In Which Sooni Is Not Pictured
“This is your dorm?” Pala asked me after ducking through the doorway into the nexus hallway. She seemed really impressed with the idea, considering it was just the space between the three nearest dorm buildings enclosed and roofed over.
“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.