RECORDS. ROOM 404. THE WALLS PLAY BACK SCREAMING AT THREE IN THE MORNING. REA SAYS YOU GET USED TO IT, AND THAT NOBODY EVER HAS.
The House Book of Opus.
The hallway of the Undrafted Dormitory smelled of lemon cleaner fighting a losing war against mold and old despair. The stone walls were lined with heavy iron-wood doors bearing deep scratches and scorch marks from previous occupants who had evidently tried to burn, claw, or blast their way out before accepting their circumstances. Some of the marks still radiated faint warmth. Silas touched one as he passed. Recent. Someone on this floor had lost control of their affinity in the last forty-eight hours, and nobody had bothered to repair the wall.
They’d been students for less than a day.
An older girl emerged from the shadows of a support pillar. She was a second-year, frayed gray tunic, sleepy eyes with a purple shimmer behind the irises. Her curly dark-red hair was pulled back in a braid that looked like it hadn’t been redone in days, and she carried herself with the slouch of someone who had been tired for so long that good posture had become a distant memory.
A small translucent purple toad sat on her shoulder. Its skin was opalescent, shifting between pale blue and milky white, its enormous drowsy eyes tracking the new arrivals with an expression that managed to convey both boredom and an unsettling sense of knowing. Every few seconds, its throat pulsed with a soft, iridescent glow.
“I’m Rea,” the girl said, stifling a yawn. “Second-year. Undrafted. Warden Voss told me to get you lot sorted before you start crying in the hallway. Fair warning, there’s already been crying. Third floor. Didn’t end well. Reverie here,” she scratched the toad’s chin, “gave the poor kid a vision of his grandmother’s funeral by accident. The kid’s been calm since, but in a concerning way. Reverie’s a Dream Toad. He likes to project himself where he pleases.”
“Is this where we live?” Malachai asked.
“This is where you sleep,” Rea corrected. “You live in the training grounds. Or the library. Trust me, you don’t want to spend more time in these rooms than you have to. The dampness gets into your bones. And the walls talk.”
“The walls talk?” Kent repeated, alarmed.
“Not literally. There’s a resonance effect from the old warding system, it picks up vibrations from the training grounds and plays them back at odd hours. You’ll hear combat echoes at three in the morning. Sounds like screaming. You get used to it.” She paused. “You don’t actually get used to it. But you learn to sleep through it.”
She turned and walked, her boots making no sound on the stone. “Follow me. First-years are on the fourth floor. Heat rises, so it’s warmest in winter, but it smells the worst in summer.”
As they climbed the stairwell, a narrow, spiraling column of damp stone with no railing, they passed an open door on the third floor. Inside, a group of older students sat around a floating mana-light, playing a card game Silas had never seen. Third-years. The difference between them and the first-years trailing behind Rea was the difference between iron and clay.
These students had been forged. Their arms bore the rough, overlapping tears of real combat. One had a metal prosthetic hand, a crude, functional thing bolted together from scrap iron and spite. Their gear was mismatched, a Tyranis gauntlet on one, a Geomacus boot on another, a chest plate with the scratched-out crest of House Aquarius. Scavenged pieces cobbled together to keep them alive. They looked like soldiers on leave from a war that nobody back home believed was happening.
The man with the prosthetic glanced up. His eyes, flat, the color of rusted copper, locked onto the first-years with an expression of utter indifference. He’d been where they were. He had nothing left to feel about it.
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“Eyes forward,” Rea whispered. “That’s Grim Squad. They’ve survived two Wilds rotations. They don’t like staring.”
“Why are they still here?” Kent whispered. “I thought if you survived, you got drafted eventually.”
“Not always.” Rea’s voice drifted like smoke. “Sometimes you survive, but you don’t shine. The Houses want stars. If you’re just sturdy? You stay here until you graduate or die. Or until the Open Assignment pool sends you somewhere that amounts to the same thing.”
She stopped at the end of the fourth-floor hallway, next to a dripping pipe that had left a rust stain running down the wall.
