Chapter nine
Jessica
The blazer itches, the collar is a small starched enemy, and I have honestly never felt more like a kid who snuck into the wrong building.
But I'm not the only one suffering, which helps.
"Whoever designed this uniform," Renzo announces, jacket already off and slung over his chair in open rebellion, "hated students. Personally. This collar is a war crime."
"You've been here one morning and you've already committed a dress code violation," Freya observes. She, of course, looks like she was born in hers.
"It's a protest."
Sophia yanks at her own collar for the hundredth time, coffee already in hand because some things survive the apocalypse. "How does Declan look ironed? We moved into the dorms yesterday. I unpacked by throwing my suitcase at a wall. How are you pressed?"
Declan shrugs, enormous and immaculate. "I hung it up."
"He hung it up," Sophia repeats, scandalized, like he's confessed to witchcraft.
I keep smoothing my sleeves, which is a nervous habit I've apparently developed in the last twelve hours, and I take it all in — because it's a lot to take in.
The dining hall at Luftis is not a dining hall.
It's a cathedral that happens to serve breakfast. Stone arches soar up into shadow.
Ancient banners hang the length of the walls, deep colors faded soft with age.
Stained glass throws pools of red and gold and blue across the long tables, and the whole far wall is portraits — stern men and women.
And it's full. Hundreds of students, all in the same uniform, and every single one of them looks completely, effortlessly at ease, like they've been eating breakfast under thousand-year-old banners their entire lives. Which, I'm slowly realizing, a lot of them probably have.
We are, unmistakably, the new kids. You can spot our table from across the room by the sheer volume of fidgeting.
"We got lost twice getting here," I admit. "Twice.”
"I swear the staircases move," Sophia says darkly. "I'm telling you. I totally had the way here memorized, but still Jess and I got lost!"
"We'll learn it," Torres says, easy, biting into something. He's the only one of us not visibly rattled by any of it, but then, he's had some time to come to terms with the whole ‘I’m a wolf-thing’.
"I'm not so sure. Do you see how they're all looking at us?" Renzo says, then immediately ruins it by adding, "Although the food is unfairly good, so... we'll see."
I laugh, and for a minute, it almost feels normal.
Almost feels like six friends at breakfast at the castle before we watched a professor turn into a wolf.
I still can't quite believe I'm here, at the Luftis Academy from the brochure, sitting under these banners, wearing this ridiculous blazer, actually enrolled.
"Does anyone else keep expecting to wake up?" I ask.
"Every ten minutes," Sophia says immediately.
"Constantly," says Declan, quiet.
"I've decided this is a very elaborate dream and I'm going to enjoy the pastries while it lasts," Renzo says, and I'm mid-laugh, the whole table grinning —
when the room starts to change.
I don't notice it all at once. It's more like a draft you feel before you understand a door's been opened.
The conversation nearest us thins, then drops.
A chair scrapes back somewhere behind me.
Then another. Then — more, a dozen, two dozen, a soft scattered thunder of wood on stone rolling across the hall.
Students are standing up.
Not all at once, not to any announcement, nobody said a word. It just — spreads. Table by table, the whole enormous room rising to its feet, quiet and unprompted, like the tide coming in.
I look at my own table, and the laughter's gone out of it.
Sophia's mouth has closed mid-sentence. Declan has gone very still.
Freya's whole attention has snapped to the doors at the far end of the hall.
Beside me, Renzo pushes slowly to his feet, uncertain, glancing around to copy everyone else.
And Torres is already standing — I didn't even see him rise.
I stay in my chair, because I have no idea why anyone's out of theirs.
"What the hell is going on?" I ask, low.
Nobody answers me. They're all looking at the doors.
So I turn to look too.
Three young men are walking into the dining hall.
And my first, entirely involuntary thought is: Good Lord.
Because they're — okay. They are, without any competition, the three most attractive men I have ever seen in my life, and I've seen Jon's forearms, so that's saying something.
