Maybe it was the fact that the nexus hallway was a narrower space than the lunchroom or the venues for the dances I’d been to, and less formal a gathering than the classes I attended… but then, I hadn’t felt this way when Hazel’d had her community potluck on Sunday. I’d been aware of a spirit of togetherness, but it had felt like something external to me… something I could see and maybe touch, but not something I could be included in.

Even when a good number of other students had come together in protest or whatever they’d been feeling when I got banished to the labyrinth, I’d felt more surprised and overwhelmed by the surge of support than I’d felt any real kind of connection to those who’d turned out.

Maybe that had been a mistake… maybe if I’d reached back out more, followed up on that a little bit, I might have been able to carve out more of a place for myself.

“You go to a human university, you can’t expect everything to be your size unless you’re a human,” Oru was saying as we approached.

“Actually…” Pala began, a little bit hesitantly. She seemed eager to speak up, but uncertain of her right to do so… it was easy to see how less invested she was in the topic than the two principal combatants.

“Is it a human university?” Shiel replied. “I mean, it’s definitely human-owned and human-ran, and naturally it’s very humanocentric…”

I could understand Pala’s hanging back from the conversation and her look of mild amusement. The problems of the shorter races might interest her in the abstract, as she had her own version of the same issues to deal with, but she’d have less reason to be emotionally involved than the goblin or kobold.

“Well, naturally. So what are you even arguing for?” Oru asked.

“I didn’t expect… hi, Two!” Pala said, seeing us.

“Hi, Pala. Hi, Hazel,” Two said.

“Hello, Two,” Hazel said. “Pull up a floor and join the, er, fun.”

“As I was…” Pala started to say as we sat down, but Oru and Shiel were too engrossed in their debate to notice.

“Well, the fact that it remains a de facto human institution doesn’t matter,” Shiel said. “The moment they started accepting enrollment from other races, they’ve defined themselves as a university for all of those races, but by not making their facilities and services equally accessible they’ve done so poorly.”

“To hear you speak, I’d think you don’t want them to let anyone in at all,” Oru said.

“No, explicitly excluding other races is its own failing,” Shiel said. “The most that could be said for it is that it’s honest. Here, they’re saying that all races are equal, but they’re rating our needs differently. Their actions have proven…”

“I didn’t expect things to be my size, is what I was saying,” Pala said. “I just said that I would like for them to be so.”

“Well, there you go,” Oru said.

“Wait a second,” I said, adjusting my position… sitting on the floor could be uncomfortable enough, but the sloped floor in the nexus made it even more awkward. “You’re all talking about how big Pala is?”

“I was talking about how small the buildings are,” Pala said.

“Not specifically about her, no,” Shiel said. “She’s merely serving as a convenient example of how humans have prized their own accessibility over others.”

“When I mentioned it, I thought I was talking specifically about me,” Pala said. “Did I say it wrongly?”

“You said it fine, love,” Hazel said. “Goblin-type ears just have a lot of room for words to echo around in.”

“Oh, don’t you start,” Shiel said.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Hazel said.

“I know what you meant, Pala,” Oru said. “And I’ve been inconvenienced for my size, too. But like I said, there’s got to be a practical limit on the amount of special accommodations they can make.”

“I think it’s more of a special accommodation when everything around you,” Shiel said, “the buildings, the doorways, the furniture, the lifts, the bathroom facilities… literally everything is designed specifically to accommodate you and people like you.”

“Isn’t that what you’re asking for?” Oru asked.

“Not for buildings made for any one type of person, no,” Shiel said. “For everyone. If they made a building that was truly accessible to everyone, each accommodation that was made to achieve that goal would be less ‘special’ and more routine.”

“Wouldn’t that get really expensive really fast?” I said.

“Buildings are really expensive to make, I would imagine,” Shiel said. “But people come up with the funds for it if a building needs to be built. That kind of money on a building is considered reasonable, right? Normal. But who defines what’s normal?”

“The people who live there,” Oru said.

“Okay, so if any of you tall folk came back to my warren, or Oru’s village, or the shire of Logfallen, you wouldn’t be able to get around very well,” Shiel said. “You wouldn’t be able to walk through any of the portals, or fit in furniture… well, we don’t really use ‘furniture’… but you wouldn’t be able to stand up in our tunnels. And it wouldn’t be because we did anything to exclude you. We just constructed them the way we normally do. Our definition of normal excludes non-kobolds.”

“Well, again, there you go,” Oru said. “It’s not on purpose, it’s not to keep anyone out… it’s just doing what you’d do normally. Can we ask for more?”

“If we don’t, we deserve what we get,” Shiel said. “My point is that what’s ‘normal’ is entirely up to the people making the definition, so there’s no reason it can’t be defined more broadly.”

“So why not start at home?” Oru asked. “Why not start digging bigger warrens?”

“If I had any input on warren construction… or much of anything else… maybe I would. But our warrens are inaccessible for reasons of self-protection, and self-determination,” Shiel said.

“And humans don’t get to self-determine?” Oru asked.

“‘Human society’, by nature of their imperialistic impulses, is intrinsically pluralistic,” Shiel said. “Their culture touches and envelops a lot of other races. What we do in our mining communities by ourselves is different than what humans do. If we went so far as to put up a sign that said ‘No humans allowed!’, would it make a difference to anyone? Humans don’t have to pass through our tunnels to get anywhere. Humans aren’t surrounded by our warrens. And as a race they’ve shown a tendency to go into other peoples’ lands and do whatever they want anyway.”

“Well, if you’re talking about what’s fair, why does it matter how many humans need to pass through your mines?” Oru asked. “If it’s the principle of the thing you ought to make sure humans and giants and orcs and gelatinous thingies can fit comfortably in your tunnels anyway.”

“If we were inviting humans and ogres and ‘thingies’ into our warrens and these warrens were the only source of certain advantages they would need to get along in a kobold-dominated world, then yes, it would be horribly unfair of us not to accommodate them,” Shiel said.

“Aren’t you maybe overstating the case?” I said. “I mean, I think in general I’d agree with your side over Oru’s, but humans control something like less than twenty percent of the land on the surface of the world, and most of that’s split between two empires that haven’t exactly gotten along that well, historically.”

“Okay, a human-dominated continent,” Shiel said. “Or sphere of influence. The Imperium surrounds or borders every kobold warren known to us in this part of the world. It would take about ten percent of the Imperial military forces to wipe out every one of those communities in under a year.”

“Oh, you’re making that up,” Oru said.

“No… it is just an estimate, obviously, but it’s based on the actual strength of the imperial armed forces, the typical defenses of a kobold warren, and historical engagements between human and kobold forces on kobold turf,” Shiel said. “We don’t have the same capabilities as dwarves. We don’t have their same investment in and knowledge of shielding and secrecy runes, in traps, or fortifications. No matter how much we dig in, we could be dug out. All of which means that humans will never have to worry about us the way we have to worry about them.”

“Why would you ever sit down and figure out something like that in the first place?” Honey asked. “It’s so… morbid.”

“I think about it because they think about it,” Shiel said. “You don’t think the imperial government has done studies and war games and divinations to figure out how to permanently pacify or eliminate the other races that share its domain?”

“You’re looking well, Honey,” I interjected. Up closer, she was noticeably down a little weight and a little sleep, but she seemed relaxed, almost relieved. In fact, it was hard to say how exactly but now that she’d drawn attention to herself she was practically radiating an almost tangible sense of relief.

“Oh, I’m just glad the whole thing… well, it’s nice to know it was just a monster attack, you know?” Honey said. She hiccuped, or giggled. “Not a murder after all.”

Any guilt I might have felt from not immediately divulging the truth was wiped out by seeing how much calm the idea gave her. Perhaps that was a good sign for the campus mood. After contemplating the implications of a horrible murder, “just a monster attack” didn’t seem so bad.

“Look, the thing we’re overlooking is that this was an all-human university,” Oru said. “They made the choice to open it up to all races. Doesn’t that say something? About their willingness to accommodate? About their intentions?”

“I think inviting members of every race to come to your university but not making it fully accessible to them says something, alright,” Shiel said. “It says that it’s all still yours. I mean, apart from the university’s actual owners, who do you think has the greatest sense of ownership, of belonging: the human students, or the non-humans?”

“Is that a real question?” Oru asked. “This university was built and founded and run by humans, and it’s in the middle of a human empire. Obviously humans are going to feel more at home. Not that I feel particularly unwelcome… I mean, I can be made to feel unwelcome in a room with no humans in it as easily as one that’s full of humans. I just think it’s more a matter of… economics, I guess you’d say. I think a lot of it is.”

“A lot of what is?” Sheil asked.

“The stuff you talk about,” Oru said. “All the racism you think is everywhere. Doesn’t it really come down to money and power?”

“Well, yes… it comes down to power, and money is a form of that,” Shiel said. “Racism without power would just be prejudice. Ugly, but irrelevant.”

“Except I don’t think it’s about race,” Oru said. “I mean, okay, yes… some people don’t like goblins. I call that racism. You’d probably call it prejudice. But it’s not like I care what some hairy, round-faced breast ape thinks I look like, right?”

“But human attitudes matter because they’ve got the power,” Shiel said. “Including most of the money.”

“Okay, yeah, right now there’s a lot of money in human hands, but they’ve got a lot more hands than we do, and they’ve been collecting money for longer,” Oru said. “As a race, I mean. But a rich goblin who didn’t want to live in the lowlands could go and buy a house on a hilltop, or a townhouse in the city…”

“Or a cityhouse in the town,” Hazel added.

“…or whatever… and there are poor humans, who are way worse off than anyone in my village,” Oru said. “I mean, everybody there has a house. I doubt the humans treat them any better than they treat us.”

“So there’s classism and racism,” Shiel said. “I don’t know why you think this is better than just racism.”

“I don’t think it’s racism and… classism,” Oru said. “I don’t even think there’s that much classism, unless that’s a fancy word for ‘some people have more money than you do’. But I also just don’t think there’s as much racism as you think there is.”

“Um… didn’t you tell me that you didn’t like going out at night because you were afraid of being attacked by fighter students?” I asked her. I had to wonder how much her current stance was being informed by her desire to disagree with the extremity of Shiel’s position. I had a hunch that left to her own devices she’d be less sanguine about the general state of human race relations and on-campus equality… but when Shiel said something too extreme for her to support, she ended up arguing against the whole thing.

“Yes, but… that’s just people being stupid,” Oru said. “Thinking ‘goblin equals monster equals kill it!‘ But it’s not like I walk into a sweet shop and the shopkeeper says, ‘Oh, you’re a monster. I can’t take your coppers because monsters are for killing.’”

“So you’re fine with the idea that you might get randomly killed for your race as long as you can buy sweets?” Shiel said.

“I’m not ‘fine’ with being killed, but it’s dangerous outside for everyone,” Oru said. “More humans get killed by ghouls, so I suppose that ghouls are racist against humans?”

