"One uses technology. The other uses magic that will trap you in here if you try to do anything stupid."
The estate shrinks through the too-dark window. My reflection stares back at me, brown hair disheveled, blue eyes wide in a face that's always been determinedly average. Nothing special to look at, which has always suited my family just fine.
The lights are on in the ritual room. My mother and Mara, already turned toward each other, already in the process of moving on.
"So that's it?" I ask. "Eighteen years of being the family disappointment and I get shipped off without so much as a goodbye?"
"Did you want a goodbye from them?"
The question catches me off guard. "No. But it would have been nice to be asked."
"People rarely ask what nulls want."
"Former null, apparently."
"We'll see."
I look at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means magical awakenings at eighteen are unheard of. Null bodies absorbing full ritual invocations without dying is impossible. You're either a medical miracle or something else entirely."
"And you're hoping for something else entirely."
"I'm hoping you survive long enough for us to figure out which one you are."
Outside the window, the city slides away and the road narrows into something older, lined with trees that press too close. The car's headlights catch the spaces between the trunks and turn them briefly into doorways.
"This academy," I say. "What makes you think I'll fit in any better there than I did with my own family?"
"I don't."
His honesty is brutal and somehow refreshing. "Then why take me?"
"Because unprecedented magical anomalies don't get to live quiet lives. You're going to be powerful or you're going to be dangerous, and either way, you need to be somewhere that can handle what you become."
"And if I don't want to become anything?"
He looks at me for the first time since we got in the car. "What you want stopped mattering the moment you absorbed that ritual. Magic doesn't care about your preferences."
"How comforting."
"It's not meant to be comforting. It's meant to be true."
The trees get denser, and the road gets darker, and somewhere ahead of us through the windshield there are lights burning steady and cold against the black of the sky.
"Those lights," he says, following my gaze. "That's Nocturne Academy. Your new home."
"Temporary arrangement, you mean."
"We'll see about that too."
The gates appear out of the dark, massive iron and older than anything has a right to look. The car passes through them without slowing.
"Welcome to Nocturne Academy, Miss Fairmont," Professor Ashford says as the academy closes around us. "Try not to burn it down on your first night."
I look at the imposing stone buildings rising around us, at the windows glowing with warm light, at the students I can see moving through the corridors.
"No promises," I say.