One is tall and golden — blond hair, sapphire-blue eyes, the kind of face they carve into things.
The one in the middle is enormous, easily the biggest person in the room, black hair cropped short, ice-pale eyes that move over the hall without landing on anything, an expression like a locked door.
And the third has dark brown hair and startling green eyes and moves through the room with a casual, absolute confidence that says he has never once in his life wondered whether he belongs somewhere.
The whole hall seems to bend toward them. It's the strangest thing. Every standing student oriented like plants to a window.
I get why everyone's staring. I'm staring. They're objectively staggering to look at. Then I watch as everyone’s gaze hits the floor.
I don't get is why everyone's standing and now looking at the floor.
"Who are they?" I ask my table.
Nobody answers that one either.
Their path takes them right past us. And because they're passing, and because I was raised to be polite, I glance up as they draw level, give them a friendly little smile, and say, "Morning."
Then I take another bite of my breakfast.
The room goes wrong.
I feel it before I understand it — the silence of a held breath multiplied by three hundred. The three of them stop walking. All at once, like they hit the same invisible wall. And three pairs of eyes — blue, ice, green — turn and land on me.
The entire dining hall is watching. I can feel it on my skin, hundreds of stares converging on our table, on me, and I have absolutely no idea why.
I blink, fork halfway to my mouth.
Did I say something wrong? Morning seems safe. Do I have food on my face? I resist the urge to check. Have I broken some rule already, on day one, before I've even finished breakfast? I run back through the last ten seconds and find nothing, nothing, a girl said good morning to some classmates.
The moment stretches. And stretches. The green-eyed one tilts his head very slightly, like I'm a math problem that isn't resolving. The huge one just looks, flat and unreadable and somehow more unnerving than a glare. The blond one's jaw has actually tightened.
Then, without a word, the three of them start walking again.
And as they pass — each of them, one after another — glances back at me.
They cross to a table near the head of the hall and sit, and only then, only once they're seated, does the rest of the room slowly lower itself back down, chair by chair, like the tide going back out.
Conversation resumes. But it's different now—hushed, uneasy, and spreading.
Whispers, table to table, heads bending together, and more than a few of them are turned toward us. Toward me.
I set my fork down and look around at my friends, who are all studiously not meeting my eyes.
"...Seriously," I say. "What did I do?"
Nobody knows. Freya opens her mouth, closes it. Torres just shakes his head because a bell somewhere deep in the castle rings and it's time for freshman orientation.
The Great Hall makes the dining hall look modest.
It's cavernous — vaulted stone rising into dark, tiered seating filling as the entire student body files in, easily a couple hundred of us.
I try to focus on the room, on the sheer weight of history in it, but I can't quite, because the whispers followed us here.
I catch students two rows over glancing at our little cluster and looking quickly away.
Whatever happened at breakfast, it's traveling faster than we are.
"Stop looking," Sophia mutters out of the side of her mouth.
"I'm not looking, they're looking at me."
At the front, the faculty file onto a raised stone dais, and my stomach does a small glad flip when I spot Jon among them — except it's not orientation Jon, warm and rumpled by a fire with my lizard tucked under his arm.
This is Professor Jon Matthias, in a proper coat, standing straight, completely at home in front of hundreds of people.
He doesn't look for me. But I feel steadier just knowing he’s up there.
Then a man steps forward to the front of the dais, and the whole hall goes quiet without being asked.
He's older, silver-haired, immaculately dressed, with sharp grey eyes that seem to take in the entire room in one unhurried sweep, and he doesn't rush a single second of the silence before he speaks.
"Welcome," he says, "to Luftis Academy. I am Chancellor Falken."
His voice isn't loud. It doesn't need to be. It fills the space anyway.
"For over two hundred years, this academy has educated the leaders of our world.
The men and women who have sat where you sit have gone on to become military officers.
Members of the Council. Diplomats. Researchers.
Physicians. Professors. The people who hold our society together and carry it forward.
" He lets that land. "We do not apologize for our standards.
