The whispering followed him all the way to the dormitory.

  Not literally — the other students weren't trailing behind Raka with their mouths cupped around gossip, though it felt that way. It was more that the sound preceded him somehow, rippling ahead through corridors and up staircases, so that every group he passed had already heard something and had already arranged their faces into the appropriate expressions. Curiosity. Amusement. A particular kind of sideways pity that is worse than contempt because it involves no respect for the person being pitied.

  He heard the words Dormitory Seven twice before he reached the end of the eastern corridor. He heard the word failure once, and kept walking.

  * * *

  A junior prefect — second year, by the look of her, wearing the deep crimson of Ignis — had been assigned to escort the Dormitory Seven newcomers. She did this with the brisk efficiency of someone completing an unpleasant task quickly.

  'Down the east hall, take the stairs at the far end, third door on the left after the landing. You can't miss it.' A pause. 'Well. You could miss it. Most people try to.'

  'That's encouraging,' said a voice beside Raka.

  He turned. The girl from the sorting ceremony — the watchful one, whose eyes had moved a fraction of a second ahead of events — was walking at his left shoulder. Up close she was perhaps a year older than him, with a composed, careful face and the manner of someone accustomed to knowing more than she let on.

  'Mira Solene,' she said, not looking at him. She was watching the prefect's retreating back.

  'Raka Arden. You were sorted before me.'

  'I know.' She said it simply, without showing off. 'I watched you crack the Crystal.'

  'I didn't do it on purpose.'

  'I know that too.'

  They walked. On Raka's other side, Damar Kairo had materialized — Raka hadn't seen him approach, which was strange for someone so large — with his pack over one shoulder and his expression set to a neutral that communicated very little except that he had assessed the situation and reserved judgment.

  'Seven of us,' Damar said, counting heads with a glance. 'For Dormitory Seven.'

  'Is that symbolic?' Raka asked.

  'Probably not,' Damar said. 'But it might become that way.'

  Sena Valis walked ahead of them, alone, her head slightly tilted as if following a sound. Kai Noctis drifted at the back of the small group — Raka noticed him in his peripheral vision but found it oddly difficult to look at him directly, like trying to focus on something just outside a lamp's reach. The remaining two newcomers Raka didn't know yet: a wiry girl with paint-stained fingers who moved with coiled, restless energy, and a quiet boy who hadn't said a word since Crystal Hall.

  Seven students. Seven anomalies. Walking single-file toward the dorm that nobody wanted.

  * * *

  The third door on the left after the landing was different from the other dormitory entrances Raka had passed. Those had been wide, well-lit, fitted with polished handles and surrounded by the accumulated decoration of years — dormitory crests, competition trophies in display cases, honor boards with names etched in careful script.

  Dormitory Seven's door was narrower. The wood was darker. There was no crest. There was no trophy case. There was a small brass number — a seven — screwed slightly crooked into the wood, as if installed by someone who hadn't expected it to matter.

  Nobody moved to open it.

  'Well,' said Mira.

  'We could go back,' the wiry girl said, without apparent sincerity.

  Raka reached out and opened the door.

  Inside was better than the door had suggested, which Raka noted was a low bar. The common room was long and narrow, with high windows looking out onto the academy's inner courtyard. The furniture was mismatched — chairs that had clearly been moved here from elsewhere, a table that didn't quite match its surroundings — but someone had put books on the shelves and a rug on the floor, and the evening light came in warm and sideways and made the whole space look, briefly, almost deliberate.

  Seven beds in seven small alcoves, separated by curtains. Seven wardrobes. Seven desks. All of it sized correctly, prepared in advance. They had been expected.

  'Someone knew we were coming,' Sena said quietly, from the doorway.

  'The academy always knows,' Mira said.

  Kai Noctis walked past all of them without a word, selected the alcove farthest from the door, and pulled the curtain closed. That, apparently, was that.

  The wiry girl — who introduced herself, in the absence of any formal ceremony, as Lenne Ash — dropped her pack on the nearest bed and announced that she was claiming it, and that anyone who objected could discuss the matter with her fists, which she raised briefly and cheerfully to demonstrate.

  The quiet boy's name, offered in a voice barely above a murmur, was Tobas Renn. He sat on the edge of his chosen bed and looked at the floor with the expression of someone still processing the day.

  Raka stood in the center of the common room and looked at the six strangers around him.

  These are the people I'm going to spend a year with.

