On Monday morning, Darius Holt’s seat in Class A was empty.
By lunch, the whole Academy had a theory about it.
Some people said he had gone home to his father’s estate in shame, after Team Four’s story about the Training Rift had spread through every dormitory.
Some people said he had gone hunting in the hills to prove he was not a coward.
A second-year girl swore she had seen him get into a carriage with a pretty actress from the city theater, and that he would come back in a week with a ring on his finger and a story to tell.
Aren listened to all of it with his head down and his spoon moving.
He had slept for two hours on Sunday.
In both of those hours, he had dreamed about a sword ringing once against the rocks, very far down.
He had woken up both times with his hands clenched so tightly that his nails had cut his palms.
He had washed them carefully in the cold water of the pump, again, though there was nothing on them anymore.
“You’re quiet,” Mira said, sitting down across from him at the long table.
“I’m always quiet.”
“No, you’re always annoying.
Quiet is new.” She pushed a piece of bread toward him.
“Eat that.
You look like a ghost.”
He ate it.
It tasted like nothing.
Professor Crane did the weekly crystal check that afternoon.
It was a simple thing.
Every Monday, the students of Class D lined up in front of a small Awakening Crystal on Crane’s desk, no bigger than a fist, and put their hands on it one at a time.
The crystal showed their class and their current rank and level, and Crane wrote the numbers in his book.
The nobles in the upper classes did it in private with their instructors.
Class D did it in a line, in front of everyone, so everyone could see how little they had grown.
Aren stood in the line and tried very hard not to think about the window floating at the edge of his vision.
[True Class: Zero (EX, Unique).]
[Rank E: Level 1.]
Two nights ago, he had broken through.
He was Rank E now, the same rank as Vivienne Ashgrave, one full rank above every single person in this basement.
If the little crystal on Crane’s desk showed that, it would be over.
Nobody went from F to E in a week without a noble family buying them a core.
A commoner who did it would be asked questions until he bled.
False Face, he told himself.
It held at the ceremony.
It will hold now.
Fenwick went before him.
The crystal showed Lamplighter, Rank F, Level 2.
The class clapped sarcastically, and Fenwick bowed.
Then it was his turn.
He put his hand on the crystal.
It was cool and smooth under his palm.
For one long second, it did nothing, and he felt his heart climbing into his throat.
Then it glowed its weak, dirty grey.
Class: Servant
Rank F: Level 1
“No progress, Servant,” Crane said, writing it down without looking up.
“As expected.”
The class laughed.
Aren went back to his seat and sat down very carefully, because his legs had gone soft.
The System was smarter about lying than he had thought.
He wondered, not for the first time, who had built it.
When the class ended and the others had gone, a new window opened in front of him.
He had seen it once already, briefly, on the night of his breakthrough, but he had been too tired and too shaken to look at it closely.
Now he did.
[Investment Board.]
[Hostile individuals within range:]
Under the words, there was a list.
Names, and numbers beside them.
Vivienne Ashgrave (Primary Anchor): 98%
Rook: 72%
Celia Penrose: 41%
Aldous Penrose: 33%
Fenwick Gale: 12%
Gideon Crane: ??%
He read it three times.
Vivienne, at the top, as always.
Celia Penrose, the quiet healer from his team, who had been Darius’s friend since they were children.
Her brother Aldous, the weak-chinned liar who had sworn he saw Aren near the vault.
Fenwick, who mostly hated him because hating Zero was the most fun thing to do in Class D.
Then there was a name he did not know at all.
Rook.
Seventy-two percent.
Someone out there hated him almost as much as Vivienne did, and Aren could not even put a face to the name.
And at the very bottom, Crane.
The number beside his name was not a number at all.
It was just two question marks, flickering slightly, as if the System itself could not decide what to write.
Aren closed the window and sat in the empty basement classroom for a long time, listening to the laundry machines rumble through the wall.
Him, can’t I see him?
he thought.
Vivienne came back to classes on Tuesday, and the whole Academy came out to see her.
The Headmaster announced it in the main courtyard before the morning bell.
Lady Vivienne Ashgrave has completed her Trial and reached Rank E, the fastest first-year to do so in the history of Highcrest.
