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Chapter Twenty-Three: Finding Him

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last update Data de publicação: 2026-09-27 19:52:24

Ronan caught up to me as I crossed the courtyard toward Vale House, falling into step beside me without asking, hands in his pockets, a tension in his shoulders that his usual directness never showed.

"Pairings went out today," he said. "Who'd you get?"

"Nolan Dane."

He stopped walking.

I stopped too, mostly out of surprise, watching his jaw work through something before he finally started moving again, slower this time, like he needed the extra second to decide what to actually say.

"Are you f
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  • The Academy’s Most Underestimated Student   Chapter Twenty-Four: First Steps

    The entrance to the Hollow Expanse was a stone archway cut into the side of a hill, half-swallowed by ivy that looked older than the Academy itself. Hundreds of students stood in loose clusters across the field before it, waiting for their names to be called, waiting for bands to be strapped to their wrists. Nervous chatter rippled through the crowd in bursts, punctuated by silences that felt heavier than the noise.I found Nolan near the edge of the crowd, arms crossed, staring at the archway like it owed him something. He hadn't bothered to look for me. I'd had to search the field twice before spotting him standing apart from everyone else, as always."You're late," he said, not looking at me."By two minutes." "Two minutes is late."I bit back a response about how he could have done anything to make himself easier to find. It wouldn't have mattered. Nolan wasn't the type to make things easier for anyone. An instructor called our names before I could answer. We stepped forward, he

  • The Academy’s Most Underestimated Student   Chapter Twenty-Three: Finding Him

    Ronan caught up to me as I crossed the courtyard toward Vale House, falling into step beside me without asking, hands in his pockets, a tension in his shoulders that his usual directness never showed."Pairings went out today," he said. "Who'd you get?""Nolan Dane."He stopped walking.I stopped too, mostly out of surprise, watching his jaw work through something before he finally started moving again, slower this time, like he needed the extra second to decide what to actually say."Are you for real?""Yes," I replied."That's not great.""Why not?""Because he doesn't work with people. Never has, not that I've seen." He said it plainly, no heat behind it, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd been angry. "It's not that he's dangerous, not to you specifically. It's that he doesn't need anyone else, and people who don't need anyone tend to forget they're supposed to be looking out for someone.""You make it sound like a warning.""It's not a warning. It's just true." He glan

  • The Academy’s Most Underestimated Student   Chapter Twenty-Two: The Brief

    Bree elbowed me before I'd made it past the heading, nodding toward Ms. Fritz's slack, snoring form at the side desk."Guess we're figuring this out ourselves."I smoothed the paper flat and started reading, the classroom settling into a low hum of murmured commentary as everyone else did the same, whispered reactions rippling outward in waves as people hit different parts of the brief at different times.THE HOLLOW EXPANSE TRIALA joint exercise for first and second year students, conducted in the Hollow Expanse, a sealed region beneath the Academy grounds. The Trial is designed to foster inter-house, inter-race cooperation in accordance with the Academy's founding principles."Beneath the Academy?" Bree whispered. "I thought that was just cloud.""Guess not."I kept reading.Participants will be assigned in pairs, determined by faculty selection rather than student request. Pairings are intentionally cross-house and, where possible, cross-year, in keeping with the Trial's purpose."

  • The Academy’s Most Underestimated Student   Chapter Twenty-One: Ms. Fritz

    "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

  • The Academy’s Most Underestimated Student   Chapter Twenty: Class A

    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,

  • The Academy’s Most Underestimated Student   Chapter Nineteen: What He Missed

    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

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