  Maybe much more than a year.

  * * *

  The academy's first proper day began the next morning at seven, announced by a bell that rang from the central tower with enough volume to rattle the windows of every building on the island. Raka was already awake — he suspected, from the sounds he heard, that several of the others were too. The kind of awake that comes not from rest but from a long night of not quite sleeping.

  Breakfast was in the Grand Refectory, a hall large enough to seat the entire student body at long tables arranged by dormitory. The system was immediately clear: Ignis at the nearest tables, warm and loud and already argumentative about nothing. Tempest beside them, crackling with energy. Terra, deliberate and solid. Aqua, gentle and grouped in small clusters. Lumina, bright and composed. Umbra, quiet in the way that is never entirely comfortable.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  And then the far end of the hall, where two long tables sat with enough space for seven.

  They filled the space with more dignity than Raka had expected. Damar sat straight. Mira chose her seat with the slight pause of someone who had already seen two or three versions of the next few minutes. Lenne grabbed the most food. Tobas ate in silence. Sena tilted her head at something only she could hear. Kai was there and then, between one blink and the next, wasn't — and then was again, with a full plate in front of him, as if he had simply always been sitting.

  Raka poured himself tea and surveyed the room.

  They were being watched. Not constantly, not obviously — but in the way a room full of people watches something they've decided is interesting or pathetic or both. Eyes that slid past with too much casualness. Groups at the Ignis tables where laughter landed a second after a glance in their direction.

  'They're staring,' Lenne said, through a mouthful of bread.

  'They're curious,' Mira said.

  'They're both,' Damar said.

  'Does it matter?' Raka asked.

  Lenne considered. 'It matters if they decide to do something about it besides stare.'

  It was, Raka thought, a reasonable concern.

  * * *

  The first class Dormitory Seven attended alone — separate from the general student body — was Aether Theory, conducted by a small, energetic professor named Instructor Hale who had the manner of someone in love with his subject and entirely unbothered by the political reality of teaching the academy's most marginalized dormitory.

  'Right,' he said, dropping a stack of books on his desk with a crash that made Tobas flinch. 'Who can tell me what Aether is?'

  Silence.

  'Come on. Someone must have done some reading. You had two weeks' notice.' He pointed at Raka. 'You. Take a guess.'

  'It's an energy,' Raka said. 'Something that exists inside certain people. It gives them abilities.'

  'Technically accurate in the way that describing the ocean as some water is technically accurate,' Hale said, but not unkindly. 'Aether is not merely an energy. It is a fundamental force — the residue of something much older. Current theory suggests it is an echo left behind by the event that created both our world and the Void Realm. It exists in human beings because human beings are, in some sense, walking intersections between those two realities.'

  He paused to let that land.

  'The Aether Core is not a muscle and it is not an organ. It is a node — a point where the fundamental force concentrates and becomes controllable. When it awakens, it develops a signature. That signature determines what you can do.'

  'And if the signature doesn't fit the categories?' Mira asked.

  Instructor Hale looked at her for a moment. Then he smiled — not the pitying smile, not the amused one. A real one.

  'Then you're in the right room,' he said. 'The classification system was built three hundred years ago based on the abilities that existed then. Powers that don't fit it aren't failures of the system. The system failed to anticipate them. There is a significant difference.'

  Raka felt something ease slightly in his chest — some tension he had been carrying since the Crystal cracked and everyone's eyes had found him. He looked around the room. Damar was watching Instructor Hale with the focused attention of someone re-evaluating a calculation. Mira had already written something in her notebook. Even Kai, from the back corner where he was barely perceptible, seemed more present than usual.

  'Now,' Hale said, picking up a piece of chalk. 'Let's talk about what we actually know about anomalous Aether signatures. Which is less than I'd like, but more than you'd expect.'

  He turned to the board and wrote a single word.

  RESONANCE

  Raka went very still.

  'Aether Resonance is perhaps the oldest recorded anomalous ability,' Hale said, his back still turned. 'The capacity to attune to and temporarily mirror the Aether signatures of others. It appears in the earliest academy records — not as an ability, but as a phenomenon. Something that happened to people rather than something they controlled.' He turned. 'It is extraordinarily rare. The last confirmed case was documented approximately three hundred years ago.'

  He looked directly at Raka when he said it.

  'Three hundred years,' Raka said.

  'Give or take,' Hale said pleasantly. 'Don't let it intimidate you. History has a way of recurring.'