The Headmaster did not say how.
She did not need to.
Everyone had heard by now that Vivienne had gone into the Old Quarry alone under the full moon and come out with a guardian’s core in her hand.
The students cheered.
The older ones cheered loudest.
Even some of the teachers clapped.
Vivienne stood beside the Headmaster in her white uniform with her silver hair braided neatly over one shoulder, and she did not smile once.
She looked at the crowd the way she looked at everything, calmly and from very far away.
Aren stood at the back of the courtyard with Class D and clapped like everyone else.
He found that his hands wanted to clap harder than he meant them to, and he made them stop.
After the announcement, Crane found him.
“Lady Ashgrave trains with three instructors today,” Crane said.
“One for swordwork, one for her class, one for the Rank E body.
Her equipment must go with her to each of them.” He pointed.
“That is her sword case.
You will carry it.”
The sword case was long and heavy, made of black wood bound in silver, with the Ashgrave crest on the lid.
Aren picked it up and put it on his shoulder.
“For the whole day, Professor?”
“For as long as she needs a servant.” Crane looked at him for a moment.
His thin face showed nothing at all.
“You do have the right class for it.”
He carried the case for nine hours.
He carried it up the east tower to the private training room on the top floor, where Vivienne practiced her swordwork against an old knight with a scarred face and a voice like gravel.
He stood against the wall for two hours and watched her move, and he learned more from those two hours than from a week of practice in the dark.
He carried it down again, across the whole Academy, to the class instructor in the observatory, a quiet woman who made Vivienne sit under a glass dome and draw moonlight down into her body until her skin glowed silver.
He waited outside the dome for three hours.
It started to rain halfway through.
Nobody told him to come inside.
He carried it to the last instructor in the stone hall by the lake, a big man who made Vivienne run, jump, lift, and fight barehanded until she was gasping.
Aren stood in the corner, soaking wet, holding the case, and did not move.
Vivienne did not speak to him once.
She did not look at him.
When she needed her sword, she held out her hand without turning her head, and he put the handle into it.
When she was done with it, she held it out to the side, and he took it back.
If he had been a hook on the wall, she would have treated him exactly the same.
[Vivienne Ashgrave.
Hostility: 98%.]
It did not move once, all day.
She did not even think about him enough to hate him more.
At the very end of the day, outside the stone hall, she held out her hand for the case.
He gave it to her.
Her fingers closed around the handle, and for one second, her eyes dropped and rested on his hands.
His knuckles were covered in scabs.
Some were from the stone canyons of the Old Quarry, some from the terrace, some from places he did not want to think about.
He had told anyone who asked that he had fallen down the dormitory stairs.
She looked at them for a heartbeat.
Then she looked at his face, wet from the rain, and then she turned and walked away toward the Ashgrave wing without a word.
He stood there for a while after she was gone.
He did not know what that look had meant.
He told himself it had meant nothing, that she had looked at his hands the way you look at a crack in a wall.
He did not entirely believe himself.
The sun was going down when he walked back toward the scholarship dormitory, his shoulder aching from nine hours of black wood and silver.
He heard the horses before he reached the main courtyard.
They came in through the great gate of the Academy in a long column, two by two, iron shoes ringing on the old stones.
There were twenty of them, maybe more.
The riders wore grey steel and long dark cloaks, and every cloak had the same crest sewn on the back in silver thread.
A hawk, with its wings spread.
Students stopped in the courtyard to stare.
Teachers came out onto the steps.
At the head of the column rode a broad, grey-bearded man in heavy armor, with a face that was older and harder than Darius’s, but shaped exactly the same way.
He reined in his horse in the middle of the courtyard and looked around slowly at the students, the teachers, the old stone towers, as if he were looking at a field he intended to burn.
A knight rode up beside him and unrolled a scroll.
“By order of His Grace the Duke of Holt,” the knight called out, in a voice that carried across the whole courtyard, “every person who had contact with Lord Darius Holt in the last month will be questioned.” He looked down at the scroll, then up again.
“Beginning with the commoners.”
Behind the column of horses, the great gate swung closed.