“Hold on, now,” Hazel said, in a surprisingly serious voice. I could almost feel something shifting inside her, like a card had been flipped over or a puzzle piece had locked into place. “I think you’ve got a point, Oru, but I don’t think it’s the one you mean to make.”

“What do you mean?” Oru asked.

“Oh, this should be good,” Shiel said.

“I mean, we’ve the same sorts of problems in my shire, only we’re sort of an insular lot, so it’s all one race, see? But there are definitely what you’d call ‘class divisions’, and you see the same sorts of things you’re talking about across the classes.”

“Not really,” Honey said. “I think our society’s really very… egalitarian. I mean, we did away with most noble titles before the Imperium did, and peasantry before that. I think it’s like Oru said: some people just have more money. You have to expect that, unless you do away with money entirely… but it’s not like money plays favorites.”

“Just because we stopped naming the classes doesn’t mean they went away, Honey,” Hazel said. “Or that people don’t know them. Look at your family. Look at mine.”

“We’re cousins, Hazel. We are family.”

“You know what I mean,” Hazel said. “Your folks. My folks. You could put them in a line, with you at the front, us at the back, and most any random folks from town falling somewhere in between us. That’s class.”

“If you think the folks in town looked down on you, Hazel, it might be because of the way you walked around like you had a chip on your shoulder all the time,” Honey said.

“Are you saying your folks didn’t look down on my dad and me?”

“Well, if you want to bring that up… but if that’s a matter of class, Hazel, it’s that your father didn’t have any class, of the other kind, and you didn’t have the chance to pick any up from him,” Honey said. “And that’s sad, but that sort of class is something a person of any station can acquire, not a… social… division… thingy.”

“Except…” Shiel said. “Except that it’s not really a different sort, is it? It still refers to social standing.”

“It is,” Honey said. “I meant class as in classy, as in… classiness.”

“Yes, but that means ‘having class’,” Shiel said. “You see, ‘classy manners’ are manners associated with people ‘of a certain class’. Anybody can learn them, but if your parents have them, you learn them growing up. If everybody else around you shows them, then that becomes like your idea of what normal default behavior is. The fact that it’s a special advantage you possess that others don’t doesn’t even occur to you.”

“Some advantage,” Honey said. “It’s just… one way of behaving. So what if Hazel learned other ways? Is she really worse off because she doesn’t know how to fold a napkin?”

“Hey now! I fold them better than you do,” Hazel said.

“She is pretty good at that,” Two added.

“Well, yeah, because you practiced it every day all summer long after my mum said something about it,” Honey said.

“After she snapped my head off, more like, ” Hazel said.

“The point is that you practiced it and you got better at it, and anybody could do that,” Honey said.

“The point is that your ‘classy’ behaviors act like a filter,” Shiel said. “Keeping the ‘right’ sort of people above the ‘wrong’ sorts… it can be used to sort out who gets dinner invitations, who’s allowed into the ‘respectable’ establishments… if the class stigma’s strong enough, that becomes self-policing as people who don’t know the etiquette end up staying away for fear of embarrassment…”

“Is it anybody else’s fault if they do?” Honey said.

“Yes. It’s the fault of people who would use social stigma as a weapon,” Shiel said. “These are just some examples of how people of a lower class end up with reduced opportunities.”

“Oh, yes, right,” Hazel said, nodding. “I could talk all day about ‘reduced opportunities’ compared to Honey.”

“That’s not ‘reduced opportunities’, that’s just being poor,” Honey said.

“Trust me, Honey, that reduces your opportunities,” Hazel said.

I found myself nodding along with Hazel. Growing up with less money than everyone else in your class was an almost daily lesson in “reduced opportunities”. I wasn’t sure how much of it came down to class… my grandmother was respected and “the right sort of people” in the eyes of most, and she owned her own home even if she’d never exactly rich, but her respectability hadn’t in any way been passed down onto her daughter the single mother.

“Alright, then, so it’s reduced opportunities to spend money,” Honey said. “If you’ve got one gold and I’ve got ten gold, then I can buy ten times as much. Stands to reason.”

“Yeah,” Oru said. “Stands to reason.”

“Yeah, only maybe there are more things in the world that will do you lasting good that and cost ten gold than cost one,” Hazel said. “Maybe we each need one gold for food to live on and here comes a thrilling investment opportunity that costs nine more. Or even one more. I couldn’t… if I couldn’t afford to come to university, you’d have an opportunity I don’t.”

“So? You can make a good living without a university education,” Honey said. “I was thinking about being a teacher, once. You just need to know your figures and your letters to teach the young ones.”

“You think anybody ‘proper’ would have let me teach their children?” Hazel said. “Assuming I could even live on what they give the schoolteachers.”

“Well, money’s not everything.”

“No, just food and shelter and decent clothing and anything else,” Hazel said.

“Miss Ruth told me the best things in life are free,” Two said.

“Yeah? Did she say that as she took money out of your pockets?” Hazel asked.

“No,” Two said. “She said ‘Best I hold onto that for you’ when she did that.”

“Is she keeping a lot of your money safe, then?” Hazel asked.

“Not anymore,” Two said. “I donated it to Hearts of Clay.”

“I’d ask another question but I don’t think I’d like the answer,” Hazel said. “Anyway… my point is that there’s class, and it’s real, and it doesn’t need race to make a mess of things. Though I’m pretty sure race is in there, too… tallfolk don’t even know about river people, and they still look at me like I’m not there.”

“It’s all real and it’s all related,” Shiel said. “Lower class correlates with less money, which is less power, and class tend to correlate strongly with races, even intraraces.”

“Whatra-races?” Oru said.

“Like hobgoblins and goblins,” Shiel said. “Or arguably, hobgoblins, kobolds, and goblins.”

“Oh, sub-races,” Oru said.

“I don’t like the connotations of that word,” Shiel said. “I am not sub-goblin.”

“I didn’t say you are,” Oru said. “It’s just a word… the proper one. Hobgoblins, kobolds, and goblins are all sub-races of the same race.”

“And what race is that?”

“Well… goblin, I guess,” Oru said. “That’s why we’re called ‘goblinoids’.”

“We’re called ‘goblinoids’ by humans because they met you first,” Shiel said.

“Yes, and so if they’d met you first we’d be koboldoids,” Oru said. “Do you think I’d be complaining?”

“Honestly? No.”

“Well, there you go!” Oru said. “And you don’t have anything to complain about. ‘Teeth and claws may rend my flesh’… is there a way to make that rhyme in Pax?”

A couple of human girls, one with sandy hair and freckled skin… and maybe just a trace of La Belle ancestry in her face, though that could have been my imagination… and the other with dark hair in long, tight braids… had wandered over and were standing a few feet away, listening to the conversation.

“Oh, hello, Irene,” Shiel said when she noticed them. She said the name with a long e audible on the end.

“Hello, Shiel,” the darker-toned girl said with a distinct Metropolitan accent. It was so weird hearing those vowels coming out of a person over three feet tall. “This is my friend I was telling you about, Jeanie?”

“Hi,” the other girl said.

“Oh, right, you wanted to trade soldiers,” Shiel said. It seemed like such a random thing to say, until I realized she was talking about her game.

“Well, yeah,” Jeanie said. She gave a nervous little laugh. “The only thing is, I don’t have any soldiers, yet…”

“Oh, well, I do sell them, but I’ve kind of got a backlog for that,” Shiel said. “I’ll do a trade if it gives me something I can use immediately, but otherwise I’d end up selling my way right out of the game, and I’m not prepared to do that for any price.”

“Oh, yeah, I can respect that. The thing is that I don’t have any soldiers,” Jeanie said, “but I’ve been making… landscapes, I guess… for Irene and she said you might like them?”

“What kind of landscapes? Do you mean battlefields?”

“They’re painted mats,” Jeanie said. “You can roll them up like a poster… I made the first one for a class. I use memory parchment, so you can switch it between two different pictures I made, one that’s more open and one that has a lot of trees, and if you touch two points with fingers on different hands it’ll show you the distance between them. The next one I got fancier… it does that, and you can also turn on a grid if you just want to be able to eyeball it.”

“Interesting,” Shiel said, and to my shame I almost agreed with her. Interactive maps were a lot more interesting than make-believe warfare. “Detailed maps are awesome, but the problem is that even if you can toggle between two of them, that’s two identical maps that you’re going to be fighting on again and again. It might be nice to be able to re-fight the same battle with different forces, but I like being able to change things up more.”

“Oh, well, that was just my first attempt,” Jeanie said. “My second one had three maps stored in it, and I copied the shape of a skirmish field for it… so you can rotate it and get six different starting positions. I had another brainwave while I was working on it… too late to work on it… but for my third map I cut the memory parchment into smaller sections and then attached them together, so you have a bunch of different sections that you can change independently of each other.”

“How long have you been working on these?” Shiel asked.

“Three days,” Jeanie said. “I get an idea in my head and it tends to take over, you know? I use the clone and stamp brushes a lot, but I have a good variety of trees and things because each one I have everything I’ve done before to draw on plus whatever new I make. Anyway, each section of my newest map has five different landscapes… I couldn’t make them too different because the edges have to match up or it looks all blocky.”

“Couldn’t you get around that by not permanently attaching the sections?” I asked. “Just leave the pieces separate and let people put them where they want. If you did it that way, you’d have an easier time trading, too… you wouldn’t have to finish a whole five-way map for each person you wanted to trade with.”

“I don’t know how thick this memory parchment is, but it seems like that might be messy,” Shiel said. “It seems like they’d be easy to move or scatter.”

“I guess I could attach them to cardstock or board or something,” Jeanie said. “I’m trying to find a way around the sectioning, though, because I’m looking at ways of putting more special effects in, like fires and poison clouds and things… that’s going to be hard enough if I’m not enchanting a hundred sheets individually for each map or whatever.”

“Well, then you either make a transparent overlay that you put over the whole map, or a baseboard enchanted to display the effects a short distance above it,” I said. “I don’t think I could do it, but I can see how it would be done. You’d just need a bunch of conditionals and tiny little illusions, or something. Illusions are generally pretty cheap. It would still be a lot more work than just storing paintings in memory parchment.”

“True,” she said. “And honestly, if I made all of them do that I’d never have any finished for trading. If I could figure out a way to copy them without losing the quality.”

“What about that clone brush you mentioned?” Shiel asked.

“Oh, it’s good for picking up a few inches from here and putting it there,” she said. “But I’d need something a lot more heavy-duty to retain a whole painting, even a square foot at a time, with the level of color and detail I use. The school’s autoscribes just aren’t set up for that kind of thing… I mean, nobody outside of publishing houses has that kind of equipment just lying around.”

“Or bored enchanters,” I said. “Hey, Two,” I said, right at the same time that Hazel did.

“I believe I could copy your paintings, Jeanie,” Two said.

“She wants twenty-five percent,” Hazel said. “Cash goes to her, any figures you get in trade you can give to me and I’ll pay her for them.”

“I’d have to see what you can do first,” Jeanie said.

“Yeah, that goes for me to you,” Shiel said. “But if they’re workable I think we could come to an arrangement.”

