The tank was never inducted; it vanishes to who knows where. Four eighteen-year-olds land sprawling at the Boston induction point and immediately get hit with a wave of general-purpose healing magic while the second healer starts checking them over for injuries.

"I'm fine I'm fine--Annisa--" she's not here but that doesn't mean anything, she would have gone back to Indonesia--"I need a phone!" Then there's a phone in her hand and she hasn't seen a qwerty keyboard in four years but she stumbles through a text to the number Annisa gave her.

This is Marcy ar you OK

We are all fine

She doesn't get a response for ten minutes. 

Then

Annisa is injured

 

Is this her alliance? I will send updates when we know more

She spends those ten minutes becoming increasingly convinced that Annisa is dead and her parents are too busy grieving to answer a text.

The others keep texting the rest of their contact list, telling everyone they're alive and getting back "I'm ok" and "I saw Jessica go down" and "Ferdinand lost his left leg but he'll make it, he'll text you all when he wakes up". And of course a lot of nothing, from a lot of people.

Marcy's phone buzzes and she jumps, because she had forgotten what it felt like when phones did that, but then she reads the text and almost cries with relief.

Injured. Not dead. She's not dead. And whatever else you can say about her parents they definitely cared enough to have a healer at the ready, and an adult healer with reasonable supplies can do a lot. There are never any guarantees, but she still has a chance. Marcy takes a deep breath and types complete sentences this time.

Yes, this is her alliance (Boston enclave). Are you her parents? Please tell us whatever you can when you know. Thank you.

It's another twenty minutes.

She was stabbed in the heart. Her heart is not functioning but we think she's not brain dead. She is in magical stasis now. If you have referrals for anyone who can treat that, they would be appreciated. 

 

 

We would need a long term payment plan.

Through all of this their parents are hugging all of them, and their older siblings and their younger siblings and as many aunts and uncles and grandparents as could cram into the induction point, because they are ALIVE and they are OUT and everyone is way too emotional to care how terrible they all smell. The healers pronounce them all in excellent health Given The Givens and will probably start lobbying for them to start taking twenty-seven kinds of nutrition supplements any minute now.

"Mom, Dad, Annisa--our ally--she needs help. She got stabbed and she's alive but she's in stasis and there's got to be a healer somewhere who can fix it, right?" She can tell she's being incoherent but she can't actually stop being incoherent so she just shows her mother the text.

"It would have to be one of the top healers in the world, to fix that."

"If you were ever the person I remember you being--"

"Of course, Marcy, of course we'll help."

"We couldn't've done it without her. I can get a job."

"Oh, Marcy."

She isn't quite sure what that means but Mom already said the important thing so she can text back now.

I'll get some names for you. We can help with the money, she's one of us. I don't know any numbers yet but I will figure something out.

She knows she has no idea what she's committing to, here, but she can become one of the best enclave guards in the world, or something, and that should be enough to pay one of the best healers in the world, probably. There are four alive people in the squad and they only need to hire one person. They went into the Scholomance and came out intact; they can do anything.

Thank you

 

Do you happen to know anything about Annisa's younger sister Ovi.

She's alive and doing okay. Annisa made her wards and a mal detecting rod and things.

Marcy has three younger siblings inside already and a fourth one going in in a couple hours, by far the most nervous of the hugging family member pile. Between texting and fretting about healers Marcy has been memorizing her face and giving her advice she's already heard a hundred times.

Thank you.

You are welcome to visit if you would like but she won't notice.

 

We will send regular updates on her health.

Visiting someone in stasis is a waste of time she could spend fixing the problem.

Thank you.

They stay at the induction point long enough to see off this year's freshmen, including Marcy's sister Eliza and Franklin's cousin Roku, and then they all go back to the strange and unfamiliar houses they lived in for fourteen years.

Franklin knows, in words, that he can relax out here, but he still checks every room he enters and every piece of furniture he sits on and scrutinizes his dinner before he eats it. His parents assure him it will wear off eventually and he doesn't know if he hopes they're right or not.

The enclave is just like Kevin remembers it and objectively it's a perfectly reasonable size, but parts of it are "outside" and outside is Too Large. He doesn't know the layout as well as he knew the Scholomance blueprints and the farthest things he can see are too far to focus on and the spaces are too large to scan in one sweep of his head and everything is such bright colors. The fake sun is too bright and the fake sky feels so much wronger than a void ceiling. You know where you stand, with the void. It has edges. The fake sky is confusing the issue and also it's too far away.

