Professor L'Moussefluer stopped at the door and looked back at me, waiting. It took me a moment to figure out how to explain my situation without sounding insane. "I can't remember anything." She looked confused. "How do you mean?" "Well, it's— I mean, I can remember stuff *now*. Like, now now." That didn't sound any better. How do I even explain this? "Whenever I try to think about the past, the furthest thing back I can remember is waking up underneath that giant tree outside." I pointed in the general direction of where I thought the Lote tree on the hill was. I couldn't see a window from where I was sitting, so honestly I could've been pointing at a closet. Professor L'Moussefluer looked at my finger. Then at me. Then she walked back toward the examination table, and somewhere in those few steps she turned back into a doctor. Like she'd hung the professor on a coat rack and put on a different costume. She pulled the stool up beside the bed and sat down. She glanced toward Lynne. "Would you mind excusing us, Miss Daniels?" Lynne nodded and started collecting her things. I waved both hands. "No, no, she can stay." "Only if you're comfortable with that.” "Yeah. Lynne already knows." "Oh, does she now?" She looked over at Lynne. Lynne had frozen halfway through stuffing a book into her bag and was looking at me like she was checking I meant it. "She was actually the first person I saw when I woke up." Lynne sat back down on the bench by the wall. Professor L'Moussefluer crossed one leg over the other and rested her notebook on her knee. "All right. Start there. You woke beneath the tree." "Yeah." "And before that?" "Nothing. Well..." I thought about it. "I kind of remember a dream." Her pen moved. "What do you remember?" The image came back in pieces. Not a whole picture. Just bark. Branches above me. My hands reaching up. "I was climbing a tree, but I couldn't use my legs for some reason. So it was just my arms, like going up a ladder without using your feet. And then one of the branches snapped, and I fell, and then I woke up." Her pen slowed for a second. Then kept going. "Do you remember hitting the ground?" "No." "Anything before the climbing?" "No." "Anyone else there?" "No. It was one of those dreams where it's, like, the same motion over and over. You know? Where you jerk awake right when you fall." "A hypnic jerk." "Yeah. That." I didn't know how I knew she was right. She just was. She wrote for longer than I'd talked. "And since you woke? Any trouble remembering things that happened after?" "No, not really." "What did you do yesterday?" "Went to class." "Which classes?" I told her. "And what did you have for breakfast this morning?" "Coffee." Lynne sighed from the bench. Professor L'Moussefluer looked over at her. "That was a remarkably disappointed sigh." "He had bread too." "I remembered the important part," I said. "You remembered the qawah." "Yeah, exactly." Professor L'Moussefluer smiled before looking back at me. "That's actually useful." "The coffee?" "The fact that you remember it." "Oh." "Conversations since you woke? People you've met? Your classes?" "Yeah. Mostly." She nodded. "Then whatever happened to your memory, you're still forming new ones normally. You aren't continuing to lose them." That made me feel better than I expected. I hadn't even realized I'd been worried about that until she said it. "What seems to be missing," she went on, "is your autobiographical memory." "My what?" "Your memory of your own life. Your childhood. Your family. Where you've lived. People you've known. Things that happened specifically to you." "Oh." Yeah. That was pretty much all of it. "Your parents?" "No." "Siblings?" "No." "Friends?" "No." "Where you were born?" "No." "Your name?" My hand went to the metal tag pinned on my uniform before I could stop it. She noticed. "I know what the tag says." I lowered my hand. "I mean... I don't actually know if this is my name. It could be." "Could be?" This was the part that sounded bad. I tried to explain it without sounding like I'd mugged some random kid for his nametag. "Okay, so when I got to the bridge, I couldn't remember my name, and they had all these nametags laid out, and I was wearing the uniform. So I figured I was probably supposed to be there. And I thought, if I just wait for everyone to take theirs, whatever one's left over is probably mine." She let me talk and didn't interrupt, only after I finished and the was a moment of silence it when she asked. "And when you saw it?" "I didn't think it was mine." "Why not?" "I mean, look at me." I laughed and pointed at myself. My brown skin. My face. All of it. Professor L'Moussefluer looked. Apparently that wasn't enough of an explanation. "I don't really look Asian." She squinted a bit. "Or Zhanghua," I said. "Or whatever you guys call it here. Like, maybe I'm