“I don’t know what’s going on around me,” Nev said. “Quona won’t explain any of it to me. You won’t tell me. Nori has been lying to me all along. The truth is that I want to go home and never come back. Home is so different from Ledra. Here, everything is stuck, spinning in place. Everyone is trapped in some role and no one stops to think about why they’re doing what they do. Why they want the best grades, or the most friends, or the most information. Everyone lies and competes. Even some of the streets are traps, if you aren’t rich enough or connected enough to have some cowshit pass. I hate it here,” she said, in a voice that was composed almost entirely of contemptuous breath. “At home, you can see across the mountains. You can measure how much the glacier moves every year. You can breathe.”

Lovisa wasn’t sure if she’d ever been someplace where she could breathe. “Why are you here?” she asked, not as a challenge; just out of curiosity.

“Because my grandfather raised me to be an animal doctor,” she said. “Because I want to take care of animals. The academy can teach me things I can’t learn anywhere else on earth.”

Lovisa knew her next question was selfish, but she couldn’t help herself. “So you’ll come back?” she said. “When all this is over?”

“I guess so,” said Nev. “Whenever that is.”

“Will you tell anyone else that you have dangerous knowledge?”

Nev paused. “No,” she said. “I won’t tell, until I understand better what’s going on.”

Lovisa’s eyes filled with tears. “Thank you,” she whispered. “What time do you leave today?”

“Early.”

That was good. The sooner Nev went away, the fewer people Lovisa would have to worry about. “Thanks for the tea,” she said.

“Thanks for telling me the truth about Nori,” said Nev.

The light was changing, shifting. Lovisa perceived the slightest movement on the footpath below Nev’s window. Then, suddenly, she saw a pair of blinking gold eyes. Then more: three pairs, four. As Lovisa’s eyes adjusted, she kept seeing more foxes.

“How creepy,” she said. “Why are there so many? Whose are they?”

“I have a guess,” said Nev, sounding disgusted.

Then Lovisa saw a fox that was sitting right in the middle of the group, staring up at her. It had a malevolent gleam in its eyes, a familiar long nose, and jaunty ears.

“Oh,” she said. My mother’s fox.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

It hit her first as despair. That one, at least, is here for me. I’m never alone, I’m always watched. I can’t get away from it.

I’ll never be free.

Then, to her surprise, a tiny seed dropped down and took root, somewhere inside her. It was a realization. It began to grow into something certain, and sad.