That night he lies awake for an hour, and then concludes that the problem is that his bedroom is too large. There could be something skittering across the floor in the far corner and he wouldn't know. There isn't, of course, but that's not the point, the point is that he can't sleep. He pulls all his blankets off the bed and piles them on the floor of his closet, which his parents have helpfully stocked with three sets of clothes in various guesses of what his size might be. He evicts the clothes so he can see the walls and ceiling of the closet and then it's almost like sleeping in the tank. He dreams in three hundred and sixty degrees.

Abigail is used to seeing her whole squad at breakfast every morning and has a minor freakout at the kitchen table in which she texts Marcy and Franklin and asks them to confirm they're okay. They're all fine, of course, and they all agree to meet up at her and Kevin's place for lunch. Franklin finds a phone setting that makes your location visible and they all turn it on. It's not quite as good as knowing where each other are, just their phones, but it's still nice.

They all have a dozen things to do. They need to see all their relatives again, and share a year of news, and hear a year of news, plus three years of details that didn't make it into the letters. They need to get their power-sharers retuned to the enclave's main sink. They need to get set up with bank accounts and credit cards and the monthly stipend they get from the enclave's endowment. They need clothes and shoes and toiletries. They need to update the photographs on their fake drivers' licenses and their genuine passports. They need to get more detailed medical workups and get prescribed the inevitable cocktail of nutritional supplements, plus other things. Kevin needs contact lenses. Marcy needs her wisdom teeth out.

The nice thing about having a cell phone is that they can all research and contact healers while they do all this stuff.

A couple days after graduation, Marcy gets a text from an unknown number. 

This is Julian. Annisa hasn't been answering my messages – do you know if she's alive?

She hadn't told anyone the first day, because she had been hoping it would be simple. Then when it became complicated she still hadn't wanted to tell anyone. But it was already becoming clear that she couldn't wait for a fait accompli. 

She's badly injured and in stasis. I'm looking for a healer who can fix a fatal chest wound.

The typing indicator is on for a long time. Then: 

I'm flying to New York in a couple of days. I can ask if they know of anyone. Let me know if there's anything else I can do.

Thanks. I will. 

A long pause.

How is Naima doing?

She's alive. In Paris. I don't have a good way to contact her right now; I'm going to see if she can take physical letters. 

And then, a few hours later: 

Heard from New York HR. She says they don't have anyone Boston wouldn't already know about. I'm sorry. 

Marcy doesn't respond to the second text for a few hours either.

Thank you for trying. Tell Naima we're all glad she's alive. I asked and we don't have any particular connections in Paris, not that New York doesn't.

And, in another few hours (which, if anyone is paying attention, imply that Julian is staying up at very odd hours for Hong Kong): 

She'll appreciate that you tried. Please let me know if anything changes with Annisa. 

I will.

It's just like it was inside, in some ways. You solve your problems and your allies' problems and other people solve theirs. Maybe out here someone will actually run out of personal problems and start having the resources to work on something else.

The first five healers they try are all useless. Two of them say right out that they can't help. One totally fails to respond to all attempts at contact and has no known address. One says he could get Annisa out of stasis and restart her heart, but it would take so long she'd be a mindless vegetable by the end. The fifth has stopped taking cases entirely. Eventually he recommends his brightest former student, a woman named Yan Gao who makes optimistic noises and agrees to fly out to look at Annisa. She refuses to discuss payment until she's seen the problem. 

The problem has been scrubbed and her hair brushed and her clothes changed out for ones that haven't been patched a hundred times, and lies in a shimmery field of magic in her parents' home. They're being run ragged; eighteen year olds who can defend themselves aren't that tasty to mals, but eighteen year olds who can't are delicious. There's a gaping hole in her chest and a puncture in two chambers of her heart; blood stopped reaching her brain about the instant of induction, and they had an initial, partial version of the stasis spell up about a minute and a half after that.

This healer says she thinks she can do it, but she'll need to design something to prevent brain damage the instant the stasis collapses.

 

She thinks it will take at least a few months, and she would want payment up front.

 

 

 

 

We do not expect we can keep Annisa alive for another few months, and do not have payment. I do appreciate your efforts.

She wants to yell at them for trying to give up, yell at the healer for not being faster, yell at the world for making the process of getting her allies out of the Scholomance alive take months longer than it was supposed to. She doesn't.

How much money does she want? If the problem with the wait is just guarding her we can move her into the enclave, it'll be safer there.

