“We need a favor, Tall Man.” Benji had tried to make a break for it after his first-year languageworking lecture, but Simon and Lucy had a knack for moving rapidly through crowds, like nimble cats, or a particularly virulent disease.

  “Why in the world would I do you a favor?”

  Simon pondered as eddies of students swirled around them. The languageworking classrooms were housed in one of the annexes off the Hall of the Elements. They had been a bit of an afterthought, creating a rat’s nest of passages and staircases where Benji had gotten lost twice already today.

  “. . . generosity?” Lucy tried.

  “Definitely not that,” Benji said, regretting that in these crowded hallways, he couldn’t use his relatively longer legs to his advantage.

  “How about we help you with languageworking?” Simon asked.

  “What makes you think I need help?”

  “Your general performance and look of sheer terror during the entirety of the class, mostly,” Lucy said.

  “You saw the terror too, Lu?” Simon asked.

  “I could feel it.” Her eyes widened, reminding Benji of the strange face Simon had made the first time they’d met. When her voice deepened similarly, it was somehow more upsetting. “It fed me.”

  Her face changed back. The twin smiles looking up at Benji could not have been more benign.

  That makes them even scarier, Benji thought.

  Benji stopped in a pocket of space between a bench and a class in session. A muffled voice came through the closed door. The languageworking annex’s narrow hallway forced them against the bench if they wanted to be out of the way of students headed to their next class. He hated to admit the twins were right.

  Of everything he’d tried so far, languageworking was the furthest over Benji’s head. The professor, Nathan, was a bearded, tenured professor who’d been teaching students languageworking for dozens of years and knew exactly how to strike the appropriate amount of fear and respect in his students. He was not necessarily mean to the incompetent—thankfully for Benji—but made it clear that a lack of effort was a punishable offense.

  “That’s enough,” Benji said. “Tell me what you need so I can decide how much to laugh at the idea that I would do it for you.”

  “Alright, Feisty Tall Man,” Simon said, “here’s the deal. We find ourselves in need of a certain magical item required to run a set of experiments.”

  “Important ones,” Lucy added, “involving dangerous creatures.”

  “Why would you need to run experiments? You’re first-years.”

  “You are too,” Lucy retorted.

  “And I don’t need to run experiments.”

  Simon whistled under his breath. “Wow, Lu, he really got you there.”

  Lucy shoved him against the bench and turned back to Benji. “We know the item we need is at OPMI. Where you used to work?”

  “Great, get it yourselves,” Benji said. The crowds had thinned slightly, and his stomach growled. This long after class, there would be a huge line at the dining hall. There was no rush. He wished there was.

  “We would, but they won’t loan items to people under the age of eighteen without a permission slip from a professor,” Simon said.

  Lucy grinned villainously as she said, “That, and our criminal record.”

  Talking with these two felt like rapidly disassociating. Benji would’ve preferred to be back in the languageworking classroom, failing to comprehend Nathan’s explanations of basic terminology.

  “Look, we’re not asking you to take this on faith,” Simon said. “We’ll help you first, if you promise to help us.”

  “Most assuredly,” Lucy said.

  Benji felt a stab of relief as he glimpsed Jurni moving down the hall toward them. He could theoretically have asked one of his senior classmates for languageworking help, but somehow that was more mortifying. Lucy was one of a few students called up to the front of the room to demonstrate a concept during class, and had easily identified a word that had been scrawled on a piece of parchment and crossed out until it was no longer visible, by recognizing the languageworking. She obviously had at least some aptitude. And there was another reason to get in the twins’ good graces.

  “One other condition,” Benji said. “If I do this, you have to stop with the nicknames.”

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “What sort of nicknames, Tall Man?” Lucy’s expression was absolute innocence.

  “Deal,” Simon said, grabbing Benji’s hand and shaking it. At that moment, Jurni reached them, eyeing the twins with suspicion.

  “Need a dining hall buddy, Benji?” Jurni asked.

  “Oh Varai, yes,” Benji said, turning away from the twins. The deal was in place, though. He’d soon see how bad an idea it had been.

  Jurni led the way deftly through the halls, taking a secret back door Benji would never have dreamed came out in the corner of the dining hall, right near where the buffet line started. She asked him polite questions about his classes, laughing off any suggestion that courses were over his head.

  “It’s still the first week,” she said as she scooped a pile of crispy bean sprouts onto her plate. “The first week doesn’t tell you how the rest of the semester will go. Magic comes slowly, then all at once.”

  “Any way to speed it along?” Benji asked. “It’s been a pretty long period of slowness.”

  “Can’t help you on that one.”