Asian, but not *that* kind of Asian." She was trying hard to hide that she had no idea what I was saying. She mostly succeeded. Lynne leaned forward from the bench. "What is Asian?" I blinked at her. "You don't know what Asia is?" They looked at each other. Then back at me. Then they both shook their heads. "It's a continent." "And you're from there?" Lynne asked. "Well, no, I—" Was I? I did look like I could be some kind of Asian. South Asian, maybe. Or Middle Eastern. Or what if I was Latino or something? "I don't know, actually." Professor L'Moussefluer nodded like that was a perfectly good answer. "When you woke beneath the tree, did you know what you looked like?" "No. I could see my skin, and I knew I was a boy, but I didn't see my face until I found a mirror." "Did you recognize it?" I shook my head. That one still felt weird. Looking in a mirror and having a stranger look back, and the stranger is just... you, apparently. She brought the end of her pen to her lips. "Quite curious. And yet you remember a continent called Asia." "Yeah. That's where people who look like me and other people who look Zhanghua come from." She crossed one arm over her body and rested her chin on the other hand. She looked up at the ceiling for a moment. Then she turned to Lynne. "Lynni, dear, do you happen to have your history and geography text with you?" Lynne opened her bag. Of course she did. She pulled out an absolute unit of a book. Like, a tome. There was no way that thing had fit inside her bag. Her bag was small. The book was not. "How?" I asked. Lynne looked at me. "How what?" "...Never mind." She carried it over, and Professor L'Moussefluer met her halfway. "Here you are, Professor." "Thank you." Professor L'Moussefluer needed both arms to hold it. The book didn't seem to obey space constraints, but at least it still had to obey weight. She set it on the table beside me and opened the cover to a world map stretched across two pages. I leaned over it. It looked wrong. Not completely wrong. That would've been easier. It looked *almost* right, which somehow made it feel even more wrong. Europe was there. Kind of. Where I knew the United Kingdom should be, there was an island labeled Albion. There was a sea to the east that looked a lot like the Mediterranean. There was something like Africa, except it was huge. It just kept getting bigger the farther south it went, like whoever drew it hit the bottom of the page and decided to keep going anyway. And none of the labels said Africa. The farther east I looked, the worse it got. I couldn't find where India or China should be. It was just one giant landmass covered in kingdoms and rivers and mountains. The map didn't look almost like a child had drawn it, only a very talented child. Whoever made it clearly knew what they were doing. There were coastal islands, rivers running way into the interior, mountain ranges, cities, borders, tiny names written everywhere. Around Albion it was so detailed it was almost showing off. But the farther you got from Albion, the less sure the map seemed about itself. Coastlines got simpler. Islands disappeared or sat in places that felt off. Some land looked stretched, like somebody had heard it described secondhand and done their best. And I couldn't find North or South America anywhere. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. Is this what it feels like having a stroke? I flipped the page. Professor L'Moussefluer moved like she was going to stop me. But then she didn't. "That's an older historical map from the Rhufain Empire. It's no longer current." Rhufain? This one was a circle. The Albion Isles were stuck sideways down near the bottom left, and everything else was crammed into the middle. I couldn't tell what anything was until I spotted Italy. Then something that might've been Greece, poking down into the sea. Except the sea was labeled Mare Nostrus. And most of the land around it was labeled An Ròimh, with a ton of smaller names scattered everywhere. "This one's more normal," I said. "In what way?" "I can actually tell what some of this is." Italy looked like Italy. Greece looked close enough. The Mediterranean looked like the Mediterranean was supposed to look. Then I looked east. "But then this part is worse." Everything past the Arabian peninsula had turned into a blob with names I didn't know. And Africa looked like whoever drew it knew the top really well and then just...didn't. Like it was missing its whole bottom half. Huh. That's probably why the first map made it so big. Overcorrecting. I flipped again. This one was covered in characters I couldn't read. I think it was traditional Chinese. Or whatever counted as traditional Chinese here. "This is a world map according to the Zhanghua Empire," Professor L'Moussefluer said. "Does any of it look familiar?" "Which part's supposed