Chapter 14: Callum Is Made a Target

Honoria noticed it first in the way that Aldous stopped laughing.

It was not a dramatic cessation — no abrupt turn, no visible withdrawal — but she had been watching Province Two's male tribute for three weeks and she knew the precise quality of warmth he directed at Callum during their morning walks along the east colonnade, and on the fourteenth day after the Dinner Party Trial it was not there. Aldous still nodded. He still replied to whatever Callum said with every appearance of attention. But the laugh — the one that came from his chest rather than his social training — was absent, replaced by something more careful, and Honoria filed this observation in the column she had labelled, with characteristic optimism, *alterations requiring investigation* rather than the one she had labelled *damage already done*.

By the afternoon, she had three more entries in the former column: Benedikt's slightly lengthened pause before returning Callum's greeting in the tributes' corridor; the Province Six girl whose name was Elara and who had, for the past fortnight, reliably saved Callum the window seat at the mid-morning refreshment hour, and who today sat down beside Province Three's Lisle instead with the focused deliberateness of someone completing a task; and, most telling, the Province Eight girl — the one Callum had made laugh genuinely at the First Dinner — who crossed the receiving room rather than pass through the space where Callum was standing, which was not a route that could be explained by architecture.