  When their plates were full, Jurni led the way down the rows to a round table in the corner. Dozens of scroll-shaped reminders about school policies and advertisements for clubs and activities lit up the ceiling. Benji’s first few meals had been as quick as he could possibly make them, grabbing a plate of food and rushing back to his room to avoid the awkwardness of sitting alone or with strangers. It was nice to have his destination predetermined. They arrived at the table and sat with three of Jurni’s friends. She introduced them as Margot, Art, and Lenora. Benji was naturally intimidated by all of them—they seemed to span seventh through ninth year—but they didn’t question his presence. Benji didn’t contribute much to the conversation, as they were deep in discussion about a professor who hadn’t returned for the beginning of the term.

  “Supposedly she’s off in the Claglands, with the dragons,” Margot said, clearly enjoying every second of speculation. “They had to shuffle the entire fireworking schedule.”

  Art had yet to speak when he hadn’t just taken a massive bite of a dinner roll or bean sprouts. “If I could be in the Claglands instead of here, I totally would.”

  “Such a hard life you live, Art, having three meals a day cooked for you and attending the most prestigious magical university in the world for free,” Jurni said.

  “I’m more the hands-on type.”

  “You put your hands on a dragon, I don’t think it’s gonna matter how good you are at fireworking,” Margot pointed out.

  “I would befriend them, just as our illustrious professor obviously has,” Art said.

  Benji watched the conversation with delight. Somehow he imagined that even the casual conversations at the university would involve complicated debates over theory, and how best to apply magic to public policy. But this, this was so normal. Friends making fun of each other, playfully pushing each other, shaping themselves together.

  Benji had forgotten the remaining vegetable fried rice on his plate as he thought about how this was exactly what he’d been missing in his life.

  “Ah shit, we gotta get to waterworking,” Margot said. Her bracelets jangled as she stood up. Art and Lenora followed, taking their plates to the wash tubs by the kitchen. The plates were ceramic, spelled with a joint ceramic- and waterworking that caused food scraps to slide off and the plates to come out sparkling and dry after a single dip into hot water.

  Silence crept into the space that had been filled with laughter and conversation now that Benji and Jurni were alone. The dining hall rumbled around them. Jurni wore a tiny brass loop through one nostril that Benji wasn’t entirely sure she’d been wearing the last time he saw her.

  “I have a confession,” Jurni said after a minute.

  “I recently found out the only other senior first-year used to live in the canalworks and can turn invisible,” Benji said. “This better be a doozy if you’re trying to top that.”

  Jurni laughed. “Nothing like that. I may have half unintentionally stalked your schedule.”

  “All course schedules are publicly available at the library desk,” Benji said, proud of having acquired this one piece of institutional knowledge.

  “That’s why it was only half unintentional. I did ask for it.”

  “That sounds fully intentional.”

  Jurni’s face flushed as she focused on spearing the last few wayward bean sprouts on her plate with her fork. “Fair enough. You’re going to think I’m completely weird.”

  “I’m assuming you had a reason?” Benji was mainly curious. And surprised that anyone would want to know his schedule. Under different circumstances, he might have thought Jurni had a crush on him, but he couldn’t imagine why she would. They were surrounded by powerful mages who would go on to shape life across Thelspoint and the Unified Coast—he was just some guy who happened to have discovered his magic fourteen years too late.

  “I really don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” Jurni said.

  “I promise I’ll take whatever it is the right way.”

  “I have a brother a few years younger than me. I followed the standard track, joining the university at thirteen. My parents always pushed me toward this life, and I developed magic early enough to get into the university as early as allowed. My brother, for whatever reason, he just didn’t. He’s eighteen now, and my parents won’t let him take the entrance exam again after he failed for a third time.”

  “I’m so sorry. Does he want to come? There really are a lot of other options besides becoming a mage.” Benji fully appreciated the irony of him saying this, as someone whose entire adult life had been defined by his distance from the university.

  “He says he doesn’t. I think that’s a defense mechanism. And more than that, I doubt my parents will ever believe he’s good enough if he doesn’t go. I was stalking your course schedule to find out how they treat the so-called senior students. To see whether it’s still possible for him to have a good experience here.”

  That gave Benji plenty to unpack. Jurni’s love for her brother. The implicit acceptance of her parents’ understanding of a person’s value. The categorization of Benji along with her brother who lacked magic and needed to be looked after.

  “I’m sorry, that was way too personal,” Jurni said, putting her head in her hands.

  “No no, it’s alright.”

  Jurni got up, sending her chair shooting back with a jarring scraping sound. “I’m an idiot. You must be so weirded out.”

  “I promise I’m not.”

  Jurni shook her head as she collected her plate. “The point of me saying all that wasn’t to be a total creep, even if that’s how it looks. The point was that we have metalworking together tomorrow. See you in class.”

  She left, practically sprinting for the kitchen and the wash tubs.