Chapter ten
Jessica
Our first class is Shifter Society, and I decide on the walk over that I am going to be excellent at it.
I don't have a choice, really. One hundred Merit Marks between me and staying, and I've already done the math a dozen times — I have no idea how many any single class is worth, but I know the number I'm chasing. So I walk into that classroom with my notebook, and every intention of earning my keep.
The room is a tiered lecture hall, smaller than the Great Hall, with tall windows and a slate board and the kind of worn wooden desks that have had a thousand nervous students carve their initials into them. And Jon's at the front.
Except it's Professor Matthias at the front — jacket, straight back, arranging notes with the calm competence of a man who's done this a few hundred times.
He glances up as we file in, and his eyes pass over the six of us with no more warmth than anyone else gets, which is somehow reassuring. No favoritism. Zero and zero.
"Sit anywhere," Professor Matthias says, which gets a small ripple of surprise, like that's not the done thing.
"For those who don't know me, I'm Professor Matthias.
This is Shifter Society. It's not a first-year course.
You'll find students from every level in this room, and that's intentional.
We need different backgrounds, different experiences, different perspectives if we're going to have anything worth discussing. "
He lets his gaze travel over the room.
"Over the next year, we're going to take apart how our world is built, why it's built that way, and whether it should stay that way." A pause. "That last part is not rhetorical. I expect you to argue with me. I award Merit Marks for good thinking, not for agreeing with the professor."
The corner of his mouth lifts.
"You'll find those are frequently different activities."
I like him. I already knew I liked him, but I like this version too — the one who runs a room by making it want to be smart.
The door opens one more time, late, and the whole room does that thing again.
It's smaller than the dining hall version — no chairs scrape, we're already seated — but I feel it, a kind of collective settling, a lowering. And I know before I turn who it's going to be, because there's only one energy in this school that makes a room hold its breath.
It's the blond one. From breakfast. Golden hair, sapphire eyes, a jaw you could use as a straightedge, and he moves down the steps to a seat in the front row that has very obviously been left empty for him, like the room was saving it. He doesn't thank anyone for it. He just takes it.
His gaze sweeps the room out of habit — and snags on me. Just for a second. Recognition, before he faces front.
"Mr. Ardent," Jon says, mild, marking something off. "Good of you to join us."
Ardent. I file the name away. So the blond one has a name, and it's the kind of name that gets a room to save you a chair.
Jon doesn't lecture. He asks. He puts a single word on the board — DOMINANCE — and turns around.
"Our entire society is organized around it," he says.
"Rank. Hierarchy. Who defers to whom, and why.
Most of you have lived inside that structure your whole lives, so you've never had to explain it.
Today you're going to try." His eyes move over the room.
"Why? Why is our world built on dominance? Someone make the case."
Hands go up. Jon points at a student near the front, who gives an answer about strength and order and packs needing a clear leader to survive — solid, textbook, the kind of thing you can tell he's heard his whole life.
Jon nods, awards him a Merit Mark, and I watch the boy sit up a full inch taller.
So that's what it looks like when they land. Good. I want one.
"Anyone want to build on that?" Jon asks. "Mr. Ardent. You look like you have opinions."
Ardent doesn't raise his hand; he just speaks, because apparently he doesn't have to raise his hand.
"Because it works," he says, and his voice matches the rest of him — smooth, certain, born knowing it'll be listened to.
"Hierarchy isn't cruelty, it's clarity. Everyone knows their place.
The strongest lead because they've proven they can.
The rest follow because it's the natural order, and pretending otherwise gets people killed.
It's not complicated. It's just true." He says it like he's closing the discussion.
A few heads nod. Nobody argues. Nobody ever argues, I'm starting to understand.
And I raise my hand.
Jon's eyebrow moves, very slightly. "Miss Miller."
"I think that's half right," I say.
The room goes strange around me — a little intake of breath, a shift, the girl two seats over actually turning to stare — but I'm already going, because Jon said to argue and I've spent my whole life having exactly this opinion with no one to say it to.
"Hierarchy's efficient, sure. Everyone knowing their place gets decisions made fast. But 'the strongest lead because they've proven they can' and 'you follow because it's the natural order' are two totally different things, and you kind of smashed them together.