In between emailing healers, Marcy has been looking into the wizarding job markets--and the wizarding loan market. There aren't a ton of jobs for eighteen-year-olds, but she's a relatively well-qualified eighteen-year-old. She could get something as a junior artificer, or join one of the teams guarding enclave gates or disabled teenagers. With parents willing to contribute directly and co-sign a loan for more she should be able to spend her first few years' salary up front, and so should everyone else in the squad.

She prefers payment in mana not money

32000 Itir, not sure what that amounts to in the American measurement system

the stasis will last indefinitely but mals are drawn to her

if you can move her into the enclave that would fix that

We'll move her, then. I'll get back to you with the details.

She looks up Itir. The four of them can't generate 32,000 Itir in three months, and Annisa will need expert guards even inside the enclave, so waiting until they have it is a bad plan. She emails the Boston mana management office asking about a loan, and then looks up renting a plane and a team of guards.

At first the wizard with the pilot's license says he's booked all the trips he wants to take for the next month and a half. Telling a sob story to a man she's barely met feels terribly undignified, by Scholomance rules, but the actually pathetic thing would be failing in her mission because she was afraid of looking pathetic. 

We'll be there to get her a week from Saturday. Does she need any special precautions or equipment to be moved safely?

She's going to be on the plane herself, of course. It's not that she doesn't trust the guards she's hired, and it's not as though Annisa's parents will see her as a familiar face. She certainly doesn't think Annisa will know or care who's with her. But she's spent four years not relying on anything that she or Abigail or Franklin or Kevin isn't personally right there looking at. 

The field can move with her fine. It needs to be fed but not that much. There's a interface for transferring mana to it indirectly if transferring mana direct to an unfamiliar working is not something you are comfortable with. 

 

Thank you.

The enclave agrees to loan them the mana. Their usage is going to be audited every month until they've paid it back, which will take the next year if they all get jobs paid in mana and spend every spare moment generating more. Marcy is already spending every spare moment down on the practice range with the children and the off-duty guards, throwing knives and spears and shuriken at paper targets with pictures of mals, building mana with her perfect aim and her sore arms and the anger standing between her and despair.

They iron out a few more details, and the following Friday she gets on a plane to Indonesia.

She was warned about the potential for claustrophobia, and agoraphobia, and panicking at the loss of control, but it turns out what gets her is the turbulence. It feels exactly like being in the tank as the senior dorms descend to the graduation hall, and when she takes the pills she brought to deal with this sort of thing her brain goes fuzzy and comes unglued from itself and it's even harder to remember that she isn't really there. It ends up being a blessing that the flight's so long, because by the time they land it's out of her system and she's almost pulled herself together.

Annisa's parents look like people who haven't slept in a month, and they do a double-take at Marcy, perhaps because they imagined Annisa's powerful American allies less Korean and less eighteen. Overawed tiny Annisa siblings peek out from a door down the hall. 

Annisa is here. She does not appreciate any of this, though.

It's very weird seeing Annisa asleep. She's seen Annisa in just about every other state, from happily absorbed in a shop project to exhausted after a practice run to grumpy about language assignments to mid-shower, but never asleep.

"Thank you for everything. I'll get her back."

"Thank you," Annisa's father says hoarsely, and nothing else, because there's not much else to say.

There really isn't, is there. 

She brought a collapsible wheelchair to push Annisa in, but she's taller than Marcy and a dead weight and it's an embarrassingly clumsy process getting her squared away in it. She can feel Annisa's parents' eyes on her back, and they're total strangers but also something very like her allies and she'd be scared of their judgement if she wasn't far too busy being scared of failure.

"Boston's gonna save Annisa because they're enclavers and can do anything," a tiny voice squeals in the other room and is shushed.

She considers, for an instant, saying something, 'We'll see you in a few months' or 'You bet, kid!', but she doesn't. It's not that she doesn't think they can do it, she thinks to herself. They can and they will. But there are no guarantees. Annisa would want the kids to know that. She pushes the wheelchair out the door like she didn't hear anything and scans for mals like it's a supply run. Today's loot: one mortal vessel.

The mals that have been plaguing this household aggressively for the last month seem scared off by all the professional guards. It's uneventful travel to the plane.

She is not going to have any flashbacks on the plane this time. She is not.

She does.

(The guards politely ignore her aborted attempt to run through the final checks on a collection of nonexistent weaponry. They know how it is.)

The other three are there to meet her at the airport, even Kevin who hates being outside. 

