She’d probably said the same sentence to a thousand girls. Apparently a response was not required from me to complete her task. She said it, then she turned and walked away, heels clicking down the corridor.
The room was as advertised. The bare necessities. A desk, probably older than I was. A dresser with one drawer that didn’t close. The bed was made with a gray wool blanket I would hate the smell of by morning. And the window faced a wall.
Nice view,I thought as I dropped the duffel on the bed.
For an institution that had apparently seen fit to rearrange my entire life around it, Zenith Hall seemed strangely uninterested in telling me what to do next.
No tour. No schedule. No older student assigned to point outthe bathrooms and tell me which professors enjoyed ruining lives before breakfast.
Not that I’d been oriented many places before. The shop had taken all of eight minutes. But even there, someone had taken the time to show me the break room.
I’d been told it was a school for those Marked by Fate. I’d be given a Reading and a chance at a new life. Recruitment had not been presented as optional.
The first wasn’t a lie, at least. On the way to my room we’d passed students milling, and I’d seen a quad through the long windows letting late afternoon light through an obscene amount of glass.
It looked like a school. Just not any I’d attended.
The chance at a new life, though… this wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind.
I waited for someone to come back.
No one did.
The room stayed cold. The building’s shadow grew longer on the wall outside my window. Somewhere beyond the door, a bell rang once, and the building answered with footsteps that all seemed to know where they were going.
I could only sit alone and do nothing for so long. Eventually, hunger won.
So I followed the smell of food.
When I reached the dining hall, I stood at the threshold for what was probably ten seconds and felt every face in the room do one of two things: stare at me openly or pretend not to.
The room was packed. No one waved me over or made space for me, so I walked toward the nearest table where a girl with brown hair and a Mark on the inside of her wrist sat.
I waited the four seconds politeness asked for, but she didn’t slide down or even look up.
A boy at the same table, three seats down on the bench, glanced at me. He didn’t slide down either. In fact, he spread out to take up more space.
In under two minutes, it had been made clear what my social life would look like inside Zenith Hall.
I went to lean on the wall because there was no place else for me, and snatched a piece of bread off the tray in the corner on my way. It was dry and stale, but I had eaten worse and called it dinner.
The bite had barely reached my mouth when the conversation at one of the nearby tables changed.
A pause passed through it, small enough that anyone who wasn’t paying attention might have missed it.
I was paying attention to everything.
One of the boys leaned closer to the girl beside him and said something almost without moving his lips.
At the center of their table, another boy looked up and looked at me.
He was my age, maybe a few years older, with blond hair and a formal air about him that immediately annoyed me.
The even more annoying part was that I noticed him back.
My attention caught on him and stayed there, as if some small, stupid part of me had mistaken being stared at for being summoned.
He stared long enough that I had to stop myself from shifting under his gaze, and he didn’t turn away until the girl beside him put a proprietary hand on his sleeve and shot me a glare.