“They’re more than workable,” Irene said. “Believe me, she paints like you carve.”

“With a chisel?” Pala said.

“You two are in the apartments out on west campus?” Shiel asked, and they nodded.

“Yeah, in the senior housing. We’re crashing in Pelinor tonight, I think,” Irene said. “You could walk back with us with tomorrow morning if you want, or we could make a time to bring one of the maps over?”

“That’s a long walk for me, and I’ve got class in the morning,” Shiel said. “But I should be in my room from three on… it’s top floor, east side, last door on the right before the lounge.”

“Cool,” Irene said. “I also wanted to talk to you about this meeting that some of us are brewing up for a new campus group… we don’t have a faculty sponsor yet so it’s not official, but this is just kind of a planning thing…”

“Oh, there is Ian,” Pala said, pushing herself up and craning her neck uphill. I looked up and saw that Ian had indeed entered through the doors at the back of the hall. He was with Winnie, Puddy’s cousin with the annoying laugh. “Did I tell you he said he was coming?”

“No,” I said, trying not to scowl at his choice of company… or the fact that he had any. I wanted to talk to him about what had happened in the bathroom with Iona, which would necessitate going off alone with him. “It’s okay. Excuse me, I’ve got to go tell him… hi.”

I’d given up on trying to make up an excuse at the last moment, when it had occurred to me that I could just say I was going to say hi to him and it wouldn’t be suspicious at all. That information had arrived a few seconds too late to be useful, and I blushed at the awkward sentence that had fallen out of my mouth.

“Ah… young love,” Irene said, grinning. “Fresher, right? Were we ever that young?You go run and tell him ‘hi’, then.”

Apparently awkwardness was the perfect camouflage in some settings.

Soon: Ian and Mackenzie quibble over word meanings. And there’s sex. It’s almost like something that might happen in Tales of MU. Later: Puddy.

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

“No, it’s… kind of a front hallway, I guess,” I said. “It connects the dorms in this cluster together.”

“Oh,” Pala said. “It looks more like a sitting room to me.”

She had a point… there were the most people than I’d ever seen in the nexus since after the first day when people had been moving in and getting to know the area. Now there were people sitting all over the gently sloped floor. Some of them were eating dinner from the corner store, or fast food from the student union.

There were more human-only groups than otherwise, but it was a relief to see that they were sharing the space with a good number of Harlowe students, some even in mixed groups. Even in the absence of stupidity-fueled violence, I had figured the press conference’s “revelation” would have kept everybody buttoned down inside their dorms… instead it looked like a good number of people had decided to split the difference to obey the letter of the safety guidelines and the spirit of camaraderie.

Hazel’s little “community outreach” initiative on the day of the killing hadn’t lost all of its momentum in the following days, it seemed. I looked around to see if I could spot her… I saw Oru and Shiel, and as soon as I saw them I realized that Honey was with them, looking better and more relaxed than she had in recent days. She actually waved at me when she saw me looking at her. After a second of being stunned, I waved back.

“Well, this is nice,” Pala said. “Everybody seems so friendly. It makes me wish I lived on campus.”

“Not everyone in the dorms are friendly, but yeah, it is nice to see.”

“And the ceiling is so high!” she said. I’d never thought about it, but it really was… especially at the southern end of the hallway. The floor followed the general contours of the sloping ground, but the ceiling was flat. “I hope that the rest of it is like this, because this and the student union atrium and the gymnasium center are the only places on the campus where I don’t have to stoop.”

“Oh, well… it’s not quite as spacious inside the actual dorms, no,” I said, trying to picture it in my head. I’d never given that much thought to headroom in the hallways. Harlowe Hall seemed like one of the bigger dorms, in terms of its proportions. There were larger dorms, and dorms that housed more students, but Harlowe had been built during a period when the fashion for institutional building designs called for broad hallways and high ceilings. The towers were similar, though their layout was a little more… involved. “Did you do much exploring of the dorm where the Veil party was?”

She shook her head.

“The party room was nice and big but the hallways leading out of it looked very… cramped,” she said. “And I was not sure where I was allowed to go.”

“Well, you’ll probably be able to get around in Harlowe,” I said. “But it won’t be like this.”

“Oh,” she said. “Then I believe I will just.. hang out… in here for a while, if you think that’s okay. I mean if you think you will be safe. You won’t be attacked in your own dorm, do you think?”

It had happened before, but I didn’t want to say anything that would make Pala feel guilty about staying behind when she was clearly enjoying being able to stand upright with a roof over head. She’d been “hired” by Ian to protect me from out-of-control human vigilantes, not the random assaults of my dormmates.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. I looked around the gathered groups of students… some of whom were looking at us, but more eyes were drawn towards Pala than me… and made a decision. “I’ll come back down and hang out, too, once I’ve dumped my stuff off in my room and found out what everyone else is up to.”

“Oh, okay,” she said. “I should mirror to Ian to let him know you are safe.”

That made me realize that I should probably do the same thing, since he was worried enough about me to engage a student bodyguard… but I didn’t want to step on Pala’s toes. She was doing this for a grade, and I didn’t know what all affected her score.

“Okay, would you please tell him where we are so that he can come hang out with us if he wants?” I asked. I thought about adding that I love him, but asking Pala to tell him that seemed weird… so then I considered asking her to tell him that I’d said hi, but that sounded weird for different reasons. “Tell him I said thanks for the escort.”

“Okie dokie,” Pala said, nodding. I watched her mouth mumble over the words as she committed them to memory.

“Oh, um… and thank you, Pala, for doing it.”

“You are welcome,” she said. “I think I am more likely to get full points for guarding your body than anyone else I could have. Because of the danger, you see? Many of my classmates have been marked down for assignments where there was no real threat.”

“Are you going to be penalized because I wasn’t actually attacked?”

“No,” she said. “Our battle effectiveness is graded separately. Even for non-threatening assignments we can be graded on procedure and form.”

“How do they grade that?”

“We write up the assignment afterwards,” she said.

“How do they know you actually did the procedures, then?” I asked.

“The grade is for knowing, I suppose,” she said. “And you have to know it to write it up. Also, we are shadowed sometimes.”

“Do they tell you when?” I asked.

“No. But if you do not note the shadow in your write-up, you fail.”

“How are you supposed to… oh,” I said, grasping the point of the exercise. “I guess that makes sense. Anyway, I’ll be back.”

I headed into Harlowe, climbed the stairs up to the fifth floor with minimal trippage… my shoes had picked up a little moisture outside and a sole slipped off one of the steps on the last flight, jarring me… and headed to my room. Two was sitting at her desk eating a muffin and working on her homework. I’d been hoping to see Amaranth, but she seemed to be alone.

“Hi, Mack! Amaranth and Steff said to tell you that they’re in Steff’s room,” Two said. “They’re in Steff’s room. Sooni left a note for you on the markerboard in permanent markers. I cleaned it off, but I copied it down for you first. Also, you left the door unlocked. You shouldn’t do that when nobody’s in the room.”

“”Hi, Two… I didn’t leave the door unlocked,” I said.

“It wasn’t me,” she said. “Be more careful.”

That would have been more than a little troubling even if I didn’t know that my floormates had been trying to spy on me… I always locked it reflexively, and I knew Two would do so with a conscientiousness that was better than a reflex.

Trina was a minor subtle artist. Dee could take a door off its hinges with her power. I doubted Trina was anywhere near as strong or skilled as she was, but it wouldn’t take much power or skilled at all to pop the lock since it was easy as turning the knob on the inside of the door. Puddy had shown some facility with getting doors open, and would have even had the opportunity to make a copy of the key when she had been my roommate. Any number of students might have learned a form of magic sufficient to get the door open… again, the locks weren’t exactly the most rigorously protected things in the world.

And that was only considering my floormates… my father had managed to physically enter my room at least once.

Suddenly, my dorm room felt a lot less secure to me than it had before. I’d have to investigate options for warding it… something to keep out demons would be problematic for obvious reasons, but something to make the lock a little more robust and maybe let us know when somebody was in the room and we weren’t would be nice. It would have to be a dorm-legal solution, of course, or else Two would object.

“Did Amaranth and Steff say how long they’d be?” I asked. No sense dwelling on something I couldn’t immediately address.

“No, they said we shouldn’t wait for them for dinner,” Two said. “Here is the message.”

She handed me a sheaf of notebook paper on which she’d drawn a brightly colored rainbow background surrounding a heart-shaped white space, with the message, “Hello, Miss Mackenzie! Reflecked Me Please!” written in big curly letters, surrounded by bizarre smiley faces. The misspelled word had been crossed out with a writing pen, and “_^^reflect” written by it. At the bottom, there was a line of characters in the Yokano language, and then a big loopy signature saying “Sooni” in the Draconized script of Pax.

“You didn’t do all this by hand, did you?” I asked.

“No, I scribed it,” she said, which made sense. Two had begun her life, essentially, as a piece of intelligent office equipment.

“Well… I suppose I’d better see what she wants,” I said. I got my mirror out and flipped it open. “Suzune Hoshinotama, Prax,” I told it. I didn’t know if she’d be on campus or not, but she had such a distinctive name that even the province should be enough to identify her.

The swirling mist that usually preceded a reflection had barely started to form when it disappeared. At first I wondered if there was some kind of interference, or if Lee had put a block on outgoing reflections that weren’t to him… but then I heard Sooni’s voice.

“Hello? Hello, Mackenzie?” she said.

“Sooni?” I said. It was weird to be talking to her and seeing my own face reflected back. Watching my lips move as I spoke was weirdly disconcerting.

“Hello!” she said.

“Something’s wrong with the image, Sooni,” I said. “I can’t see you.”

“Oh, well… I turned it off,” she said.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because… because… because I was looking forward to the sound of your voice and I did not want anything to distract me!” she said. Sooni was such a terrible liar, it was a wonder she could even fool herself as often as she did. “Anyway, something is wrong with your mirror because I could not reflect to you!”

“Yeah, well, it’s not actually my mirror,” I said. “It’s really for keeping in touch with my lawyer.”

“Lawyers!” she said. I heard the sound of her heavy wooden sandal hitting a hard surface as she said that. “I am so tired of lawyers… my father’s lawyers have been all around me all week. I am being strangled to death by lawyers! But they say I can have my room back soon.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said.

“But they say my father says I need more ‘supervision’,” she said.

Well, that’s good, I thought.

“Anyway… I’m just so glad that you got my message!” she said.

“Yeah, Two gave it to me,” I said. “Um… so… what’s up?”

“I needed to talk to you because I wanted to apologize to you for trying to drag you into my investigation,” she said. “I see now that I was not being fair to either one of us. I am sorry. I hope you can forgive me.”

No matter how curious I was about the chain of thoughts running through Sooni’s head, had to be safer to graciously accept her heartfelt apology than to ask her to elaborate on the reason behind it. She was making a considerate gesture and I was making one in return. Asking her how she’d arrived at the conclusion that such a gesture was warranted was the conversational equivalent of saying, “Please, sir, I enjoy this sausage… would you show me how it’s made?”

