Somehow the attainment of the one dream he’d nurtured since childhood felt silly when Benji described it to his mother. They sat at the kitchen table, Benji eating a late dinner and his mother watching him eat a late dinner and nibbling on leftovers.

  “So what, you’re going to be in class with a bunch of teenagers?” his mom asked. “You’re a grown man with a university job, what do you want to go sit in a room and listen to lectures for?”

  “My boss told me I wouldn’t be eligible for a promotion without a degree. This will help.”

  “After ten years! That’s how long the university takes, isn’t it?”

  “Some do it in seven or eight.”

  “Exceptional students do it in seven or eight. You just made a plant move!”

  Benji would have been more stung by this comment if he in any way disagreed with it. His acceptance still felt like a very lucky technicality. His mother heaped another serving of sausage and rice casserole onto his plate, the clatter of the double rings on each of her fingers a familiar and comforting sound.

  “I’ll only be in some classes with other first-years. They also have what’s called a ‘secondary discipline’ program for older students to develop skills that don’t come as naturally to them. Like sixth- through tenth-years who have already completed a major and want to round out their studies.”

  “So your two types of class will involve either thirteen-year-olds, or people closer to your age who know everything about at least one kind of magic already?”

  “Ma, you make it sound really stupid when you say it like that.”

  “I didn’t say stupid, who’s saying stupid?”

  Benji felt his ears reddening. “It feels like you’re implying it when you keep mentioning thirteen-year-olds.”

  His mother reared back in mock offense, taking the opportunity to puff up her impeccably curled hair. “I was thirteen too, once. Are you saying I was stupid?”

  Benji cupped his forehead between his hands and leaned against them. He half expected his mother to scold him for putting his elbows on the table. Instead, she had gone back to the other side kitchen and was putting away the remainder of the leftovers. He took the brief respite as an opportunity to savor the casserole. Its creamy texture offset the sharp bite of hot peppers. It tasted like home.

  “I’m really proud of you,” his mother finally said from across the four or five feet separating the far end of the kitchen from the table. “I really am.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “I’m serious! Don’t be snotty with me. I’m always proud of you, no matter what. I know how much this means to you. I just worry about you. Who’s going to feed you?”

  Benji’s sigh was part exasperation, part love. “The university dining hall has some of the best chefs and foodworkers in the world. And all of the food—like the tuition, I’ll have you remember—is free.”

  He could hear his father’s voice saying, “that’s code for ‘paid for by my taxes’” in the back of his head. His father was working the late shift at the laundry tonight, and wasn’t yet back from work, so this rejoinder thankfully went unsaid.

  “It’ll be lonely. You don’t know anyone.”

  “I’ll make friends,” Benji said. I hope. “And I’ll be staying in the dorms. They’re like a twenty-minute walk from here.”

  “That’s twenty minutes further than you were before!”

  As he helped his mother clean the dishes in the basin in the corner, each getting mad at the other when they tried to do more than their fair share, Benji considered how much his life was about to change. He was never quite clear whether his parents’ assumption that he would live with them forever came from economic practicality, a genuine desire to have their son around (his dad’s typical monologues about how “damn small” their apartment was would seem to contradict this), or a belief that if left to his own devices he would either starve, burn his own apartment down, or simply fail to pay his rent and end up living in the city jail once the collectors showed up.

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  The truth was, he liked living with his parents. He was comfortable here, in the apartment he’d grown up in, going through the same routines, with the same bickering parents who were always showering him with just a little more love, attention, and unsolicited advice than he needed at any given moment.

  He turned in early that night, tucked into his bedroom that was little more than an alcove above the kitchen. The kitchen also happened to be the apartment’s entryway, with a door opening directly onto steps leading up to street level. The tiny window in Benji’s alcove looked out on a back alleyway where businesses on the ground floor stored their trash until collection day. He used to make a game out of watching the rats scrabble between the bins, sometimes with half loaves of stale bread in their mouths, or sometimes—only once, really, but it stood out—carrying the body of another rat that was clearly destined to be dinner. Like a lot of things in Thelspoint, the rat problem had gotten infinitely better since Benji was a child. Offices like OPMI had sprung up as the university received more and more public funding, and in turn aimed the efforts of its graduates back toward the good of the city. In the case of the rats, it had taken a team of bioworkers three weeks to infiltrate all of the rat nests with a working that convinced the rats they actually preferred the country to the city, and couldn’t stand being around all these people. The migration had left the alley empty of the strangely comforting skittering noises that used to lull Benji to sleep.