The world expects excellence of a Luftis graduate, because excellence is exactly what a Luftis graduate has delivered. "
I find myself sitting up a little straighter. It's a good speech. It's the kind of speech that makes you want to be worth it.
"Some of you," Falken continues, "arrived here carrying names that mean a great deal in the outside world.
Old families. Powerful packs. Reputations built over generations.
" His gaze moves, slow, across the tiers, and I'd swear it pauses — just for a breath — on that table near the front where three particular young men are sitting.
"Understand me clearly. Your family name may have opened the gate. "
A pause.
"It will not earn you a single Merit Mark."
The hall is dead silent.
"Every freshman in this room," the Chancellor says, and now his eyes sweep the whole space, the pack heirs and the scholarship students and everyone in between, "begins with exactly zero.
The same zero. There is no inherited advantage inside these walls.
There is no purchasing your way forward.
Here, you are worth precisely what you earn — and not one mark more. "
And I could kiss him, honestly, because I've spent my whole life not understanding why anyone deserves anything for a name they didn't choose, and here is a silver-haired man in an ancient hall telling hundreds of people the exact thing I've always believed.
For the first time since breakfast went sideways, I feel the ground under me.
Zero and zero. That means the six of us have a real chance. That means I have a real chance.
Then he explains how we earn our way up from that zero.
The Merit Mark system, he calls it. Every action at Luftis is weighed.
You earn Marks through academic performance, through leadership, through initiative, through service to the academy and each other, through teamwork, through integrity, through representing Luftis well in everything you do.
And you lose them — just as easily — through misconduct, dishonesty, poor judgment, or any behavior unbecoming of a Luftis student.
Nothing here is neutral. Everything counts.
"Your first milestone is simple to state and difficult to reach," Falken says. "Before any freshman may attempt the First Trial, that freshman must earn one hundred Merit Marks."
I pull out my notebook.
"Those who reach one hundred earn the right to attempt the Trial. Those who do not—" he pauses, and there's no cruelty in it, just fact "—will not remain at Luftis. You will be dismissed before you ever set foot in it."
I write 100 MERIT MARKS and underline it. Twice.
Somebody a few rows down raises a nervous hand to ask what the First Trial actually is, and the Chancellor's answer is a thin almost-smile.
"You'll find," he says, "that no one who has taken it will tell you. And no member of this faculty will describe it. You will know when you are ready to face it, and not before." He lets the unease ripple through the room. "Concern yourselves with the hundred. The Trial will keep."
I underline the number a third time. Whatever's coming, whatever happened at breakfast, whatever I am — I did not fly across a continent and watch a man turn into a wolf to wash out before I've started. One hundred. Fine. I can count.
"Welcome to Luftis Academy," Chancellor Falken says. "Your education begins now."
And he dismisses us.
The students all rise in a great scrape and rustle, and the six of us stick together on instinct, the way we've done all week, drifting into our little knot as the tiers empty toward the doors.
The whispers haven't stopped. If anything they're worse and as we move down through the emptying hall, I feel it following us.
Conversations dropping as we pass. Heads turning.
A cluster of upperclassmen by the doors going quiet the second we come near, then starting up again the moment we're past, low and urgent.
They're not looking at all of us.
They're looking at me.
I feel it climbing up the back of my neck, the itch of being watched, and I start to turn my head — just to catch one of them, just to see —
"Don't," Sophia says quietly, beside me.
I look at her instead.
"I don't think I want to know," she says, and her usual brightness is gone. "So I'm not going to look. And neither are you."
"I kinda do," Renzo mutters, already half-turning.
"No," Torres says, low, without breaking stride. "You don't."
And the way he says it stops even Renzo.
So I face forward. I fix my eyes on the tall doors ahead and the bright morning beyond them, and I don't look back, even though every whisper in the hall is crawling between my shoulder blades.
The six of us walk out together, toward our first class, into whatever this place is going to be.
Behind us, the whispering doesn't stop.