"That's the answer a null would give," he says. "Which is precisely why it's wrong." He sets the chalk down. "A null placed in proximity to active death magic functions as an inverted vessel. Not empty. Negative. It absorbs ambient energy from the surrounding field and destabilizes it. This is why nulls have historically been barred from advanced coursework." He pauses. "And from most other things."
The boy with the pale hair makes a quiet sound that isn't quite a laugh.
"Demonstrate the basic intake form," Ryder says, and he's not looking at me anymore, he's looking at the girl in the front row. She extends her hand, and dark smoke curls from her palm in a controlled spiral. Easy. Practiced. The kind of thing she's been doing since she was old enough to hold a thought steady.
"Now you." Ryder's eyes come back to me. "Miss Fairmont."
I put my hand out. Nothing happens. The ember that's been sitting behind my ribs since the ritual room pulses once, sluggish and unhelpful, and does exactly nothing visible.
"Nothing," Ryder says. Flat. Informational, like he's recording data rather than humiliating me in front of nineteen witnesses. "Again."
"I'm a null," I say. "Producing death magic is not something nulls—"
"I'm aware of what you are." He clasps his hands behind his back. "I'm testing whether what you are changes when placed in an active field. It doesn't appear to. Make a note of that."
He moves on. Just like that. Like I'm an experiment that failed to yield interesting data and he's already filed the result and moved past it. I lower my hand. The girl in the front row is watching me over her shoulder with an expression caught between pity and relief that she's not me. I look at the board instead.
Source. Conduit. Vessel.
I write them down and say nothing else for the rest of the hour.
Draconic Arts is in a different wing entirely, past a courtyard where something large has scorched the flagstones in overlapping black circles and no one seems concerned about it. The classroom is more of a training hall, ceilings vaulted high enough that I immediately understand why. Five students are already there when I arrive.
Thane Valorix is one of them.
He's leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed and his eyes half-closed—dark brown eyes that should look harmless, puppy-soft, except for the way gold flickers behind them like banked fire. His dark brown hair catches the light, and even relaxed against the wall, there's no hiding the heavy muscle across his shoulders and chest. Tanned skin, like he spends time under an actual sun instead of in stone corridors. He looks like someone who has never in his life arrived anywhere and wondered whether he belonged there.
I find a place along the wall opposite him and set my bag down.
He pushes off the wall and crosses the room at a pace that looks casual and isn't. He stops two feet from me, looking at my bag on the floor, and then he looks up at me.
"You're in the wrong place," he says.
"The schedule says Draconic Arts, second years and crossovers, this hall, this time." I look at him. "Which part of that am I misreading?"
"The part where a null belongs in a fire discipline class." He says null the way some people say contamination. Like it might spread. "You'll slow everyone down."
"Then train faster," I say.
His jaw tightens. He looks down at my bag again, and before I understand what he's doing, fire runs from his palm in a thin, precise line, and my bag lights up from the bottom seam. Not an explosion. A surgical burn, controlled and deliberate, moving through canvas and paper and the two textbooks I borrowed from Sage this morning until there's nothing on the floor but ash and the copper smell of burned ink.
The other students have gone very still.
I look at the ash. I look at him.
"That was my property," I say.
"Was it?" His voice is light, pleasant almost, the tone of someone who has just done something perfectly ordinary. "I thought it was clutter."
I crouch down and pick up the one thing that survived — a pen that had rolled clear of the burn radius. I stand back up and put it in my pocket.
"I'll need to replace two borrowed textbooks," I say. "If you'd like to fund that, I'll let you know the cost."
Gold flickers behind his eyes again. Not regret. Something sharper.
The instructor arrives before he can answer, and Thane moves back to his place with the unhurried certainty of someone who has won something, or thinks he has.
I spend the class with nothing to take notes on.
