Chapter 9

I woke up to Dao throwing a pillow at my head.

"Breakfast in twenty. Don't be late or they run out of the good eggs."

I sat up and immediately regretted it. The room pressed in from every direction. Last night the accumulated anxiety of former students had felt almost comforting, like a weighted blanket made of other people's worry. This morning it just felt heavy. Layered. I could almost sort the traces by era. Older ones near the floor, settled deep into the stone, carrying emotions that felt different from modern anxiety. Sharper. More afraid.

"What makes the good eggs good?"

"They're not the bad eggs." Dao was already dressed, pulling on shoes. He had music playing from a small speaker on his desk, something Filipino that sounded like jazz but wasn't quite. I wouldn't have guessed it in a hundred years. "Trust me. You don't want the bad eggs."

He moved around our small room with the comfort of someone who'd been here long enough to stop thinking about where things were. Grabbed a jacket from the back of his chair without looking. Found his phone under yesterday's shirt. His hands were always moving, I noticed. Straightening things, tapping surfaces, fidgeting with whatever was closest. Even buttoning his jacket required both hands plus his teeth because one hand was already reaching for the doorknob.

"You always this awake in the morning?"

"I'm always this awake, period. Sleep is a suggestion I take loosely." He paused at the door. "Bathroom's going to be a zoo. Fair warning."

He wasn't wrong. The hallway bathroom was crowded with first-years in various states of consciousness. I kept my head down and my hands close to my body, navigating around people without touching anyone. A few of them glanced at me with curiosity. The mid-semester transfer. Cross's project.

Word really did travel fast.

I made it to a sink without making contact. Splashed water on my face. In the mirror, the kid looking back at me seemed thinner than I remembered, though it had only been two days since I'd left Ohio.

On my way out, I passed a room with its door open. Two beds, same as mine and Dao's. But one side was stripped bare. Mattress exposed, desk empty, the wall above it marked with small holes where something had been pinned up and removed. The other side was lived in. Posters, textbooks, a jacket thrown over a chair.

A girl was sitting on the lived-in bed, staring at the empty half of the room. She looked up when I passed, and what I caught from her wasn't grief exactly. More like confusion hardening into something she didn't want to name.

I kept walking. I didn't know her. Didn't know who'd slept in that stripped bed or where they'd gone. But the emptiness had a quality to it that stuck with me. Not just absence. Erasure. Like someone had been carefully removed instead of simply leaving.

The walk from the dormitory to the dining hall was my first real look at Mudwick in daylight, and it stopped me in the corridor.

The building didn't make sense.

I'd noticed it last night, the way different architectural styles crashed into each other like tectonic plates. But in the morning light coming through tall windows, the collisions were louder. A colonial hallway with thick stone walls and narrow openings gave way to a section with antebellum columns that were too grand for the space they occupied.

Something about those columns made my skin prickle. Not the columns themselves but the human traces clinging to them. Old hands that had built them. Old hands that had been forced to build them. The residue was different here. Heavier. Carrying a weight that went deeper than student anxiety.

I slowed down without meaning to. Put my hand near the wall but didn't touch it.

The traces were layered so thick they bled into each other. Students, yes, decades of them. But underneath the student layer was something older. People in pain. Not sharp pain, not the immediate kind. The slow pain of being kept somewhere you couldn't leave. Patients, maybe. People who'd lived in these rooms when they were something other than dormitories.

And underneath that, something older still. Faint enough that I could barely feel it, but present. A grief so deep it had become part of the stone. I didn't know whose it was. Didn't know what had happened here to leave that kind of mark. But it was there, woven into the foundation like rebar.

"You get used to it." A voice behind me. An upperclassman, second or third year, walking past with a backpack slung over one shoulder. She'd seen me standing in the hallway with my hand hovering near the wall. "The lower floors are the worst. Too much history. Stay above ground when you can."

She kept walking before I could ask what kind of history.

The smell was what Cross had described but more complex than she'd let on. Old stone and candle wax, yes. But also something green and alive underneath, like moss growing in a place that shouldn't support it. And deeper than that, in the wing I passed through where the windows were smaller and the doors had locks on the outside, something metallic. Faint. Old. The ghost of a smell that the building had tried to forget and couldn't.

I walked faster through that section.

By the time I reached the dining hall, I was more awake than any amount of coffee could have made me. Mudwick wasn't just a school. It was a document. Every surface recorded something, every hallway was an archive, and I was a kid who could read the signatures but not the language they were written in.

Breakfast was loud and crowded. The morning crowd was less social than the dinner crowd I'd met last night. More functional. People shoveling food and staring at notes.

A girl at the next table was clutching a small stone, rubbing her thumb across its surface in slow circles. As I watched, the stone pulsed with a faint amber glow, barely visible unless you were looking for it. She closed her eyes and her breathing steadied, whatever stress she'd been carrying seeming to drain away through her shoulders.

Across the room, a guy touched something in his pocket before turning a page in his textbook. When his hand emerged, there was the faintest shimmer around his fingers, like heat rising off summer pavement. It faded before he finished the gesture.