These were the thoughts that went through my head mere moments after I asked her, “What do you mean?”

“Well, I was expecting too much of you,” she said. “You are my dear friend, but you are not a trained investigator with trained investigative skills. I should not have placed such a heavy burden on someone with your meager abilities.”

“…that’s… nice of you to say,” I said.

“Especially since I did not need your help after all!” she said. “Don’t you see, Mackenzie? I had the power to solve the case of the… dead… bird… girl… princess all the time!”

“I… what?” I said. The thought that she might have stumbled over the actual killer didn’t even occur to me… I just didn’t want anybody else to have to put up with being arbitrarily made the villain of Sooni’s story, for their sake and hers. Many people wouldn’t put up with random accusations, magical assaults, and shoe-flingings. “Sooni… they said it was a monster attack.”

“Yes!” Sooni said, with such triumphal joy in her voice that I could just see her beetle-black eyes sparkling. “And just the other day I was saying, I was saying aloud, that I did not see how any person could possibly have done such a thing to poor Lydia.”

“Leda,” I said.

“It might have seemed like a chance remark at the time, but in my experience investigations often turn on such remarks,” she said. “Obviously my intuitive powers of intuition had already grasped what the so-called ‘imperial’ investigators had missed.”

“Obviously,” I said.

“Of course it is for the best that my involvement remain secret,” she said. “There is no sense embarrassing the authorities by letting everyone know they have been shown up by a plucky and spirited girl detective.”

“Well, that goes without saying,” I said, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. I didn’t know if she could see me.

“So anyway… all that I really need from you is to keep your eyes and ears open for my next case,” she said. “I don’t need you to help me solve it.”

She seemed to have forgotten her plans to design and sell clothing as quickly and completely as she’d forgotten about representing Harlowe on the student senate. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing… it was something she had a genuine talent for, but she had seemed to think that the real money was in dressing up like characters from her favorite TV shows, and also that all that was needed was for me to somehow put together an a-commerce ready weavesite for her.

“I’ll let you know if anything comes up,” almost seemed like a neutral, non-committal enough response… except that Sooni’s definition of a binding promise roamed a bit far afield of most people’s.

“Sooni, I don’t think I’m the one to…”

“Nonsense! I believe in you!” she said. “Oh, I have to… bye!”

From the abrupt cut-off, it sounded like she’d been interrupted. Perhaps some of the supervision that she had mentioned had just walked into the room.

I sighed and snapped the mirror shut.

“There’s a bunch of people hanging out downstairs in the nexus,” I said. “Including Pala and Hazel’s cousin Honey. Do you want to go join them?”

“Hallways are supposed to be kept clear,” Two said, her nose wrinkling as if she found the violation distasteful.

“Well, it’s not really a hallway,” I said. “It’s more like a courtyard that got a roof and floor put on.”

“Which made it a hallway.”

“It’s big enough that you can still walk through it when people are sitting in it,” I said. “That’s a pretty good definition of clear.”

“Maybe,” Two said doubtfully.

“Would you rather argue about this or go down and hang out?” I asked, and then watched while she thought it over.

“I would rather go down and hang out,” she decided. “Then stay up here and argue about it. But I would like it best if the hanging out were somewhere else.”

“Well, yes, but we’re not going to be able to make that happen.”

“I know,” she said. “I will be ready to go down with you very shortly.”

She cleaned up her muffin crumbs, put away her homework, and then checked her face in the mirror. I didn’t know what she was checking. Two didn’t wear makeup regularly… she didn’t need it to look like most women did with makeup in understated natural colors… and her hair seemed to fall into place like it had been designed to.

It probably had.

“Pala said you guys are friends now,” I said as we headed downstairs.

“Yes,” Two said. “She is also friends with Suzi.”

“Is Suzi really your friend?” I asked.

“Yes,” Two said.

“Are you sure she doesn’t just like you for your baking?”

“No,” Two said. “But I do not think it matters why she likes me as long as she does and is nice to me and is happy to see me. That is being friendly, and being friendly is like being a friend, and if she is always perfectly friendly to me then she is exactly like a friend.”

“Is she really always perfectly friendly?” I asked.

“No,” Two said. “But my friends Hazel and Dee both agree that you can’t expect people to be perfect. You have to make allowances.”

“Well, just don’t make too many allowances,” I said.

“I won’t,” she said, then gave me a hug and said, “I only make so many allowances for you because you’re like a sister to me.”

“That’s nice of you,” I said.

As much as I loved Two, it was very possible that for the sake of our friendship we’d need to find a different roommate arrangement before too long. She was making friends fast enough that she had other options. For that matter, she’d probably get along fine with her original roommate, Dee, now that she was sleeping better.

We headed back down to the hallway, where Pala had lain down on her side next to the small folk, who had also been joined by Hazel. As she had been in the tunnels around the arena, Pala was lying with her head pointed downhill. Oru and Shiel seemed to be having an argument. I wasn’t exactly too fond of either one of them… Shiel was argumentative and into war games, and Oru… well, she was a biter. And goblin bites hurt.

Pala seemed to be a participant, too, but she had the same emptily pleasant smile on her face as usual, like there was no disagreement happening at all… or at least none worth getting upset about. Whatever the argument was, she probably had less stake in it personally than the others.

Soon: The unpolished dialogue that’s been carried over from my last two draft chapters is withheld again. Why? Clearly just to annoy you.

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

I then had the thought that I could ask her if she minded walking faster. That wouldn’t be rude, would it? I had a legitimate reason to want to be out of the cold… it sapped my strength and caused discomfort that verged on pain. Also, it was cold. As soon as I thought of it in those terms, though, I felt like I’d be making an imposition… just because she was “guarding my body”, as she put it, didn’t mean she had to accommodate my weaknesses.

Except it wouldn’t cost her anything, and I would be asking her. Nicely. I could manage that, couldn’t I?

It was weird how the bare tree limbs seemed to get darker faster than anything else. As long as there was any light in the sky, you’d think they would show some of their color against it, but they were like skeletons of shadow grasping at the breeze.

How many students had lost their lives on campus the past weekend? The school year so far? Each school year? It was a dangerous world, and the only way to deal with it was really to not deal with it… but walking across the darkening grounds with the glow of the path giving Pala and me an elven complexion was eerie. It felt more like Veil than Veil had.

Yeah, under the circumstances, I thought I could manage “nice” if it meant getting indoors where it was warm and bright and full of people… many of whom had little to no interest in killing me, a little bit faster…

“Pala?” I said gently, trying to break into her thoughts gently.

“Do you think birds are… ticklish?” she said.

“I… what?”

“Birds,” she said. “Do you think they are ticklish?”

“I… can’t say the question has ever entered my mind,” I said. “But…”

“They are covered in feathers,” she said. “All over. My uncle Halbjorn, he used to tickle my feet with goose feathers.”

“They don’t have feathers on their feet,” I said.

“I think a goose at least would laugh himself silly if he were ticklish, at all, anywhere.”

“The part of the feather that tickles you is different from the part that’s connected to their skin,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “I was thinking that maybe they were ticklish of scales.”

“What?”

“Scales,” she said. “If I am ticklish of feathers, then maybe a bird is ticklish of fish scales.”

“I… this is not the best topic for me to talk about right now,” I said, as birds and fish were putting unpleasant associations in my mind.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “The cold weather makes me think of geese, and goose down, which made me think of my uncle… what would you like to talk about, instead?”

“I’d actually just like to get back to Harlowe and get inside,” I said. “I don’t really feel like talking.”

“Okay,” she said. “But, do you think it would be okay if I spent the night in the Harlowe Hall? Ian did not say for sure if he needed me to guard your body tomorrow, but it would make things easier.”

“Yeah, it should be fine… I mean, I don’t care and I think the actual rules about overnight guests are same-sex, no sleeping in the hallways or on the lounge furniture,” I said. “There might be a limit of nights in a row or something about needing roommates’ permission, I don’t know off the top of my head. Two probably wouldn’t mind, since you wouldn’t actually put her out.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t! I like Two. She knows so many things,” Pala said. “And many of the things she knows are about dessert.”

“You know Two?” I asked, surprised.

“Everybody knows Two,” she said.

“What I mean to ask is… how do you know Two?” I asked.

“Oh, it wasn’t hard,” Pala said. “I met her.”

“So… you’re friends?”

“According to her definition.”

“So you disagree?”

“No, I also think that we are friends,” Pala said. “But unlike her, I cannot prove it. So I mention her definition, because it is the stronger case. You see?”

“That’s… why would you need to prove you’re friends?” I asked. “Who’s going to doubt you?”

“You?”

She was getting kind of frustratingly good at that.

“Oh… sorry, I wasn’t trying to sound skeptical,” I said. “I was just curious about how well you know her.”

“How well?” Pala said. “Um… I think pretty well. I’m not good at knowing people, but I would know Two anywhere. She’s the one who has her name written on her forehead.”

“When did you become friends?”

“Oh, a day ago… maybe three? Veil was… when?”

“The dance was on Saturday,” I said.

“Yes, that was it,” Pala said. “So many things have happened since then.”

Tell me about it, I thought, but even I could see the response to that one coming.

“Well, anyway… I think it would be great if you stuck around,” I said. “There’s still the possibility for things to get very ugly, very quickly if someone takes the ‘monster attack’ report the wrong way.”

The more I thought about, the more I thought it was probably a good thing that the official school broadcast of the press conference had ended with the cameraman getting caught up in the vice-chancellor’s aura of… whateverness. Hopefully at least some of the people who caught the close-up would be sufficiently distracted for their knee-jerk reactions to pass before they could be acted on.

“You think monsters could attack Harlowe Hall?” Pala asked. “But I thought the dormitories were protected by the paths so that monsters can’t get in.”

“No, I mean some misguided human students could attack Harlowe Hall to get the ‘monsters’,” I said.

“Don’t they know that monsters can’t get in?”

I thought about saying “oh, never mind”, then I realized it was a matter of word choice. She didn’t understand monster as a pejorative… or that its traditional use included a lot of humanoid races, including hers and mine. I started to think about how best to explain to her that some people heard “monster” and thought “goblins and ogres and other types of people who live in Harlowe” rather than things like wild creatures and mindless undead, but then I realized that would be shading right up against explaining the sleight-of-word that had gone on at the press conference.

She hadn’t watched it, that I knew of, but I felt uneasy about the idea of putting the idea in her head all the same.

“Oh, never mind,” I said. “Look, the cold kind of bothers me… do you think we could pick up the pace just a little?”

“Okie dokie,” she said. “I did not want to leave you behind… my test assignment, I moved too quickly. You’d think short steps would be faster.”

“Why?”

“They don’t have as far to go.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that… nothing constructive, anyway… so we lapsed into silence. Silent Pala radiated a sort of spaciness that I really didn’t think was just my initial “brainless” prejudice. She was looking all around as we walked, but with a vacant smile on her face and a general air of pleasant blankness. As bodyguards went, I figured she had the imposing stature and the fighting skills, but I wasn’t sure she’d pass any sort of general alertness test.