"I said you didn't have to."

"Looking up builds mana. Let's get the fuck home."

They put Annisa in Eliza's bedroom and set everything up for the guards, whose salaries are eating all four of their stipends, Marcy's college fund, and some extra from Abigail and Kevin's parents (who have no more kids under age 14). Marcy emails the healer about delivering the mana and scheduling the procedure and whether there is anything whatsoever that four eighteen-year-olds with their skillsets can do to make it be safer or happen sooner.

The healer is optimistic; if there's brain damage, it'll be because they were too slow getting the stasis set up and there's already brain damage. And magic can heal that, too, with time, it's not her specialty but you can at least get all the tissue back even if you have to build new connections to use it. The first time you use a spell many things can go wrong but she tests on pigs with all her spells. 

It still takes nearly two months for her to be ready.

Kevin gets a job on the enclave maintenance team. It's usually paid in "enclave membership for your children" but he gets paid in mana instead.

Franklin was planning to go into research inventing better wards, but that takes a long time to become lucrative, so he puts it off and sells bags of holding.

Abigail sells potions, and works on learning to bake them into lightweight healing cookies for Scholomance students, and finds excuses to walk past Marcy's house and see that the light is still on in Annisa's room.

Marcy takes shifts training the younger children, teaching them to run and fight and scan a room and identify mals and the hundreds of other things they can't afford to forget even one of. (Was she really that tiny and clueless, once? She must have been.) When the kids aren't around, she does pullups and handstands and horrible wall sits, and remembers Annisa teaching her to horrible wall sit and laughs (because it's that or cry, and she has nothing nothing nothing to be sad about because Annisa is going to be fine and Marcy will pay off the loan and then all her obligations will be cleared and she can rest.)

By the end of the two months, they've paid off about a third of the mana.

The operation takes about four hours; most of that is setting up the spell that'll keep Annisa's tissues oxygenated while it takes ten minutes to rebuild and restart her heart. Once the stasis field goes down it moves quite quickly. The healer lingers about ten minutes after it's done, doing diagnostics, which isn't long enough for Annisa to wake up; magical stasis is more like putting you into a coma than putting you on pause, and it's expected to be an hour or two. 

"She's fine," the healer says regardless of this. "Call me if followup seems necessary, but it shouldn't be."  And she leaves. 

Annisa feels like she is floating very far from everything. She is not sure how that could have happened. Maybe she died. ....no, no, no, she can't have died, she was going to not die. Had a plan. 

What freaks out any given person is kind of random, a lot of the time, and Annisa is subjectively mid-graduation right now, so they stand a meter or two back from the bed and don't make any loud sounds or sudden movements and wait for her to acknowledge their existence, or at least her own.

Annisa thinks she should try not to die. But she doesn't know how. It isn't like in school, where you knew what to do. She is floating - and made of lead, funny how you can float while made of lead -and she doesn't know what direction of floating is dying, though she's pretty sure one of them is -

- she's in pain, that's fine, only living people are in pain -

- she can't breathe -

- she panics about this, even though she already thought she was dying, tries to draw mana into herself for a spell that she's too floating and too suffocating to breathe - and it's not there - and she's got to move she's got to fight she's got to get to her team she's got to get out of here -

To outside observers this looks like she does about nothing for twenty minutes and then whimpers, tries to sit up, and falls out of bed.

Everyone tries to rush over and catch her but also simultaneously stops themselves from doing that, because being a well-oiled combat machine that looks like one mind with four bodies does not help when none of the bodies know what to do. 

The thing to do when nobody knows what to do is that Marcy takes point. She goes and kneels next to Annisa. "Annisa? It's Marcy. You're safe. We got out."

People are talking! That's very rude. Can't they see that Annisa is over here dying? They should do something about that!

It looks like she's in pain. Should she ask Abigail to do the painkiller spell? No, at high levels it makes your senses fuzzy and her senses are probably fuzzy enough already. Should she ask Abigail to give her something for sensory acuity? Maybe, but only if she seems to be stabilizing at something that looks like 'can't perceive things'. 

"Annisa? Can you try to move your hand if you understand me?"

That sounds like Marcy. But Marcy would not be TALKING while Annisa was dying. Marcy would be FIXING IT. An imposter, Annisa concludes. She tries to open her mouth to say something but she's not totally sure what is her mouth and what is - oh, those are her eyes. That was a mistake! It's bright! Mouth, not eyes.

