Page 63 of Legacy Found

"I was rescuing someone—"

"You can rescue someone and not get eaten. Those aren't—"

"Oh, so now you're the—"

The door swings shut behind them, and their voices carry on down the corridor, rising and overlapping and entirely unbothered by me, and I stand in my office and listen until they fade.

Then I open the drawer, and I get back to work.

Chapter twenty-two

Jessica

Nobody at our table is eating.

There's food. Somebody put food in front of all of us. But the whole freshman class is running on no sleep and pure dread this morning, and the dining hall, usually a wall of noise, has gone quiet enough that you can hear forks not being used.

Today the final Merit board goes up. A hundred marks or you go home. That's the whole year, decided by a number.

"I did the math again last night," Declan says, low, to no one. "Everyone's, not just mine. I've had a spreadsheet going for a week."

"That's deeply unwell," Renzo tells him, "and also, what did it say?"

"It said I should stop doing spreadsheets and go to sleep."

Sophia hasn't stopped talking since we sat down — a nervous, unbroken stream about the weather, the pastries, a dream she had about the board showing everyone's name in Comic Sans — and none of us tell her to stop, because that's just how Sophia holds herself together, out loud.

"I'm scared to look," Renzo admits, which from Renzo, who performs confidence like it's an Olympic sport, lands harder than it should.

Torres looks calm. He always looks calm. But when I catch his eye he shrugs. And I think what everybody is trying not to, some of the people in this room are going home today.

I run the whole year back in my head like I can change it by reviewing it. The three marks Jon gave me on day one. Every mark Celeste Faris peeled back off me for the crime of helping people and asking questions. Combat, bleeding points for a whole semester until Luke got his hands on my footwork. Renzo, and a feral wolf, and the fistful of marks that came after. Probation.

The Great Hall doesn't feel like the Great Hall this morning.

The whole freshman class packs in, faculty lining the walls, and up on the balconies the upperclassmen have gathered to watch — not to gloat, I realize, but because every one of them stood exactly where we're standing once, and they remember what it costs.

Chancellor Falken steps forward, and the room stops breathing.

"One hundred Merit Marks qualifies you for the First Trial," he says, without ceremony. "Below one hundred, you leave Luftis today. There are no appeals. There is no negotiation." He lets that settle over two hundred terrified faces. "You have all worked a full year for the number that is about to appear beside your name. Whatever it is — you earned it."

The board illuminates.

Names begin to surface across it, and the class surges forward as one, and the silence that follows is the worst sound I've ever heard — two hundred people all reading at once, and then the little breaks in it. A sob of relief somewhere to my left. A whispered yes. And, near the front, a girl who reads her number, goes very still, and then simply turns and walks out of the hall before anyone can look at her, spine straight, chin up, gone.

Not everyone made it. It lands in my chest like a stone.

I can't find my own name. My eyes won't focus on it. So I look for my friends instead, because I have to know, I have to know first —

Sophia Dimitriou. Qualified.

She screams. Actually screams, both hands flying to her mouth.

Renzo Moretti. Qualified. Declan Byrne. Qualified. Freya Lindholm — qualified, of course, near the top, and even Freya's careful face cracks.

Mateo Torres. Qualified.

My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my teeth, because I'm counting, I'm counting and I can't quite believe the number I'm getting —