to be Zhanghua?" She slid her finger across the large eastern part of the map. "These territories, and several of its tributaries. To the southwest is Jambudvipa. Farther west, Al-Mishraq and Pharshiae." I squinted. This one had a ridiculous amount of detail around Zhanghua. Rivers everywhere. Provinces packed together like a crowded dinner table. The coast was way more detailed than it had been on the Albion map. Then something clicked. "Wait." I pointed at a peninsula on the eastern edge. "Is that Korea?" "Korea?" Lynne repeated. "The big one right here." Professor L'Moussefluer followed my finger. "That is Joseon." It was a little too big, and the coast wasn't exactly right, but I could see it. "That's Korea." She wrote the word down. I moved my finger to the islands beside it. "And that's Japan." "That's the Yamato archipelago," Lynne said. I stared at it. It was tiny, and it was backwards. Like an L instead of a J. "No. That's wrong." Professor L'Moussefluer raised a brow. "Wrong?" "Japan doesn't look like that." "How does it look?" I tried tracing it in the air. "Like...It kind of curves down more. Like this." What I drew probably didn't look like Japan either. "But not like *that*." I flipped back to the Albion map. Japan was barely on it at all. Then forward again. There was another one after the Zhanghua map, centered farther south and west. Al-Mishraq. Pharshiae. Jambudvipa. The Arabian peninsula was way easier to recognize on this one, and the western side of Jambudvipa had little sea routes drawn between ports that weren't even on the Albion map. Then, the farther it got from those seas, the weirder everything got again. I flipped back. Forward. Back. "So they know this part better." I pointed at Al-Mishraq's coast. "And they know this part better." Zhanghua. "And the Rhufain people knew this part." The Mediterranean. Professor L'Moussefluer nodded. "Cartographers tend to know best what's nearest to them. Where they have travelers, merchants, surveys, soldiers." That made sense. They were all trying to draw the same world. Each one was just clearest around wherever it was made and got fuzzier the farther out it went. But none of them were the world in my head. "Something else is wrong," Professor L'Moussefluer said. It wasn't really a question. "A lot." "Tell me what you notice." I went back east. "This whole part. There should be more islands down here." "There are quite a few." "No, like, *way* more than that." I dragged my finger down the coast. "There's supposed to be all kinds of stuff around here." "Do you know their names?" A few came right away. "Malaysia. Indonesia. The Philippines." She wrote each one down. Neither of them reacted. Nobody had heard of any of them. "And Vietnam." "Van Lang?" Lynne said, leaning closer. I stopped. "What?" "Van Lang. Here." She pointed at a region about where I thought Vietnam should go. "...Maybe?" Professor L'Moussefluer looked at me. "Did the name Van Lang seem familiar before Miss Daniels said it?" "Naw not really." "Does it now?" I thought about it. "Kind of, like probably Lynne's right?" She wrote that down, and something about the way she wrote it looked pleased. "Good." "Good?" "That's a useful distinction." I didn't know why yet. I went back to the map. Something else was bugging me. It took me a second to figure out what. West. Past Albion there was this massive ocean. And then nothing. "There's a lot missing." "Where?" "Here." "The Western Ocean?" "There should be land over there." "There are islands," Lynne said. "No. Not islands." I moved my finger farther out across all that empty blue. "Continents." Professor L'Moussefluer's pen stopped. "Continents." "Two of them." I could see them. Not clearly. But they were there in my head. One big one on top. A thinner one below, kind of shaped like another Africa, like the two of them could fit together. And a skinny strip connecting them. "One up here. One down here. North America and South America." "America," Professor L'Moussefluer repeated. For some reason, when she said it, I heard gunshots, an eagle, and fireworks. I had no idea why. I was not going to tell her that. Nobody said anything. I looked up. "You don't know America either." She looked at her notepad and nodded, but didn't answer. "What can you tell me about them?" I opened my mouth. "I don't know." "Who lives there?" "I don't know." "Have you been there?" "I don't know." "Do you remember seeing them on a map?" That one stopped me. Because I could see the map. In my head. Europe on top, Africa underneath it, Asia stretching out east toward Japan, the Americas across the ocean. All the countries colored different colors so you could tell where they started and stopped. Not perfect. If you handed me paper and told me to draw every country, I'd embarrass myself. But I knew the shape. I even knew it