Chapter One: The Letter I Forgot I Sent

I ran after him.

“Hey!” I shoved through two people carrying grocery bags, my sneakers slapping the wet pavement. “That’s mine, you absolute—”

He cut left into the alley behind Denny’s Pharmacy. Mistake. I knew that alley better than he did. Dead end, dumpster, a fence with a gap just wide enough for someone my size.

Not his.

I caught him right as he hit the fence, both hands fumbling with the wire, my bag still looped over his shoulder like he actually thought he was getting away with it.

“Give it back,” I said.

“Back off, kid.”

“I’m nineteen. And that bag has my rent money in it, so no.”

He turned around swinging. I’d love to tell you I saw it coming because I’m skilled, or trained, or secretly a genius at reading body language. Truth is, he telegraphed it so hard a blind man could’ve dodged it. I stepped inside the punch instead of away from it, drove my elbow into his ribs, and grabbed the strap of my bag while he was busy remembering how to breathe.

“Thanks,” I said, and yanked it free.

He swore at me. I didn’t stick around for round two. I had groceries getting warm in that bag and a shift at the diner in forty minutes.

“You got mugged again?” Priya didn’t even look up from the register when I walked in, hair a mess, elbow throbbing.

“I got un-mugged. There’s a difference.”

“One day you’re gonna chase the wrong guy.”

“One day,” I agreed, tying my apron. “Today wasn’t that day.”

She snorted and went back to counting the till. Priya worked the morning shift at the same diner I did nights, and she was the closest thing I had to family in this city, which said more about my life than I liked to admit. My parents were gone. My mom disappeared when I was small. I didn’t remember much beyond a smell, something warm like cinnamon, and the sound of a door closing. My dad raised me alone until I was twelve, and then he didn’t. After that it was me, an apartment I could barely afford, and whatever jobs would take someone with no family references.

I liked it that way. Mostly.

The diner smelled like burnt coffee and fryer oil, which after four years didn’t bother me anymore. I’d learned this city one shift at a time: which regulars tipped, which ones didn’t, which streets you didn’t walk after dark unless you wanted trouble from the wrong kind of resident. This town had all sorts. A werewolf ran the auto shop two blocks over. My upstairs neighbor was some kind of low-tier fae who complained constantly about the noise from my TV, like she wasn’t the one levitating her furniture at 3 a.m. Nobody blinked at any of it. That was just the world. Humans didn’t run things anymore, not really. We didn’t have the strength for it, but we got by. We always got by.

I grabbed my notepad and clocked in.

By the time I climbed the four flights to my apartment that night, my legs hated me and my elbow had turned a deeply unattractive shade of purple. I dropped my bag by the door, kicked off my shoes, and saw it.

An envelope. Slid halfway under my door, thick cream paper that didn’t belong in a building where the mailbox lock had been broken since March.

I picked it up.

No return address. Just my name across the front in gold ink, and beneath it, a seal I didn’t recognize: some kind of crest, wings wrapped around a sword.

“Okay,” I said out loud, to no one. “Weird.”

I tore it open standing right there in the hallway.

————————————

Dear Ms. Mia Callahan,

We are pleased to inform you that your application has been reviewed and accepted. You have been granted admission to Alliance Elite Academy for the upcoming term.

————————————

I read it twice. Then a third time, because surely I was misreading it.

Alliance Elite Academy.

I knew the name, everyone knew it. It was the school on the hill that wasn’t really a hill, more like its own floating slice of mountain, visible from half the city on a clear day. The school where the strongest bloodlines in every race sent their kids. Dragon lines. Wolf packs with centuries of pedigree. Kids who could bend fire before they could walk.

Humans didn’t get in. Not because they didn’t apply. Thousands did, every single year, but because the entrance trials required things humans didn’t have. I’d heard the physical trials alone killed the applicant pool down to almost nothing. No human had passed them in longer than anyone could remember.

Which meant this had to be a mistake.

I stood very still in my hallway, letter shaking a little in my hand, and a memory surfaced that I’d buried under four years of double shifts and unpaid bills.

Last spring. Half-drunk on cheap wine after a rough week, scrolling through my phone at two in the morning, laughing at myself the entire time.

Might as well, I’d thought. Not like they’ll actually take me.

I’d applied to Alliance Elite Academy on a dare I made with myself, forgotten about it by the next morning, and never checked the results because there was obviously no point.

There was a point.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I didn’t look at it because I couldn’t stop staring at that gold seal, at my name written in ink too fine for someone like me.

Because the letter wasn’t done.

Beneath the acceptance line, in smaller script, was one more sentence. And that one didn’t read like a formality.

————————————

Physical evaluation waived. Special candidate status confirmed.

—————————————

I had never taken the physical trial.

I had never taken any trial at all.