She didn’t look as I had expected her to look.
The Council had let me build her in my head for years: significant, weighted, impossible to miss. A girl made of prophecy and consequence.
My first glimpse was completely different.
Astra Verita was small.
Hair pinned messy without a mirror. Bread in her hand, pressed against a wall, because no one would make room for her at a table on her first day.
She should have looked breakable.
She should have looked like someone who needed what I had been raised to offer: steadiness, protection, theold Ashford certainty wrapped around whatever the Council feared she might become.
She did not.
That was the first offense.
The second was worse: she looked ordinary enough for the room to dismiss her, and then crossed it as if the room had failed to impress her.
In the quad, she corrected my use of her name as if I had made a clerical error.
My name is Astra.
A boundary.
I had walked away because I could not stay there one second longer and let the others see what she was doing to me.
A settled Mark did not warm at a girl who was no longer in the same room.
A settled Mark did not warm at a girl at all.
In my room, I took off my coat. I unbuttoned my cuffs and put the links in the wooden box my father had given me at fourteen.
The box had held them every night since.
Tonight, it looked too small.
At my desk, my father’s letter waited.
Bedrock. Certainty. Performance. The body remembers what the blood teaches.
I had been told the Untethered was coming.
I had not been told she would make every inherited certainty feel impossible to carry in my hands.
5
The ceiling of Room 114 was exactly the same at dawn as it had been at midnight. I knew because I’d been staring at it all night.
Despite my sleeplessness, the bell rang at six.
I didn’t get up at the sound. I waited, letting the bell pass without obeying it, because I still had no idea where I was supposed to start the day.
By seven, the hallway was full of students with a plan for their morning. I didn’t have one, but I decided I’d need to find one.
I left my room and made it halfway down the corridor before a man stepped out from the stairwell.
He was older than the students and younger than Juno, with a faculty coat.