" I'm not looking at Jon anymore. I'm looking at Ardent, because he's the one who said it, and where I come from you look at the person you're talking to.
"The first one's earned. The second one's just inherited.
And the second one's how you end up following someone who's never proven anything except that they were born to the right people. "
The silence has teeth now. I don't fully understand why. I keep going anyway.
"Respect for someone who's actually good at leading — that makes sense.
I'd follow that anywhere. But respect for a name?
For a rank you got handed? That's not clarity, that's just everyone agreeing not to ask questions.
" I shrug. "Seems like a great system right up until the wrong person inherits the top of it. "
Ardent has turned fully around in his seat to look at me.
And I look back. Right at him, steady, the way you look at anyone you're in a conversation with, because it would be weird not to.
His eyes are sapphire and hard and, for just a second, thrown, like the floor moved under a man who's never once in his life felt it move.
There's heat in it, and affront. The whole room is dead silent watching the two of us hold a stare that everyone but me seems to understand is not a normal thing that's happening.
"You don't defer," he says. It's not a question. It comes out low, almost baffled.
"To what?" I ask, genuinely.
His face jerks back like I've slapped him and he smirks like I’ve complimented him all in the same breath.
"That's enough for now," Jon says, and his voice cuts cleanly through whatever's building. "Miss Miller — three Merit Marks."
Three. The most he's given anyone all morning, and the room hears it too, another ripple, and I write it down — 3 — and underline it before I can stop myself, and beside me I feel Sophia's hand grip my knee under the desk. I think she is telling me good job, or maybe shut your mouth.
"For a genuinely uncomfortable argument, made well," Jon says, to the room now, "which is the only kind worth making.
Mr. Ardent, you're welcome to answer it — properly, with your mind, not your rank.
That's what the marks are for." And Ardent opens his mouth and finds, visibly, that he doesn't have a fast answer, that because it's the natural order isn't going to survive contact with a follow-up, and Jon lets him sit in that for exactly one merciless second before moving the class on.
I should feel triumphant. Three marks, first class. Instead I spend the rest of the hour aware of the back of Ardent's golden head like it's giving off heat, and aware — slowly, uneasily — that again I've done the thing my friends keep flinching at and I still don't know what it is.
I notice the second professor when the class is nearly over.
She's at the very back, in the top row, and I don't think she's a student — she's older, sharp-featured, and she's been sitting there the whole time with a folded coat and a small notebook, and she has not once looked at the board.
She's been watching the room. Watching, I realize with a small cold drop, me.
When I catch her at it she doesn't look away or pretend.
She just holds my eyes for a moment, makes one unhurried note, and returns to watching.
When Jon dismisses us, he catches her eye across the emptying room, and something passes between them — brief, professional, and entirely about me. I don't imagine it. Two professors, one glance, and I'm the subject of the sentence neither of them said out loud.
The corridor outside is a crush of students, and the whispers are back, riding along with us the way they did after orientation, and I keep my eyes forward and my chin level and I do not look, because Sophia trained me this morning and I'm a fast learner.
I don't get far.
"You."
The voice comes from behind me, and it's his — Ardent's — and the corridor around us goes quiet in that now-familiar way, students slowing, pretending not to watch, absolutely watching.
I turn.
He's taller up close.
That's my first thought, which is annoying, because my second is that he's even better-looking from three feet away. Broad shoulders, sharp jaw, that unfair face.
I have the strangest urge to step closer.
Kiss him. Touch him. Like he’s addictive to me personally. Which is ridiculous. I don't even like this guy.
There's a large open space around him even here, in a packed hallway, everyone giving him a berth. His friends aren't with him — not the huge one or the green-eyed one. It's just him.
And he's looking at me with that same thrown, searching expression from class.
"Nobody talks to me like that," he says. Not shouting. Not even angry, exactly. Just stating a fact of his universe that I've apparently broken.
"Like what?" I ask. "Like you were wrong? Because you kind of were. Half wrong."
His jaw works. Somewhere behind me I hear Renzo whisper "oh my God" with the reverence of a man watching a building collapse in slow motion.
"Do you have any idea," Ardent says slowly, and there's that flicker again, that thing under the affront that I can't read, "who I am?"
And the honest answer, the only answer I have, comes out of me before I can dress it up.
"No," I say.