  * * *

  The Ignis students found them between classes.

  Raka had been walking alone — Damar had gone back to the dormitory, Mira to the library, the others scattered — and he was navigating the broad corridor between the east wing and the training grounds when a group of four boys in red fell in alongside him. Not aggressively, not initially. Just present. Filling the corridor in a way that left him less room than there should have been.

  The one at the center was perhaps a year older, well-built, with the easy confidence of someone who had been told repeatedly that he was talented and had decided to agree. His name, Raka would later learn, was Drev Casson — second year, ranked third in Ignis, tipped for the academy tournament team.

  'You're the one who cracked the Crystal,' Drev said.

  'It cracked,' Raka said. 'I touched it.'

  'Same thing.'

  'Not really.'

  Drev smiled. The smile of someone establishing terms.

  'Dormitory Seven,' he said. 'The rejects. No offense.'

  'Some taken,' Raka said.

  The other boys laughed. Drev's smile held.

  'Look, I'm not trying to start anything. I'm just being honest. The sorting system puts people where they fit. Seven is where the system doesn't know what to do with you. That's just a fact.'

  'The system is three hundred years old,' Raka said. 'It might be wrong.'

  Something shifted in Drev's expression — not quite respect, but the recalibration that happens when someone decides you're more interesting than expected.

  'Bold,' he said. 'We'll see if you're saying the same thing at midterms. Just a word of advice, Seven: this academy runs on merit. Win something. Otherwise you're just the dorm that breaks things.'

  He walked on. His group followed.

  Raka stood in the corridor and breathed slowly and thought about what it would feel like to copy Drev Casson's fire abilities and set something minor ablaze.

  He thought about it for a long moment.

  Then he decided not to, because he had no idea how to control it yet, and also because Deputy Headmaster Crane had the eyes of someone who would know.

  He walked on.

  * * *

  That evening, for the first time, all seven of them were in the common room at the same time.

  It wasn't planned. Lenne was sharpening something that may or may not have been a pencil. Tobas was reading. Damar sat at the table with a piece of paper, working through what appeared to be a detailed map of the academy drawn entirely from memory. Mira sat in the window seat, looking out at the darkening courtyard with an expression that suggested she was watching something that hadn't happened yet. Sena had curled into the corner chair she had wordlessly claimed the night before, doing nothing visible — just sitting, and listening.

  Kai was present. Raka could tell because occasionally the air in the far corner felt occupied.

  'Did anyone else get told by an Ignis student that we're rejects today?' Raka asked, looking at the ceiling.

  'Second year? Broad shoulders?' Lenne said.

  'That's the one.'

  'He told me Dormitory Seven hasn't produced a single ranked guardian in twenty years,' Lenne said. 'I told him twenty years was a short sample size. He didn't like that.'

  'I saw him coming,' Mira said, from the window. 'Took a different corridor.'

  'Smart,' Damar said, without looking up.

  'What are you drawing?' Raka asked him.

  Damar turned the paper around. It was a map — careful, detailed, rendered from memory with surprising accuracy. Every building Raka recognized and several he didn't, all labeled in small, precise handwriting.

  'In case we need to move quickly,' Damar said.

  'Move quickly from what?' Tobas asked, his voice barely above a murmur.

  Damar considered the question with genuine seriousness.

  'I don't know yet,' he said. 'But this doesn't feel like a place where nothing happens.'

  Raka looked at the map. Then at Damar. Then at the rest of them — Lenne with her maybe-pencil, Tobas with his book, Mira watching futures in the window glass, Sena tilted toward sounds from elsewhere, Kai existing at the margins.

  'No,' Raka said. 'It really doesn't.'

  Outside, the academy's lights were coming on one by one as the sky darkened, each dormitory tower glowing its own color. From the window of Dormitory Seven's common room, Raka could see them all — red, gold, brown, blue, white, violet — arranged in a ring around the central towers like a crown of small fires.

  Dormitory Seven's window put out no particular color. Just the ordinary warm light of a lamp, visible to anyone who happened to look up.

  Raka looked at it for a long time. Seven people who didn't fit anywhere. A dormitory nobody wanted. A crystal that had cracked rather than given him an answer.

  History has a way of recurring.

  He didn't know yet what that meant. But he was fifteen and curious, and the island floated impossibly above the clouds, and somewhere beneath them in the vast dark of the world, something old was beginning to stir. He would find out.