“Say, Lottie, who do you have a crush on?” Sue asked without any lead-in.

“Ack?” said Charlotte. Her cheeks turned a pink bright enough to match her shirt, and she turned away from her puzzle, flustered. “What?”

“A boy you like,” Sue said casually.

Charlotte froze, searching for a workable non-answer. “Out of the two boys I’ve seen here, I only met one for a few minutes before he went off with a pair of Chypros agents, and the other is my brother. I don’t know which sort of girl you think I am, but I’m neither.”

“Aw, but you’d make such a cute couple. You seemed to get on well.”

“We are, but – stop grinning. He’s my brother.”

Sue only smirked wider. “I didn’t say it was your brother you’d be cute with.”

“You watch too much anime.”

“Heresy.”

Charlotte pouted, then spotted an opening. “I suppose that makes me a bit of an iconiiclast,” she said. She mentally high-fived herself: she’d finally made a pun!

Both girls tried very hard to keep straight faces. Blank glanced over, curious about why they’d momentarily stopped bantering.

Charlotte blinked first. “Well, who’s your crush, then?”

“I have one on everyone,” Sue said candidly. “Most of my classmates are cute or have something else going for them, and it’s not like you can only have one. Speaking of which, is your brother single?”

“Why does everyone always ask that,” Charlotte muttered.

“Because he’s –”

“Please never answer that question. Um, yes, he is, but I don’t think he’d ever agree to date one of his students. And, uh, isn’t he a bit old for someone our age? He’s said so before.” She paused and reran that through her mind. “He wasn’t saying it about me specifically.”

“Uh-huh. I can’t wait to see Bright’s face when they get back, then.”

“Wait, what?”

“It’s not like a wildly inappropriate age gap ever stopped anyone before,” Sue said instead of answering the question. “There was one time when I was eleven, and I tried to flirt with one of my brothers’ friends, who was at least twenty, the operative word being ‘tried’. They stopped bringing friends back to our house after that. I was annoyed at the time, but in hindsight, it was the best possible outcome.”

“I can’t help but be reminded of price anchoring, you know, where a salesman opens with a ridiculously overpriced offer, then switches to a normally overpriced one so that it’ll seem reasonable.”

“I’m mostly just daydreaming out loud. I’m sure he has brighter things on his horizon anyway. Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Charlotte said with composure. “I don’t really mind you thinking about that, and I won’t be upset or anything if you ask him, but I don’t think it’d go anywhere.”

“Fair enough. Hey, Blank,” Sue called, “what about you? You’re breaking the Code if you listen to two girls gossiping about excruciatingly awkward pre-adolescent crushes without volunteering any yourself.”

“Welp,” Blank said, stepping back from her puzzle. “You’re not wrong, but on the other hand, I hate maths, I haven’t made any headway on this at all, and I’d sooner chainsaw out my own eyes than gush about boys, so I’m going to have to take a few Girl Card demerit points, because I’m going for a walk.”

“Out of every possible power tool,” Charlotte said, “a chainsaw might be the one I’d least like to do eye surgery on myself with.”

“Words to live by,” said Blank, and she headed out the door they’d come in by.

Sue sniffed at her armpit.

“Hmm?” Charlotte asked.

“We’ve split the party into, like, five groups,” Sue said, counting them off on her fingers. “Her, us, your brother and Bright, your mum and Mr Robards, and Jase and the Chypros pair.”

“Don’t forget Jill,” Charlotte said. She thought about the explosion at the Chypros tower. “I hope she’s okay. I can’t smell anything, but I have some perfume in my bag, if you want?”

“I was joking, I showered like half an hour ago.”

Charlotte paused. Lots of people hide their insecurities behind self-deprecating humour. Sue had made a serious effort to talk to her, but not with anyone else; Charlotte didn’t think she’d done anything especial to deserve so much attention, which suggested that Sue probably had tried to socialise with the others in the past, but it hadn’t worked.

“What’s your favourite thing about Jason?” she asked.

“Jason?” Sue repeated, nonplussed at the non sequitur.

It was only now that Charlotte realised how abrupt her question had been. She blushed, but pressed on. “You seemed to like him.”

Sue gave her an unconvinced look, but then she shrugged and thought it over anyway.

“I don’t know if this is the right word for it,” she said, “but his self-acceptance. He is what he is and doesn’t apologise for it. He was the one who got me onto anime, for example. He was the only person in the class who liked these weird Japanese cartoons. Especially when you’re younger, it’s easier to go with the flow and pretend to like the same things everyone else does, but he never did. I think the world would be a better place if more people were like that.”

Charlotte nodded.

