The gates of St. Gabriel University open on a hydraulic mechanism — not slowly, not dramatically, but with the precise indifference of something that has been opening and closing on schedule for a long time and does not consider you particularly significant.
My driver — one of Dante's men, who hasn't looked me in the eye since the airport — eases the SUV through without being asked. Marco is very good at anticipating what he's expected to do. He's been doing it for twenty years in one form or another, and the skill he's best at is never being the one who looks at you when you don't want to be looked at.
I look out the window instead of at him.
The campus resolves through rain and November light: gray stone, bare trees, the kind of architecture that was built to suggest permanence and has been managing it for well over a century. It's beautiful in the way that places built on serious money and serious purpose tend to be beautiful — not decorative, not designed to please, just the inevitable aesthetic of things that were built to last. I'd done my research. I knew the stone, the spires, the Regent history stretching back to 1887.What the photographs hadn't conveyed was the specific quality of quiet that sits over a place where everyone present already understands the rules.
The SUV stops at a secondary checkpoint. A guard taps the glass. Marco rolls it down.
"Delivery for Romanov."
I had prepared myself for this word. I had encountered it in the contract forty-three times in various euphemistic forms, and I had said it in my head in the weeks before this morning, using it deliberately to blunt the edge of it, the way you press a bruise to locate where it hurts before anything else presses it without warning.
Still. Hearing it in the rain at the gate of this place lands differently than saying it alone in a room where I was the only one listening.
I get out before Marco can turn around.
The guard hasn't finished speaking. I'm already on the wet pavement with my hand on the trunk latch when he catches up — "Leave the bags" — and I stop.
"My things are in there."
"Everything you need will be provided."
The way he says this isn't unkind. It's recitation, the kind you develop when you've said the same sentence to a hundred different people and have learned that the fastest path through the moment is delivery without inflection. He's not cruel. He's just the person who says the part about the bags.
I let go of the handle.
He points toward an iron door set into the perimeter wall, separate from the main gate. "Processing."
I walk.
The processing room is windowless and smells of antiseptic and old stone — not unpleasant, just institutional, the particular combination of a space that is cleaned thoroughly and regularlyand has been for so long it's become the smell of the room itself. A woman sits behind a table. She wears a gray uniform. She has the composure of someone who has performed this procedure many times and finds it neither remarkable nor uncomfortable.
She tells me to undress.
I'd known this was coming. The intake protocol was in the documentation I'd spent months studying — not publicly available, but derivable from the testimony of people who'd moved through Regent-adjacent institutions and written about it afterward in the specific, guarded language of people who have agreed to say nothing directly. The physical intake, the confiscation, the blood oath.
Knowing doesn't make the room smaller. It doesn't make her efficient, clinical hands less precise on the thorough pat-down, or the plastic bin less gray, or my own body less cold under the examination lights. What knowing gives me is the ability to stay inside myself while it happens — to observe from a remove, to maintain the distance between the self that is being processed and the self that is doing the noticing.
This is procedure,I think.It is not personal. It is not permanent.
When it's done she pushes a pile of fabric across the table.
The uniform is gray plaid — blazer, white shirt, skirt, high socks, loafers. It fits precisely, which tells me they've had my measurements for long enough to have them made correctly. I look at the blazer's inside collar tag.
Not a size. A barcode.
Below it, in red:PROPERTY.
I put it on. I do this carefully and without comment, not because I have accepted what the tag says, but because I have decided that this garment is a costume and I am the person wearing it, and those are categorically different things, and the distinction belongs to me regardless of what the collar reads.
"Sit," she says.
She produces a lancet. I sit.
She recites the intake language —St. Gabriel is built on blood— with the flat fluency of something memorized so long ago it has stopped having meaning. She takes my left thumb and presses the lancet against the pad of it. I watch the bead form: a small, dark red point.
She presses a piece of parchment against it — heavy, textured, the Romanov crest already printed in the corner. My name beside it.
