"That's terrible!"

He dramatically closes his fan to punctuate his opinion. Man, this is great. He should do that all the time.

"Are other countries less dangerous than that? Or is it just that enclaves are better, like here, because they're in the void?" 

"I think mostly indies' parents kill the mals for them?"

"My parents tried, but they weren't good enough at being careful and they died and so did all my brothers and sisters except the one who's four." Masozi says this very matter-of-factly. 

"I'm... sorry."

It feels so inadequate. The concept of all of his family but one being dead opens a small dark pit in the center of his stomach and if he thinks about it too hard he'd fall in.

...Huh. That's - the most friendly or sympathetic interaction that Masozi has seen - what's that boy's name - has seen Jiang Cheng have with anyone. It's confusing. 

He ducks his head. "If I survive I'm going to go find my sister again. I - found a mundane family that'd look after her. They had money and they don't believe in magic and she's going to forget about magic soon and - maybe..." 

She'll have forgotten about him, too, by the time he makes it back. If he does. But that's fine, that was never the point, the point is for her to survive. 

Feelings, she reminds herself, are not for having where people can see them. 

"For what it's worth, most places are... not that dangerous. And most indies don't find the Scholomance to be relaxingly safe." 

"I'm sorry," he says again.

He can't stop thinking about Yanli giving him to some other family, hoping he'd forget her.

He wants to hit something with Zidian.

Masozi...feels like he wants to say something, like he should say something, but he has no idea what. 

"It's oka–" He stops himself. "- No, it's not. And it's - even less okay for a lot of people. I knew kids in Lilongwe who never had any chance to come here. But - if I, if we - if enough people survive then maybe we can make it okay. Someday." 

"Well, this is an incredibly depressing topic of conversation! How is everyone's classes?"

Masozi is pretty content to be distracted from depressing topics. "Wei Wuxian is teaching me the International Phonetic Alphabet! And I learned that the earth goes around the sun because the sun is bigger and so the earth falls toward it except it's falling so fast -" and he launches into a fumbling but very excited recounting of Wei Wuxian's explanation of gravity.