He shrugged. “It’s good.” This was true. Mazul Kandeep’s history of warfare and alliance between the southern continents had been the only book that kept Cyril halfway engaged in class discussion at Cantrell. It had given his teacher several weeks of false hope before the class moved on to less brutal and less interesting historical periods.

“Hmm.” Jinadh put back a bit of his drink and sank farther into the upholstery. “I’m certainly pleased to see the house still standing, anyway.”

Stephen’s expression, at an angle visible to Cyril but hidden from Jinadh, was thunderous verging on tears. Cyril put this down to embarrassment. It was one thing to blow up a pencil sharpener for the entertainment of your classmates. It was another for your parents to make jokes about it while you were in exile pending possible expulsion.

“Please,” said Cyril, stretching his legs out and sighing. “I’d never let him blow up his own house.”

He had guessed on this one—that if he turned Jinadh’s joke around, made it about himself and not Stephen, he’d win some gratitude. And it worked; Stephen’s mouth twitched and he turned his face down toward his book.

By contrast Jinadh looked off-balance, as if he hadn’t considered that Cyril might take responsibility for Stephen, or let him blow up other people’s houses.

Smiling thinly, Cyril snapped the creases of his newspaper and pretended to resume reading he had never been doing in the first place.

But Jinadh had gotten himself back in the saddle, and said, “If either of you are going to be arrested, at least wait for the arson until after Solstice? I do not want to make things awkward for our guests.”

“Who’s coming?” Stephen put his book aside, curiosity overwhelming his pique. “Mummy’s work people?”

“No,” said Jinadh, sounding slightly too pleased with himself and pointedly ignoring Cyril, who probably wasn’t going to like the answer. “Old friends.”

“Yours?” asked Cyril.

“Actually, yours.”

The newspaper was loud in the silence, when he folded it and set it down. “Lillian agreed to this?”

“Of course.” There was too much cheer in it, which meant there had been some argument. He wondered if her initial reluctance had been on his account or her own.

But she had acquiesced in the end. And despite what he’d said to Stephen, about being ready for the moment the adults around him decided he couldn’t be fixed and had to be gotten rid of, he now found it was much worse to be dragged out of obscurity, roughly polished on somebody’s sleeve, and newly assessed as fixable after all.