to Battle School does, that's all of the smartest children in the world learning only things that will make them better at killing buggers. I don't think we need to be that ready. Smart people are useful for more things than war."

"They test things besides smartness. I almost didn't get in because I had to have my exact mutation to pass any of the physicals. And there's psych tests, I had to take a lot of those. And they want a specific kind of smart, military smart, not like just artists or something."

"I don't think their tests are that good."

"Why?"

"Well, what do you mean by 'military smart'?"

"Strategic and tactical type of thinking, and sort of ruthlessness and opportunism and being able to do all your thinking really fast and change your plans. Somebody could be a really good doctor or something without any of that."

"The tests I took didn't look for that sort of thing very well."

"Didn't they? I wonder why. How do you know?"

"It was obvious."

"What do you think a test that tested for that would've looked like then?"

"I'm not sure the format allows for it."

"How would you do it?"

"Differently."

She huffs and folds her arms. Briefly. Then she goes back to swaying and fidgeting in her seat.

"What was that?" says Oat, puzzled.

"What was what?"

He tries to formulate a question, then gives up. "Never mind."

"...Okay."

Sit sit sit.

Bella signs on to her desk (username "Bella", password "extremely specific keysmash she couldn't reproduce as actual characters on demand if she tried"), investigates the software in a cursory manner, and then sets about introducing herself to people and learning their names now that she has a place to write everything down once she's learned it.

The boy in the bunk across from Oat is, "Sindri. You were sitting beside that kid in the shuttle, right? Do you have any idea why he keeps looking at me like that?"

"I think he might not have any social skills," says Bella.

"...What, literally?" says Sindri.

"Well," she says, "we didn't talk very much, but I didn't notice him having any except enough that we could have sort of a conversation. So like, he didn't interrupt me or talk about totally different things when I said stuff? But besides that."

"...," says Sindri.

"Did you try telling him how people are supposed to look and not look at other people?" she wonders. "That might work. I mean, he's here, he can't be stupid."

"I'm not really upset about it, I'm just confused."

"Well, I have no idea why he's looking at you in particular," says Bella.

"What do you mean he makes sense?" says Bella.

"Do you make guesses about other people that don't make sense, or not make guesses about them at all?"

"Maybe your mutant power is kicking in and doesn't work on everybody. One like that definitely wouldn't work on me anyway, I'm an antitelepath."

"It might if you were the right sort of telepath."

"That's - that's a wrong sort of telepath for there to be," says Oat.

"Well, I know that."

"Do you? What do you mean exactly?"

"I mean that it's kind of awful there are telepaths who can know things about people without asking and the more they know the worse it is and I'm glad they can't do it to me. What did you mean?"

"Well, then you should tell Sindri your guesses and see if you're right."

"What would that prove?"

"Whether you were understanding him right or just thinking you did."

"It'd be a better mutant power if it let you be understandable back."

"Like there was already a Sindri-shaped hole in your head before this even happened?" ventures Bella.

"Usually if people especially small children don't like being alive people get really worried," Bella volunteers.

"...Well, I think if people didn't want small children to be alive they probably wouldn't have any in the first place," says Bella.

"Neither you nor Sindri is a parent!"

"Well, I'm not especially worried because I suppose it's your business if you want to be alive or not but I'm sort of concerned that you might be having a bad enough time for the answer to be not?"

"What was that?" Bella asks Oat, tilting her head.

"What was what?"

"You sort of started smiling and then changed your mind, how come?"

"This is the weirdest dumbest mutant power."

"I still don't think it's a mutant power at all," says Oat.

"What else would it be?"

"I don't have a hole in my head," Bella says. "Anyway, for most people it works on everyone, not just Sindri or any one person like that."

"Well, but Oat is a mutant and doesn't know what his power is," Bella says. "And I can't think of another way it would be."

"Most people don't get their powers this young anyway," says Sindri. "I don't have mine yet."

"Well, I have mine, it happens. I couldn't be here if I didn't."

"What do you mean," Oat asks Bella, "when you say you can't think of another way it would be?"

"I don't know any other things that happen to people that might make a Sindri-shaped hole in your head and make nobody else make sense to you."

"I don't know," muses Bella.