was supposed to be on a ball, not flat, even though the version in my head was a flat rectangle. But when I tried to remember actually *seeing* it—a classroom, a book, a wall, a teacher pointing at it, anything— There was nothing there. It was just in my head. Like knowing how to read. Like knowing what a spoon is. "I don't remember seeing one." "But you can picture one." "Yeah." "How clearly?" "Not perfectly." I tapped the giant southern continent. "But I know this is Africa." "Africa?" "This. And it gets narrower at the bottom. It doesn't just keep getting bigger forever." She wrote it down. "And there's way more islands over there, and Japan's shaped wrong, and—" Something else slid into place. "Australia!" Her pen stopped again. "What is Australia?" "Another continent." "Where?" I pointed down at the bottom right of the map, somewhere southeast of everything. "Like... around here somewhere." Lynne leaned over. "There isn't a continent there." "I know. That's why I'm saying it's missing." Lynne frowned. Not at me, exactly. More like I'd insulted a bunch of sailors she'd never met. "But those waters have been explored. These are maps from every empire, compiled from all their explorers' records. They're the most current maps the Academy has. There isn't anything more—" "Lynni." Professor L'Moussefluer closed the book. I grabbed the edge of it. "Wait—" She put her hand gently over mine. "You don't recognize these maps, do you?" "No, I do. Well, kind of. They're just wrong." "That isn't quite what I asked. Do you remember ever seeing any of these maps before today?" "No." "Do you remember anyone teaching you the names Asia? Japan? America? Australia?" "No." "But you knew those names before either of us gave you any others." "Yeah." "That's what I wanted to know." She slid the book away from me, out of reach. "Wait, I wasn't done." "I know. That's precisely why I'm stopping." I stared at her. She looked at me first, not Lynne. "Before Miss Daniels said so, did you know these were considered the most current maps available?" "No." "Now you do." Lynne looked between us. "I was only explaining." "I know, dear." Professor L'Moussefluer's voice went soft. "Thou didst nothing wrong." I blinked. She'd just gone full Shakespeare on her. Out of nowhere. And Lynne didn't even react, like that was a totally normal way for a professor to talk to a student. Okay. Professor L'Moussefluer turned back to me. "Xu. When you opened this book, you had an idea of what the world should look like. Yes?" "Yeah." "Then you saw four maps. Miss Daniels gave you the names Yamato and Van Lang. I told you which empires drew them. And now Miss Daniels has told you that respected cartographers from every one of those empires agree there's no continent where you say there is." "So?" "So now you have two things in your head arguing with each other. One came from whatever you knew before you walked in here." She tapped my chest. "The other came from someone you trust." Lynne looked down at her hands. "So you're saying I'm making it up." "No." She corrected me quickly. "I'm saying I don't know whether your map is wrong or these are." I stopped to consider what she was saying. "And neither do you." Damn. I came in here for a leg, and now I'd gotten a whole doctor's visit just to be told *I don't know what's wrong with you.* Somehow that also felt about right. "Memory isn't a perfect record," she said. "When you remember something, you aren't taking it off a shelf untouched. Your mind rebuilds it. And what you learn afterward can get mixed into what was there before." "So Lynne can give me fake memories?" Lynne's head shot up. "I would never—" "Not deliberately," Professor L'Moussefluer said. "That's the whole trouble. Nobody has to lie to you for it to happen." She looked back at me. "You said Japan before we opened the book. Now you've seen Yamato, tiny and backwards, on a Zhanghua map. Tonight you'll think about it again. And again tomorrow. In a month, can you promise me you'll still know which shape you pictured first?" I opened my mouth to say yes. Then I tried picturing Japan. The long curvy one was there. But the little backwards L from the map was sitting right next to it now, like it had always been in the drawer. "...Oh." "Yes." "That's already happening." "I know. It's why I closed the book." She leaned back. "Five years from now, you might sincerely believe you knew the name Van Lang before she said it." "I'm pretty sure I won't." "Memory works in a rather particular way." She folded her hands on top of the book. "It won't only be maps. Suppose you tell someone you can't remember where you're from. They look at your face and tell you that you must be from Vanga." Lynne shifted on the bench. Professor L'Moussefluer looked at her. Lynne looked very innocently at the wall. I turned around. "What?" She