Not that I was going to win any awards for most vigilant sentinel any time soon.

The perception that she wasn’t paying attention disappeared in a hurry when she suddenly crouched low and angled her face upwards. Her spear swung around like a gate to stop me. I jumped back from it… the last person I’d seen come into contact with the spear aside from Pala was Puddy, and she’d taken a pretty vicious smite-down for it.

“Stay where you are,” Pala said. “No, wait… move to the center of the path and turn sideways.”

“Um… okay,” I said, though I followed her logic. By turning perpendicular to the direction of the path, I would very slightly increase the distance between any part of my body and the unprotected ground outside. “What’s going on?”

“Something moving around,” she said. “Behind a building.”

“You can see behind buildings?”

“No, over.”

“You can see over buildings?” I asked. Pala was tall, but she wasn’t that tall.

“Yes, can’t you?” she said. “You just look at the front of the building and look up… that’s where it peeked out..”

“Something pretty big, then?” I said. I had a brief vision of one of Pala’s relatives coming to pay an unscheduled visit. I couldn’t think of any giant creatures known to live in the area. I was used to the occasional dragon watch back home, only one of which had ever escalated into a full-blown warning, but something about Prax seemed to make it unappealing to dragons… none of the local wyrms had ever extended their hunting territories northward into it, and neither had any of their kin in the other bordering provinces.

“No,” she said. “Something flying. No… big and flying.”

I turned in place to look at what she was seeing, just in time to catch a curving body flashing with scales as it crested behind an old three story class building. The thoughts of dragons resurged in my brain before the thing shot upwards, exposing an undulating form with tentacle-like whiskers protruding from its snout.

“It is hard to tell in this lighting,” Pala said, “but it appears to be some variety of blind sea monster.”

“Oh, the eyeless fish-beast,” I said. It was hard to tell, since it was moving and not close enough to anything to get a real comparison, but it seemed larger than the last time I had seen it. “It’s some kind of ambassador for the underground realms, I guess.”

“It is… looking for someone,” Pala said as it swam through the air with a back-and-forth motion. “Or patrolling?”

“It looks like it,” I said. Maybe the subterranean contingent had taken the “monster” story to heart.

“Stay still,” Pala said.

“Why?” I asked, more than a little annoyed. Every time I stopped moving outside, it seemed like the cold started finding new ways to slip past my increasingly-reflexive insulation spells. I pumped a little more energy into them and then tried to warm myself up with a little very low-key invocation of the heat aspect of fire.

“Because it seems powerful and we do not know for what it is searching,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

The thing passed directly over us. It was definitely bigger than it had been inside of Harlowe… bigger than a carriage. There was no way it could fit inside one of Harlowe’s hallways, much less squeeze through its doors. The power needed to effect that sort of size change was tremendous, but there was a good chance the fish-beast had other options. It gave off a very unworldly vibe that was probably nothing but accurate, and in some dimensions space was not as much of a fixed thing as it was in ours. It was possible for something from those planes to lack a true size or shape, which meant it could alter how it manifested upon our plane.

The thought of size-changing magic got me thinking, though. It took a tremendous amount of energy to make someone… or something… grow to giant size, or shrink from the size of a human to something you could slip into your pocket, but there were more subtle resizing magics. Disposable rings of protection got by with a cheat, using a flexible outer layer and an inner band that expanded or contracted to fit different sized fingers, but rings with more permanent enchantments often could make adjustments within a small range by actually shrinking or growing the ring band.

Making Pala small enough for her to fit into a human-sized world would take bigger magic than she could probably afford, but if she were even just a few feet shorter she’d have an easier time getting around and fitting in. It was probably worth mentioning to her… once the current situation was over.

I realized the fish-beast had circled around over us a few times and was now fluttering directly overhead. It was kind of discomfiting to see… it was one thing to watch it floating in the air without visible support, and another thing to see it do so right over your own head. That aside, there was just something… off… about the fish-beast, something that struck me as wrong and just got more so the longer I looked.

I felt a prickling feeling in the back of my head, just above my spine.

“Boobies!” Pala said.

“What?” I said, an image of Amaranth popping into my head. I turned and looked at her.

Overhead there was a sound like a long, wet gasp, and the fish-beast flew on. I wasn’t watching it do so, but I could tell that it had… it was a bit like when a cloud moves out from underneath the sun and it’s suddenly warmer and lighter, except that it was still just as cold and dark as before. But it felt like that.

“Why did you say ‘boobies’?” I asked her.

“Because you are a female p… lesbian,” she said. “And I thought it would distract you. I am meant to be guarding your body but I thought your brain is a part of your body, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean, it’s inside your skull and connected to you…”

“I understand that, but what do you mean… do you think looking at that thing was harmful?”

“Maybe? But it was getting inside of our heads,” she said. “I think it was looking at our thoughts?”

“My mind can’t be read,” I said, then I remembered that this was because of the extraplanar connection of my demon blood. That, and the demon side of my mind could be pretty vicious to intruders. But the eyeless fish-beast wasn’t exactly from around here, either, and I wasn’t about to place bets on my brain against its when it came to the subtle arts. “Usually.”

“Mine, either,” Pala said. “People get… lost. But I think that maybe the blind sea monster can find its own way.”

“Probably,” I said. “You know, Pala… I was thinking. Have you ever considered a size-changing enchantment?”

“Oh, yes!” she said. “I have looked into that quite often. But giants are not as well-affected by size-changing spells. They say that our size is more… inherited?”

“Inherent,” I said. “A giant’s size is more fundamental a characteristic… I didn’t realize that but I suppose it would be true. Still, it wouldn’t have to be a huge change… even just a foot would mean you wouldn’t have to duck your head as much.”

“Wouldn’t it mean I would have to duck my head more?” she said. “Or… am I not understanding what it means ‘to duck’?”

“I think so,” I said. “Lower your head so it doesn’t hit the ceiling… being shorter would mean you’d have to do that less.”

“Why would using magic to be taller make me shorter?”

“I wasn’t talking about being taller,” I said. “I’m talking about making you shorter.”

“Oh!” she said, the light of recognition dawning in her eyes. “That makes sense! Because I thought… wait, why would you do that?”

“What?”

“I am too short by half already!” she said. “Why would you have me shorter?”

“Well… the buildings aren’t exactly made for someone your size,” I said. Shit, I thought. She’d given me a big enough hint, no pun intended. Size was intrinsic to gianthood… even if her folks weren’t full-blooded giants, if they identified with their giant blood then it stood to reason that she wouldn’t be interested in shrinking. “If you had a belt or ring or something that you could put on and take off, you could get around more easily. Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything…”

“These belts,” she said. “They could make me bigger, too?”

“Well, yes… it would be a different enchantment, but similar,” I said. “I don’t know if anything like that’s on the market, and it would have less effect on you, proportional to your giant blood…”

“My blood would grow more than the rest of me?” she asked. “Or less?”

“The same,” I said. “I just mean… your natural resistance to size changing would lessen it, but it should do something.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I drank a potion of giant growth once and it did nothing.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have been permanent, anyway,” I said. That was one of the well-known weaknesses of metaphor magic: trying to give something like, say, the grace of a cat to a cat or the strength of a bull to a bull would accomplish nothing, and at exactly the same energy expenditure as if it had worked.

“They wouldn’t necessarily be cheap,” I said. “But… your family has some money or other resource, I’m guessing?”

The gold armor she wore in the ring hadn’t looked cheap, even without considering the enchantments it would need to be much more effective than a mail shirt made from aluminum foil. That, and the out-of-plane tuition rates were even higher than the out-of-province ones.

She nodded. She seemed happy with the idea, which made me glad I’d said anything, even though she didn’t seem to find my original idea at all appealing. Well, I had tried to help. In the interest of at least not doing any harm, I added, “You’d probably want something you could take off easily when you had to go inside.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I do not think I would need to wear it here, but when I go home… I can show everyone how much I grew!”

I was becoming glad that I’d given Pala a second chance… and that she had apparently decided to do the same thing for me, even after noticing how little I had thought of her. Some people spread joy like a torch sheds light, and when Pala smiled, she was one of them.

Soon: A short political round table, and Sooni cracks the case.

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I was relieved because I wasn’t really keen on walking back to Harlowe alone. Sunset was still probably an hour or so away, but it was already getting dark out. I was worried that Iona wouldn’t be able to wait “a day or two”, or that I’d run into armed human students who didn’t buy the official explanation… or ones who did. Both Iona and Oru had implied that sticking to the paths wasn’t necessarily going to protect monstrous-looking students who went out after dark.

Even though I looked completely human, I also looked like myself, and I was pretty visible as freshmen went.

“There you are!” Pala said. “You shouldn’t run off like that. It makes it very hard to protect you when you aren’t here, you know!”

“I didn’t go anywhere,” I said. “I was in a locked room with no other exit when you wandered off.”

“Well, you should have said something,” she said. “I knocked on the door and I listened and I couldn’t hear anything.”

“I told you I needed to talk to my lawyer,” I said.

“Yes, that’s why I was worried,” she said. “When people talk, they usually make sounds. I have noticed this often.”

“We use a silence spell when we talk,” I said. “Sorry, it didn’t seem worth mentioning.”

“That is fantastic!” Pala said. “Do you read lips?”

“What? No, it just keeps sounds from getting in or out of the area around us,” I said. “It’s more of a sound-blocking spell than a silence spell, I guess.”

“Oh,” Pala said. “It is good that you have a lawyer, I suppose. My uncle says they are good at choosing words. Ian said he thinks this will be over soon. I hope he is right. I would not like to keep guarding your body.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask you to be here,” I said.

“This is true!” she said. “Ian did. I am not sure that I would have said yes to you.”

I hated the way she kept saying his name… by that I meant both the fact that she kept saying it, and the way she pronounced it almost as one syllable, like Yan. It grated on me. I also didn’t like the implication that she was doing this as a favor to him. Pala didn’t seem like a particularly sexual person, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be interested in him.

“Why wouldn’t you have said yes to me?” I asked. I figured that sounded a little less jealous than focusing on why she did say yes to him.

“Well, I might have, I am not sure,” she said. “I do not like your friends very much, but until this afternoon I didn’t really have… feelings? About you, going either in one way or the other.”

If her feelings about a person could be swayed by the grumblings of the crowd, then bodyguard was probably not the best career path for her… people who were universally beloved didn’t generally need protecting.

“I don’t know what you’ve been listening to, Pala, but I’m actually the good guy here,” I said.

“You sound like the girl in my Pax class,” Pala said. “She is saying that all of the time. She acts like she is the hero of her own edda. She says I am plucky comic relief. What means ‘plucky’?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Courageous and spunky?”

“Oh,” she said, crinkling up her nose. “I try to avoid spunk. She tells me not to stand too close to her, that I am a… scene-stealer. I tell her, you make enough scenes, who cares if anyone takes one? And then she throws her clog sandal at me. And the teacher excuses me from the class along with her like I have done something wrong! They take scene-stealing very seriously.”

