The S class orientation room was smaller than I expected.
Not a lecture hall. Not an amphitheatre. A single rectangular room on the fourth floor of the academy's north tower with ten chairs arranged in a loose circle, a window overlooking the mountain face, and a blackboard on the far wall that had nothing written on it. The kind of room that said we are not going to teach you things in here so much as put you in a space together and see what happens.
I arrived early. Old habit. You learn more about a room before it fills up than after.
I picked a chair with my back to the wall and a clear line of sight to the door and sat down.
They came in ones and twos over the following ten minutes.
I watched each one the way I had watched the assessment yesterday. Quietly. Building reference points.
A girl with red hair cut short and a scar along her jaw that was old enough to have faded to silver sat down two chairs to my left without looking at anyone. She moved like someone who had been in genuine fights rather than structured training bouts, a particular quality of economy, nothing wasted, nothing performed.
Two boys from what I placed as the same house based on the crest pins on their uniforms came in together and took adjacent seats across the circle, already talking in the low comfortable tones of people who had known each other long enough to not need volume.
A tall girl with dark skin and close cropped hair sat directly across from me, opened a notebook, and began writing something before the room was even half full. She didn't look up.
Then Seris Elwyn came in.
I recognised her from the assessment yesterday. Silver white hair in a loose braid, pale green eyes that moved across the room in a single sweep that was faster and more thorough than it looked. She found a chair on the opposite side of the circle from me, sat down, folded her hands in her lap, and was still.
She had looked at everyone in the room during that sweep.
She had looked at me for slightly longer than everyone else.
Not obviously. The difference was maybe half a second. But my Perception stat was ninety one and half a second at this point was a considerable amount of time.
I noted it and said nothing.
Then Lucien Varek walked in.
He took in the room the way someone takes in a room they have already decided belongs to them. Not arrogant exactly. Just settled. The easy ownership of someone who has never seriously considered the possibility that a space might not want them in it.
His eyes moved around the circle and stopped on me.
Not the way Seris had looked at me. Hers had been measuring, careful, a look that was gathering information and withholding judgement. Varek's look was a different thing entirely. It lasted about two seconds and in those two seconds I watched him process the assessment result from yesterday, arrive at a conclusion about it, and file it somewhere that suggested the conclusion was not particularly complimentary.
He sat down on the opposite side of the circle, one chair along from Seris, and didn't look at me again.
That was almost more interesting than if he had.
The last two students came in together, which is how I met Theo Brant.
He was average height, brown hair that had lost an argument with itself this morning, and he was talking as he came through the door in the slightly breathless way of someone who had been talking for the entire walk here and hadn't finished yet.
His companion, a solidly built boy with a patient expression, appeared to be listening with the practiced tolerance of someone who had accepted talking as the background condition of Theo's existence.
Theo stopped talking when he saw the room. Looked at the circle of chairs. Looked at the remaining two empty seats. Looked at the one next to me.
Then he looked at me.
His expression went through several things in quick succession. Recognition, because the assessment yesterday had been the kind of thing people remembered. A brief internal calculation. And then the particular resigned acceptance of someone who has decided that protesting a situation won't improve it.
He sat down next to me.
"Brant," he said, not looking at me, settling into the chair with the energy of a person making the best of circumstances.
"Knox," I said.
"I know." He paused. "You broke two instruments yesterday."
"One cracked. One went dark."
"Right. Completely different." He looked at the ceiling for a moment. "We're roommates by the way. I got the notification this morning. Room forty two, north residential. I've already been there. It's a good room. I was happy about it right up until I saw your name on the second door."
I looked at him.
"Nothing personal," he said, with the tone of someone who meant it and was also being completely honest about why. "It's just that people who break assessment instruments tend to attract a specific kind of attention and I have spent my entire academic career specifically avoiding that kind of attention and I was quite good at it up until approximately this morning."
"I'll try to keep the instrument breaking to a minimum," I said.
He considered that. "Appreciated," he said seriously.
The faculty advisor arrived at exactly the first bell.
She was younger than I expected for a position like this. Late thirties, academy colours, dark hair pulled back with the efficiency of someone who didn't think about it. She moved quickly and sat down in the remaining empty chair as if it had always been hers and the circle had been waiting for her to complete it.
She looked at each of us in turn. No notes. No clipboard. Just a complete unhurried assessment that went around the circle and ended on me and stayed there for a beat longer than the others.
Then she looked at the whole group.
"My name is Advisor Cael," she said. "I will be your point of contact for the next four years. I am not here to teach you. The academy has subject specialists for that. I am here to make sure you don't waste what you are."
She let that sit for a moment.
"S class has ten students this year. In previous years the range between the strongest and weakest student in this room has been roughly one full rank on the strength scale. This year that range is somewhat larger." Her eyes moved briefly to me and away. "We will be adjusting the program structure accordingly."
Varek's head turned toward me by about five degrees. Not enough to be a look. Enough to tell me he had registered the implication.
Seris didn't move at all.
Theo, next to me, exhaled very slowly through his nose in the manner of a person updating their threat assessment of a situation.
"Your first session begins tomorrow," Cael continued. "Today you are here to meet each other. I would recommend using the time well. The people in this room will define the next four years of your development whether you intend them to or not."
She stood up, which apparently meant the formal portion was over.
"One administrative note." She paused at the door. "The assessment instruments from yesterday are being replaced. The Academic Standards Committee has asked me to remind all students that instrument replacement is a routine maintenance matter and should not be a subject of extended discussion."
She left.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Then Theo said quietly, to no one in particular, "Routine maintenance."
"That's what she said," I agreed.
He looked at me sideways. "You are going to be a problem aren't you."
I thought about the log in the forest. The status screen. The assessment hall and the cracked crystal and the disc going dark and the entire room going quiet all at once.
"Probably," I said.
He nodded slowly, with the expression of a man who had suspected as much and was now at the acceptance stage.
Across the circle Varek was talking to the two boys with matching house crests, his voice low and his posture relaxed, but his eyes moved to me once over the course of the next ten minutes with an expression that had sharpened since yesterday into something more considered.
Not hostility exactly. Something more careful than that.
Seris sat with her hands folded and said nothing to anyone and looked at the window.
But once, when I glanced across the circle, she was already looking at me. And unlike Varek she didn't look away when I caught her at it. She just held the look for one quiet second and then returned to the window as if neither of us had done anything worth noting.
I filed that away with everything else.
The room had nine other people in it and I had been here less than an hour and I already had more information than I knew what to do with.
Four years.
It was going to be a long four years.