Chapter twenty-two
Jessica
Nobody at our table is eating.
There's food. Somebody put food in front of all of us. But the whole freshman class is running on no sleep and pure dread this morning, and the dining hall, usually a wall of noise, has gone quiet enough that you can hear forks not being used.
Today the final Merit board goes up. A hundred marks or you go home. That's the whole year, decided by a number.
"I did the math again last night," Declan says, low, to no one. "Everyone's, not just mine. I've had a spreadsheet going for a week."
"That's deeply unwell," Renzo tells him, "and also, what did it say?"
"It said I should stop doing spreadsheets and go to sleep."
Sophia hasn't stopped talking since we sat down — a nervous, unbroken stream about the weather, the pastries, a dream she had about the board showing everyone's name in Comic Sans — and none of us tell her to stop, because that's just how Sophia holds herself together, out loud.
"I'm scared to look," Renzo admits, which from Renzo, who performs confidence like it's an Olympic sport, lands harder than it should.
Torres looks calm. He always looks calm. But when I catch his eye he shrugs. And I think what everybody is trying not to, some of the people in this room are going home today.
I run the whole year back in my head like I can change it by reviewing it.
The three marks Jon gave me on day one. Every mark Celeste Faris peeled back off me for the crime of helping people and asking questions.
Combat, bleeding points for a whole semester until Luke got his hands on my footwork.
Renzo, and a feral wolf, and the fistful of marks that came after. Probation.
The Great Hall doesn't feel like the Great Hall this morning.
The whole freshman class packs in, faculty lining the walls, and up on the balconies the upperclassmen have gathered to watch — not to gloat, I realize, but because every one of them stood exactly where we're standing once, and they remember what it costs.
Chancellor Falken steps forward, and the room stops breathing.
"One hundred Merit Marks qualifies you for the First Trial," he says, without ceremony.
"Below one hundred, you leave Luftis today.
There are no appeals. There is no negotiation.
" He lets that settle over two hundred terrified faces.
"You have all worked a full year for the number that is about to appear beside your name. Whatever it is — you earned it."
The board illuminates.
Names begin to surface across it, and the class surges forward as one, and the silence that follows is the worst sound I've ever heard — two hundred people all reading at once, and then the little breaks in it.
A sob of relief somewhere to my left. A whispered yes.
And, near the front, a girl who reads her number, goes very still, and then simply turns and walks out of the hall before anyone can look at her, spine straight, chin up, gone.
Not everyone made it. It lands in my chest like a stone.
I can't find my own name. My eyes won't focus on it. So I look for my friends instead, because I have to know, I have to know first —
Sophia Dimitriou. Qualified.
She screams. Actually screams, both hands flying to her mouth.
Renzo Moretti. Qualified. Declan Byrne. Qualified. Freya Lindholm — qualified, of course, near the top, and even Freya's careful face cracks.
Mateo Torres. Qualified.
My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my teeth, because I'm counting, I'm counting and I can't quite believe the number I'm getting —
Every single one of them. Every scholarship student. Nobody in our cohort is below the line.
We start yelling each other's names like idiots.
Sophia's crying and laughing at once, Renzo's pointing at the board and demanding someone confirm he's not hallucinating, Declan has picked Freya clean up off the floor, and it takes me a full stunned minute to understand what I'm actually looking at.
The first latent wolf cohort in the history of this academy — mostly kids who a year ago had never heard the word shifter — didn't lose a single one.
"Jessica." Torres grabs my shoulders and turns me toward the board. "You haven't even looked. Look."
I look.
My finger finds the line, and I stop.
Jessica Miller — 108.
I just stare at it. "...A hundred and eight?"
I was behind. I was behind pace half the year, watching Faris carve me back down every week.
And then I ran onto a field I'd been ordered to stay off, and pulled Renzo out from under a feral wolf, and the marks they gave me for it are sitting in that number right now.
A hundred and eight. Not scraping the line by a hair. Clear of it.
I didn't barely survive this. I earned it. The exact thing I kept getting punished for is the thing that put me over.
Sophia hits me at full speed and nearly takes us both down.
Torres scoops me straight off my feet in a bear hug and spins me, and I'm laughing so hard it's most of the way to crying, my face buried in his shoulder, and for a second there's nothing in the entire world but the six of us and a glowing board and the impossible fact that we all made it.
When I finally come up for air, I look across the hall.
Luke's there, near the front with Soren and Ander, the three of them composed as ever, an island of stillness in all the chaos. And Luke's already looking at me.
