Лей Бардуго - Ninth House

And still nothing had prepared him for the shock of her presence in that shabby Vanderbilt common room. The room was small but high-ceilinged, with three tall windows that looked out onto the horseshoe-shaped courtyard and two narrow doors leading to the bedrooms. The space eddied with the easy chaos of a freshman year move-in: boxes on the floor, no proper furniture to be seen but a wobbly lamp and a battered recliner pushed up against the long-since-functional fireplace. A muscular blonde in running shorts—Lauren, he guessed (likely pre-med, solid test scores, field-hockey captain at her Philadelphia prep school)—was setting up a faux-vintage turntable on the ledge of the window seat, a plastic crate of records balanced beside it. The recliner was probably hers too, carted along in a moving truck from Bucks County to New Haven. Anna Breen (Huntsville, Texas; STEM scholarship; choir leader) sat on the floor trying to assemble what looked like a bookshelf. This was a girl who would never quite fit. She’d end up in a singing group or maybe get heavily into her church. She definitely wouldn’t be partying with her other roommates.

Then the other two girls shuffled out of one of the bedrooms, awkwardly hefting a banged-up university-issued desk between them.

“Do you have to put that out here?” asked Anna glumly.

“We need more space,” said a girl in a flowered sundress Darlington knew was Mercy Zhao (piano; 800 math, 800 verbal; prizewinning essays on Rabelais and a bizarre but compelling comparison of a passage in The Sound and the Fury to a bit about a pear tree in The Canterbury Tales that had garnered the notice of both the Yale and Princeton English departments).

And then Galaxy Stern (no high school diploma, no GED, no achievements to speak of other than surviving her own misery) emerged from the dark nook of the bedroom, dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and black jeans totally inappropriate to the heat and balancing one end of the desk in her skinny arms. The low quality of Sandow’s video had caught the slick, straight sheaves of her black hair but not the severe precision of her center part, the hollow quality of her eyes but not the deep inkblot of their color. She looked malnourished, her clavicles sharp as exclamation points beneath the fabric of her shirt. She was too sleek, almost damp, less Undine rising from the waters than a dagger-toothed rusalka.

Or maybe she just needed a snack and a long nap.

All right, Stern. Let’s begin.

Darlington rapped on the door, stepped into the room, smiled big, bright, welcoming, as they set the desk down in the common room corner. “Alex! Your mom told me I should check in on you. It’s me, Darlington.”

For a brief moment she looked utterly lost, even panicked, then she matched his smile. “Hey! I didn’t recognize you.”

Good. She was adaptable.

“Introductions, please,” said Lauren, her gaze interested, assessing. She’d pulled a copy of Queen’s A Day at the Races from the crate.

He extended his hand. “I’m Darlington, Alex’s cousin.”

“Are you in JE too?” Lauren asked.

Darlington remembered that unearned sense of loyalty. At the start of the year, all the incoming freshmen were sorted into residential colleges where they would eat most of their meals and where they would eventually sleep when they left Old Campus behind as sophomores. They would buy scarves striped in their residential college colors, learn the college’s chants and mottos. Alex belonged to Lethe, just as Darlington had, but she’d been assigned to Jonathan Edwards, named for the fire and brimstone preacher.

“I’m in Davenport,” Darlington said. “But I don’t live on campus.” He’d liked living in Davenport—the dining hall, the big grassy courtyard. But he didn’t like Black Elm sitting empty, and the money he’d saved on his room and board had been enough to fix the water damage he’d found in the ballroom last spring. Besides, Cosmo liked the company.

“Do you have a car?” asked Lauren.

Mercy laughed. “Oh my God, you’re ridiculous.”

Lauren shrugged. “How else are we going to get to Ikea? We need a couch.” She would be the leader of this crew, the one who’d suggest which parties to go to, who’d have them host a room for Liquor Treat at Halloween.

“Sorry,” he said with an apologetic smile. “I can’t drive you. At least not today.” Or any day. “And I need to steal Alex away.”

Alex wiped her palms on her jeans. “We’re trying to get settled,” she said hesitantly, hopefully even. He could see circles of sweat blooming beneath her arms.

“You made a promise,” he said with a wink. “And you know how my mom gets about family stuff.”

He saw a flash of rebellion in her oil-slick eyes, but all she said was, “Okay.”

“Can you give us cash for the couch?” Lauren asked Alex, roughly shoving the Queen record back into the crate. He hoped it wasn’t the original vinyl.

“You bet,” said Alex. She turned to Darlington. “Aunt Eileen said she’d spring for a new couch, right?”

Darlington’s mother’s name was Harper, and he doubted she even knew the word Ikea . “Did she really?”

Alex crossed her arms. “Yup.”

Darlington took his wallet from his back pocket and peeled off three hundred dollars in cash. He handed it to Alex, who passed it to Lauren. “Make sure you write her a thank-you note,” he said.

“Oh, I will,” said Alex. “I know she’s a real stickler for that kind of thing.”

When they were striding across the lawns of Old Campus, the red-brick towers and crenellations of Vanderbilt behind them, Darlington said, “You owe me three hundred dollars. I’m not buying you a couch.”

“You can afford it,” Alex said coolly. “I’m guessing you come from the good side of the family, cuz.”

“You needed cover for why you’re going to be off seeing me so much.”

“Bullshit. You were testing me.”

“It’s my job to test you.”

“I thought it was your job to teach me. That’s not the same thing.”

At least she wasn’t stupid. “Fair enough. But visits to dear Aunt Eileen can cover a few of your late nights.”

“How late are we talking about?”

He could hear the worry in her voice. Was it caution or laziness? “How much did Dean Sandow tell you?”

“Not much.” She pulled the fabric of her shirt away from her stomach, trying to cool herself.

“Why are you dressed like that?” He hadn’t meant to ask but she looked uncomfortable—her black Henley buttoned to the neck, sweat spreading in dark rings from her armpits—and completely out of place. A girl who managed lies so smoothly should have a better sense of protective cover.

Alex just slid him a sideways look. “I’m very modest.” Darlington had no reply to that, so he pointed to one of the two identical red-brick buildings bracketing the path. “This is the oldest building on campus.”

“It doesn’t look old.”

“It’s been well maintained. It almost didn’t make it, though. People thought it ruined the look of Old Campus, so they wanted to knock it down.”

“Why didn’t they?”

“The books credit a preservation campaign, but the truth is Lethe discovered the building was lode-bearing.”

“Huh?”

“Spiritually lode-bearing. It was part of an old binding ritual to keep the campus safe.” They turned right, down a path that would lead them toward the ersatz-Medieval portcullis of Phelps Gate. “That’s what the whole college used to look like. Little buildings of red bricks. Colonial. A lot like Harvard. Then after the Civil War, the walls went up. Now most of the campus is built that way, a series of fortresses, walled and gated, a castle keep.”