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Olivier was a boy with a complexion the colour of vomit and an uncanny bone structure, but he had an easy smile. He laid out fourteen flashcards before Kari.

He pointed to the bathroom.

"Salle de bain," said Kari.

He pointed to the kitchen.

"Cuisine," said Kari.

He pointed to the bedroom.

"Chambre," said Kari, and so on.

When they'd gone through all fourteen, Olivier flashed her a brilliant grin. His voice rode the melody of foreign lands.

"Yes, very good, you say it like a real French. Which country are you from?"

Kari blushed, watching Olivier repeat the same exercise with the other two students, and her ears knew that they were throwing themselves at the language clumsily, like toddlers trying to walk the same pace as adults.

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"I don't know," she said.

"Bon, une citoyenne du monde," he said, clapping his hands together.

This gesture seemed to blow aside the shutters of her memory, stirring up long forgotten feelings in her ribs, impressions of a different time and a different tongue.

Kari remembered the tang of ash catching in her nostrils and she remembered her father running his fingers through her hair to pick out the nits, and she remembered squirming and wriggling away until he resorted to singing lullabies in his deep, throaty voice. The broken fragment of a melody bounced around her head; her heart thumped in her chest as these emotions flooded her.

"Olivier, do you know this song?"

She hummed it for him, but she'd never sung before, feeding her voice box notes that cracked and wobbled to the point that when she'd finished she could only look at him in despair. It sounded nothing like the ideal in her head.

Despite her performance, he nodded, smiling as he sang, voice flowing out of his mouth like icing. Although Kari didn't understand a word he said, and the accent of his modern French ran at ninety degrees to her father's, she recognised this as her mother tongue.

"My song. What's it called?" she asked.

"L'araignée gypsie," he said. "The spider gypsy.”

"Thank you," she said, clasping his hands. "I know now how I can live again. There is a path for me, and it’s not here in Madame Gunmetal's school. I need to find my people and learn my native tongue."

Kari welled up with resolve, standing. And then she caught sight of the red number on her hand, a mark of condemnation for her murders, the lethal option she'd chosen when she could have simply run away. The final reminder that she had no place among any people.

Voilà la pluie — a single tear. She fell to earth.