At least Ares will be there, too. He gives me a little fist bump as we line up next to our guide, a Polynesian guy with his hair shaved into a Mohawk and several piercings in both ears.
“I’m Johnny Hale,” he reminds us. “I’m supposed to help you get settled in. Remind you of the rules. Make sure you get places on time the first week. But I’m not your fucking babysitter, and I don’t give a shit about your problems. So follow the rules, and don’t expect me to bail you out if you don’t. Any questions that aren’t fucking stupid?”
He glares at us, challenging us to come up with a query that fits his criteria. Nobody dares to try.
“Good,” he grunts. “Let’s get going.”
He leads us across the courtyard in the direction of the towers on the northwest corner of campus. We pass through a couple of greenhouses, and then what looks like an Armory.
“Gym’s in there,” Johnny says. “That’s where your combat classes will be held, too. You can work out any time outside of class hours—it’s open all night. There’s an underground pool, too. And showers so you can clean up after.”
“Are all the dorms over here?” I ask him, wondering how far away Anna might be.
“No,” Johnny says. “They’re scattered all over. The Enforcers are in the Gatehouse. Spies in the Undercroft. Accountants over by the library. You lot will be in the Octagon Tower. The girls are separate from the boys—you’re not allowed in their rooms, so don’t get any bright ideas. There’s four guys for every girl at Kingmakers. You’re not supposed to be dating and the odds aren’t in your favor anyway. Half the girls here probably have some marriage contract lined up already, and if you get one pregnant, her family can have you castrated. So just keep that in mind.”
I can’t tell if he’s joking or not. Bram looks green at the thought.
“We’re in here,” Johnny says, shoving through a heavy wooden door studded with metal reinforcements. The thing looks like it weighs as much as a refrigerator, but Johnny pushes it aside easily.
He’s leading us into the second-tallest of the towers on the northeast corner of campus. Unlike the others, which are cylindrical, this particular tower is indeed octagonal. Its strange shape creates odd corners in the main common room, and awkward angles for each of the dorm rooms. At least our rooms are high up with good airflow and a stunning view of the limestone cliffs.
“Two to a room,” Johnny says. “Pick your own roommate, I don’t give a fuck.”
It’s an obvious choice to go with Ares. We only have to make eye contact and grin at each other to confirm it.
I expect Bram Van Der Berg to room with his Albanian friend Valon Hoxha, but to my surprise he gives a quick upward jerk of the chin to Dean instead, saying, “You wanna share?”
Dean eyes him warily. “Alright,” he says. “As long as you’re tidy.”
“Of course.” Bram nods.
They take the room down the hall from Ares and me. I can’t tell if it’s a good thing or a bad thing to have both my antagonists teaming up. At least it puts them in the same place, so I can keep an eye on both of them at once.
Valon Hoxha looks disgruntled at being abandoned without so much as a second thought. He’s forced to turn sullenly to the blond Norwegian Erik Edman instead.
“You have a roommate already?” he mutters.
“Nope,” Erik says. “And I don’t snore, so you better not either.”
Jules Turgenev turns to the French-Canadian Emile Girard.
“Serons-nous colocataires?”
“Pourquoi pas?” Emile shrugs.
That leaves the boy with the dragon tattoo, Kenzo Tanaka, to room with the sullen and silent Hedeon Gray, who I believe is from London.
Ares and I take the room at the very end of the hall. It’s the farthest walk away from the stairs, but it has the best view and hopefully will be a little quieter than the bedrooms closer to the common room.
It’s a small space with two beds on opposite sides of the room, two dressers, and no closet. No desks either—I guess we’re supposed to do our schoolwork in the library. If there even is any schoolwork. Do we write papers at Kingmakers? I have no idea.
That’s when the strangeness of this place finally hits me. I realize that I have no fucking clue what class is going to look like tomorrow. This is not a normal college. I can’t picture what we’ll be learning, or how.
“You care which bed you get?” Ares asks me.
“Nope.”
“I’ll take this one, then,” he says, throwing his backpack down on the bed set against the right-hand wall of the room.
“Suits me,” I say, flopping down on the left.
The bed is hard and narrow. My feet hang off the end.
“Well, shit,” I say, realizing how poorly I’m going to fit in this room, especially with a guy as big as Ares. “Maybe we should have picked smaller roommates.”
Ares laughs. “It wouldn’t help you fit on that mattress any better.”
At least the rooms are clean—the stone floor is swept, and the walls have been freshly white-washed to remove whatever scuffs or scribbles the former occupants might have left.
“Does the window open?” I ask Ares.
“Yeah,” he says, trying it. “Careful though—it’s a long way down.”
He peers through the bubbled glass down the steep walls of the tower to the courtyard below.
“When do you think we get dinner?” I say.
I skipped breakfast and they didn’t feed us anything on the boat. My stomach is growling.
“Should we ask Johnny?” Ares says.
I weigh my hunger against Johnny’s obvious irritation at being asked to care for us Freshmen in any way.
“Yeah.” I grin. “Let’s ask him. But be prepared to run if he decides that’s a stupid question.”
5
Dean
I wake early, before the sun is even up. I know at once that I’m not in my old room at home. I can tell because the air isn’t musty and enclosed, with that awful lingering scent of neglect I could never seem to shake. Instead I smell the sea breeze and the fresh herbs growing in the terraced garden below my window.
Bram is still snoring in the bed across from mine. It’s weird sharing a room with another dude, especially one I barely know. Bram is an ally though, and that’s all that matters. I only just met him in Dubrovnik, but I’ve seen that he’s tough, aggressive, and reasonably intelligent, and that’s what I want in a friend.
In Moscow I always got up early to go for a run while the streets were still empty. I could probably run all over this island in a couple of hours. But I don’t know the rules well enough to know if we’re allowed to leave the school grounds.
Better to just use the gym our guide showed us the day before.
Slipping out of bed quietly, I open my top drawer and pull out the gym attire I purchased along with the rest of my uniforms. I already neatly folded my clothes and stowed them away in the dresser the night before.
When Bram asked if I wanted to room together, I told him bluntly that he’d better keep it tidy if he wanted to share space.