The Great Hall of Highcrest Royal Academy could hold a thousand students, and that morning every seat was full.
Aren stood in the middle of the stone floor with a guard on each side of him.
Above him, the tall windows let in a cold grey light.
Around him, a thousand faces watched and waited.
Some of them looked curious.
Most of them looked pleased.
Nothing brought nobles together like watching a commoner fall.
Professor Gideon Crane stood on the platform at the front of the hall.
He was a thin man with a thin voice, and he read from a thin sheet of paper as if every word bored him.
“Last night, the Dawn Seal was taken from the Academy vault,” he said.
“This morning, it was found in the trunk of a first-year student.
By the name of Aren with no family name.
A Scholarship student.”
A murmur ran through the hall.
Someone laughed.
The Dawn Seal sat on a velvet cushion beside Crane.
It was a disk of gold the size of a palm, old and very valuable.
Aren had never seen it before today.
He had certainly never touched it.
Someone had wrapped it in his spare shirt and put it at the bottom of his trunk, under his books, where a thief would hide it.
“We also have a witness,” Crane went on.
“Lord Penrose saw the accused near the vault at midnight.”
Penrose was a second-year with a weak chin and a rich father.
He stood up in the third row, nodded once, and sat down again without looking at Aren.
At midnight, Aren had been at the healer house in the lower city, sitting beside his sister’s bed.
Nell was twelve.
She had Rift sickness, and on bad nights she could not breathe without someone there to hold her up.
Last night had been a bad night.
The only people who had seen him there were a sick little girl and a tired nurse.
Neither of them would be allowed to speak against a lord.
“Do you have anything to say?” Crane asked.
“I didn’t take it,” Aren said.
“Noted.” Crane did not write anything down.
“By order of the Academy, your scholarship is revoked as of today.
You may remain a student until the end of the month if you pay the term fees in full.
Forty gold crowns.”
Aren had three silver coins in his pocket.
Crane knew that.
Everyone in the hall knew that.
The scholarship was not only for his classes.
It paid a small monthly allowance, and every coin of it went to the healer house.
Without it, Nell’s treatment would stop in thirty days.
Aren had done that math before Crane finished speaking.
He was good with numbers.
He had always been good with numbers.
“That is all,” Crane said.
“Guards, you may…”
“Sir.”
Darius Holt stood up from the first row.
He was tall and handsome, with the easy confidence of someone who had never been told no.
He was the heir of House Holt, the best young swordsman of his year, and the boy every noble girl in the Academy wanted to dance with.
“With respect, Professor,” Darius said, “the Academy code says a thief should learn a lesson before he leaves.”
Crane looked at him for a moment, then went back to his paper.
Darius walked over slowly.
The guards stepped back.
Aren saw the punch coming and did not move, because moving would only make it worse.
The fist hit him under the ribs.
The air left his body all at once, and he folded over.
A knee came up into his face.
The world flashed white, and then he was on the floor with blood in his mouth.
Laughter filled the hall.
“Holt,” Crane said, without much interest.
“He slipped, Professor.” Darius crouched next to Aren and lowered his voice.
“You should have stayed in the gutter, rat.
People like you don’t belong here.”
Aren said nothing.
He was busy breathing.
“He was at the healer house all night!”
The voice came from the back of the hall.
Aren knew it before he looked.
Mira pushed through the crowd, red-faced, her brown hair half out of its tie.
She had grown up three streets away from him in the lower city.
She had won her own scholarship a year before he did, and she had told him to apply.
She was the only person in this building who had ever been kind to him without wanting something.
“Ask the healers,” she said.
“Ask anyone at the house.
He was with his sister.”
“Miss Hale,” Crane said.
“Were you there?”
“No, but I know him.”
“Then you are not a witness.
Ten demerits.
Sit down.”
Mira did not sit down.
“This is wrong and you know it.”
“Twenty demerits.”
A guard took her arm.
She pulled it free and kept walking toward the platform.
Aren lifted his head and caught her eye.
He shook his head, just a little.
Stop.
It won’t help.
You’ll lose your place too.
Mira stared at him.
Her jaw was tight, and her eyes were wet with anger.