hesitated. "...You do look a little Vangan." "Do I?" "Or from somewhere else in Jambudvipa." I looked down at my arms. I heard Vanga a bunch of times, I assumed they're people look like me or something. "So I might be Vanga," I said. "Or Jambudvipa." "Vanga is in Jambudvipa," Lynne said. Professor L'Moussefluer slowly turned her head toward her. Lynne covered her mouth. "Sorry." I laughed. Professor L'Moussefluer sighed, but she was smiling. She raised one finger at me. "That you look Vangan," she said, "is an observation." She pointed the pen at my chest. She pointed the pen at my chest. "And that tag says Xu XiaoXing. That is also an observation." I looked down at it. "Neither of them is a memory." That felt strange. For weeks I'd basically been walking around as Xu XiaoXing because nobody had handed me anything better. My whole identity came from waiting until everyone else picked up their luggage. "So I could be Vanga." "You could." "Or from somewhere else." "Yes." "And this could actually be my name." "It could." "This isn't helpful at all.” "No, but it's true to what we actually know.” She opened a drawer beside the bed and pulled out a small blank notebook. "People are going to want to help you, Xu. They'll tell you what your accent reminds them of. Someone will watch you fight and tell you where you must have trained. Someone will look at your face and decide where your family lived." She held the notebook out. "And because those answers will sound perfectly reasonable, one day you may not remember which ones came from you." I looked at the notebook. It's she assigning me homework? Bitch! You're not even my professor! "No." Her brow went up. "No?" "I came here because my leg hurt." "Yes." "You already gave me exercises." "Yes." "You banned me from sparring." "Yes." "And now you're giving me homework?" "Yes." I groaned. "This is the worst infirmary I've ever been to." "How many infirmaries do you remember?" "Only this one, and it's the worst!" Lynne started giggling like I was joking, I'm not. Professor L'Moussefluer opened the notebook anyway and wrote across the top of the first page. REMEMBERED. FAMILIAR. TOLD. INFERRED. "What is that?” She pointed at each with her pen. "If you remember something clearly, it goes here. If something only feels familiar, here. If someone tells you something about your supposed past, put it here, and write down who told you. And if you decide something is probably true because it makes sense." "Inferred?" "Inferred." I looked at my chest. "So Xu XiaoXing goes under inferred." She smiled a bit and nodded. "At the moment, yes." Great. I asked her for help figuring out who I was, or what's going on with my head. She just told me my homework is to go figure it out myself. Free healthcare sucks. "What about the dream?" She thought about it, then added one more. DREAM. "Write down exactly what you remember. The tree. Your legs. The branch. The fall. Nothing extra just because it feels like it belongs." "Should I record all my dreams?” “You may, dreams do not always include memories, but they can provide hints into your waking life, and subsequently, your past.” She handed it back. "And if something new comes to you, write it down before you ask anyone what it means." "So nobody messes with it." "Yes, precisely, so no one ‘messes’ with it, nor with you." Professor L'Moussefluer seemed amused by my word choice. I opened the journal and started writing the map words before they could go fuzzy. Africa. Asia. China. Japan. Korea.. America. Australia. England… Wait, England… "English." Professor L'Moussefluer looked up. "I'm sorry?" "That's what we're speaking right? “What?” The language we're speaking." They stared at me. “What country are we from? We speak English here!” Lynne shook her head and looked at me confused. “What?” "English! We speak it!" Lynne and Professor L'Moussefluer looked at each other, then back at me. “What's English?” Lynne asked “The language we're speaking in.” “Albion?” Lynne tilted her head. I sighed and rubbed my forehead. Ofcourse it's not called English. Then Professor L'Moussefluer started writing. "Do you remember learning this language?" "No." "Learning to read?" "No." "To write?" "No." "But you can do all three." "Yeah." "Then you haven't forgotten everything." "I forgot my entire life." "You forgot your life," she said. "You didn't forget how to live." She picked up a strip of cloth from the medical tray. "You may not remember who taught you to tie a knot." Her fingers moved fast. Knot. "But your hands may still know how." She pulled it loose. "You may not remember your mother teaching you to hold a spoon. But you can still eat." This was true, to be fair I didn't know if my mother had ever taught me anything. I didn't really think about it until after I met Lynne's mom. But I do know everyone has to have