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“Sorry,” I muttered. I was apologizing to luggage now.

The girl who owned it turned. She had dark hair pulled back so tightly it looked painful and a face made of clean expensive lines. She looked like the kind of girl that had a thirty step skin care routine. Her gaze dropped to my bag, then to my boots, then jerked back up to my face, taking in the pink hair, the chipped black nail polish, the secondhand jacket, the duffel with one zipper pull replaced by a paperclip.

Her expression shifted minutely. Not in disgust. Disgust would have been easier. It was a flinch she converted into a smile before it finished forming.

“No harm done,” she said.

Her voice may as well have dripped money. Pippa stiffened beside me. The girl moved on, her trunk following obediently.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Vivienne Mallory,” Pippa said, like the name should have done work by itself.

It did not.

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

Pippa looked at me with the dawning exhaustion of a person realizing the tour was going to take longer than scheduled. “The Mallorys are one of the Founding Nine.”

“Founding what?”

“Oh.” She blinked. “You really are first-generation.”

The words landed light. They were not meant as a slap. That was what made them one.

First-generation.

I had seen it in the letter but not understood the weight. Back home, first-generation meant you were the first in your family to go to college, and people said it with pride if they were kind, with suspicion if they weren’t. Here it sounded medical.

“I guess so,” I said.

Pippa bit her lip, then brightened too hard. “It’s fine. Rare, obviously. But fine. Very impressive, actually.”

Obviously. Fine. Impressive. Three words people used when the real word was something else.

We were finally in the main courtyard and the buildings rose around us like pale knights at the round table, or maybe that was just me feeling fantastical since people were floating their luggage and dressed like witches and wizards minus the pointy hats. I swear if I’d seen a wand I might have lost it.

I glanced up, trying to regain some sense of equilibrium which was when I saw students in darker robes standing in what was almost an observation area. A hallway of glass stretched between two of the buildings and the cluster of students standing and watching new arrivals come through. Assessing, I realized. Like this was a show put on for them every year.

Someone near the gallery window leaned on one elbow and said something to the person beside them. They both looked at my hair.

I lifted my chin. My duffel slid another inch down my shoulder, and I refused to adjust it while anyone was watching.

“East range,” Pippa said, steering me away from the warm light and carved doors where most of the new students seemed to be going. “Provisional housing is this way.”

Provisional? Like I wasn’t a full student yet. It made nerves clatter in my belly.

After a few minutes of walking we were in the east range. I knew thanks to the signage. The hallway that was the east range narrowed as we walked, the ceilings lowering and the stone growing colder, the doors losing their brass nameplates one by one, until by the time we reached the end the corridor had gone quiet enough that my boots sounded too loud on the stone floor.

My room was the last door on the left. Of course it was.

“This is you.” Pippa opened it and stepped back.

The room was nicer than any room I had ever slept in, with a narrow bed made up in clean white sheets, a desk under the window, and a wardrobe taller than the refrigerator we had at home. A small fireplace had been laid with actual wood that nobody had bothered to light, and when I crossed to the glass the window showed me the slope down to the washhouses and, beyond that, the black line of trees.

It was warm. It was private. It was mine, at least for now.

“You’ll probably move,” Pippa said.