It seemed unlikely, in the grand scheme of things. This was Anaxas, where the children went hungry, the passives hid a plethora of thin white scars beneath their clothes and the roofs leaked with a quiet- almost timid, drip, drip, drip into battered old pans.

“Wonders and wonders, ah?” A grey fog of weariness swathing the slow words, the sick-sweet gestures.

His strained smile tried to show sugar. It only showed splinters.

Her planner was on the desk--she had forgotten to put it away, which would've been a better idea, considering on the visible page were large letters in red pen, proclaiming LOSHIS 24, STUDY WITH HORACE, 18 OC SHARP. DO NOT BE LATE. NO EXCUSES. encircled many times. Other, less-important items had been squished to the sides, such as "go see professors for late work--may fail otherwise" and "go to infirmary for checkup to ensure you don't have anything else wrong with you following duel."

He hadn't been hit so hard since his sister had left.

Galdori healers danced a rather fine line. While imminently respectable in public, they could, in private and with no consequences to their reputation, tell a Headmaster to drop his pants and bend over.

She spoke without looking at Abe, focusing on a dust bunny in the corner. The passive imagined it hopping around and acting like a real bunny. Having a pet dust bunny would be nice. You wouldn't have to feed it, it'd just eat dirt and grime. And it would sleep in your bed with you and wake up with you and wait for you to come back from work and be there when you did. You wouldn't have to worry about it and it wouldn't have to worry about you and someday it would die but you wouldn't need to be sad because it never really felt anything at all.

And you wouldn't have to feed it.

"Did you just say what I think you said? I asked you because you've been here longer. Figured you might know better than I do, ye chen? I didn't know where the broom was. I don't know where the dustpan is. Does that make me some kinda defective girl in your eyes? We can do a lot more than cook and clean, lemme tell you. Didn't your parents, ever? Boch, you can't just be tellin' girls things like that. They kinda get offended. Maybe I just won't be helpin' you clean this up. I guess you'll have to get some other girl to do it for you, hmm? Sexist. I can't believe you."

There were a few more tests she could try, but those required a physical examination. She shuddered to think of what a matron might do if she were caught lifting a passive's shirt. A cute passive, too.

Damned glasses get me every time.

"You're just gettin' on my nerves, Hal. Gettin'. On. My. Nerves."

"She is..." He paused for dramatic effect. "Deceased."

How could she possibly doubt him, after all they'd been through? They'd risked life and sanity for that discovery, just over a week ago..

Triston's words echoed in her heart: '...maybe a week?'

How could he, after all they'd been through? Did.. did it mean nothing to him?

To say that Viator had been in a semi-constant state of drunk and disorderly over the last few weeks would be false, slanderous and cruel. After all, the statement doesn't cover the times he was hung over, or on his way to being drunk, or any combination of the above.

Startling him out of his stupor, the sudden yell made him jump guiltily. Vrunta, someone had seen him making eyes at his witch. Obviously someone as lovely as this new stranger had to be claimed.

Whirling about with a frantic waving of his arms, Henri turned to assuage the irate lover, his smitten blush still cursing his features.

"This uh...Is..It's not what it looks like!" Funny, he hadn't noticed the echo before...

Though disappointed, she consoled herself by presuming the man's life was an utterly uninteresting tangle of affairs with boring women, some of whom enjoyed the occasional costume-and-stabbing party.

Internally, she was spinning, spinning... a confisalto dancer twirling on vapor. Her stage was a void, and her audience was silence.. and her partner...?

What words could describe that empty space? It was immaterial and ineffable. What trailed along her arm as she dipped? Not flesh and blood; not light, not warmth, not air. What supported her hand as she spun? No resistance, no pressure, no weight. What held her aloft? Nothing.

And what caught her when she fell?

Nothing...

He was feeling amiable today, for gods' sake, and someone was going to clocking benefit from such a mood before it was too late. Or else something would have to be set on fire. Well, that might happen anyway ... but it was besides the point now.

And it didn't matter. He was no closer to understanding Caiaphas than he was the day they'd met. He might as well be a stranger, for all the good it did him. Jeremiah would never, could never, understand his strange nobility. Jer felt no kin to those dead bodies, any more than he would were they golly or human or entirely foreign. Jer was a man with no kin but what he claimed for himself, nothing beyond his fami. Not much of a wick, not a human either, for Jer there was only his parents, there was only Cai.

What lived between her ribs? She could name each and every bone; she'd mapped the arteries, veins, and capillaries that flowed in her like tiny rivers, and she knew them as well as she knew the back of her hand. Follicle, epidermis, dermis, hypodermis, interossei.... What made the thoughts in her little grey cells? Could she change at all? Or was she merely an organic machine, built by chance to complete the same meaningless actions over and over again?

So he couldn't be her knight in shining armour and save her from the Loshis rain, but at least they were in the same boat together no matter if it was a boat rowing around in circles.