Carrying Ingersoll's tray into the hushed dining hall

pivotal · 11 Nov YDAU, dinner

• When: 11 Nov YDAU, dinner in the E.T.A. dining hall, three days after the Eschaton's season-ending injuries.
• What: The stern prorector's one tender beat, and his fullest daylight scene. A "brief rippling lull" moves through the dining hall as "little Evan Ingersoll emerges from the Entree Line's end on crutches, his cast new and sailor-hat-white, unsigned, prorector Tony Nwangi behind him with his hatchet-face stony, carrying the kid's tray for him" — the ruptured patellar tendon will cost Ingersoll at least six months, and the whole hall's unease is "almost visible" around him. When Hal comes over to make amends, Nwangi's edge is instantly back: "Tony Nwangi is saying something acerbic to Hal, who looks like he's kneeling penitent before Ingersoll, everyone at the surrounding tables inclined very subtly away from Hal." And it is not a one-liner — pages later Hal "is still down on one knee by Ingersoll's chair, his elbows on his knee, listening across Ingersoll and a blindfolded Idris Arslanian to Tony Nwangi." The scene the book chooses for his humanity keeps both his hands full: the tray in one, the reprimand in the other.