Mag-log in"Settle down," she said, in a voice that suggested she'd already said it a hundred times that morning and expected to be ignored regardless.Nobody settled down."I said settle down." She dropped a stack of papers onto the podium hard enough that it should have gotten some attention. It didn't.A boy near the front laughed, loud enough to carry, saying something to his friend about "the tiny one," and a ripple of quiet snickering spread outward from him, the kind of low-grade disrespect that clearly happened whenever a small, unassuming person tried to command a room full of teenagers who'd been raised on legendary bloodlines and inflated self-importance.The woman's expression changed, tired giving way to a flatter, more dangerous look."Fine," she said, almost to herself. "We'll do it the other way."The pressure hit before I even registered her moving.It slammed down across the entire room at once, an invisible weight pressing every single body flat against their seats, and I felt
The knock on my door came before I'd even finished getting dressed, two rapid raps followed immediately by Theo's voice through the wood, too loud for how early it still was."Mia! Did you check your compact yet?""Give me a second."I found it exactly where I'd left it the night before, screen dark, and by the time I'd tapped it awake, Theo and Bree had let themselves in without waiting for an actual invitation, Sandra groaning from her bed at the sudden intrusion of morning energy into a room that hadn't earned it yet."There's a memo," Bree said, already pulling up her own compact to show me. "Academy sent it out an hour ago. They're assigning homerooms.""We don't already have those?""Apparently not officially. Whatever we had before was just orientation groupings. This is the real thing." Theo leaned over my shoulder, scrolling through his own screen. "There's a link. You tap it, it assigns you randomly. No picking, no requesting, nothing. Board's very proud of how fair that is,
Three days after the exhibition, I found Ronan back at the same broken fountain, sitting in almost the exact spot he'd occupied before, like the courtyard had simply been waiting for him to return to it. The stone around him still bore the scars of that day, cracked and scorched in places, but he seemed unbothered by the reminder, or perhaps he'd chosen the spot because of it."You're healed," I said, taking in the absence of bandages, the easy way he held himself now instead of the careful stillness from before. There was color back in his face, a looseness in his shoulders that hadn't been there the last time I'd seen him upright."Mostly." He didn't look up right away, turning something small over in his hands, a smooth grey stone he must have picked up from the fountain's wreckage. His thumb moved over its surface again and again, an absent, restless motion. "Suspension's over tomorrow.""I heard.""You heard a lot of things lately, apparently." He glanced up then, a faint, crooke
The morning of the exhibition, Sandra woke me up by throwing a pillow at my head."Up. Now. You've got four hours and you're wasting them sleeping.""It's not until this afternoon.""Which means we have exactly enough time to make sure you don't look like someone who's been panicking about this for two days straight." She was already rifling through my closet, tossing things onto the bed with the brisk efficiency of someone who took personal offense at my complete lack of a fashion sense. "Also I brought breakfast. Eat first. You get dramatic when you're hungry.""I'm not dramatic.""You cried during the chimera thing.""That was a near-death experience.""Details." She held up two shirts, considered them both, and threw the less interesting one back into the closet. "This one. Trust me."I ate the breakfast, mostly to avoid the argument, and let Sandra fuss over my hair longer than strictly necessary, her violet fingers quick and surprisingly gentle as she worked, humming something u
Vale House had a kitchen nobody was technically supposed to use after curfew, tucked behind the common room through a door that stuck unless you knew to lift the handle first, and by the time I found Bree and Theo there two nights before the exhibition, it looked like they'd already claimed the whole room for themselves."There she is," Theo said, not looking up from whatever he was stirring in a pot far too large for two people's dinner. "The girl of the hour. Come sit, we're celebrating.""Celebrating what?""You. Surviving three weeks without dying, getting a rare creature to like you more than it likes literally anyone else on this campus, and somehow not being expelled after two boys destroyed half the Arena over something that apparently had nothing to do with you." He said the last part with a pointed look that told me exactly how much he believed that."It really didn't.""Sure." He didn't push it, which I was starting to recognize as Theo's particular way of saying he had opi
Ember had fallen asleep curled against my knee by the time I noticed the enclosure had gone quieter around me, most of the other first years drifting toward the tent's exit as the afternoon light through the canvas roof shifted gold, and I stayed where I was, half out of exhaustion, half because moving felt like it might wake her.Instructor Fenn passed twice, glancing our way each time with an expression I still couldn't fully read, somewhere between approval and something more guarded, before finally disappearing toward the back of the tent to deal with whatever the feed schedule required of her.I didn't hear Lucian arrive until his shadow fell across the enclosure floor."So the rumors are true."I didn't have to look up to know who it was. Nobody else at this school sounded quite that pleased with themselves over nothing in particular."What rumors?""That the school's favorite mystery human tamed the single most bad-tempered creature in Fenn's entire collection." Lucian crouched