"DYING", she successfully says. She thinks. She's not sure why she bothered because the imposter won't care. 

"Not anymore! We fixed it! Do you want painkillers?"

Okay this instance of talking is Annisa's fault, she tried talking, she cannot blame people for talking back! But ow!!! 

She lies there on the floor thinking and then she says "gradation?" because that seems like the most important thing.

"We made it out," she says, softly because she saw how Annisa winced at the last time she made a sound. "We all survived."

"Oh," says Annisa.

That seems....inadequate to the occasion. If it's really Marcy and not an imposter, but she can't remember why she thought it was. 

"...yay?"

Then she bursts into tears.

Marcy feels that this is incredibly reasonable of her but that doesn't translate into knowing what to do about it! 

"Abigail? I need to know what she's feeling." She adjusts to a sitting position from which it will be very hard to fall over on top of Annisa.

That's very Marcy of her and also she has a point. Abigail does the spell that briefly overwrites Marcy's sensorium with Annisa's.

Marcy swallows a small unhappy noise, waits a few seconds for the effects to wear off, then jumps up as quietly as possible and turns off half of the lights before returning to the floor next to Annisa and putting a hand very gently on her shoulder.

Annisa can see, but only sort of because the brightness of everything hurts! She can hear but only sort of because the loudness of everything hurts! Her chest feels like it was recently cut open and stitched back together! She's dizzy. Her fingers and toes feel numb. 

But if she graduated, none of that matters. 

She has absolutely no idea why she's crying.

Marcy makes the 'Shhhh' gesture at the others and then mouths "Painkiller spell!"

Abigail starts chanting the painkiller spell very quietly; just one verse at first to see how Annisa reacts before turning it up. She's good at doing this particular spell in a near-whisper; it was one of the ones she sold to other kids and some of them (including Annisa) were worried about getting stuck with a new language.

It's darker. And quieter. Annisa still isn't sure she remembers how moving works, which is ridiculous since she was in great shape just this morning -

- wait a second - 

"Boston?" she asks. Presumably if they're not imposters her allies will know what she means.

A complete word! And she recognizes them! Or possibly is just asking about them? Either way this is Progress and she has to make an effort to keep her voice soft and quiet. "Yes. We're in Boston. You were hurt so we brought you here to heal." That should resolve the central confusion without dumping too many additional revelations at once.

Annisa needs to stop being a stupid person! Stupid people die! Just, it's all very confusing. 

"Oh," she says. "Very smart Annisa." Wait she didn't mean to say that part out loud the plan was self- flagellate internally.

Marcy completely fails to register this as potentially awkward because Annisa is being sarcastic again! This is the best day ever! All the joy and relief she didn't manage to feel at graduation is hitting her like a collapsing brick wall and she is completely unaware that she's crying happy tears.

"Did I - make a mistake -"

She realizes she's crying when it interferes with getting her tone of voice right. "No, no, you were amazing, you were perfect, we all got out and it's going to be okay."

"Abigail Franklin Kevin?"

"All alive and not injured." She gestures for them to come closer to where Annisa can see them, and they all sit on the floor in a rough semicircle. (Except Franklin, who squats, because he hates being more than half a second from being able to run.)

"Do you need anything? Water? Painkiller spell? Help sitting up?"

"One thing." 

Yeah, that's Annisa all right. "We're out. We're adults. You can want as many things as you want now." Wow, she phrased that stupidly. 

"Oh. I don't know. I didn't.... miss anything." She hasn't said that even to her allies. It wasn't the kind of thing that mattered. "Except feeling safe."

"Well, you can have that now. Plenty of time to figure out anything else you want. Do you think you'll be able to stand up soon?"

Do they need Annisa to stand up? Annisa can do whatever they need her to. It might be tricky. She thinks the first step is rolling into a ball so she knows where her legs are. She gropes around for them with her hands, which is hard because she also only sort of knows where her hands are. There! Legs! Legs go on the floor. No, not sideways, they go on the floor with the feet down. Hands can stabilize. Then all she has to do is stand up.

...she is stuck on this step.

"There's no hurry. You can stay on the floor, or we can help you get back into bed." She's glad she didn't schedule the guards' last day for today.

"Hurry!" Annisa disagrees. "Trouble Boston! Impress Boston, not trouble Boston!! This Annisa, she can't walk!! Not impressive!"

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

"It's fine! We graduated and that means we're all impressive! You're our ally and it's okay. You don't need to worry about any of that."

