“But Shanghai already has them, presumably…”

"Yeah. These would be Chinese enclavers, building another school."

..........................

Anything new, Backchannel?

That sure is a magical nondisclosure agreement.

So no. “…If the magical NDA is preventing him from talking to us, then…there’s something covered by the NDA that’s relevant. Not just in terms of who has it, I think, but in the spells themselves—it could be that there’s something else, I assume you can use magical nondisclosure for more than just spells…”

"In principle for basically anything, yeah."

“Can you tell us if the reason you can’t tell us anything, has to do with the spells or not?” And she’s keeping Backchannel wide open just in case.

........

(Backchannel Says: being in a mawmouth sucks and nothing else on his mind right now can get through the NDA.)

Sigh. “It’s not working. I don’t suppose you know of anyone who’s in school who might know that I could interrogate.”

"About enclave-building? It's not really something we focus on in here, considering."

“I didn’t think so. Although, actually, if there were someone not in school, who might know, who had been eaten by a maw-mouth—Subject Zero is more talkative than Sir Alfred, and was eaten considerably more recently.”

"...I don't have any names but I guess there might be some in the latest Journal of Mal Studies, the void'll cough it up easy."

Kareen gets the void to cough up some Journal of Mal Studies and goes to fetch it. Even if there’s nobody who has the information she wants, more names to connect mirrors to and put on audiobooks for is good.

There is a mention of the most recent maw-mouth attack and one name is listed in full.

Kareen pulls out another mirror and recites the name.

"- I'm gonna bail before you start talking to that Scandinavian-sounding person please?"

“—Oh, yeah, of course, sorry.” Hand.

"Thanks." Hand.

And Bella is back in the cafeteria and Kareen will do what she can for this maw-mouth victim.

The Scandinavian sounding person manages to, with enough questioning, evince a preference for trivia shows and agree to enough vision enhancements to be able to see them through the mirror.

Trivia show. Vision enhancements.

When Kareen finds out how maw-mouths happen she’s going to be mad at whoever is responsible.

She goes to the void for more issues of the Journal. She can’t save these people yet, but she can do more than nothing.

She makes sure none of the mirrors are audible from her Panopticon before lunch is over and she goes up to the library to do study groups. She really doesn’t want to bring the whole school in on Operation Maw-Mirror; Kareen is better than most people at not being incredibly depressed by witnessing horrible suffering and even she’s feeling kind of subdued about it.

El's sorting spell works a treat. She can have piles of tidy hides and neatly log-cabin-stacked bones and fluids politely pooled into the shells of anything conveniently able to hold it and heaps of scales and teeth sorted and graded by quality and size.

Oh, wow, that’s so cool. She can keep doing that all night, looking for something that keeps twitching after being so neatly dismembered.

There's something that looks sort of like a magic robot and its parts scoot towards each other after they've been dismantled. There's some kind of ooze; the more voluminous liquid parts (stored in a balloon airsac of some frog-thing) don't move, but the dried-out foamy mass of glittery green meringue does.