"No."
"Was she informed I'm a null?"
A pause that lasts exactly one stride. "No."
"Great," I say. "I love being someone else's surprise."
He stops in front of a door. It's plain wood, nothing remarkable, a small brass number affixed at eye level. He doesn't knock. He looks at me instead, and the blue-lit corridor does nothing flattering to either of us, and I think about the ritual room and the car and the office and the relics and how none of tonight has had the shape of anything I would have predicted this morning when I was standing in the circle waiting for my sister's Awakening to start.
"The sorting doesn't leave this building," he says. His voice is low. "You don't tell your roommate. You don't tell anyone you encounter tomorrow. You answer questions with as little information as possible until I've spoken with the Headmaster about how to proceed."
"And if someone asks which house I'm in?"
"Tell them it's pending review."
"That's going to go over beautifully with a room full of students who sorted at birth."
"I didn't ask you how it would go over." He reaches past me and knocks twice, short and sharp.
A moment. Then shuffling. Then the door opens.
The girl on the other side is shorter than me, dark-skinned, with her hair wrapped in a silk scarf that's slightly crooked from sleep. She has a textbook tucked under one arm and a jar of something luminescent green in her other hand, and she's looking at me with curiosity and wariness in equal measure.
"Sage Winters," Ryder says. "Your roommate. Get her settled." He looks at me one more time, the same brief cataloging sweep. "Don't absorb anything."
He walks back down the corridor before I can respond to that.
I watch him go. Then I look back at the girl in the doorway.
"I'm Angelic," I say.
"I know," Sage says. "He told me your name this afternoon. He didn't tell me you'd be arriving at—" she glances past me toward a clock somewhere inside the room, "—two forty in the morning."
"I didn't know the schedule either."
"Fair enough." She steps back to let me in.
The room is small and organized in the specific way of someone who has established a system. Her side is dense with it: textbooks stacked by size, jars of ingredients arranged by color along the windowsill, notes pinned to a corkboard above her desk with a precision that suggests they've been moved and repositioned several times until they were right. The other side has a bed with plain linens, a desk, and a wardrobe standing open and empty.
I cross to the empty side and sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress is firmer than I expected. The pillow smells like cedar, the same note that was in the Headmaster's office, and I wonder if everything in this building is infused with the same base scent or if I've just absorbed enough magic tonight that my nose has stopped working correctly.
Sage sets the green jar on her desk and sits on her own bed cross-legged, pulling her knees up. She looks at me with frank curiosity.
"You're not a student who transferred," she says. It's not a question.
"No."
"Ashford brought you in himself, which means something happened that required a hunter response rather than an admissions form."
"You're very awake for almost three in the morning."
"I was studying," she says, not apologetically. "Something happened at your Awakening?"
I look at her. She looks back, steady and patient, the jar of green luminescence casting a soft light across her face. She doesn't push. She just waits.
"Something happened at my sister's Awakening," I say carefully. "I was there."
"And they sent a reaper hunter to collect you."
