"I heard," he says. "Recently."
"And you didn't tell me."
"I thought you should come anyway." He says it simply, without apology. "You needed a reason to leave Luftis for a week and the posting was a reason. Now you're here and you can see for yourself whether there's something worth staying for."
I look at him.
"That's very managing of you," I say.
"I learned from someone," he says.
I almost say something about that. I don't.
"Stay for dinner," he says again. "Then decide."
Tomlinson takes me to see the campus in the afternoon. I know how to look at campuses — not at what they present but at what they reveal underneath. How students move through space. Who defers to whom. Who holds eye contact and who drops it.
Frosthaven's students move like students. Relaxed, socially organized, none of the performative hierarchy that dominates Luftis. No house system, no visible ranking, no student whose bearing announces their family's position in the pack structure.
Because they don't know what they are.
They're moving through this campus having no idea that the institution they're attending was designed to find the thing they're carrying and bring it to the surface. And what strikes me — what I'm not expecting to strike me — is how many of them there are. Students who carry the latent quality, who haven't presented, who are being slowly, carefully brought to threshold under cover of a wellness program.
In Europe these students don't exist in the system at all. They graduate from human schools and go to human universities and present alone, without context, without support, often without ever understanding what happened to them. The powerful families track their own bloodlines carefully enough that their children are identified early. Everyone else falls through.
Everyone else.
I have never once thought seriously about everyone else. The families whose children I teach have made certain of that — every committee meeting, every curriculum review, every funding conversation oriented around the students already inside the walls. The ones outside them have never been the problem anyone was paid to solve.
A student coming down the path ahead of us drops a stack of papers. The top half skids across the frozen walkway in a burst of white.
Tomlinson and I both stop.
I step forward, catch two pages before the wind can take them, crouch for the rest, and hand the stack back to her in a straightened pile.
She blinks at me, startled.
"Thank you," she says.
"Of course," I say.
Her gaze flicks over me once — quick, assessing, not especially subtle — before she hurries on.
When I straighten, Tomlinson is watching me.
"What," I say.
"Nothing," he says.
That usually means something.
We continue around the side of the main building. Two students pass behind us, voices low enough for human ears to miss.
"Okay, but look at them."
"Which one."
"The older one."
