The dormitory had a curfew.
I know this because I broke it, and because the boy sitting on the steps outside the east entrance was apparently also breaking it and felt the need to make it my problem.
"You're late," he said, without looking up from whatever he was eating. It appeared to be a bread roll he had absolutely destroyed, picking it apart into small pieces and then eating the pieces in a specific order that I clocked immediately and chose not to think about.
"So are you," I said.
"I live here." He finally looked up. Round face, dark circles, the particular expression of someone who found most situations mildly offensive. "You're Harlan."
Not a question. The body had a name. That was something.
"Last I checked," I said.
"You smell weird."
Copper and old pennies. I had washed my hands in the stream near the tree line but apparently not well enough, or maybe it was psychological, or maybe this kid had the sensory sensitivity of a search dog. He was still looking at me with that flat, assessing expression.
"I went for a walk," I said.
"At midnight."
"I find the darkness clarifying."
He stared at me for another three seconds, then went back to his bread. "I'm Pell," he said, like that was the end of something. "Pell Orin. Your roommate. I have two rules. Don't touch my notebooks, and don't talk to me before I've had coffee." He paused. "Actually three rules. Stop standing there, you're blocking the light."
There was no light. It was midnight.
I liked him immediately, which was inconvenient.
The room was small enough that both of us being in it at the same time required a kind of negotiated spatial awareness. Two beds, two desks, one window that faced directly into the wall of the adjacent building. Someone had nailed a small wooden shelf above Pell's desk and loaded it with notebooks, all of them unlabeled, all of them with the spines facing inward.
I did not look at the notebooks.
I sat on the bed that was obviously mine because it had no personality whatsoever, and I stared at the ceiling, and I thought about the hands.
Cedric Mallow's hands, folded across his chest like someone had taken a moment. Like someone had stood over the body and thought: this should mean something. Either that, or whoever it was had done this before and the arrangement was habit.
Habit meant pattern. Pattern meant this was not their first.
Which meant there was another killer in a story that, as far as the original author was concerned, only had one.
The System had called it an anomaly. Very helpful. Very reassuring.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
Infamy: 0
Composure: 61
Profiling: 88
New Skill Unlocked: Environmental Reading (Passive)
You now retain subconscious forensic awareness of your surroundings. This will occasionally be inconvenient.
Narrative Weight: LOW (Stable)
Occasionally inconvenient. I appreciated the honesty.
I turned onto my side and looked at the wall, and my Environmental Reading passive skill immediately informed me that there was a faint scuff mark along the baseboard near the door that matched the sole pattern of a standard academy boot, size 10 or 11, dragged not walked, consistent with someone being pulled or someone stumbling. It was old. Weeks, maybe. The dust pattern around it hadn't been disturbed recently.
I closed my eyes.
The scuff was still there when I opened them.
I closed them again.
Morning arrived the way mornings do when you haven't slept, which is badly and all at once.
Pell was already gone. He'd left a bread roll on my desk, same type as last night, which either meant he was generous or he'd bought too many and didn't want them to go stale. I was going to assume the latter because it felt safer.
Ashford Academy in daylight was exactly what a webnovel academy should look like if the author had a word count to hit and had googled "European boarding school" once. Stone buildings, ivy, a courtyard with a fountain that had probably been symbolic when it was installed and was now mostly a place where pigeons made poor decisions. The students moved through it in clusters, all of them wearing the same grey and navy uniform, all of them performing the particular social theatre of people who had known each other long enough to have strong opinions.
I had the memories of the body I was inhabiting, technically. They came in fragments. Like trying to remember a dream six hours after waking. Faces without names, names without context. The body had not been happy, I could tell that much. There was a texture to the residual memory that I could only describe as someone who had been grinding their teeth for a long time.
First class was History of Arcane Doctrine, which I would not be paying attention to.
I sat at the back.
The girl who sat two rows ahead of me had a notebook open before the instructor arrived, and she was not taking notes. She was drawing a map. I could see the edge of it from my angle, detailed enough that she'd used two different ink colors, and she was marking locations with small precise crosses.
Campus map. She was marking locations on a campus map.
The crosses had dates next to them written so small I shouldn't have been able to read them. But the passive skill had other ideas.
Three crosses. Three dates. The most recent one was last night.
She was not a student.
Well, she was a student. She was also something else, and the something else was the part that had apparently decided to sit two rows ahead of me in History of Arcane Doctrine with a map of what I was now certain were crime scenes.
I looked at the notebook.
I looked at the back of her head.
She had a braid coming apart on the left side, which meant she'd done her hair in a hurry or she'd been somewhere before class and had not had time to fix it. Small ink stain on the right cuff of her uniform jacket. She was left-handed. The way she held her pen had the particular grip of someone who'd been trained to write quickly and quietly, not in penmanship classes but in the field.
She was good.
She was also, I realized, marking the location of a body that hadn't been reported yet.
The instructor walked in. Everyone went quiet. The girl closed her notebook with one hand and capped her pen with the other without looking down, and just before she did I caught the tab on the notebook cover.
A name, written in the same small precise hand.
Sable Vane. Case No. 4.
Case four.
Four crosses. Three locations I'd seen. One I hadn't.
Cedric Mallow was not the beginning. He wasn't even close.
The instructor started talking about something that had happened four hundred years ago and I sat at the back of the room and looked at the profile I was already building on the girl who was two rows ahead and three cases deep into a mystery I had apparently just been enrolled in whether I wanted to be or not.
I did not want to be.
The bread roll was still in my pocket. I ate a piece of it.
It was good, actually. Rosemary. Pell had opinions.