Professor Dano seemed to know the way. He hurried her and Pixit through a storage room filled with brooms, mops, and buckets, and then out a door onto a narrow bridge. It was barely wide enough for Pixit. It ran directly below a far wider bridge, like it was tucked into its shadows. “Where are we?” she asked.

“Maintenance bridge,” he replied. “Beneath the archway. You’ll tell people you never left the ship this morning. You were too sick.”

“But people saw me.”

“Fine, then. You left the ship, but you came back sick. Were any of the other students close enough to tell you weren’t ill? Did you talk with any of them?”

“Yes. I talked to Jyx, Ferro, and Zek. Are they going to be in trouble too?”

“They can get you in trouble, if they tell the wrong person you weren’t sick.” He grimaced. “You’ll need to prove to your friends you’ve been sick so no one suspects you were the one who spoke with the prime minister. Vomit on one of them, if you can. With luck, by the time anyone thinks to question them, that’s all they’ll talk about.”

«You should throw up on Chauda,» Pixit suggested. «That would be funny.»

Nothing about this is funny, Mina told him.

In a very small voice in her mind, he said, «That would be a little bit funny.»

“Once we’re back to Mytris, you’ll be given a leave of absence to visit your family. That way, if the prime minister sends anyone to the school to identify you, you won’t be there to be identified. You won’t have to answer any uncomfortable questions, and you won’t have to admit you crossed the border. A week should be sufficient. The prime minister should lose interest in you quickly enough—​in the grand scheme of things, this was a minor infraction. Unfortunately, we’ll need to label the absence an academic suspension in order for Professor Werrin to approve it. It will be on your record.”

Mina stumbled over her feet, and Professor Dano hauled her upright. “It’s that serious?” She hadn’t thought a simple question could cause that much trouble. She didn’t understand why Professor Dano was reacting this way.

“Just a precaution. You wouldn’t know this, of course—​how could you?—​but you asked a sensitive question at a sensitive time. Rumors have been flying between storm guardians for a while about the connection between our weather control within Alorria and the devastating storms beyond our borders. The prime minister has been attempting to squelch those rumors—​and she sees the festival as proof that all is well, the rumors are baseless, and change is unnecessary.”

Did that mean . . . Am I right? There is a connection?