Small rituals. Personal magic. Things I didn't understand yet but could feel happening, like catching the edges of conversations in a language I almost spoke.

Dao had saved me a seat. The good eggs were indeed better than the bad eggs, though I couldn't have explained why. Something about the texture. The bad eggs had the rubbery quality of food cooked hours ago and kept warm through spite.

"The secret," Dao said, pointing with his fork, "is getting here before the second-years. They descend like locusts around seven forty-five. After that you're eating whatever survived."

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Shelby. Two texts from this morning, sent before I was even awake.

did you know there's a college that offers a degree in puppetry? PUPPETRY eli. what is happening in this country

And then, twenty minutes later: seriously though how's day 2? surviving?

I should respond. She was trying. Keeping things light because she could tell I needed that. The puppetry thing was classic Shelby. Find something absurd, share it, make you laugh before you remembered you were supposed to be miserable.

I put the phone back without typing anything. The distance between her world and this one felt wider this morning than it had last night. Last night I'd been tired enough to think a text could bridge it.

Sasha found us before we finished eating. She had a schedule printed on actual paper, which she slid across the table to me. The paper was covered in highlights. Yellow for classes, green for meals, blue for free periods. A tiny key in the corner explained the system.

"Your classes. Cross had it sent to my room since I'm apparently your unofficial orientation guide now."

"Did you color-code my schedule?"

"It helps with time management." She said it like the question was absurd. "You're behind in everything. The semester's half over and you haven't taken any of the foundational courses."

"She made one for me too," Dao offered. "First week. I didn't ask for it."

"And you were late to three fewer classes that week." Sasha didn't look up from her own breakfast. She ate methodically, like even food was a problem to be solved efficiently.

Thaddeus appeared with his tray and sat down on my other side. "How'd you sleep?"

"Like someone pressed under a thousand anxious ghosts."

"So, normally." He smiled. It was the kind of smile that made you feel like everything was going to be okay, even when you had strong evidence to the contrary. "My mother's called three times already this morning. Wants to know if I'm eating enough, if the heating works, if I've been to see the counselor she apparently scheduled for me without asking."

"Three calls before breakfast?"

"She's in a different time zone. Emotionally, I mean. She experiences worry on an accelerated timeline." He said it fondly. The way you talk about someone whose love is so large it occasionally crushes you.

As he sat down, a second-year passing behind us slowed. "Monroe-Whitmore. Your mother coming to the fall reception this year?"

"Probably." Thaddeus kept his voice neutral, but something tightened around his eyes.

"Tell her my father says hello. He's been meaning to call about the board position."

"I'll let her know."

The second-year moved on. Thaddeus poked at his eggs and didn't look up for a moment.

"Your family's on the board?" I asked.

"My mother is. It's not..." He trailed off. Tried again. "My family's been involved with Mudwick for a long time. There's a plaque somewhere with our name on it. I try not to think about it."

"A plaque?"

"For a building. Or a wing. Or a library endowment. Honestly, I've lost track." The discomfort was genuine. Not performed humility. The actual unease of someone who knows they occupy space they didn't build but can't pretend away.

Sasha gave him a look. Not mean. Just present.

"Right," Thaddeus said. "Sorry. I know my frame of reference is... calibrated differently."

"I wasn't going to say anything," Sasha said.

"You didn't have to. You have a very articulate face."

Dao laughed. Even Sasha's mouth twitched.

I looked around the table. Dao with his restless hands and his unlikely jazz. Sasha with her color-coded systems and her articulate face. Thaddeus with his inherited guilt and his mother's accelerated worry.

None of them had asked me to sit with them. They'd just made room.

Three years I'd spent in Millbrook reading every person who came near me. Feeling their pity, their discomfort, the way they rearranged themselves around the dead woman's kid. Three years of people managing me. Tolerating me. Making space for me the way you make space for something inconvenient that you're too polite to move.

This wasn't that. I could feel the difference. Dao's casual ease wasn't manufactured. Thaddeus's warmth wasn't obligation. Even Sasha's bluntness was its own kind of welcome. They had their own damage, their own reasons for sitting at a corner table instead of with the confident kids near the windows. And they'd let me into their corner without making me audition for it.

It shouldn't have meant as much as it did. It was just breakfast. Just eggs and conversation and a color-coded schedule I hadn't asked for.

But I'd spent three years learning what it felt like when people kept you at arm's length, and I knew what it felt like when they didn't. The difference lived in my chest, in the place where I'd been holding my breath since Ohio without realizing it.

"So." Sasha tapped the highlighted schedule. "You have Echoes first period. That's the one that matters most."

"Echoes?"

"Learning to read places. The foundation of everything else we do here."

Dao and Sasha exchanged a look I couldn't interpret.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing," Dao said. "Just... good luck."

The way he said it made the good eggs sit a little heavier in my stomach. But I carried them with me anyway, out of the dining hall and into the corridors of a building that remembered everything, surrounded by people who were just starting to learn my name.