He doesn't come over. He can't — princes don't cross a room to celebrate with a scholarship girl, not in front of the whole academy, not with the divide between our worlds as real as it's ever been.
But he catches my eye, and he gives me the smallest smile, barely there, just for me — and I can see it anyway.
He's proud of me. He watched me claw this back mark by mark on that training mat, and he's proud.
I smile back.
And I wish, stupidly, that he could just walk over. Say it out loud. Maybe even hug me, the way Torres just did.
He doesn't. He holds my eyes a moment longer, and that's all we get.
I understand why. I just wish, standing in the best moment of my year, that I didn't have to.
That afternoon Jon asks the six of us to stop by his office, and we all assume it's Trial information, so we file in braced for bad news.
Instead there's a spread on his desk. Nothing extravagant — tea and coffee and a bottle of sparkling cider, pastries, bread, a bowl of fruit. Just enough. He's cleared space and pulled in extra chairs, and it takes me a second to understand that Professor Jon Matthias threw us a party.
He pours the cider around and lifts his glass.
"To the First Cohort," he says.
The room quiets.
"Over a year ago," he says, "I visited an academy in North America.
Frosthaven." His eyes flick, briefly, to Torres, who went through that system.
"It was full of latent wolves. Kids who'd grown up human, found late, many of them from hard places — and they were thriving.
Learning what they were. Becoming who they could be.
" He turns his glass slowly. "I flew home and I could not stop asking one question.
If North America is finding its latent wolves and giving them a place — why aren't we?
Why is Europe letting them slip through the cracks alone? "
Nobody says anything. I don't think anyone's breathing.
"That question became this program," Jon says.
"And when it was approved, I'll be honest with you — no one knew if it would work.
I believed it would." A small, dry pause.
"But belief and proof are not the same thing.
I've spent my whole career reminding students of that.
It's less comfortable when it's your own idea on the line. "
He looks around at all of us.
"Today, every member of Europe's first latent wolf cohort qualified for the First Trial. Every single one of you." His voice stays even, but for once, he doesn't quite hide his pride. "I am more proud of you than I have words for, and I have a great many words."
There's a knock at the doorframe. One of the other professors leans in, glances at the six of us, and says, mildly, "It seems your program succeeded, Matthias."
Jon shakes his head. "They succeeded," he says. "I only gave them the opportunity."
And I get it, then — how much this means to him. That this was never just a good idea he had. It was the thing that reignited him, and we're the proof it worked, and there's a whole future of kids like us who'll come after because six strangers made it through a year.
Jon raises his glass one last time.
"There will be other latent cohorts," he says. "But there will only ever be one first."
We all lift our glasses, and it feels — genuinely, for a moment — like history.
Then Renzo, because he's Renzo, ruins it perfectly.
"So," he says, into the warm silence. "What exactly is the First Trial?"
The room goes still in a completely different way.
Jon smiles. "I can't tell you."
Everyone groans at once. Sophia throws both hands in the air. "You're kidding. We just qualified! We earned the answer!"
"You earned the chance to find out," Jon says, laughing now. "If I told you what it was, it wouldn't be much of a trial, would it?"
Which is, somehow, the least comforting sentence anyone has said all day. I watch it move through the room — the celebration draining slowly back into nerves, everyone suddenly very aware that qualifying wasn't the finish line. It was the door.
We spill out of his office still buzzing, and the theories start before we've even reached the stairs.
"It's going to be physical," Sophia says darkly. "We're going to have to wrestle wolves. Fully grown wolves. With our hands."
"They drop us in the middle of the Preserve with nothing," Renzo counters. "Mark my words. No food, no map, just hope and predators."
"It'll be a written exam," Declan says, gloomy. "An impossibly long one. Watch."
"You want it to be a written exam," Freya says.
"I want to live, Freya."
Torres just shrugs, hands in his pockets, easy. "Whatever it is," he says, "we'll get through it."
"That's it?" Renzo demands. "That's your whole strategy? 'We'll get through it'?"
"Worked so far." Torres nudges me. "Right?"
"A hundred and eight," I say, and I can't stop grinning about it, and Sophia loops her arm through mine, and the six of us head back across campus into the long gold afternoon light — arguing about wolves and wilderness and exams, no closer to knowing what's coming, and for once completely unbothered by not knowing.
Behind us, the Great Hall glows. Ahead of us, somewhere, waits the First Trial.
That's tomorrow's problem. Today we made it, all of us, and nobody's letting go of anybody's arm.