a mother to be born and stuff. Professor L'Moussefluer continued "We call it procedural memory. Things learned through repetition can stay, even when the memory of learning them is gone." "So my body remembers how to fight." "In a manner of speaking." That actually made sense. When I was sparring, and when I threw that one dude out the window, I wasn't thinking. I just knew I should move, and I did. I couldn't remember anyone teaching me how to move like that. I looked at the journal. "So I could remember more techniques." Professor L'Moussefluer blinked. Lynne groaned. "That was not the point," Lynne said. "But I could." "It's possible other memories may return with time." Said Professor L'Moussefluer. "Knowing how to fight is a memory." She looked at Lynne. "Ah, Now I understand, he is of that nature.” "Yes, he will most definitely need a re-evaluation come next week." Lynne looked at Professor L'Moussefluer like she was starting to get it. Professor L'Moussefluer looked back at me with the face of a woman picking her battles. "Perhaps, if you actually use the journal, one day you'll remember who taught you to launch a grown man through a window with a shovel." Damn. She was really never letting the shovel go. "So there's a chance." She laughed. "If that's what gets you to write in it, then yes." The journal suddenly looked a lot less useless. I was probably just coping. Whatever. I looked down at my arms. Then my legs. She'd made comments about them during the examination. My shoulders and arms looked like I'd actually used them. My back too. My legs weren't useless, I'd been running and kicking and getting thrown around on them for weeks, but next to everything above my waist they looked like they belonged to a guy who'd had a desk job for twenty years of his fourteen-year life and skipped every single leg day. "If I trained enough to fight like this, why do my legs look like that?" Her expression got more serious. "You've noticed." "It's kind of hard not to." "Your development is unusual." "Unusual good?" "No." "Oh." "Could I have been injured?" "Possibly." The dream came back. Pulling myself up the tree with only my arms. My legs just hanging there. "What if I couldn't walk?" She was quiet for a second. "It's possible you had some earlier condition affecting your lower body." "Because of the dream—" "The dream suggests something." She held up one finger. "It doesn't prove it." Professor L'Moussefluer stood up. "If you sit alone in your room tonight deciding you must have been unable to walk, that idea will feel a little more true every time you repeat it. And one day you won't be able to tell whether you remembered it or built it." I looked at the journal. DREAM. INFERRED. Two different lines. Fine. Then another idea hit me, and it was a better one. "What if I'm a sleeper agent?" Professor L'Moussefluer stared at me. Lynne rolled her eyes "Not this again" Lynne said. “A what?” Professor L'Moussefluer asked. I lowered my voice. "Like, somebody trains me to fight, wipes my memory, sends me here. And then one day somebody says a secret word and I just... assassinate the Headmaster." Lynne had been about to laugh. She stopped. Professor L'Moussefluer slowly put down her pen. "Why would that be your conclusion?" "It's not my first conclusion." "What number is it?" "I don't know like my fourth?" "What were the other three?" “...Ok maybe it was my first guess.” "Is there magic that can do that?" That made her thoughtful, which oddly made me hopeful. I don't actually want to hurt anyone, but not gonna lie. Being a sleeper agent as my backstory sounds so badass. "Not anything I know of that works the way you're describing. Nothing that would neatly cut out an entire personal history and leave the rest of you working the way you are." "So that's a no." I didn't realize how disappointed I was til I heard it seeping out the sound of my own voice "That's an I don't know. Which is a phrase I'd like you to get more comfortable with." "But there's mind magic?" "There are forms of magic that can affect perception and memory in limited ways." She held my eyes. "And nothing you've told me gives me reason to think anyone did that to you. I'd consider many other possibilities first." "How many?" "Many." Every time somebody shot down the sleeper agent thing, I felt a little disappointed. It made perfect sense. And it kinda sounded cool. "So what do I actually do?" "For now?" "Yeah." "Very little." “Okay.” "Attend your classes." Ugh no. "Study." No! "Your leg exercises." Nooo! "Eat properly." Lynne nodded so hard I could hear it. I ignored her. "Sleep properly." Impossible with the parade of students marching next to my bed every morning. "And no sparring until I clear you." I fell backward onto the examination bed. "So my treatment is homework, exercise, vegetables, and no fighting." "That's