Three hundred students packed into a vaulted space that had once been a pre-Unveiling gymnasium - you could still see the painted lines on the floor beneath the mana-lacquer, the ghost of a basketball court serving as the foundation for long metal tables bolted to the concrete. Conduit pipes ran along the ceiling like exposed arteries, pulsing with soft blue light that supplemented the high windows. The air smelled like roasted grain, fried protein strips, and the faint metallic tang of overworked heating enchantments. It was loud. It was bright. And it was, Jace was discovering, a battlefield with a seating chart.
He stood at the edge of the food line with a tray of whatever the kitchen had produced - some kind of stew that was brown in a way that discouraged close inspection, a hunk of bread that was either dense or stale, and a cup of water that tasted faintly of the mineral filters in the mana-purification system. Standard fare. He'd eaten worse in the Boroughs, and at least this was free.
The problem wasn't the food. The problem was where to sit.
The tables had organized themselves overnight with the ruthless efficiency of a market finding equilibrium. In the twenty hours since the Awakening ceremony, the social geography of the sophomore class had been completely redrawn. The center tables belonged to the Rare-tiers - Kael Ashworth's group held the largest, their trays surrounded by the gravitational pull of status. Around them, a ring of high-value Normal-tiers: the [Wardens], the [Evokers], the [Storm Callers] - anyone with a clean role designation and the stats to back it up. Farther out, the mid-range classes sorted by party affiliation. Clusters of four and five students who'd already begun the negotiations of working together, testing compatibility, measuring each other's value.
And at the edges, alone or in small quiet groups, the rest. The unclear. The unpartnered. The unwanted.
Jace moved through the room and felt the social physics of it push against him like a current. He passed a table where a girl he recognized from freshman combat training glanced up, made eye contact, and then looked away with the particular quickness of someone pretending they hadn't seen him. Yesterday she'd borrowed his notes from Mana Theory. Today he was radioactive.
*[Nomad]. Unassigned. Dead weight.*
He kept walking. Past the mid-range tables. Past the edge tables. All the way to the far corner of the hall where the light from the windows didn't quite reach and the noise from the center dropped to a manageable hum, and he sat down at a table that had three occupants and four empty seats and the unmistakable aura of people who hadn't chosen each other so much as they'd been deposited here by the same tide.
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The girl directly across from him was talking.
"-not saying the vasovagal response is *uncommon*, it's actually fairly prevalent in medical literature, pre-Unveiling studies suggest anywhere from three to five percent of the general population experiences syncope triggered by hemophobic stimuli, which is - sorry, fainting, I mean fainting triggered by the sight of blood, which is - the point is it's not a *character flaw*, it's an autonomic nervous system dysfunction, the vagus nerve sends a signal that drops your heart rate and blood pressure and you just - down you go, and it's not like I can *reason* with my vagus nerve, I've tried, I have literally sat in my room and had conversations with my own nervous system and it does not-"
She stopped. Looked at Jace. Blinked twice.
"Sorry. Hi. Are you sitting here, or are you just standing there holding a tray?"
"Sitting," Jace said, and sat.
"Oh. Good. Great. More witnesses to my ongoing psychological collapse." She stuck out her hand, then pulled it back, then stuck it out again. "Mara Osei. [Medic]. Normal-tier. Healer role. And yes, before you ask, the girl who faints at blood got a Healer class. The System has a sense of humor. It's a terrible sense of humor."
She was small - not short exactly, but narrow, with the delicate bone structure of someone who'd spent more time in libraries than on training fields. Dark brown skin, darker eyes, and a cloud of tight black curls that she'd attempted to pin back with a series of clips that were losing the war. She wore her academy uniform like it was slightly too big for her, the sleeves pushed up past her wrists, and her hands moved when she talked - constant, restless gestures that punctuated her words like she was conducting an orchestra only she could hear.
Jace shook the hand she'd re-extended. "Jace Miller. [Nomad]. Normal-tier. No role."
Mara's eyebrows rose. "You're the - oh. You're the one from the ceremony."
"The one from the ceremony," Jace confirmed. "That's what we're calling it."
"I wasn't going to say anything bad! I just - [Nomad] is unusual. I've never actually met one. I read about them in the registry appendix during freshman year because I read the entire registry, which in retrospect was probably not a healthy use of my time, but the point is-"
"You read the entire class registry."
"Cover to cover. Twice." She said it without embarrassment, the way someone might admit to a hobby they knew was eccentric but couldn't bring themselves to abandon. "My mother is a [Restorer] in Silverhaven. Rare-tier. She wanted me to understand the landscape before I got here. She's very - thorough. Thoroughness is genetic, apparently, along with the fainting."
"Your mother faints at blood too?"
"God, no. My mother once field-amputated a man's leg with a saw and a prayer and didn't blink. I got the thoroughness. The vagus nerve thing is all me." Mara poked at her stew. "Lucky, lucky me."
