Heart-Less

Chapter 16

As had become routine in the past few weeks, Ada left her lecture five minutes early. She made her way to the atrium, managing to get her meal — fish today — before the lunch bell rang. By the time the students began to stream in, Ada was already seated down.

"What did you choose today?" she asked her lunch partner.

Kai looked at her. "You can see. Anyway, we need to talk about seating arrangements. Has anyone talked to you about it?"

Ada took a bite of her fish. "Nope. I'm supposed to meet Aki after school and Eiji tomorrow though."

"Good, good," Kai said. "I talked to Hiroto and Eiji just now, and we were thinking that the seating arrangements should go something like this." He put down his chopsticks and rummaged through the file lying next to him, eventually handing over a piece of paper to her.

It showed a long, rectangular table. The Sakoku representatives, which would comprise of the council and a few selected students, were seated in the middle, with the Kaiguo group on her right, and Pendragon's people on her left.

"We had some problem figuring out where to put you," Kai said, "but we think that having you here," he pointed to a circle, "between us and the Kaiguo group would be a good idea. What do you think? Do you prefer to be among us, or among them? You could join either side, although personally, I'd rather you join us. Sitting in between might be a bit too ambiguous."

Ada frowned. Hopefully Kai picked up on it."I think you should change it."

"I knew you wouldn't want to sit in between us."

"I'm not talking about my seating arrangement," Ada said, taking care to sound upset. "I meant that you should change the entire seating arrangement."

Kai's face fell. "Why? It's good, it allows us to listen to both groups, while preventing too many conflicts from happening."

"That may be true, but the Kaiguo people aren't going to be happy about this. You put them all to one side, and it means that none of them can get unique videos. And we don't even know what the head wizard's people will think. Have we gotten any information from them?"

"Hiroto hasn't said anything."

Ada took care to sound exasperated. "Why don't you just ask him? At the very least he can tell us about their culture."

"We shouldn't bother the Head Wizard like that," Kai protested, "he's much too busy."

"Why don't I try explaining this again. We should change the arrangement to something more circular, so that we can all face each other."

"But how are we supposed to face the lecturers?"

Ada put down her chopsticks. "You can move the tables after the lecture. Give them a break to digest the information at the same time. Trust me, this will improve communication, and that's what we want, right? Frank and open talk?"

From the looks on Kai's face, and the fact that he started choking, Ada had said the wrong thing.

"Open talk?" he asked, his voice hoarse. "But what if someone decides to argue? We could go over the allotted time limits."

Ada took care to smile encouragingly. "Wouldn't that just mean that the meeting was a success?"

Despite her best efforts, the rest of the meeting was a dud. And when Ada went to talk with Aki later that day, she discovered that this was another decision that had been made without her. In fact, all that talk about choosing her own side was just a ploy to get her to accept the basic structure, so that they could guide her to the seat that they wanted her in.