Page 75 of Legacy Ascended

"You're not in this rotation," Declan says.

"I'm invested." She reads down the column with her scarf still over her mouth. "Two nights out. Paired. God, they're going to make you carry each other."

"That's the entire idea."

"Renzo's with you."

"I know."

"Renzo."

"I requested him," Declan says, "because if it goes wrong I want the man who talks constantly. You can always find him."

Freya has her notebook against the wall and is copying the whole thing down, which is how Freya reads anything. Snow came in overnight and stopped, and the light through the high windows is flat white. The corridor smells like wet wool.

Behind us there's a knot of first-years at the noticeboard, and one of them is asking whether anybody has ever died on it, and whether it's true they take your boots.

I want to tell them to focus on the trial - they don’t even do the block first-year, but Renzo beats me to it.

"They take your boots," Renzo tells him gravely.

"Don't," Sophia says.

"They take one boot."

The first-year goes away looking worse than he arrived, and Renzo watches him go with something almost fond.

"That was us," he says.

"That was you," Freya says. "You worried about everything."

"We spent about six weeks terrified of one day," Renzo says.

Nobody answers that for a second, and then Sophia snorts.

"God, first year was adorable," she says. "Do you remember when the worst thing that had ever happened to us was Faris taking three marks off Jessica for being helpful?"

"I remember it vividly, thank you."

"A hundred merit marks and a rumor about wolves. That was the whole year." She hitches her bag up. "I'd go back tomorrow. I'd go back this morning."

I find my name in the column, and the pairing box beside it has a line through it and one word written in.

Pending.

"That's the panel," Freya says, without looking up. "Everything about your training goes through them now. The block faculty put you forward weeks ago. Voss told me it's been sitting upstairs since."

"Pending as in probably, or pending as in nobody's read it?"

"I don’t know."

I let myself want it for exactly the length of the corridor, and then try to put it out of my mind. Focus on what I can control.

Here's my week. Escort at 07:40. Leadership and Governance on the second floor of the history building. Legal office. Communications briefing. A security review I sit in and don't speak at. And a line that says TBC — Chancellor's office, which is the most frightening item on any list ever written.

Nobody asked me if I wanted a single one of them. Sophia read Leadership & Governance — Priority Recommendation off my advisory page in September and said they were training me to be a princess, and she said it as a joke, and then the whole year happened.

Search and Rescue isn't on my advisory page. It isn't recommended for me, wasn't suggested to me, doesn't suit my file. I went and found the block faculty in the second week of term and asked what it would take, and they told me, and I did it, in the evenings.