"I think there is a way to tell but I don't know what it is," says Sindri. "The way my parents talk about it, they know for sure I don't have mine yet, and how could they know that if there wasn't a way to tell which things are and aren't a power?"

"Well, it would also have to be something that suddenly appears," says Bella. "And is weird."

"When did yours suddenly appear?"

"We're not sure because nobody was trying to telepath me until I started first grade."

"...Why was somebody trying to telepath you then?"

"Because I kept tripping and having bruises and they wanted to check to make sure my mom wasn't hitting me but she wasn't. They telepathed her instead when it didn't work on me. But it has to have been earlier than that because I broke monitors," she adds thoughtfully.

"It could have suddenly appeared! It just wasn't obvious because I didn't catch fire or grow wings or something."

"Maybe I noticed but I was like two," she says, "and don't remember."

"That's now how you find out true things," says Bella, "but it might be a good way to operate until you can find them out."

"I'm not sure I'd even want to find something out if finding it out would be that horrible," says Sindri.

"Huh."

"I don't think there's actually such a thing as something so horrible that I'd kill myself if I knew it," says Sindri. "But if there was, and if I thought it might be true, I'd try not to find out. Because if I found out it was true then I would die, but if I didn't find it out then maybe it would stop being true without me, or I'd stop feeling that way about it."

"If there was such a thing I'd still need to know because it would have to be the kind of thing where it mattered if I was dead or not."

"...What?" says Oat.

"Like, if I found out that maybe buggers were going to kidnap me and torture me for information and I actually had any information," says Bella, "then that might make me decide to kill myself if they were really going to do that, and it wouldn't help at all with the actual problem of buggers getting information to not know for sure, and I think all the things that might make me want to kill myself are like that."

"That's not a thing about it being horrible, though, that's a practical thing, it's different," says Sindri. "There's practical things like that for me too, probably, but they're not the kind of thing I was thinking about."

"Oh. I don't think I have any of the other kind of thing, then."

"People don't like it when other people seem to be missing out on things they like," says Bella. "It's usually a book or something and not being alive but still."

"What's being from Thule have to do with anything?"

"Thorn A I N N E I eth," says Sindri. Her desk is not set up to type the first or last letters.

She finds the international characters with a little poking and identifies thorn on her own and has him point out eth and looks it up.

I take as my charge this country and its people, and I swear none shall go hungry that my hand can feed, and none shall be killed that my hand can protect. With this oath I become a thane of Thule, servant to its ruler and friend to its people. May I never forget my duty.

"Huh," says Bella.

"I guess it wouldn't make a very pretty oath if you were very careful about exact words," muses Bella.

"It's old, it has cultural connotations," says Sindri. "It's not just about what sounds pretty."

"Yeah. I'm probably just too literal to appreciate it."

Nod, nod.

Once they have had time to pick bunks and get acquainted with the room their "mom" has them all get in uniform. (Bella asks if she's supposed to change somewhere else. Crane tells her to get over it. That wasn't what she meant, but she shrugs and changes with everybody else.) Oat's uniform is obviously cut down from a larger one. They get to eat, which everyone is delighted to do because they didn't do so before their launch. And now they are all supposed to troop to the gym, which they will have to be in on a daily basis to compensate for the low gee. They are not to be out of uniform at any time they're not in the shower, at which time they should either be actively in the water or wearing a towel. The gym is nice and cold so this shouldn't present a problem. Look at all this nice gym equipment, go exercise.

Oat cannot really operate a treadmill safely by himself, and even Sindri finds them difficult to handle alone, but they can help each other out.

Eventually their exercise period is over and they are shown to the game room for a look around before their next mealtime.

Games! Nifty! Sindri is a big fan. Oat follows him around and watches him be delighted at things.

It may be for the best that their time in the game room runs out before Sindri gets a chance to challenge Bella at one of those games.

The handholds on the walls are spread out such that most children can grab two at once without a lot of trouble, although the littler kids have to stretch. Sindri can manage it with some pairs of handholds but not others; Oat has no hope. Oat, therefore, spends his time on learning how to accurately propel himself from one handhold to the next, and Sindri copies his tricks, finding them more useful to him than the official maneuvers designed for people less tiny.

