“It’s not like that,” Abi protested, except she knew it actually was like that, and that this was the reason why she was beginning to enjoy the classes she had been a bit dubious about not that long ago. If you knew the way a problem worked, then working the problem always gave you the same answer. Math was reliable.

“You can’t fool me, I’m your best friend and I’ve known you forever,” Kat reminded her.

“I wouldn’t want to fool you, except if it was a joke,” she replied. “You might order my head chopped off.”

“They won’t let me do that,” Kat giggled. “Or I swear, I’d have had Trey’s head off a long time ago. Here, read something besides musty math books,” she added, shoving something with a cover Abi didn’t recognize at her. “This just came into the Royal library, and I swiped it before anyone else could.”

But Abi pushed it back toward her, much to her surprise. “Believe it or not, I’d rather read those musty math books.”

•   •   •

Abi turned up at the refectory in Heralds’ Collegium in the middle of the lunch mob all alone. She looked around, but she didn’t see anyone obvious to eat with. Trey and Kat must have had an earlier lunch. Niko was in the middle of a huddle of his friends at a single table, and Abi didn’t want to intrude on what was clearly a Very Male discussion.

About girls, she guessed with amusement, catching their covert glances at some of the more attractive girls among the Trainees. All the eyes moved to a particular target at once and then quickly away, and none of those targets were boys, so she was pretty sure she had read the group correctly.

Her presence would certainly end that discussion, considering that she tended to make fun of Niko’s butterfly memory when it came to a girl he crushed on. It was a good thing that so far he’d never let the object of his desires know he was crushing on her, since he would have left a long string of broken hearts—or at least really annoyed girls—in his wake.

So she settled in a corner favored by Blues where her uniform wouldn’t be conspicuous, helped herself to the bowls of food as they were passed around and proceeded to methodically work her way through her lunch. As always, she kept her ear open for bits of gossip that might be useful to her father, but today, there wasn’t really anything of interest.

That wasn’t such a bad thing, since it meant she could eat her lunch in peace; but she’d barely begun when she caught sight of three of the boys from her class moving through the crowd and working their way in her direction. There was no mistaking it after a few moments; they couldn’t have any goal but her, because they passed several good seating opportunities. So the question was, was this a group of Dudley Remp’s allies, or of his former victims?