Page 404 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

earned nothing but love and trust from her and she's replied by shutting you out of her life at home and at work; and then you finally tell somebody that you're sick of it. You're just about the worst person I've ever known."
She found herself laughing at her own self-condemnation. Childishly, she didn't want to laugh at herself. "Don't patronize me." She tried to put as much contempt into her voice as possible.
He noticed. His eyes went distant and cold. "Don't spit at a friend," he said.
She didn't want him to be distant from her. But she couldn't stop herself from saying, coldly, angrily, "You aren't my friend."
For a moment she was afraid he believed her. Then a smile came to his face. "You wouldn't know a friend if you saw one."
Yes I would, she thought. I see one now. She smiled back at him.
"Ela," he said, "are you a good xenobiologist?"
"Yes."
"You're eighteen years old. You could take the guild tests at sixteen. But you didn't take them." "Mother wouldn't let me. She said I wasn't ready."
"You don't have to have your mother's permission after you're sixteen."
"An apprentice has to have the permission of her master."
"And now you're eighteen, and you don't even need that."
"She's still Lusitania's xenobiologist. It's still her tab. What if I passed the test, and then she wouldn't let me into the lab until after she was dead?"
"Did she threaten that?"
"She made it clear that I wasn't to take the test."
"Because as soon as you're not an apprentice anymore, if she admits you to the lab as her co- xenobiologist you have full access--"
"To all the working files. To all the locked files."
"So she'd hold her own daughter back from beginning her career, she'd give you a permanent blot on your record-- unready for the tests even at age eighteen-- just to keep you from reading those files."