“Room 404,” she said, tossing a heavy iron key to Silas. He caught it one-handed. “End of the line. Don’t lose the key, replacement costs come out of your food stipend. And don’t let the Reverie lick you. Unless you want to wake up three days later thinking you’re a turnip.”
“Has that happened?” Kent asked.
“Twice,” Rea said, without elaboration. “The second was Tobin, third floor, who gave me this speech on my first day. He’s on rotation now. He’ll want to tell you himself when he’s back.” She offered a small, sad smile. “Good luck, first-years. Try to make it to breakfast.”
She drifted back down the hall, the opal toad croaking two descending notes.
“She’s given that speech before,” Silas said. “The pauses are worn in.”
The room was tight. Spartan. Four bunks recessed into the stone walls in stacked pairs that looked like morgue drawers. A scratched communal table with four stools. Battered metal footlockers with locks that didn’t work. The single window offered a view of moss-covered cliff face and the slow drip of condensation down the glass.
Sitting on one of the bottom bunks was a boy who looked like he had been assembled from spare parts by someone with a general idea of human proportions but not quite the precision. Six and a half feet tall and lanky in a way that made every joint look provisional. Deep tan skin. Thick, round glasses that magnified his eyes to comically large proportions, giving him the permanent expression of someone who had just been startled by a loud noise.
He jumped up when they entered, his head nearly brushing the ceiling, and extended a hand that felt boneless and cool, like driftwood.
“Oh. Hello,” the boy said. “The attendant said I might be alone. He said it like a threat.”
“Room’s full,” Silas said, dropping his bag on the remaining bottom bunk. “I’m Silas. This is Kent and Malachai.”
“Tha’kir. From the coast. Near Aquarius, but outside the city walls. Way outside.”
“Bond?” Malachai asked from the top bunk, eyeing him with the sharp gaze of someone who sorted everyone into two categories: useful and irrelevant.
“Deepwater Octopus.” Tha’kir pulled up his sleeve to show a shifting, ink-like tattoo wrapping his wrist, a tentacle rendered in ink so dark it seemed to absorb the lantern-light. As Silas watched, the pattern moved. Not dramatically, in the subtle, peripheral way that things move in deep water. If you looked directly at it, it was still. If you looked away and glanced back, it had changed position.
“My family farms coral,” Tha’kir said. “Outside the walls. The Octopus liked the salt on me, I think.”
“Coral farming?” Kent beamed. “That’s amazing! That’s where the Aquarius healers get their base, right? My mom said.”
Tha’kir blinked. “Mostly we filter silt.”
“Great,” Malachai said, flopping back on his bunk. “A dirt farmer, a coral farmer, a soot-smith, and whatever Silas is. House Opus. More like House Peasant.”
Kent snorted. Tha’kir managed a nervous smile, the first Silas had seen on his face.
“It’s better than being sent home,” Silas said.
“Is it?” Malachai sat up, his eyes flashing green. “You heard the toad-girl. ‘Survivors.’ Did you see Grim Squad? They’re stuck here. Stuck in the mud while the Tyranis kids drink wine in a hot tub comparing Spirit Fruits.”
“So un-stick yourself,” Silas said.
Malachai had already shoved his bag into the footlocker with the resigned violence of someone who’d lost an argument, and was now conducting what appeared to be a structural survey. He tested the mattress. It didn’t bounce. It barely compressed. He knocked on the metal bed frame and listened to the resonance.
“Coffins,” he announced.
Kent looked up. “What?”
“The bunks. They’re coffins.” Malachai lay down and crossed his hands over his chest in a funeral pose, his expression one of exaggerated serenity. “Very authentic. In the Sump, we’d call this luxury housing. It has a mattress and a ceiling.”
Kent laughed. A real laugh, warm and too loud for the small room, bouncing off the concrete walls and coming back softer. Tha’kir, sitting on his bunk with impossibly long legs folded beneath him, managed a shy smile.
Silas leaned against the doorframe and watched them. Malachai, still in the coffin pose, cracked one eye and made a face. Kent, still laughing. Tha’kir, still smiling, began laughing with them.
The bunks might be coffins. But they were their coffins.