“Believe me, I know how you feel,” I said. “Well… ish. But I mean what I said, and in a non-crazy way… if you had any idea how much time I’ve spent worrying about being evil…”

“So! There you go,” Pala said.

“What do you mean, ‘there I go’?”

“So worried about being evil, not worried about being good,” she said. “You should try it the other way around sometime.”

“I meant worried about not being evil,” I said, then added, in order to forestall any more confusion, “in the sense that I don’t want to be evil and was worried by the possibility that I would be.”

“You should try being good instead,” she said. Apparently some things just couldn’t be avoided.

“I just said I was!” I said.

“No,” she said. “You said you were trying to be not evil. That is different.”

“Okay, granted, there is a difference between not being evil and being good,” I said. Was I actually having a philosophical discussion about moral alignment with a twelve-foot-tall fighter jock? It seemed like I was. “But my goal’s still to be good… and I don’t know what you know about my heritage, but I think ‘not evil’ is a pretty ambitious start on that road, under the circumstances.”

“I think it is foolish,” Pala said. “If you want to be good, why not try to be good? Instead of not being evil.”

“You’re not making any sense,” I said. “I think we’re having a language barrier thing here.”

It seemed like the most charitable explanation.

“I know! I will explain it another way,” Pala said. “It is like as though you wanted to be a dancer, but instead of taking dancing lessons, you went to singing lessons and learned how to sing rather poorly.”

“Oh, well, that clears it up completely.”

“Because a singer is not a dancer,” Pala said. “And a dancer is not a singer. So because you wanted to be a dancer and not a singer you went and learned how not to sing?”

“Okay, Pala… I’ve been accused of picking apart metaphors instead of addressing the content of their points before, so please understand I’m talking about the point when I say: huh?”

“That was an analogy,” Pala said.

“My point is that I’m trying really hard to do what’s right, even when conventional wisdom says I’m kind of damned anyway,” I said.

“Oh!” Pala said. Her cheeks burned an impressive red, and her hair danced and crackled weirdly. “I am sorry. I didn’t realize… it looked an awful lot like you were just standing by and doing nothing. I didn’t realize you were trying to do something. I’m sorry.”

“Um… okay,” I said. In this case, I’d done a bit more than just trying… time would tell if I’d accomplished anything, and I even sort of doubted I’d ever be confident it was the right thing even if things worked out okay, but in any event I wasn’t about to start spreading it around.

“I feel better,” Pala said. “A little stupid, but better.”

“Why stupid?” I asked. To my surprise… and a little bit to my chagrin… I could see echoes of Amaranth in the way she said that, the obviously painful embarrassment that accompanied it.

Nobody liked to think of themselves as stupid. I’d seen it all throughout my years of primary and secondary schooling: even the people who were clearly more proud of their physical attributes, the ones who showed nothing but scorn for education and for “brains” hated being called stupid. That was fighting words on par with questioning a guy’s sexuality or saying something about somebody’s mother.

I’d always thought of that as a matter of the truth hurting, but maybe that was a little simplistic. I doubted Pala thought of herself as stupid.

“Well… I thought you were just standing there while your friend was being so awful to me,” Pala said. “I should have realized that you wouldn’t… that nobody would… well. Never mind, please! Forget I said something about it.”

“Iona? She’s not my friend, whatever she said to you,” I said. “Not that I could have done much about that… I was already in the bathroom when she showed up, remember?”

“Oh, not her,” Pala said. She reached up and touched her own slightly frazzled hair. “The one who was in your class, with hair like mine, but longer? Well, less long, but longer on her. With a face like an alf but curves like… not?”

“What?” I said. “What the hell did Steff ever do to you?”

“You were there,” Pala said. “Or were you trying so hard to do the right thing that you did not notice?”

The worst thing was that she sounded absolutely sincere when she said this. There was no accusation and no sarcasm in her voice. I had the feeling that if I’d said yes, I had been so busy trying to be good that I hadn’t noticed then she would have forgiven me with a cheery formality that would have impressed Two and gone on with her newly reformed opinion of me.

But I hadn’t been trying to do the right thing with regards to anything Steff had been doing, because I hadn’t noticed any such thing in the first place… which I would have had to have done in order to try to do anything about it.

“What was Steff doing?” I asked.

“She was being very vulgar in an unwelcome fashion towards me,” Pala said.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s… well, that’s just Steff.”

“Yes,” Pala said, nodding.. “Nobody else was doing it.”

“No, I mean… you can’t really hold that against her,” I said.

“Why? Was she trying to do the right thing, too?”

“Well… probably not,” I said. “I think that’s pretty low on Steff’s list of priorities, honestly. But, I mean… she’s not really dangerous, except maybe to herself.”

“She’s certainly not dangerous to me,” Pala said. “Which is the only reason I did not slap her good. That and we are not supposed to let others taunt us into starting an altercation when we are guarding. I would lose my practical experience credit if I started a fight. Though I’m not sure that it would count as a fight. More like a hitting her once? I would ask the guard captain if that is counted the same as a fight, but he told me to stop asking questions.”

“My point is you’re overreacting.”

“But how? I didn’t react at all,” Pala said. “If she were a boy I would be reporting her because that is sexual harassment and it’s wrong.”

“I think that’s going a little far,” I said, though I had a growing uncomfortable feeling in my stomach that suggested that maybe she wasn’t exaggerating that much. I’d been more annoyed by the attention Steff paid to Pala than anything else… that Pala hadn’t wanted it had barely impinged on my awareness. “And anyway, are you suggesting that women can’t harass women?”

“Not sexually,” Pala said.

“That’s… a little naive.”

“No, it’s worldly,” she said. “I guess you don’t know about sex or else you would understand that.”

I could hardly blame her for having a blind spot when it came to lesbians. She wasn’t the only person in the world… or in a world, in this case… who’d had a sheltered upbringing. In any case, it really wasn’t my place to convince her that she should be reporting my best friend for sexual harassment.

Though, if the only thing that was standing in the way of her doing that was a misunderstanding about the nature of Steff’s sexuality… could I really argue that she was wrong? I could shrug off Steff’s more extreme impulses, but that didn’t mean that everybody who caught her eye should have to.

Suddenly I thought I understood what Pala had meant with her insistence that there was a difference between trying not to be evil and trying to be good… if that was what she was insisting.

“You’re giving me a lot to think about,” I said.

“Oh!” Pala said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I mean, I’ve got a lot of things on my mind to begin with… which I guess is the closest thing I have to an excuse. I’m sorry I wasn’t trying harder, Pala… to be good, or to understand what you were saying. I guess I’ve been sort of writing off what you say.”

She nodded.

“Because you think you’re better than I am,” she said.

“What the hell makes you think that?”

“The fact that you think you’re better than I am,” Pala said. When I didn’t say anything in response to that, she added, “It is not exactly… subtle?”, and it was my turn to blush.

“I guess you wouldn’t be the first person to accuse me of being a little bit of a snob when it comes to that sort of thing,” I admitted. “It’s something I should probably work on… something I’ve been trying to work on, have been working on… but there are a lot of things going on, and I can’t exactly put everything on hold to work out my issues.”

“That’s okay,” Pala said. “As long as you’re trying. No one can blame you if you’re trying.”

“I think you’re underestimating other people’s blaming abilities,” I said.

“Yes, well… if you’re trying and they blame you, they’ll be wrong,” Pala said. “And you’ll be right. That is something, isn’t it?”

“It’s less of a consolation than I’d expect.”

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Next: Pala’s in Harlowe. Hazel gets political. All this, and some sort of eyeless fish beast.

“I’ll catch up with you at dinner, I guess… I’ve got to make a reflection,” I said, but she was already gone, moving with the kind of speed she rarely used. I sort of wondered about her urgency, but I didn’t have time to sit and think about it… I had a kind of terrible but very vague and half-formed notion forming in my head.

Even not fully articulated , it was enough to roil my stomach.

Lee worked for Pendragon and Associates. Pendragon and Associates worked for Mr. Embries…

“Your friend leaves very quickly,” Pala said, coming up beside me. Her suddenly looming presence and voice made me jump, which made her jump… it seemed she wasn’t really used to sneaking up on people. “It is one of her good qualities?”

“I think she’s excited about something,” I said. “I need to ask you to excuse me, Pala, I have to talk to my lawyer for a bit.”

“Oh… okay?” she said.

She just stood there, so I turned to go and look for a quiet corner or an empty room… I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find a place to be alone, with classes mostly done for the day. It quickly became obvious that it wouldn’t be that easy… while Pala had snuck up on me, she was far from stealthy.

“Why are you following me?” I asked her.

“I am guarding your body,” she said. “I cannot do that if I am not where it is, or I am where it is not.”

“I asked you to excuse me,” I said.

“Yes, and I did,” she said. “I don’t know why you needed me to. It is not any business of mine if you talk to a lawyer. Is it considered rude?”

“It’s considered private,” I said.

“Oh. Like going to the bathroom?” she said.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “Kind of, I guess. Pala, I wasn’t asking you to pardon or forgive me… I was saying I needed you to leave me alone while I take care of my business.”

“Oh. Okie dokie,” she said. “I can wait outside the bathroom for you, if you want?”

I thought about trying to argue that if she could wait outside the bathroom while I did private things in there, then she could wait outside of an empty classroom while I did the same thing. If anything, it would be safer. Bathrooms weren’t really private, after all. She couldn’t control people coming and going in them. Also, as I myself knew, bathrooms held some advantages for people who wanted to dispose of evidence of violence.

But then I realized that the argument was unnecessary… a bathroom would work just as well. It would be less private, but Lee would trigger the silence spell if I asked him to, I was sure.

“Right,” I said to Pala. Now that I was thinking about it, I thought I remembered a single-occupancy bathroom… that would be perfect. I could duck into it, lock the door, have my conversation inside the shield of silence and if anybody was even paying attention they still wouldn’t know anything was up.

As long as people were spying on my room anyway, maybe it would make sense to start having all my official legal reflections in bathrooms… but then, what would be more suspicious than the girl who never has to pee hanging out in the stalls? That was exactly the sort of gossip-fodder my reputation didn’t need…

In any event, I found the room I was looking for and was suddenly very glad I didn’t need to use it for its intended purpose… it looked like it’d been cleaned maybe once, long ago, possibly by the workmen who’d just finished installing the fixtures. Well, I could have my conversation standing up.

I didn’t even have to ask Lee to trigger the silence spell… the sparkly purple field came on as soon as he answered.

“Mackenzie,” he said. “Hello. You were watching the press conference?”

“I was, until it got cut off.”

“Cut off?” he repeated.

“Oh, I guess you weren’t watching the university’s coverage,” I said.

“No, INN was carrying one of the local station’s feeds,” Lee said. “Anyway, I know it’s not quite what you were expecting…”

“Were you expecting it?” I asked.

“No, Mackenzie, but maybe I should have been,” he said. “I was… thinking humanocentrically. I don’t know why I expected this to stay inside normal legal channels. I made an appeal to the citizenship of someone who rules over a state of one.”

“One what?” I asked.