Bella spies on them and copies these tricks too in case it is ever useful to be able to do. Lookit her go. "Hiiiii," she says, sailing past in a spin.

"I'm flying!" crows Bella. She lands on her toes and pushes off again with a twist. Somebody bats at her as she goes by and she starts working on how to correct midair; she bounces past that launchie again to provoke more opportunities.

"Don't you want to fly?" Bella asks, clinging near them with windblown hair and a grin. "You probably can't fly like me but you could do a little."

"Bah," says Bella, and she tumbles away again. Someone holds out an arm to her and she catches his hand and they go spinning interestingly.

Oat and Sindri continue to help each other navigate a system that wasn't really designed with them in mind.

"You'll grow," she points out next time she's in their corner of the room, "and you won't have any practice. I'll fetch you if you get stuck floating?"

"At projected rates, by the time I'm tall enough to reliably reach two handholds at once, I will have graduated," says Oat. Sindri snorts.

"So learn to fly with one at a time," says Bella. She demonstrates.

"Why do you want me to?" says Oat.

"It's fun!"

"Also we're supposed to and the grownups might think you're not taking school seriously if you don't," Bella tells Oat.

"If the grownups wanted me to take their school seriously they should have built it better," says Oat.

"Do you want to go back to Earth?"

"Yeah."

"So we could do that!" says Sindri. "If we do extra practice do you want to come with us?"

"Sure."

"Great," says Sindri. "Have fun flying! You look awesome!"

And soon their time in the battle room is also over. Sindri and Oat are not actively reprimanded for their choices.

Well, maybe he had to pee too. The girls' bathroom is far away compared to the nearest one of the more numerous boys' rooms; she just goes in the boys', it's the middle of the night and she can't see where she's going well enough to relish the chance to dance down the corridors.

Oat is not peeing, at least not in that bathroom. He is still not in his bunk when she comes back.

In the morning, Oat appears to wake up with everyone else, as small and socially dysfunctional as ever.

"Where were you last night?" Bella asks him while they all are going to breakfast.

"I couldn't sleep."

"Where'd you go?"

"If I tell you, you might be able to find me there, and then I won't be able to sleep there either."

"...Why?"

"I can't sleep if there's anyone nearby, or might be."

"I wouldn't come bother you in your sleep."

"But you could, if I told you where I was going to be."

"So you need it to be a secret? What if the teachers notice?"

"I don't know."

"Oh." Pause. "I'm not totally sure you thought through going to Battle School very hard."

"I don't think you understand what my alternatives were."

"What were they?"

"Mostly death."

"Mostly?"

"There were some chances to survive available, but none better than this."

"What are you going to do if it doesn't work and you have to go down?"

"At worst, the same things I was doing but better fed and better educated."

"Hm," she says dubiously.

"I don't understand you."

"Why?"

"... What?"

"What did I say that was confusing? What are you trying to figure out about me that you can't?"

"You're having some sort of reaction to my decision to come to Battle School and I don't know what it is or why you're having it."

"Well," she says, "you know a lot more about your circumstances than I do and there might be a very good reason you don't want to go into more detail, but if what I know were all there is to know it still seems like you could have found something better for you to do."

"Something such as what?"

"There are other schools that look at test results like the ones Battle School wants, and even if you were starving you got to take the tests somehow."

"Why would it be better to go to one of those?"

"They might have private rooms or be easier for a very tiny child to get around in. Up here if they find out you need a stepladder for something you can only have one if they launch it into space or already had one around and that's not a problem on Earth."

"I think you are judging schools on the wrong criteria."

"Well, you don't seem to like anything about Battle School, either, so I'm not sure why another school would be worse and you could sleep without having to worry about what if a teacher notices."

"I don't like anything about anything. Other schools would have an easier time getting rid of me and wouldn't feed me as well. I was not, actually, offered a choice of which school to go to; but that is why I didn't ask for one."

Bella nibbles her lip and shrugs.

"I didn't say that," says Bella. "But I would've asked about other places to go if I were him since he is having predictable problems here."

"...What?" echoes Bella.

"Okay," sighs Bella.

And then they have class. Sindri is interested. Oat is... maybe that's what 'bored' looks like; it's hard to tell.

It really is, and Bella has given up on trying to figure Oat out for the moment. Class things!