rather oversimplified." "Am I wrong?" She paused. "...No." Exactly. "If you'd like," she said, "I can take a closer look at your case." I rolled my head so I could look at her. "What does that mean?" "A more thorough examination. Which kinds of memory you've kept, which you haven't, whether anything changes over time. Your physical development too, and whether it connects to anything." "Are you gonna mess with my head?" She laughed. "No." "Magic?" "Not without explaining exactly what I mean to do and getting your permission first." "And you wouldn't tell everyone?" "Medical matters are confidential." "Other professors?" "Not without a medical reason that requires it." "The Headmaster?" “Only if your health and immediate safety are concerned. Not simply because he asks." I looked at Lynne. Professor L'Moussefluer noticed. "That's why I asked Miss Daniels to leave at first. She only stayed because you said so. Who you tell is your choice. But I'd keep the circle small until we understand more." I looked at the journal. I still didn't love the idea of somebody investigating me. But she'd listened to all of it without acting like I was crazy. Every time she didn't know something, she just said so. And she'd spent half the conversation stopping people from handing me answers, which was a weird thing to do if you wanted to mess with someone's head. She felt safe. Like exactly the kind of person you'd want doing the looking. "Okay." "Okay?" "You can look into it." She smiled. "Very well." I slid off the bed and started grabbing my stuff. Then I remembered something important. "How much is this?" She looked genuinely confused. "How much is what?" "This. All the doctor stuff." Lynne laughed. "What?" "It's free," Lynne said. I stared at her. "What do you mean, free?" "The Medical Research Centre treats enrolled students without charge," Professor L'Moussefluer said. I looked around the room. It was enormous. Clean. Full of equipment I didn't understand, staffed by a professor who'd just spent an entire afternoon listening to me explain that the world was shaped wrong. Nothing here looked free. "What about people who aren't students?" "That's rather different." “What's the price for a physician's in town?” “Oh about five to six pence.” I started counting. I knew you could get like 2-3 qawah drinks with a pence Lynne watched me. "What are you doing?" "Math." "For what?" "One doctor's visit in town is like twelve to eighteen qawah drinks!" They looked at me dumbfounded. "That's like twelve coffees if I get the most expensive one!," I clarified. "I understood you," Lynne said. "You're measuring medicine in qawah?" Professor L'Moussefluer said. "It makes sense to me, I don't get your pence pound stuff, but like one pence can get you like 2 or 3 qawah drinks depending on what you get." "That doesn't make it a useful measurement," Lynne said. "I know exactly what eighteen coffees feels like." Professor L'Moussefluer laughed into her hand. "Yes. Physicians outside the Academy can be expensive." Lynne was packing the giant geography book back into her tiny bag, it made no sense how it got back in there, it was either magic, or her organizational Tetris skills were magical. "This is the best medical centre in Albion." "One of the best," Professor L'Moussefluer said. "The best." "Lynni." "It is." The best hospital in the country. Free. Because I was an enrolled student. I looked down at the tag. Xu XiaoXing was an enrolled student. Whoever that was. If it wasn't me, then technically this was their free hospital. Their bed. Their afternoon of a professor listening. I didn't really want to think about all that right now, so I put it in the back of my head next to the backwards Japan and stuff. Professor L'Moussefluer pointed at my legs. "Exercises." I sighed. "Yes, Professor." I said, teasing Lynne by imitating her voice. "And use that." I held up the journal. "Yes, Professor." "No sparring." I didn't say anything. "Did you hear her?" Lynne said. I looked back at Lynne. "...Yes, Professor." I made sure to really make my voice all squeaky like hers. She needs to know I'm mocking her now. Lynne narrowed her eyes. I smiled at her as nicely as I could. "Goodbye, Professor." I said in that same voice. Lynne grabbed my sleeve before Professor L'Moussefluer could think of anything else and pulled me out the door. Outside, the afternoon was bright and quieter than usual. Fewer people running between buildings. I turned around to get my bearings, and there it was, up on the hill. The Lote tree. On the exact opposite side of the building from where I'd pointed. Oh, well damn. Lynne was already a few steps ahead. I stopped and opened the journal against my palm. Under INFERRED, I wrote: Xu XiaoXing. I looked at it for a second Then, under REMEMBERED, I wrote: The tree is the other way.

Chapter 34