Page 24 of Winterveil

Nadiya nodded.

Giselle had to swallow down her disbelief. Nadiya’s expression was open, sincere. Almost smiling. It took her another moment to find the word: “Okay.”

“Okay,” Nadiya echoed. Giselle tried to read the emotion in her voice. She couldn’t quite manage it. She had the sense again of Nadiya being regal, almost untouchable. But that made her all the more pleased to have been invited—to have been chosen. Giselle had never been chosen before for any reason other than her looks, which surely could not matter to Nadiya.

Nadiya started down the hallway, watching Giselle over her shoulder until she began to follow. As Giselle fell into pace beside her, she caught a glance of the gold band around Nadiya’s wrist. She had been fitted with one, too, upon her arrival at Valeran, her name and birth date engraved into the plate.

KARAM, NADIYA, it said. 12.27.2018.

It was the first time Giselle had seen her name spelled out. Another curious quirk of her mind was that letters appeared to her in flashes of color. Words and names had their own signature hues. And the name Nadiya, with those three elegant, lilting syllables, was a rich orange-gold. Just like the sunset she had sketched for Professor Blanchard. As she walked with Nadiya to the dining hall, the world behind her eyelids glowed with color.

Eight

Spring 2037

Rural Virginia

“Come on, get up. You’ll miss breakfast.”

Julian had already been awake for hours, but he pulled the covers over his head anyway, turning to face the wall. While Valeran’s other students stretched, yawned, and prepared for the day, he lay motionless in bed, trying to pretend he was somewhere else, anywhere else.

If this were Exeter, he would have been the one rousing his roommate: standing over Landon’s bed and shaking his shoulder while his friend tried to sleep off last night’s high. Drugs were of course forbidden at Exeter, but unlike at Valeran, there were no armed guards to pat them down and search their bags. Landon wasn’t even the only student on their floor who popped uppers between classes, though he was the most glib about it.

And if he were home, it would be the housekeeper waking him up, standing in the doorway of his bedroom and urging him downstairs for breakfast. His father had recently replaced their head housekeeper with an older woman, stocky and short and utterly unamused by his antics. That was after his mother had caught Julian with their old housekeeper, a thirtysomething aspiring influencer who used her days off to audition for reality shows and touch up her lip injections. They had actually been running around since Julian was fourteen, when she had taken his virginity, but his mother didn’t need to know that.

Here, at Valeran, it was Mikhail who stood over his bed, an irritatingly sunny expression on his face. “Come on,” he repeated. “You don’t want to be late on your first day.”

“Right.” Julian cast off his sheets at last. “That would be a tragedy.”

He put on his uniform and checked the schedule on his tablet. His day started with S011: Strategic Leader Foundational Course. In the afternoon he had Global History I, Economics for Strategists, and something called, bizarrely, Basic Weapons Management for Non-Majors. The idea that they might expect him to use a gun made Julian’s skin crawl. He was not that kind of criminal.

Julian walked with Mikhail to the dining hall, feeling increasingly ashamed for all his petulant brooding and even a bit grateful for his roommate’s company. Mikhail had been more patient with him than he deserved.

The dining hall wasn’t even close to fully occupied, but with the domed ceiling, even fewer than fifty voices were carried to a near-deafening roar. His head throbbed. Already exhaustion was catching up with him. He would have to find a way to sleep more. For the past month, since his arrest, he had been using his mother’s prescriptions, topped off with a gulp of scotch, to knock himself into oblivion.

That wasn’t going to work now, obviously. He would have to wait until he reached number one, until he won the weekend furlough. Then maybe he could figure out a way to smuggle the pills back into Valeran.

Mikhail led him to one of the center tables with brisk, assiduous strides. There was a very pretty girl sitting there, head bent over her tablet. When she looked up and saw Mikhail, her face broke into a grin.

“Hi,” she said—to Mikhail first, and then to Julian, with such uninhibited friendliness that Julian was almost taken aback. He had expected more pretentions from Valeran’s students.

“Hey,” Mikhail replied. His tone was sheepish and the tips of his ears were bright pink.

“Is this your new roommate?”

“Yes,” Mikhail replied. “Jane, this is Julian.”

The girl he’d been messaging on his tablet yesterday, with that same furtive, giddy smile. Julian stuck out his hand. “Julian Joyce-Young the Third.”

“Jane Lin.” She offered her hand back. “Welcome to Valeran.”

Her voice was almost impossibly chipper for 7:45 a.m. Together she and Mikhail made quite the welcoming committee. Maybe they had managed to smuggle uppers past the guards.

“Thanks,” said Julian, unable to match her enthusiasm. “Are you a hacker, too?”

It was blunt, but he didn’t care. If everyone at Valeran already knew his face and his name and his crimes, if Mikhail—and probably Jane, by extension—had watched scathing parody videos about him, he at least deserved some basic facts in return.

But Jane didn’t seem to register it as rudeness. “Yes, though I’m not nearly as good a hacker as him.” She batted her lashes at Mikhail.