“Never mind,” Lee said. “I’m getting poetic, it’s a bad habit for attorneys outside of select circumstances. Anyway, the thing I would emphasize is that you don’t have to worry… things are going to progress on their own now. It’s out of your hands.”

“Progress towards what, exactly?” I asked. “A cover-up? Lee, whatever happens, we can’t pretend it doesn’t involve me… I started it moving.”

“Mackenzie, this thing is so much bigger than you or I… did you see the Clarion-Call‘s headline this morning? ‘Disorder In The Heartland: The Chaos Wars Revisited. It was referring to the royal family’s visit. This thing was always going to come to a quick and expedient end. Maybe because of you that end will have something to do with actual justice. That’s all we can hope for, and really, all the more we should say about it.”

“So you don’t think my tip is just going to be buried?” I asked.

“I’m positive it won’t be,” Lee said. “But really, that’s all I can say.”

“What exactly are you involved with?” I asked.

“Mackenzie, the extent of my involvement was getting your information into the hands of a well-connected individual who could put it to use.”

“His use?”

“I meant in the sense of passing it on to where it would do some good.”

“Good for who, though?” I asked.

“I never pretended that this would be a wholly altruistic act for anyone involved,” Lee said. “You’ll recall I was very clear on the point that you’d be ceding any reward by doing things this way.”

“I was fine with that,” I said. “But I thought that was a way to see justice done, not sacrifice it on the altar of… of career advancement.”

“Everybody makes sacrifices to get ahead,” Lee said. “I’m the one who’ll have to live with this one, not you.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“You entrusted the information to me. You’re not benefiting from it in any way,” Lee said. “Nothing that happens from here on out will have anything to do with you.”

“If you say that a few more times you might buy it, but I doubt I will,” I said.

“Mackenzie… I can tell this is really bothering you,” he said. “The thing you have to remember is that, however things turn out… and we may never know what actually happens as a result of all this… but however things turn out, there’s no way of knowing if things wouldn’t have been the same even without your very limited involvement. Your information may have helped move things along all the more quickly, but not necessarily to a different end. The Imperium’s investigators aren’t a bunch of incompetents.”

“No, I don’t believe they are,” I said. “If Mike Gregory didn’t have an inkling of the truth, he’d probably have been on the stage delivering the lines. I feel like we took the investigation out of his hands, after you were so clear that it was best for him to be in charge.”

“Probably he does have an ‘inkling’,” Lee said. “But again, Mackenzie, I think you’re underestimating the scope of events here. A man like Gregory is destined to butt heads with his superiors in sensitive political matters. What’s really bothering you? If it’s the reward…”

“It’s not,” I said. I stopped and fought with myself to articulate exactly what it was that had sent me for my mirror as soon as class ended, the thing that was really bothering me. “Lee… exactly how beholden are you to Mr. Embries?”

“Be… Mackenzie, he’s a client of my firm, and an important one,” he said. “You really shouldn’t be drawing any conclusions from that. You’re my client. I have a responsibility to you.”

“But you’re looking out on the side for opportunities to serve him,” I said. “Lee, I watched him fascinate an entire room of people… probably more than one, actually. Without trying. Without noticing.”

“Yes, it’s things like that which lead to the complicated legal situation where… look, Mackenzie, this really has nothing to do with you,” he said.

“Except he’s a member of the university administration,” I said. “And your firm’s in his pocket, or his aura, or whatever. I think there’s a bit of a conflict of interest there.”

“My firm doesn’t represent the university,” Lee said. “We serve Mr. Embries’s personal interests in a private capacity. The university has its own legal representation. Our service to Mr. Embries puts us at odds with the university as often as it sees us in accord, which is really far less often than the two have nothing to do with each other.”

“But doesn’t he benefit if my suit goes away?” I asked. “Or if it gets settled quickly and easily?”

“You benefit if it gets settled quickly and easily,” Lee said. “Mackenzie, that’s what you wanted. From the beginning you were clear that what you wanted most from the school was change… if you want to switch to a more aggressive strategy and go after larger monetary damages, we can talk about that, but I feel I’d be doing you a disservice by not weighing the pros and cons again. One of the cons is that the school would more aggressively defend itself, leading to a longer arbitration…”

“I don’t really want to change strategies,” I said. “I just wonder if you can represent me at the same time you’re ‘serving’ Embries.”

“Well, I’ll assume you’re asking me, and say: yes, absolutely, yes,” he said. “If I had to guess how Mr. Embries would prefer to see this resolved… and I do have to guess, because he’s made no attempt to inform me… I’d say he’d prefer to see it handled quickly and quietly, and in a way that can be spun into something positive for the university’s image. But Mackenzie, I’m not trying to guess what he would want while I’m talking to you, and I doubt the vice-chancellor is going to be the one who ultimately decides anything, even if his signature ends up on some of the documents. It’s going to be members of the university’s legal team sitting in the room with the arbiter. We’ll all hash out something that they can live with, and then the university’s board will put it into effect, and Mr. Embries… in his capacity as the vice-chancellor… will be the one who executes some of those decisions. If he has any issues with the settlement, he’ll be talking to the university’s legal department, not his personal attorneys.”

“That all sounds very sensible, Lee, but I get the feeling that your firm’s loyalty to him isn’t just client-attorney stuff,” I said. I couldn’t stop thinking of the way Embries had effortlessly fascinated the entire TV viewing audience.

“Mackenzie, I hope you’ve noticed that while I’m not confirming anything you might have inferred about who I took your information to, I’m also not insulting your intelligence about anything,” Lee said. “I think you’re an intelligent young woman. I think you’re showing that intelligence by asking questions about whether or not your attorney can effectively advocate for you, and I hope you’ll show that same intelligence by listening to my answers.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“If the fact that my firm represents a senior member of the faculty in his private life has any implications for your case, Mackenzie, it just means that I have a decent understanding of university politics and who’s actually in charge of what,” Lee said. “If you had come to me and said that you wanted to sue the university’s officers personally, or your suit would touch on the office of the vice-chancellor in any way, I would have had to turn your case down. In fact, if my firm represented any other member of the university administration, I would have turned you down.”

“Why, if there’s no conflict?” I asked.

“Because humans and other similar races make conflicts where there aren’t any,” Lee said. “Because somebody like the chancellor defines herself by her career and associations. She can’t not take something touching on the university personally and she almost couldn’t help but try to use any personal connections she might have to try to protect it. Somebody like the vice-chancellor, on the other hand… well, he takes a longer view. University administration is more like a way to pass the time. Anything that seriously threatened the university, he’d take rather personally, but that’s so far from being… seriously, yours is likely to be one of the more, well, amiable grievances aired against the school this year.”

“And that’s not just because you’re managing to keep it amiable for them,” I said. It wasn’t quite a question. I felt a kind of reflex to argue, but what he was saying made sense.

“No, because you’re out for a resolution, not for blood,” Lee said. “Mackenzie, if you want someone else to represent you, I can get you a referral for someone outside the firm and smooth things over with the arbiter, and I’ll even arrange payment from the funds that were entrusted to us, if necessary. But I believe you’d be doing yourself a disservice.”

“Okay, Lee, I believe you,” I said. “I just hope you’ll tell me if something changes.”

“Like what?”

“Like if the vice-chancellor tells you to do something about my case,” I said.

“Mackenzie, I promise I’ll tell you anything that’s relevant to your case,” Lee said. “And that I’ll do anything I think is in your best interest, even stepping back and referring you to someone else. I’ll do this freely and willingly, because it’s nothing I haven’t implicitly done already. This is what being your attorney entails.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“And Mackenzie? Don’t feel guilty for grilling me about this,” Lee said. “You’re looking out for yourself… sticking up for yourself, really. It’s not a bad habit to have. Though, full disclosure: I have selfish reasons for saying so.”

“What do you mean?”

“If nobody were willing to stand up for their rights, I’d have a harder time finding work.”

“Thanks, Lee,” I said again. Maybe I was being horribly naive, but I did feel reassured… and I felt good about it. I felt relieved. I’d never quite distrusted Lee, but not knowing if I could trust him had felt pretty bad.

“Anything else I can help you with right now?” he asked, and I gathered that he had other things to do. Well, obviously.

“No, no, that’s it,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”

“Not a problem,” he said, and waved me away.

I closed the mirror and slipped it into my pocket, then leaned my hand against the wall for a bit to just sort of collect myself. When I’d collected myself enough to feel really, really gross for touching the bathroom wall but even more grossed out by the thought of touching the faucet, I decided it was time to leave.

When I opened the door and found not Pala but Iona, I kind of wished I’d decided to stay in there a little bit longer.

Next: Conversations in bathrooms seldom seem to end well, do they?

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“You!” Pala said when I came out. The cloud dissolved, though the demi-giantess was already drenched from its downpour. I wondered what the water would do to her nice sweater, and how she could be comfortable with it plastered against her skin like that. “I will guard your body, but I am not doing anything with her body.”

“Um… what’s wrong?” I asked.

“Why are you staring at my bosoms?” she asked.

“I’m not!” I said. “I was… concerned about your sweater.”

“Oh,” Pala said. She glanced down. “Oh! I rained on it… do you see what you made me do now?”

When I saw her reaching down and grabbing the bottom of the shirt, I had a single brief, glorious vision flashing through my head of her peeling it off in one fluid motion to reveal first a flat, well-toned stomach and then… well, the vision didn’t last that long before reality informed me that she was awkwardly wrestling the sodden garment off, to reveal an only slightly damp white blouse underneath.

“My uncle warned me about people like her,” Pala continued. “Well… not people just like her. I do not think Uncle Hallbjorn has ever heard of people like her. But he has heard of other people who behave like people like her, and he warned me about them, and I think his warning would be a good one for people like her as well.”

“That’s about the fifth time she’s said that,” Steff said. “The first two times she repeated it, it got longer. After that she started paring it down a bit. She used to go on and say…”

“That is, it would be a good warning for people like me about people like her,” Pala continued. “I mean, a good warning to give to people like me…”

“What exactly did you do to her?” I asked Steff.

“…about people like her.”

“I didn’t do anything to her… I just made her a bet,” Steff said. “On the subject of spatial relationships. Specifically, what would or would not fit where.”

“You should know better than to suggest such a thing to a young woman,” Pala said. “And you should not engage in such things yourself, either. My Uncle Hallbjorn says that young women should not gamble.”

“Oh, we don’t have to wager money,” Steff said.

“I do not have any money, anyway… I lost it playing cards.”

“Would you like to earn some?” Steff asked her.

“I thought your uncle told you not to gamble,” I said.

“Yes!” Pala said. She stomped her foot. It was probably a good thing she was standing on the soft ground to the side of the path… if she damaged university property, we’d probably all share in the blame somehow. “Because I lost all my money playing cards. Uncle Hallbjorn probably should have told me before that, but I’m afraid he isn’t very clever.”

“Well… anyway… it looks like this may all be over soon,” I said. “There’s an a-mail going around that there’s going to be a press conference at five.”