For a long second, he thought she would keep going.
Then she let the guard turn her around.
The laughter followed her all the way back to her seat.
Aren pushed himself up to his knees.
His nose was bleeding onto the stone.
He wiped it with his sleeve and looked up, and that was when he saw her.
The upper gallery ran along the back wall of the hall.
That was where the heirs of the great houses sat, above everyone else, the way they always did.
In the center of the gallery, in a white uniform with a silver pin at the collar, sat Vivienne Ashgrave.
Everyone at Highcrest knew her name.
She was the heir of the most powerful house in the kingdom after the crown.
She was beautiful in the way that made people go quiet when she entered a room.
She was first in every class she took.
Aren had spoken to her exactly once, three weeks ago, when he had held a door for her in the library.
She had walked through it without a word.
She was looking at him now.
She was not surprised, and she was not angry.
She looked like someone checking on a plan.
Then she smiled.
It was a small smile, polite and calm.
She lifted two fingers from the railing in a little wave, as if they were old friends.
Aren understood all at once.
Penrose’s father was a vassal of House Ashgrave.
The guards who had searched his trunk wore Ashgrave colors on their sleeves.
The whole thing had been done cleanly, quickly, with no loose ends.
It had her name all over it.
He just didn’t understand why.
All he’d ever done was hold a door for her.
The guards lifted him by the arms and walked him out.
It was raining in the courtyard.
Aren sat on the steps of the old dormitory, the one they kept for scholarship students, and let the rain wash the blood off his face.
His ribs hurt when he breathed.
His nose had stopped bleeding, but it felt twice its normal size.
Thirty days.
Forty gold crowns.
Three silver coins.
He thought about Nell, and that hurt more than the ribs.
There was something else in his head too, something he did not talk about.
He had lived before.
In his first life, on a world with no magic and too many screens, he had been a trader.
A good one, for a while.
He had ruined people for money and slept fine afterward.
He had died at forty-one in a rented flat, owing more than he had ever earned, with a cheap web novel open on his phone.
Near the end, he had read a lot of them.
He looked around the empty courtyard and almost laughed.
A poor boy framed for theft.
A public beating.
A cruel rich girl smiling from a balcony.
Rain.
He had read this chapter a hundred times.
He knew exactly what happened next.
The boy sat alone at his lowest point, and then a blue screen appeared and gave him a cheat to destroy everyone who had hurt him.
“Come on,” he muttered to the sky.
“This is the part where the System shows up.”
Nothing happened.
The rain kept falling.
Somewhere behind the walls, a bell rang for the second class of the day.
Aren let out a breath and rubbed his face.
He felt stupid.
This was not a story, and Nell was not a plot device.
She was a real kid in a real bed, and in thirty days nobody would pay for her medicine.
It had always been easy to roll his eyes at this kind of setup.
It was a lot less funny from the inside.
He stood up, slowly, one hand on his ribs.
That was when the blue screen appeared.
[The Enemy Investment System has bound to the Host.]
[Scanning for hostile individuals…]
[Highest Hostility detected: Vivienne Ashgrave.]
[Hostility toward Host: 94%.]
[Every investment in a hostile Anchor returns between x10 and x10,000.]
[Recommended action: Invest in her.]
Aren read it twice.
Then he read it a third time, because he was sure he had missed something.
He had expected revenge.
A quest to crush his enemies, a skill to make Darius bleed, maybe a timer and a reward.
That was how these things worked.
Instead, the System wanted him to help the girl who had just destroyed his life in front of a thousand people.
He started to laugh.
It hurt his ribs, and he kept laughing anyway, standing alone in the rain like a madman.
Because the trader in him understood it before the rest of him did.
On every market he had ever worked, the biggest returns came from the assets everyone else hated.
You bought when the price was at the bottom and the whole world said you were a fool.
And right now, nobody in the world hated Aren more than Vivienne Ashgrave.
He wiped the rain from his eyes and looked back at the Great Hall, at the high windows of the gallery where she had smiled at him.
For the first time that day, he smiled too.
He wiped the rain from his eyes and looked back up at the gallery windows.
“Fine,” he said to nobody.
“Let’s invest.”