"Yes."
She nods slowly. "Okay."
Just okay. No follow-up questions, no visible calculation about what I might be or what it means for her to share a room with me. Just the easy acceptance of someone who has decided that whatever I am, I'm standing in her room at two forty in the morning and that's enough information to work with for tonight.
Something in my chest loosens, just slightly, in a way that has nothing to do with the ember.
"Is there a bathroom?" I ask.
"Through that door." She points. "The hot water takes about thirty seconds to come through. There are extra towels in the cabinet on the left." She pauses. "Do you have anything with you? Ashford said you might not."
"I don't."
She uncurls from the bed and opens the wardrobe on her side, pulling out a folded shirt and a pair of sleep pants. She crosses the room and sets them on my desk without making a production of it.
"They'll be big," she says. "But they're clean."
I look at the folded clothes. My family's ritual room, the scorch mark on Mara's dress, my father's grip on my arm and the words don't make this harder than it needs to be, all of that is very far away right now and also somehow located directly behind my sternum alongside the ember, and I am not going to do anything about that tonight.
"Thank you," I say.
"Get some sleep," Sage says. She settles back onto her bed and opens her textbook with the ease of someone resuming a task rather than performing the end of a conversation. "It's a lot to handle when you're not tired. It's worse when you are."
I pick up the clothes and go to the bathroom. The hot water takes exactly thirty seconds, and I stand under it longer than necessary, and the ember in my chest pulses slow and steady like a second heartbeat I didn't ask for.
When I come back out, Sage has turned off the overhead light. The green jar glows softly on her desk, enough to see by without being enough to keep anyone awake. She's reading by it, or pretending to.
I lie down on the narrow bed and look at the ceiling. Somewhere in the building, something settles, an old sound, the kind old stone makes when the temperature shifts.
Four houses. A null sorted into four houses, including the one that belongs to the family that built their entire identity around a bloodline I was born outside of. The witch disc burning gold in the dark of the Headmaster's office, warm and steady, exactly the color of the inheritance I was never supposed to have.
I turn onto my side, away from the window.
In the morning there will be whatever comes next. The Headmaster's careful management. Ryder's controlled information. An academy full of students who sorted at birth and will have opinions about a null who arrived in the middle of the night with a reaper hunter and no luggage.
But Sage Winters said okay and handed me clean clothes without asking me to explain myself, and the bed is firm and the room is quiet, and the ember in my chest settles to something almost bearable as I close my eyes and let the darkness take what's left of tonight.
Chapter 3
"Miss Fairmont." Ryder's voice cuts through the classroom before I've fully crossed the threshold. "You're late."
I'm not late. I checked the clock in the corridor twice. I'm thirty seconds early.
"I'm not late," I say.
"You're not seated." He turns back to the blackboard. "In this classroom, those are the same thing."
The room holds about twenty students, all of them already seated, all of them now looking at me. Stone walls, high windows that let in gray morning light, long tables arranged in rows facing a raised dais where Ryder stands with chalk in one hand. I find an empty seat near the back. The student beside me, a boy with bone-pale hair, shifts his chair six inches to the left without looking at me.
Welcome to Death Magic Theory.
"We were discussing the foundational taxonomy," Ryder says, still facing the board. He writes three words in sharp, angular script: Source. Conduit. Vessel. "The distinction matters because misclassification is how practitioners die." He turns. His gazefinds me immediately, the way a blade finds the gap in armor. "Miss Fairmont. Since you've graced us with your presence, you can tell me which of these three categories describes a null."
Every head in the room swivels toward me.
"None of them," I say. "A null doesn't produce magic, channel it, or store it. By definition, a null is outside the taxonomy."
His face goes carefully blank.
