CHAPTER THREE (Jenny's pov)
765 Words
Marlowe didn't stay long enough to be unsettling on purpose — she crossed to her side of the room, took something from the nightstand I didn't get a clear look at, and was gone again through the bathroom door before I'd even set my bags down. The curtain on her side didn't stir at all, even as she passed it, like the air in that corner had already decided not to move.
Wren waited until the door clicked shut, then exhaled like she'd been holding something in.
"Okay, so, don't mind her," she said, flopping backward onto the middle bed — clearly hers, now that I looked, the only one without a made corner or a stack of anything. "She's not mean, exactly. She's just — Marlowe. You get used to it. Or you don't, and you just stop noticing, which is almost the same thing."
"She said she was expecting me."
"She says a lot of things." Wren waved a hand like she was swatting the sentence out of the air. "Anyway — classes. You'll want to know this before tomorrow, because nobody explains it twice and the schedule board only updates once a week, which is insane, but okay, fine, whatever, this is a magic school, I guess consistency isn't the priority."
She held up a finger, the same gesture Instructor Voss had used in the hall, and I wondered if it was something everyone here picked up eventually, like an accent.
"Core classes are mixed year — so you'll have some third-years, even seniors, in your basics. Foundations, Theory, Applied Practicum, that kind of thing. Once your cord settles you get sorted into Discipline tracks, and that's when it actually splits by what you are. Until then you just sort of — float. Sit in the back. Try not to get called on."
"And if it doesn't settle?"
"It settles." She said it fast, the way you say something you want to be true more than you're sure of it. "It always settles. Eventually."
"Eventually being—"
"Some people take longer than others." Wren sat up, and for a second the constant brightness in her voice thinned out, just slightly, like a light flickering before it caught again. "Look, don't worry about it. Just go to your classes, wear your cord where they can see it, don't be out after nine, and you'll be — "
The bathroom door opened again.
Marlowe didn't step all the way through this time. She just stood in the frame, cord dark against the white tile behind her, and said, without any particular emphasis, "That's not true."
Wren blinked. "What's not true?"
"That it always settles." Marlowe's eyes weren't on Wren. They were on me. "Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the school just decides it likes you better this way, and stops bothering to tell you what you are." A pause, precise as punctuation. "You should tell her that part. It's not kind to leave it out."
Wren's smile didn't fully come back this time. "Marlowe."
"I'm going to the library." Marlowe was already pulling the door shut behind her, voice trailing back into the room even as the latch caught. "Don't let her wander the east colonnade after dark, Wren. Not this week."
Then she was gone, properly this time, footsteps fading fast down the corridor outside — too fast, I thought, for someone who'd been standing so still a moment ago.
Wren let out a breath and forced the brightness back into her face, though it sat a little more carefully now, like she was holding it in place.
"She does that," she said again, softer this time. "Don't worry about the colonnade thing. It's just a rule. Everything here's just a rule until you ask why, and then it's — " she stopped herself, and reached for a different sentence instead. "Anyway. Breakfast's at seven. You do not want to be late for breakfast."
She kept talking after that — meal hall seating, which professors to avoid eye contact with, some story about a boy in her year who'd worn his cord on the wrong wrist for a week before anyone noticed — and I nodded along and let the words wash past me, because underneath all of it, quiet and persistent as the dimness that never quite lifted from Marlowe's corner of the room, one thought had lodged itself and wouldn't leave.
Wren had said it always settles like a rule she'd been taught to repeat.
Marlowe had corrected her like she knew, personally, exactly what happened to the ones it didn't.
- Writer
