EVERMORE ACADEMY

My mother cried in the car, which surprised me more than the school itself did. "You'll call every Sunday," she said, for the third time, gripping the wheel like the gates might vanish if she let go too soon. My father didn't say anything. He just kept looking up through the windshield at the towers, the way you'd look at weather you weren't sure you trusted. Evermore Academy didn't look like the brochure. The brochure had promised turrets and a photogenic sunset. What we found at the end of the long gravel drive was something older and stranger — gray stone worn soft at every corner, like two hundred years of rain had been quietly negotiating with it. Ivy climbed one entire wing in a pattern too symmetrical to be accidental. The windows threw color across the courtyard that didn't match the sky. Too red in some panes. Too green in others, like the building had its own private argument with the sun and had been winning it for a century. "It's beautiful," I said, mostly to make my mother stop crying. It was. That was the strange part. I hadn't expected it to be beautiful. I'd expected it to be imposing. They helped me carry two bags to the edge of the courtyard — further than that, apparently, family wasn't allowed. A woman in gray robes intercepted us at an iron gate with a clipboard and an expression that suggested she'd said goodbye to a thousand nervous mothers and stopped finding it moving around number two hundred. "Jenny Ashford?" she said, scanning her list. "Ashworth," I corrected. "Mm." She made a note like the distinction bored her. "Orientation's in twenty minutes, Founders' Hall, across the courtyard. Don't be late, we don't repeat it." She looked at my parents with the polite blankness of someone closing a door. "Parents say goodbye here." My mother hugged me too hard. My father said, "You'll be fine," in the voice he used when he wasn't sure, and then they were walking back down the gravel drive, smaller and smaller, until the gate swung shut on its own and I was standing in a courtyard I didn't recognize with two bags and no idea which direction Founders' Hall was. I checked the registration packet the woman had handed me. Under POWER CLASSIFICATION someone had typed, in flat administrative font: Undetermined — sensitivity indicators present. Monitor. I didn't know what a sensitivity indicator was. I only knew that three weeks ago, standing in our kitchen, I'd reached for a glass on the top shelf and it had tipped itself toward my hand before my fingers ever touched it. I hadn't told my parents. I wasn't sure yet if I'd imagined it. I was still staring at the packet, useless as a map, when someone spoke behind me. "You look lost. Which, on your first day, is basically a uniform requirement." I turned around into what I can only describe as an unfair amount of handsomeness for someone just standing in a courtyard doing nothing. Third-year, probably, if the insignia stitched into his collar meant what I thought it meant. Dark hair, the kind of easy posture that suggested he'd never once worried about being in the wrong place. A gold cord was looped twice around his wrist — combat-adjacent, I'd learn later, though I didn't know that yet. What I noticed instead was that his knuckles were faintly scarred, like something had burned there and healed wrong, and that he was looking at me with an expression I couldn't quite place. Curiosity, maybe. "I'm looking for Founders' Hall," I said, aiming for casual and missing by some margin. "Everyone is, on day one. It's not marked on purpose — they like watching you struggle a little." He nodded toward my registration packet. "Undetermined?" "You can read that from there?" "I can read the look on your face. Same thing, mostly." He held out a hand for one of my bags before I could object, which I let him take mostly out of surprise. "Come on. I'll walk you. It's this way, and if you cut through the east colonnade alone you'll end up completely turned around — the east wing doesn't make itself easy for first-years wandering unescorted." "Why not?" "Long story. Better one for later." He glanced sideways at me as we crossed the courtyard, and there was something careful in it, like he was deciding how much to say. "What's your name?" "Jenny." "Jenny," he repeated, like he was filing it somewhere. He didn't offer his own back — just smiled, slight and unreadable, and said, "You'll figure out mine soon enough. Everyone does eventually." We passed beneath a covered walkway lined with old stone archways, and the doors of Founders' Hall rose up ahead of us, tall and dark and already letting out the low murmur of a hundred other first-years finding their seats. "There," he said, releasing my bag back into my hand. "You'll be fine. Undetermined's not nothing, you know. Sometimes it just means the school hasn't decided what to call you yet." He said it like it meant something more than it should have. Then he was gone, back across the courtyard, gold cord catching the strange colored light from the windows, and I was left standing at the doors of a hall I'd never entered, in a school I didn't understand yet, holding a bag that felt lighter than it had a minute ago.