The nicest thing about graduation, Bea thinks, is that in the brief window after breakfast and before the flames burn through, most of the mals are migrating down to the graduation hall. So it's possible to let one's guard down slightly more than usual and not feel too bad about it. And if you go two to a room instead of separately to wait for the cleansing to finish... it's not like curfew's being enforced.
"...One of the smaller enclaves was destroyed a few weeks before Induction, Bangkok - we'd sponsored them a bit back. No one survived, except for one kid who'd been outside at the time - she's a freshman now, in your group actually, named Sudarat." That'd be the only enclave kid in their group at all - and she's in their Wednesday seminar in rescuing freshmen. She's usually withdrawn and moody. "The word hasn't really spread yet, and no one actually knows what happened exactly. If it wasn't an accident, or a mal... It could've been an opening to an enclave war - and New York's the most obvious candidate there."
"Maybe we can get people to leave all the murdering each other until they're outside the school."
"We'll leave the trust-building between enclaves to you and her, then. We want to focus on the indies."
Thoughtful hum. "The Higgins sisters approached me," she's still a bit ??? about those two being sisters, but it hasn't really been something that's shoved to the front of her priority list yet, "They want to set up a network to protect the independents who aren't associated with an enclave - even after they graduate, it sounds like."
"They've been protecting at least some younger students for a while... But they're hard to get a good read on. And doing that would line up with Gwen Higgins' reputation. Still..."