“Think it’s worth ditching Hart’s class over?” Steff asked. “I mean, I know I’m not supposed to encourage you to skip classes, but this could be important…”

“I’d still rather not,” I said. “History’s one of my favorite classes, and I’m really not sure where I stand with Hart. If they thought it was important enough to send out an announcement, they’ll probably put the important parts in another one. Even if most students are done with their classes by five, they can’t expect everyone to get to a TV, and they probably don’t really want everyone to show up at the admin building in person.”

“You are going to history now?” Pala asked me, frowning down at confusion.

“No, my next class is logic,” I said. “It’s still not for a little bit, but I wasn’t really… the library’s kind of stifling right now, and I thought you two might want to know about the press conference.”

“Well, you should not be standing out in the open until then,” Pala said. “If you are done in the library then I will be taking you back to Harlowe.”

“I think I’d rather stay in the library, then,” I said. I wouldn’t be any more or less alone with my uncomfortable thoughts back at Harlowe, and as far as I knew, nobody was trying to spy on me in the library.

“Okie dokie,” Pala said. “As long as I know where you are.”

“I think I’ll go inside for a bit, too,” Steff said. “The company’s easier.”

“What exactly did you think was going to happen with her, anyway?” I asked her as we headed back in.

“Exactly? Well, I did have a pretty detailed scenario in my mind,” Steff said. “It started with a series of friendly wagers that escalated until she ended up being my personal pretty pretty pony for the rest of my life.”

“Did you really think that would work?” I asked.

“Hey, I haven’t given up on the idea of having your head hanging on my wall someday,” Steff said. “And if I can get Pala back to Kilrest, I could make that deal that much sweeter for you, because there would be no need to breed you if we had a giantblood in the stables. Quarter-demon/quarter-ogre would be wicked awesome, but giants get serious cred from ogres. The fact that I could throw a saddle over her would make me basically the most badass person ever to them. I mean, talk about your epic mounts.”

“Steff, the idea of having Viktor’s baby is so far from being the reason I don’t want to be your zombie sex slave,” I said.

“You wouldn’t be a slave,” Steff said. “Well, you would be, until you died and became a zombie, at which point your will… and soul, if I did it right… would be bound to me, which would make slavery kind of a moot point. But really, there are worse lives than that. At least you’d be with someone you love.”

“Steff… I don’t think some fantasies are meant to come true,” I said. “Or be shared.”

“You’re the one who asked,” she said.

“About Pala,” I said. “And I don’t think that one’s going to come true, either. I don’t think you have a chance of even… you know, getting anywhere… with her.” Phrases that had passed through my head and been rejected as beyond my ability to pull off included getting with and nailing. “Much less turning her into an ‘epic mount’.”

“Oh, come on, Mack,” Steff said. “Look at her… I can’t believe she’s ultimately going to be much harder to get into bed than you were.”

“I can,” I said. “First of all, she’s straight…”

“Oh, you know… I think I’ve heard this story before ,” Steff said.

“Okay, but I get the feeling that she’s from a very different background,” I said. “It sounds like her family is very protective of her.”

“I think ‘raised by a fundamentalist ex-paladin’ would probably fit into both of those columns,” Steff said. “And look how you turned out. Trust me, it’s the ones who start out really uptight who eventually run wild.”

“I didn’t ‘run wild’,” I said. “I… opened up to a few new possibilities, that’s all.”

“Opened wide,” Steff said.

“Is the library really the best place for this conversation?” I asked. We weren’t talking loudly, but what we were talking about and where we were talking about it seemed to count almost as much as actual volume, in my head.

“Again… you started it.”

“Okay, well, let’s just drop it, then,” I said.

“Alrighty,” Steff said. “What do I know? I’m just the assistant bodyguard… and a darn good one if I say so myself.”

“How so?”

“Well, you know the saying: set a thief to catch a thief,” Steff said. “And so if you’re trying to protect bodies…”

“I think the point is to protect the people before they become ‘bodies’,” I said.

“People are always bodies,” Steff said. “Corporeal people are, anyway. Though I don’t know… I could probably objectify ectoplasm if I tried. It doesn’t seem like it would be hard. Well, I mean, it’s ectoplasm, so it wouldn’t… ack! I think Pala might be contagious.”

“Better give her a wide berth in the future, then,” I said.

“I don’t think she’d fit in a narrow one. Why are you so anti-Pala, anyway? I thought you’d be drooling all over her,” Steff said. “Which you kind of did back there, but you did it while looking at her like she was some kind of insignificant little giant insect.”

“She’s so not my type,” I said.

“As if you wouldn’t let her spank you,” Steff said.

“As if she’d be into that,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush with heat at the thought… both sets.

“As if that’s even the point,” Steff said. “Besides, I have a feeling that would be easier to arrange than my fantasy… we’ll just tell her you’ve been naughty and ask her what she thinks should be done.”

“I don’t think she’d fall for that,” I said, trying to imagine how that would even work. She’d have to kneel beside me… unless she picked me up and laid me across her knees?

“No, but you’re trying to picture it, aren’t you?” Steff said. “I bet you haven’t had a good spanking in days. Amy’s probably slacked off because of the whole ‘campus in crisis’ thing.”

“She’s not exactly slacking off,” I said.

“No, but she’s not exactly giving you what you need, either,” Steff said. “Let’s face it, she’s not a natural disciplinarian. Okay, she’s good at the motions, but the mindset doesn’t come naturally to her. She’ll never give you consistent punishments, Mack… on the other hand, I can give you eternal torment. It doesn’t get much more consistent than that.”

“You’re not even trying to make it sound appealing,” I said.

She shrugged.

“Hey, it’s a rough gig, but it’ll either appeal to you or it won’t,” Steff said. “I’m betting that by the time I graduate you’ll have realized that it does.”

“Then you’re going to be waiting a long time to find out you’re wrong,” I said.

“Good thing I’m known for my patience, then,” she said. “At least I think I’m known for it… I don’t usually stick around long enough to find out for sure.”

In fact, she didn’t stay at the library for very long, whether because she had a class to get to or because she was bored, I wasn’t sure. Pala walked me to my logic class, waiting outside while I went in. She wasn’t the only bodyguard in the hall, either… after having used a mirror on Monday, Sooni had returned to class in person, a fact which made me feel a surprising amount of relief.

She was wearing a very conservative outfit by her standards: a blouse with a dark blue jacket and a matching pleated skirt that stopped just above the knee, with a slit up the back for her fox tail but overlapping folds that closed up below. Maliko was wearing a similar, but somewhat simpler, outfit in gray as she had been during the previous class.

Sooni’s outfit was topped off with a scarf and veil that covered her face. Despite her furry ears and mountain of braids, I wondered if it was actually her, or if her father had provided a stand-in to act as a decoy… this was the first time I could remember Sooni not coming over to say hi or deliver a random threat, or at least look at me when I came in.

What must her parents think of the situation on-campus if they’d go that far for his daughter’s protection? If they were that overprotective, I’d be surprised they let her go to school halfway around the world, particularly at a mid-continental one and not one of the eastern universities.

Still, even if it was a stand-in that meant that he wasn’t planning on yanking her out of the school entirely. She’d have to be back when the current crisis was resolved, which would probably be soon. This was a bit of a relief to me. Maliko I would rather do without, but Sooni’s company was…well, she had her good points.

She had points that were better than her worst points, anyway.

Some of those points seemed less appealing once I’d realized that sex with her was out of the question, after our “date”… she didn’t even really know what it was, or what it really signified. The idea of lesbianism horrified her, except when she believed it was required by the plot of the comic book or animation she thought she was the star of. There was just no way I could take advantage of someone like that. The ethical problems aside… and I wasn’t sure that I could articulate those behind “it feels skeevy”, or that I needed to… I didn’t think I was equipped to take the lead in something like that.

My fantasies about Sooni had all revolved around her domineering personality, her ability to walk all over people. Sooni in the inn room had been uncertain, vulnerable… it was kind of touching, but not really arousing.

The professor started class by stiffly reading an announcement that there was going to be a statement for the student body from school officials and representatives of the Imperial Bureau of Finding at a press conference at five that evening. So apparently there was somebody in the office who realized that many students didn’t check their university a-mail accounts regularly.

After class ended, I waited around to see if Sooni would try to say anything to me. She didn’t, but as she went past I got a slight glimpse of her face around her eyes… and saw fur. So I had been right… it wasn’t Sooni. Unlike her nekoyokai “friends”, Sooni had smooth and bare skin.

The imitation was flawed in other ways. While the decoy had a tail like Sooni’s, but it didn’t swish nearly as much when she walked. Her backside was very similar in shape but she didn’t have Sooni’s walk down. She was much too prim and proper… when Sooni wasn’t stomping around in anger, she was slinking around like the fox she resembled. This woman, whoever she was, just… walked. The visual resemblance was so good it had to be a complex illusion or full-body glamour, which left me wondering why her face had come out furry.

“Hey!” Maliko said, hitting my head from behind with her logic textbook. “Quit staring!”

“Quit hitting me,” I said.

“Sooni is not allowed to speak to you but she wanted me to tell you…”

“Where is she, really?” I asked.

“What? You are so weird and stupid,” Maliko said. “And… weirdly stupid and stupidly weird. Sooni told me to tell you that you need to hurry up.”

“Hurry where?”

“Hurry to find things out and tell them to her so that she can solve the murder,” Maliko said.

“How am I supposed to tell her things when she’s not allowed near me?”

“She says she can’t think of everything!” Maliko said, snarling with a fury that I guess was probably an accurate reproduction of what Sooni had said when Maliko voiced the same objection.

“Yeah, well, you can tell Sooni there’s no need,” I said. “I have a feeling the whole thing’s going to be solved soon enough anyway.”

“Yes, she thinks so, too,” Maliko said. “That’s why you have to hurry up, so Sooni can solve it before anybody else does.”

“Yeah, I’ll get right on that,” I said.

I had the thought run through my head that I could have just told Sooni what I knew and let her be the big hero of the hour, but of course there were numerous reasons that wouldn’t have worked. Aside from the simple fact that I hadn’t had any contact with Sooni, any explanation she came up with for how she had come to know the nature of mermaids would be as ridiculous and flimsy as her typical outfits, which meant that the actual story would come out rather quickly.

No, Lee had been a much better choice than Sooni to entrust with the truth. His solution had been surprising and a little bit self-serving, but it was the best bet for my anonymity and safety. I supposed I’d have to get in to wait until I could find out what was said at the press conference before I knew how well his plan was progressing, or if it had progressed at all.

I wondered if Hart would have to read an announcement about the press conference, and tried to imagine how he’d take the intrusion into his class time, especially since the only way it would make a difference was if some of his students opted to duck out on his lecture.

When I got to Early Republican History, I realized that I’d been wrong about the last but right about Hart having reason to resent interference in his class time. There was a flat box TV set up on a rolling cart at the front of the room. Unless he’d suddenly decided to take a more multimedia approach to teaching then it seemed like we’d be getting to see the press conference after all.

Tuesday: Pressing matters are resolved.

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