"I love you Marcy," Annisa declares, and then succeeds at standing up and topples sideways onto the bed.

Marcy is not going to attempt to interpret that as anything other than "Annisa is still putting together her English". 

Kevin, likewise, is not going to snicker. (He is going to accomplish this by biting his hand where Marcy can't see him.)

"Would you like some water? Would you like us to stop talking and let you take a nap?"

That's Abigail for you, always the civilized one. (Franklin is trying not to be terrified that she might have brain damage. The healer said she'd be fine and brain damage is fixable and Annisa prefers the vast majority of possible states to being in stasis. Counterpoint: if she has brain damage it's his fault for not warding the tank hard enough.)

Flop. "Water! Nap! ....Franklin Abigail Kevin Marcy? Safe?"

"We are all safe and everything is okay." Is this the right time to tell her how long she was out? Nah, let her get some normal sleep first. 

Plastic cup of water from the bathroom sink! She is going to hold it steady while Annisa drinks.

Annisa drinks water! Then she attempts to cast a bitey-ward spell and instead lights her sleeves on fire. 

Abigail flinches and drops the cup, with the convenient result that the rest of the water gets dumped on the fire and the inconvenient result that parts of Annisa's shirt and the bedsheet are now damp. Then she puts out the rest of the fire with a spell.

"Good habits, but we're already behind plenty of wards here. Sorry for dumping water on you."

"Annisa...broken?"

"You're injured but you'll heal, the healer said you'd be fine." And if she's not fine than they'll get the healer back in here and get her to fix it. She is not about to start half-assing this now.

"Okay. Make Boston knives for - place to stay while I recover. You have to figure out how many knives, my thinking is fuzzy."

"You got our enclave slot, remember? You live here now. You already paid for it." 

They did get encouraged, before they entered the Scholomance, to offer their guaranteed slot to someone who would be an asset to the enclave, but everyone knows that you pick the person who can get you out alive, and even if that wasn't the case everyone knows that you can't always avoid this sort of thing, and even if someone had the nerve to be disappointed nobody would dare complain. They promised. And it doesn't matter because Annisa will be fine six months from now.

"Oh."

She starts crying again. 

Marcy takes Annisa's hand. She's not sure who she's trying to comfort.

Abigail takes Marcy's other hand. She knows full well she's trying to comfort both of them.

Annisa is spending way too many of her limited brain cycles freaking out about feeling fuzzy but she thinks she feels less fuzzy than she did a couple of minutes ago. She still doesn't remember graduation at all but she feels halfway oriented, other than that. She should -- say some things that aren't stupid. 

This is surprisingly hard. 

Also she has to stop crying or she won't be able to talk. This should be easy as there's no reason to cry. 

"Thank you. For getting me out. 'm okay. Everything's okay. You should - your families - not a good day to be at a sickbed -"

They should let her sleep. 

They should tell the truth.

"It's not. Graduation day anymore. You were in magic stasis for two months."

She should tell everyone Annisa's awake--but not yet. Some of them will want to talk to her, and she should definitely get to rest before that. Just her parents, today.

"Oh. 

That's a long time. 

Were you - guarding - not fair to you-"

"It was fine. Your parents helped, and we hired some people. I bet your parents will want to visit as soon as possible, once I tell them you're okay."

"Indri's twelve, they can't leave. You should tell them, though. They'll be - happy."

"I will. We should let you take that nap, now. We can stay here or we can go out and a guard can come in if you'd rather."

"I'd rather my allies but I shouldn't say that, they have other things to do," says Annisa sleepily. "The guard is fine."

"I was just going to embroider, I can do that in here no problem. Sleep well." (Now that fabric and thread are cheap, it's nice to have a way to build mana that doesn't require floor space and can be done while already exhausted from exercise.)

Annisa sleeps, mostly well. Occasionally she whimpers and occasionally she tries and fails to startle awake at motions or voices.

Marcy has no idea what her own sleep looked like the day after she graduated. Quite possibly it looked exactly like this. It still hurts to watch. (The other three left once it looked like she was out, to do their jobs and build mana and update their and Marcy's parents.)

Annisa's parents are the only people she told that the operation was going to be today. Now she sends them another email:

Everything went well! Annisa woke up and talked for a bit and said to tell you she was back. She was pretty fuzzy from being out for so long and still exhausted from graduating but the healer said she'll be fine once she's had some time to rest and recover. She's sleeping now. I don't know how long it will be until she feels okay to deal with traveling but I'll keep you posted.

