EVERMORE ACADEMY

CHAPTER TWO (Jenny's pov)

Founders' Hall was louder than I expected for a room full of nervous seventeen-year-olds, and colder than I expected for a room with what looked like a fire lit in every hearth along the walls. I found a seat near the back, packet still clutched in my hand, and watched the woman with the clipboard from the gate climb a small dais at the front.

"Welcome to Evermore," she said, in the same flat tone she'd used on my parents. "I am Instructor Voss. You will not need to remember that, because you will not be speaking to me directly for some time. What you will need to remember is this."

She held up a single finger, and the room went quiet in a way that felt almost trained.

"One. Uniforms are mandatory from the first bell to the last. Gray for underclassmen, unmarked, cord visible at all times on the left wrist — not the right, not tucked into a sleeve, not hidden under a jacket. The color of your cord is how this school reads you. Hiding it is treated as a disciplinary matter."

She held up a second finger.

"Two. Curfew is nine. Not nine-fifteen. The doors to the east wing lock themselves at nine regardless of who is on the wrong side of them, and the school does not care whose fault that is."

Around me, a few students exchanged glances like this was a rule with a story behind it nobody was going to tell us yet.

"Three. Classification is not optional and it is not something you can request early. Placement Week begins in nine days. Until then, if your cord has not settled, you are Undetermined, and Undetermined students are asked to report any unusual occurrences — however small — to their hall proctor immediately." Her eyes swept the room, and for one uncomfortable second I was almost sure they landed on me. "We take 'small' seriously here. More seriously than you will expect."

She went through the rest quickly — meal hours, corridors that were off-limits after dark, a warning about not wandering the east colonnade alone that I still didn't fully understand — and then dismissed us with a list of room assignments pinned to a board at the back of the hall.

Ashworth, J. — Room 104, East Residence.

I was still staring at the pin, trying to work out which direction East Residence even was, when I became aware of someone standing very close to my shoulder. Too close. Close enough that I would have sworn, if I'd been asked, that she'd been there longer than made sense — like she'd arrived without the part where she walked over.

"East Residence," she said, reading over my arm like it was the most natural thing in the world. "That's me too. Well — not me me, I'm not a fresher, obviously, but I'm your neighbor. Sort of. I'm actually your roommate, which is better than a neighbor, technically, come on, I'll show you, it's this way, everyone gets lost the first day, it's kind of a tradition."

She was already walking before I'd said a word back, ribbon-bright and talking fast enough that I had to catch up just to hear the rest of it.

"I'm Wren, by the way. Second-year. They put a second-year with every Undetermined first-year, it's a whole policy thing, something about 'stabilizing the new cord,' which sounds made up, but everything here sounds made up until it isn't." She glanced back at my wrist, at the flat black ribbon, with open curiosity. "Undetermined. Ooh. That's rare this early. You'll want to be careful the first week — the school gets nosy about the ones it can't read yet."

"Careful how?"

"You'll see. Or you won't, and that's better, honestly." She grinned like this was a joke I'd get later, and pushed open a heavy door at the end of a corridor lined with gray stone and colder light than the rest of the school. "Here we are. Room 104. Welcome home, roomie."

The room opened up wider than I expected — wide enough that my first reaction was to check I had the right door. High ceilings, three tall windows overlooking the courtyard, and three beds spaced generously along the far wall instead of the cramped two I'd braced for. A sitting area took up one corner, two worn armchairs and a low table, and through an open door on the right I could see a bathroom nearly the size of the bedroom back home — a deep clawfoot tub, a wall of mirror, more space than three teenage girls could reasonably need.

"Nice, right?" Wren said, catching my expression. "East Residence gets the good rooms. Something about the wing being older, more 'settled,' whatever that means. I try not to ask why things here are the way they are. Saves time."

One of the three beds was already claimed — the sheets pulled tight with obsessive neatness, books stacked in a perfect column on the nightstand, and a curtain drawn halfway across the window despite it being the middle of the afternoon, leaving that whole corner of the room dim. A black candle sat unlit on the sill, wax pooled thick down one side, like it had burned for hours before someone snuffed it out.

That side wasn't Wren's.

"Oh," Wren said, her chatter dipping for the first time since I'd met her. "Right. I should've said. There's three of us."

The door to the bathroom, half-shadowed, opened without a sound.

The girl who stepped through didn't look at either of us right away. She was still in her uniform, cord tied correctly at the left wrist, but where mine was flat black and Wren's was some pale, shifting color I couldn't quite name, hers was so dark it looked like it was pulling light out of the room instead of reflecting any.

"This is Jenny," Wren said, too brightly, the way you'd introduce two dogs you weren't sure would get along. "She's new. Undetermined."

The girl's eyes moved to me then — slow, deliberate, like she was reading something written on my skin I couldn't see myself.

"I know," she said. Her voice was quiet, level, and somehow that made it worse than if she'd sounded surprised. "I've been expecting you."

Wren laughed, too quick, too loud, the kind of laugh people use to paper over something they don't want to sit with.

"She's kidding," Wren said. "She does that. Jenny, this is Marlowe. She's — " Wren hesitated, choosing the word carefully. "She's been here a while."

Marlowe didn't correct her. She just kept looking at me, unblinking, until the silence stretched long enough that I could hear, faint through the tall windows, the low murmur of the courtyard settling into evening below.