She wondered if he was disappointed in her for failing. She thought of how she’d promised her family to behave. Yet she still didn’t regret anything. I only regret that I didn’t succeed.

Professor Dano sank into his desk chair, put his face in his hands, and sighed heavily. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to keep standing or sit, whether he expected her to speak or he planned to just sigh into the silence for a while. After a moment, she sat in the chair opposite his desk.

“You did well,” Professor Dano said, looking up at her.

That was . . . good? So I’m not here to be yelled at for getting the whole school “sealed” and failing to stop the festival? She still didn’t relax. She knew she’d failed. In fact, she’d made things worse.

He gave her a half smile, though there was little humor in it. “My friends don’t believe that children have learned empathy yet. You have at least proved them wrong in that.”

She wasn’t sure if he expected a thank-you or not. It was a backwards kind of compliment. “Don’t they remember being my age?”

Another half smile. “Just the bad parts. Children can be selfish creatures.”

“Adults can be worse,” Mina dared point out. The prime minister and her advisors, after all, were adults. They knew the truth and had the power to do something to help, yet they refused to.

He sighed again, and the smile vanished. “I can’t argue with that.” He drummed his fingers on his desk. “You must understand that this is about more than one celebration. If the prime minister acknowledges that the festival causes deadly storms beyond the mountains, then it opens the door to change.”

What does he mean? All she wanted to do was stop the festival. Stop the festival, and you stop the killer storms.

“The prime minister would need to reevaluate every use of storm beasts. If the festival causes harm, what else does? How does keeping our fields perfectly watered affect the outsiders? How does controlling the wind on the sea affect the rest of the ocean? Examining the effects of our actions could have ramifications throughout the entire economy. Alorria has been prosperous because of its carefully cultivated selfishness. What happens when that crumbles?”

Mina hadn’t thought about any of that. But the prime minister must have.

“People fear change,” Professor Dano said. “And that is what stopping the festival represents: change to our way of life. That is why the prime minister is taking steps to silence the ‘rumors’ you and your friends have been spreading. She doesn’t want to go down in history as the prime minister who destroyed our prosperity.”

Mina swallowed. “Am I . . . are we . . . in trouble?” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word “expelled.”