  At some point his father came in, grumping about something or other. That too was part of the sound of his childhood, listening through the picture window overlooking the kitchen, the shades drawn, as his father came home late. His father never seemed to eat anything, instead usually retreating with a small glass of sherry into the bedroom that made up the only other room in the apartment, where he would read the Thelspoint News Inquirer in his armchair, consumed by outrage at the city’s supposed moral and economic degradation, until he fell asleep with the paper open in his lap.

  What new sounds would he hear at the university dorms? With all the talented mages about, he wondered if the rooms would be perfectly soundproof, the sheets as soft as clothworkings could make them. Sure, sharing a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment with one’s parents at the age of twenty-seven wasn’t ideal, but it was all he had ever known. As much as he’d yearned for a different life, he’d never actually believed anything else was possible. In just a few days, that would all change.

  He stared into the shadows on the ceiling as his parents whispered—never quiet enough for him not to hear what they were saying—about him and how concerned they were for his ability to handle the university. They shuffled around the kitchen, banging cupboards even as they continued to whisper. Living off the kitchen had its drawbacks, but tonight he took comfort in the sounds of his parents trying—and failing—to be quiet.

  When they had finally brought their whispering back into their bedroom, Benji got up and went to the tiny desk where he’d done the majority of his studying for the exams. It was still stacked with orderly papers, mostly past practice exams and a couple wildly unhelpful pamphlets about how to pass the practical exam if you didn’t happen to have magic.

  Benji flicked on the magelight at the corner of the desk. Its pale light fell over the shelf built into the wall above the desk, with its hodgepodge of trinkets. Most had lost any particular nostalgia, fading into the background of the room so thoroughly that he barely could have told a visitor they were there.

  The thought of visitors in this room both made him laugh and sent an arpeggio of anxiety through him. He recalled several ill-fated instances when one of the limited number of women who had been part of his romantic life had visited. It was impossible to parse whether the fact that there hadn’t been another date after the visits was due to seeing that he lived in the kitchen, or because his mother had inquired incessantly about whether she could expect grandchildren any time soon. There was probably something more to it than that. Benji had never had a relationship grow more serious than a few dates and a couple picnics in the Overlook, the park on Thelspoint’s western edge that offered an impressive view of the seawall. All of his striving, all of his failure, it meant that he’d never really allowed himself to settle into life. He might be going about his work at OPMI, or even making a real connection with someone over a carefully curated plate of cheeses and fruits as they watched dragons fly across the bay, but he’d never been able to feel as if he had truly arrived. He knew the women he dated could sense this, could intuit that though the Benji before them might be charming, might even be somewhat attractive, there was something inside him that was unfinished and unstable. A piece of him that was always yearning for something—even if reason couldn’t allow him to hope it was within reach. His dream of attending the university had his heart, and so the dates had passed pleasantly, the women saying their farewells and drifting away.

  Perhaps that was what made Benji the most anxious. Not trying and failing at magic. Not navigating what was doubtless a complex dating world at the university. But rather, the prospect that he might finally be able to set this hungry part of himself aside and just . . . be. What was he without that part of himself driving him onward?

  Benji realized that during his navel gazing, his hands had instinctively pulled one of the trinkets off the shelf. It was a wooden carving—smooth enough to suggest woodworking rather than hand carving—of a strange chimera creature that did not, to his knowledge, exist in the real world. Its head had the pensive round eyes and features of an owl, feathers blending into a short neck that quickly changed to fur and smoothed out into the lithe body of a fox. The merchant who had sold it to him described it as the two manifestations of intellect: the wisdom and insight of the owl, combined with the cleverness and wiliness of the fox. He had then packed up suspiciously quickly when a constable came into view, departing silently before he could give Benji his change.

  Benji tucked the statue into his bag to accompany him to the university. He would need all of the wisdom and cleverness he could muster once he arrived.