“One sort of related thing that I really respect,” Sue continued, encouraged, “is that he owns it when he screws up. You know how the world is full of people who, when you tell them off for something, immediately start saying that no, they did the right thing and you just aren’t seeing the big picture; or maybe that they’re doing as well as anyone could, and you just have unreasonable expectations?” Charlotte nodded again. “Everyone screws up, and Jason’s no exception, but when I tell him off for it, he doesn’t pretend he’s in the right. He says, ‘Oh, whoops, sorry; I’ll try not to that again.’ Not that he’s a pushover, or that he necessarily doesn’t do it again, but he doesn’t have that compulsive urge to defend himself when he’s done something indefensible.”

“You think he’s honest?” Charlotte suggested.

“That might be it,” Sue said. “He’s a hilariously bad liar, you should see it. But the other thing I wanted to say is that he accepts everyone else in the same way. It’s not that he likes everyone, or even all that many people, but he doesn’t expect you to apologise for what you are, either. For example, he’s really into electronic music remixing. This one time he showed me some of his work, but electronica really isn’t my taste. You know how there’s a lot of people who get offended when you say you don’t like the same things they do, even though they shouldn’t because that’s totally not an insult? With him, it isn’t. He asked what music I do like, we compromised with some lovely Ludwig van, and that was that.”

Outside, Blank let out a silent sigh, her foot twitching. She hesitated for a moment longer, then set off in the direction Mother Bright, Mr Truman, and Jason had gone.

Their path was obvious, marked by unlocked doors, each with a dead raptor. Probably it counted as cheating for every door the two adults opened, since they weren’t students or teachers. She glanced at the raptor corpses as she passed, without much interest. Heavy chainsaw damage to most. Mother Bright looked overrated, but Mister Truman could be interesting.

Her long legs leant themselves to a quick lope, and it didn’t take her long to hear the babble of voices ahead. She slowed down to a stealthy pad so she could eavesdrop.

“You said that this was more than just a school,” Jason was saying. “Is it also a Chypros R&D facility?”

Blank rounded a corner, and the three of them came into view. Truman was in the lead, followed by Jason and Mother Bright. They didn’t notice her.

Mother Bright shook her head, despite being behind Jason. “This belongs to a rival organisation, but that just means it’s working toward the same ends on someone else’s payroll. Their ultimate goals are more or less the same as Chypros’s, although they’re targeting other individuals, usually richer ones than we do. This is a bona fide research lab, though.”

“What are your ultimate goals?” he asked. “As far as I can tell, you’re one of those vague semi-government conspiracies that just sort of mess with people for no reason.”

Mother Bright gave a sharp exhalation through her nose that managed to convey deep contempt. “That just shows what you know. In any case, that’s a childish take on it. Organisations don’t have goals. They might have a charter, but there’s no guarantee that the people who belong to the organisation care about that at all. Chypros … well, its purpose is in its name. As for me, I want to help my family by working on my career.”

“That sounds like a good strategy,” Jason lied, keeping his voice sincere. He remembered the barely-restrained hostility Michelle had shown to her mother, and wondered how she could possibly think things would turn out well by keeping on her current path. “So why a lab in a school? If I were a real scientist, I wouldn’t want kids anywhere near my experiments.”

He was mostly thinking of Bright as he said that. She was a lovely person, provided she always got her way with everything, but he wouldn’t want to have anything delicate running nearby in case anyone ever tried to stand up to her.

“It’s all about the difference between childhood and adulthood,” Mother Bright said, with maybe a note of wistfulness in her voice. “People depend on adults. Adults have obligations, and the understanding that their actions have consequences. It affects what you can say, do, who you can love … Children don’t have that. You can do anything you like, and forget about it a day later. It keeps your minds free. You have ideas that adults can’t. It makes for good inventors.”

When he had first come to Aquinas, Jason had mentioned aloud that he liked anime. It turned out that talking about weird foreign cartoons, even if some were in his informed opinion very well-made, was not a foundation for universal popularity. He was aware of the consequences of that more than a day later. “Uh-huh.”

“Of course, there’s more to it,” she went on, clearly not listening. “Inventions have consequences too, so adults need to be involved at some point, if only to monetise it properly. People who say that money doesn’t matter aren’t the ones who have obligations.”

She came to a final door, which had been cut apart by a chainsaw. Inside was a cross between an amphitheatre and a lab. They were in an open area, ringed with benches laden with partially dissected frogs and lizards; conical and volumetric flasks, some filled with food dye and set atop Bunsen burners; and a sparking Van de Graaff generator, which was ominous because it was quite near an open bottle of acetone. Spotlights lit it from above. To one side of the circle of benches was a pile of dead raptors. Around all of this were ascending rows of seats, as if for spectators.

“This is it,” Mother Bright said. “You have to solve the three puzzles here by yourself. If we give you any hints, it’ll trigger another raptor flood, and the puzzles will reset before we can kill them all. Show us what you can do.”

She and Mister Truman climbed up to the stands, leaving Jason alone with the science equipment. He shrugged and went over to the bottle of acetone.

“Might want to start with this,” he said to himself, stoppering the bottle before it could explode.