Thank you again for all your help; none of this would have been possible without you.

Thank you

I don't think we could possibly repay you but I am sure Annisa will do her best

she's a clever girl

Marcy contemplates whether she should say anything and gets hit with a wave of exhaustion. Knowing what to say would require knowing what she's feeling and it's like trying to pick up several gallons of peanut butter with her hands. She puts the phone down and embroiders and keeps an eye out for mals, and eventually manages to come up with a sentence that's both true and worth saying.

She helped us get out.

It would be worth grieving a hundred children, to see one Annisa grow up.

Marcy hopes she's that strong, someday. Even in an enclave, you don't have kids unless you know you can bear it.

She's amazing.

When Annisa wakes up she's in pain and disoriented, but with-it enough to recognize the pain as not an emergency and the disoriented as potentially an emergency. She sits straight up and - "Marcy?"

"I'm here." She gets up from where she's sitting in Eliza's desk chair. "How are you feeling?"

" - confused! Where are we?"

Yes, complete sentence! "In one of my sisters' room in Boston. Do you remember the last time you were awake? Abigail and Franklin and Kevin were here."

"We graduated? It's over? - I don't remember anything after, uh, last night checking everything and pretending we were going to try to get a good night's sleep instead of pacing in our rooms."

"Yes! We graduated! We all made it but you got stabbed really badly and spent a while in stasis. So, uh, it's October 24th now. But we're out!"

"....wow. I -" Headshake. "I guess that's all that matters. What a first impression on Boston, though. Am I cleared to do stuff or am I supposed to wait until my chest feels less stabbed?"

"I think you're good to do stuff as long as you're careful to stop if it feels like you're making it worse? Relatedly if you want, like, food or something I can go get it." This last proves to be a mistake, because it makes Marcy remember that she was too anxious for breakfast and then too busy guarding for lunch. She should have texted her dad and asked him to bring up a sandwich.

"We should eat. Have you been worrying about me and not enjoying being out at all."

". . . Yeah." She should tell her about the loan, she deserves to know, it's not actually embarrassing any more than taking out a loan to start a business is embarrassing. And if she puts it off it's just going to get weirder. "Also I'm probably going to keep being busy for a while because I borrowed a bunch of mana from the enclave to pay the healer and I'm trying to settle up in a hurry. But I am also going to be enjoying being out a lot more now that I know you're okay."

"I can pay it back. You should - do things people do for fun. Read books. Meet boys. Never think about grinding mana again."

That's exactly what Marcy would say in Annisa's place, but. "Kevin and Abigail and Franklin and I are all on the hook for it. If we all five grind mana we can pay it back within the year and then we'll all be able to focus on having fun."

A year for five adults. 

Annisa isn't, actually, surprised that they would do that for her. She's surprised in an abstract way that people like them exist at all but she's not surprised that they are them. And she'd have done it for one of them. Because of knowing they'd do it for her. 

"And if you give yourself two weeks to just relax and be okay then we'll pay it back within a year and two weeks."

Again good point, again but. "I'm. Worried that if I lose my momentum I'm going to collapse and be useless for months and that wouldn't be fair. I want to get done and collapse into uselessness with a clear conscience.--You can definitely take two weeks off, or however long, obviously, because you don't have this problem, this is a me problem."

"I've just taken several months off, apparently! Anyway I bet sit-ups with chest wounds are great for building mana."

"If you reinjure yourself Abigail will make the concerned mom face at you. Which reminds me, I said there was going to be food."

"Oh no, the concerned mom face. My plan to offer to arm-wrestle you for who gets to lie in bed doing nothing and who has to build mana is foiled."

Marcy laughs. "If anyone ever tries to impersonate you I will see through them the minute they pass up an opportunity to say something hilarious."

"If anyone ever tries to impersonate you I'll see through it because they will sometimes spend ten minutes enjoying themselves."

"Well, I'm glad that's settled. I should really go get that food. Want anything specific for your first meal on the outside?"

Her mother's cooking. "No, I'm good."

"Okay. I'll be right back."

She gets down to the kitchen via the balcony and the stair rail without touching the actual stairs, then runs up them a couple minutes later with a box of crackers, three apples, a jar of peanut butter, two plates, and two spoons. 

Marcy is very good.

Annisa is very good and so is peanut butter.

Once she's had enough food that she's not at risk of trying to talk with her mouth full, she asks, "Do you want to call your parents? I told them earlier that you were okay but needed to sleep."

