Page 24 of Legacy Elite

"The chair was here."

"Renzo hates the chair."

"Everyone hates the chair," Soren says.

Then he steps aside, because someone else is coming down the corridor.

Ander stops in my doorway.

He looks at me. Then past me, into the room, at the coats and the bags and the six people in it and Luke standing at my shoulder.

"You're living here," he says.

"That's generally what the luggage indicates."

"In this residence?"

"Down the corridor from you, apparently. Try to contain yourself."

"Yes, well. Second-year orientation is at nine," Luke says, into the silence. "Placements start this week."

"Nine?"

"Yes."

"Second year is already terrible."

"You haven't unpacked."

"I know."

They go, eventually. Luke kisses me at the door and tells me he'll find me in the morning. He doesn't check the room first. Last year he always checked the room first.

Then he takes Soren with him down the corridor, and behind me Renzo has started asking Freya whether the window seat is technically communal property.

Ander doesn't leave with them.

I follow him out into the corridor because I want to know why, and he's still standing there with his hands behind his back like a man at a memorial service.

He looks past me into my room.

"This corridor used to be quiet," he says.

I lean against my own doorway.

"Not anymore, but that sounds like a good memory."

His eyes come back to me and stay there. I feel it in my chest. Neither of us says anything and I have no idea what to do with my face.

Then his attention goes past me one more time, to the open door of the second bedroom, and the four bags on the floor of it that are very obviously not mine.

It stays there a second.

When he looks at me again I can't read it at all.

"This is going to be a very long year," Ander says.

Chapter four