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Everyone in the room could do something like that? Something so magical that I could barely wrap my head around it and yet wasn’t surprised by it at all. It felt like ever since I’d stepped through the gates I’d been seeing something astounding every other moment and, if I was being honest, it was all starting to get a bit much.

The next student stood. They grew a pane of glass between both hands. The light word appeared. Craft.

Another sent a wooden block skidding across the floor without touching it. Force.

A fourth raised a shimmer in front of them that caught a thrown pebble and dropped it harmlessly. Ward.

They were small miracles, one after another, handed to the room like calling cards, and nobody cheered or gasped or asked how. And why would they when things like this had existed to them their whole lives?

My pen hovered over the page as I watched demonstration after demonstration, because how was I supposed to take notes on this? How was I supposed to make this make sense to my brain?

The demonstrations climbed the rows of my half of the room, and my stomach dropped with every one. The realization that I had nothing to show was blaring like an alarm in my mind. I had no flame or water or glass or shimmer, nothing except an arm that should have burned but didn’t and a box of cards that hummed under my fingers.

A boy from the row in front of me shoved a chair backward without touching it. Another made a coin vanish into a wrinkle of metal and reappear as a thin silver needle. Pippa, my tour guide, shaped a little eddy of wind over her palm, neat and bright, and looked back at me with an expression that was either encouragement or apology.

Then the row ended.

The room knew before Sallow said it, and I felt it, the small collective turning of attention, all of the students realizing the tour had reached the curiosity in the back row.

“Miss… Lane,” Professor Sallow said as he checked his roster.

My mouth went dry, but I stood, because staying seated would have been worse. Sallow looked at his roster again and then at me. “First-generation provisional,” he said.

The words moved through the hall faster than sound should have.

First-generation.

Provisional.

I had been poor before, openly and visibly, and I knew what it was to have a room price my shoes and decide what that meant about my mother. But this was different, because it was not about money. Money was only the surface language, and under it ran something older and meaner.

Blood and power.

“What is your demonstrated Order?” Sallow asked.

“I don’t have one.”

Someone made a sound that was not a laugh exactly, just the breath before one.

“None declared,” Sallow corrected. “You were admitted on provisional review.”

“I was admitted on full provision.”

Everything went very quiet. Pippa closed her eyes, and Sallow smiled. The smile was thin and educational, the kind teachers used when someone had walked into a trap they were pleased to spring politely.

“Provision concerns funding. Provisional concerns status.”

Heat climbed my neck. “Right,” I said.

A few heads turned from me to Sallow and back again as though watching a tennis match. Sallow’s smile did not change, but something behind it cooled. “Show us what you can.”

“I don’t know what I can do.” I tried to keep my voice steady and calm, but panic was quickly rising in my chest.

“Then show us what you think you can.”

There was no answer that did not make me ridiculous, so, naturally, I asked a question. “How did everyone know?”

Sallow blinked once.