"Yeah, I should do that. They must've - done pretty well, if I was hurt that badly when I got out -"

"Yeah, they had a healer right there." She holds out her phone. "Here; they'll recognize my number. You'll get your own phone and stuff in a day or two. . . . Do you want me to go outside while you call?"

Weak smile. "You don't have to worry about getting stuck with Javanese."

"It's true, I don't." She stays right where she is.

She hasn't actually spoken much Javanese in the last four years; it comes out a little rusty. "Dad? It's Annisa."

           "You're alive. You're all right?

"I'm all right. We own Boston a lot of mana but that's fixable. I - I did very well. In school. I was very prepared."

           "I know. You did well for yourself. We'll need help, once you've paid back Boston - keeping you safe while you were unconscious was very difficult."

"Of course. I'll come back once it won't make things complicated in Boston. I'll check whether I can have Indri for a couple weeks here, give you a break. Probably not, though. Everyone would try to get away with that."

           "They would. Indri's affinity is wind."

Which is to say, she's probably not worth spending rare favors on. "The valedictorian my year had a useless affinity. Of course, I don't know if - is Julian alive?" she asks Marcy, switching languages.

"Yes, and so are Naima and Malak and Julia." 

Not exactly surprising - New York and Boston have two of the best survival rates out there - but still better than she'd dared to hope for. "And he got his whole team out," she finishes to her father. 

         "We're preparing her to go maintenance," he says. "There's another Surabaya kid in her cohort thinking the same, they'll watch each others' backs."

So he hasn't given up because of the poor affinity. She's glad of that. It's not hopeless. If Ovi's still alive Indri's senior year then it's tolerable odds, even... Annisa is done thinking about this. "I'll let you know when I'm ready to travel."

         "Yes. Well done, Annisa."

"Mmmhmm. Bye."

"You don't need to feel like you need to wait to visit your parents until the loan's paid off. Even I would go see my parents if I had ended up on a different continent before getting to visit them. But it's your call."

"They need help, I should only go when I'm ready to be helpful. And I want to pay the debt off, I'll feel better once I have. And we're not - they know my plan was to get an American enclave, I'd been telling them that for years."

"That--makes sense." Marcy's been sleeping in the bedroom she shared with Athena as a kid; she's still got eight months before Athena either shows up and wants it or turns it into a painful reminder. 

"I told Julian and everybody the general situation but not that today was when you'd be back, in case you didn't want to deal with a million texts at once."

"I mean, I might as well get them out of the way while I'm still not very mobile rather than once my time has more competition. What're the best ways to grind mana around here?"

"I've been learning embroidery now that thread's cheap. I found out there are kits you can get with fabric that has holes in a little grid and a diagram you can follow to make a picture exactly and all the right colors of thread for it; they're neat."

"Huh. ....maybe I will try learning Mandarin or something. Freshman year several people were horrified by how much mana I was milking out of French."

"Mandarin's cool. Tones are a pain but there's a spell that nudges your vocal cords the right way to help you practice."

"Javanese is tonal! I will only have my ordinary language problem which is that my brain is pretty sure it doesn't need to learn languages and tries to shuffle them out of memory as fast as possible."

"I should learn Javanese now that I can just start random languages at any time with almost no consequences. If studying with other people helps we can tutor each other."

Annisa feels like crying again for some reason? How stupid. "Sounds nice."

Marcy has a vague sense that she has said something wrong but Annisa is (as always) very hard to read. She stands on one foot about it.

"Should - text people. Let them know I'm alive. Julian's team -" It's not pathetic to care, now, but it kind of hurts, which is silly. She barely talked to them senior year.

"They all got out but Naima's stuck in a messed-up legal situation with Paris and doesn't have a phone. The rest of the team's in my contact list." Marcy holds out her phone. "Uh, if you had phone numbers in your pockets your parents probably ended up with them." 

"I doubt anyone else is waiting on tenterhooks but I'll try to retrieve the list eventually." She takes Marcy's phone. "Thanks."

And -

Hey all, bit of a belated update: I'm alive - Annisa

Julian ducks out of a meeting and lets lets a part of himself he didn't even know he was holding tense go slack. He didn't exactly doubt that Annisa would make it – there isn't much beyond the reach of really good magical healing – but he's also spent a long time training himself out of anything that feels too much like hope. 

Congratulations! Marcy told me what was happening – I'm in New York, I'd love to visit if you're feeling up to it. 

I feel great! I mean, I have a chest wound, but I'm alive which feels great.