And that meant she was going to eat better than she ever had in her life.
She even picked up a fork to do just that. She let it hover over the egg.
Yet somehow, she just couldn’t bring herself to stab the yolk. To spear a potato. To pick up some of that ham. Her guts seemed to roil at the very thought, and she had to set her cutlery back down. She sat back, telling herself it was just an ordinary lapse in appetite. That it was just early for breakfast. That she would feel hungry in a second.
But deep down, she knew it wasn’t anything of the kind.
She knew it was him.
It was the way he turned her stomach.
The stress and fear he struck into her, and how it robbed her of simple pleasures.
Though of course she couldn’t let Anaya know that. She couldn’t allow Anaya to be dragged into any of it. Sweet Anaya, who was actually doing okay, and just wanted to enjoy her dinner. No, no, she needed to put on a show of dinner eating.
Only somehow, Anaya took one look at her fussing with her cutlery, and seemed to just... know.
“If you’re thinking of how to get that asshole off your back, all I know is do not use poison to do it,” she said, as she used some frankly delicious-looking roti to scoop an unhinged smelling portion of dal makhani into her mouth. Then just as Mina was about to ask what she meant, she swallowed and continued. “Apparently, someone tried to do that last year to take his captain’s spot on the Gauntlet team, and it did nothing to him. He shrugged it off like they’d fed him a spoonful of sugar.”
“And I’m guessing he wasn’t pleased once he did.”
“Well, the person who did it did not come to class the next day.”
“Did they come to class ever, after that?”
“They did not.”
She sank back in her chair. Picked up her fork again, and poked at the egg she didn’t want to waste. “This place is psychotic. And I mean I knew it was because of the memory erasures and the liability waivers and stuff from the books. But even by those standards—”
“Yeah. I heard two people talking before you got here. Did you know that last year, so many people died at the end of first-year flying exam that there was a government investigation? Of course, it’s impossible for the government to find Harrowhall guilty of anything. But still. The fact that they even managed totry.”
“We live in a really fucked-up society.”
“Yeah, I thought all the baseline inequality was bad enough.”
“Right. Here it’s superpowered. And yet somehow still grindingly dull and predictable.” Mina sighed and set her fork down. The egg was now mush anyway. “You know he tried to pass me a note in the lecture hall? Like a bog-standard bully. I thought it was going to be a drawing of me with a giant butt.”
“Is that something that’s actually happened to you before?”
Their eyes met over their plates. The silence spinning out, despite how not silent everything was really. The dining hall wasgetting busy now. Plates clattered, chairs scraped back and forth, people yelled for their friends to join them. Just like she’d always imagined doing when she got here, and somehow fit in.
At least I do with you, she thought at Anaya.
And somehow Anaya seemed to understand, because she reached a hand across the table. She put it over Mina’s. “We have each other now,” she said. “When we pass notes, it’s the good kind. The best kind. The kind I used to hope I would have with someone but never quite managed.”
“Shall we write each other’s names on our pencil cases?”
“I already have. Mina and Anaya, besties forever.”
She went to laugh at that. Yet somehow, a laugh wasn’t what came out. It sounded more like a sigh of delight. And it came with such a strange and unfamiliar feeling. A flood of warmth, a flicker of something in the back of her mind. Like with Harker—a sense that she was seeing Anaya but someone else at the same time.
Jyoti, her mind whispered.
But the name flitted away before she could fathom it. After a second, she couldn’t even remember what it was—and even if she had been able to, a crash over at the end of the hall soon had her knocked out of it. Harker whipping his wand around, it looked like. A table was currently trying to eat whoever had pissed him off.
Next time, that’ll be me, she thought, and focused back on the problem at hand.
“He must have a weakness. Some way to make him stop whatever it is he’s trying to do to me,” she said, and Anaya looked thoughtful for a moment.
