Page 23 of Legacy Found

The hall is dead silent.

"Every freshman in this room," the Chancellor says, and now his eyes sweep the whole space, the pack heirs and the scholarship students and everyone in between, "begins with exactly zero. The same zero. There is no inherited advantage inside these walls. There is no purchasing your way forward. Here, you are worth precisely what you earn — and not one mark more."

And I could kiss him, honestly, because I've spent my whole life not understanding why anyone deserves anything for a name they didn't choose, and here is a silver-haired man in an ancient hall telling hundreds of people the exact thing I've always believed. For the first time since breakfast went sideways, I feel the ground under me. Zero and zero. That means the six of us have a real chance. That means I have a real chance.

Then he explains how we earn our way up from that zero.

The Merit Mark system, he calls it. Every action at Luftis is weighed. You earn Marks through academic performance, through leadership, through initiative, through service to the academy and each other, through teamwork, through integrity, through representing Luftis well in everything you do. And you lose them — just as easily — through misconduct, dishonesty, poor judgment, or any behavior unbecoming of a Luftis student. Nothing here is neutral. Everything counts.

"Your first milestone is simple to state and difficult to reach," Falken says. "Before any freshman may attempt the First Trial, that freshman must earn one hundred Merit Marks."

I pull out my notebook.

"Those who reach one hundred earn the right to attempt the Trial. Those who do not—" he pauses, and there's no cruelty in it, just fact "—will not remain at Luftis. You will be dismissed before you ever set foot in it."

I write 100 MERIT MARKS and underline it. Twice.

Somebody a few rows down raises a nervous hand to ask what the First Trial actually is, and the Chancellor's answer is a thin almost-smile.

"You'll find," he says, "that no one who has taken it will tell you. And no member of this faculty will describe it. You will know when you are ready to face it, and not before." He lets the unease ripple through the room. "Concern yourselves with the hundred. The Trial will keep."

I underline the number a third time. Whatever's coming, whatever happened at breakfast, whatever I am — I did not fly across a continent and watch a man turn into a wolf to wash out before I've started. One hundred. Fine. I can count.

"Welcome to Luftis Academy," Chancellor Falken says. "Your education begins now."

And he dismisses us.

The students all rise in a great scrape and rustle, and the six of us stick together on instinct, the way we've done all week, drifting into our little knot as the tiers empty toward the doors.

The whispers haven't stopped. If anything they're worse and as we move down through the emptying hall, I feel it following us. Conversations dropping as we pass. Heads turning. A cluster of upperclassmen by the doors going quiet the second we come near, then starting up again the moment we're past, low and urgent.

They're not looking at all of us.

They're looking at me.

I feel it climbing up the back of my neck, the itch of being watched, and I start to turn my head — just to catch one of them, just to see —

"Don't," Sophia says quietly, beside me.

I look at her instead.

"I don't think I want to know," she says, and her usual brightness is gone. "So I'm not going to look. And neither are you."

"I kinda do," Renzo mutters, already half-turning.

"No," Torres says, low, without breaking stride. "You don't."

And the way he says it stops even Renzo.

So I face forward. I fix my eyes on the tall doors ahead and the bright morning beyond them, and I don't look back, even though every whisper in the hall is crawling between my shoulder blades.

The six of us walk out together, toward our first class, into whatever this place is going to be.

Behind us, the whispering doesn't stop.

Chapter ten

Jessica