What Eric and I wanted to do was eat.
“Will you two finish stuffing your faces so we can go look at our rooms?” Clem asked. “I’m so excited to see where we’ll be staying this year.”
“We saw the dorm towers last year,” I said. “They weren’t very exciting.”
“You saw the initiate dormitory towers,” Clem corrected me. “Rooms for upperclassmen are much nicer.”
That was news to me. I’d been expecting to return to the same narrow room I’d lived in last school year. Whatever the upperclassmen dorms were like had to be better than that uncomfortable cell.
“Well, now I’m excited,” I said and pushed back my empty plate.
“I guess I’ve had enough.” Eric leaned back in his chair and patted his hands on his flat stomach. “Hard to keep my girlish figure eating like a horse.”
“More like a bull,” Clem teased. She pushed back from the table, and I gathered up the plates.
“You don’t have to do that,” Eric said.
“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “The staff has more than enough to worry about with the new initiates and the new security. Dumping our plates into the bus buckets by the door won’t kill me.”
I headed across the dining room, nodding and waving back at my fellow students. This felt like a dream. For the thousandth time, I wished I could share it with my mother.
Unfortunately, she was still in hiding, worried about what the Disciples would do after I’d defied Tycho Reyes. I was sure that danger was behind us, thanks to Adjudicator Hark, but my mother had no way of knowing that. Even with the School’s help, I hadn’t been able to get word to her during the Five Dragons Challenge.
I considered asking Clem if her family could help me find mine. As a member of the judiciary, her mother had resources I could only imagine. That seemed a little greedy, though. Her mother had already kept me out of prison and had me named School Champion. Asking for more might be pushing it.
I dumped the plates in the bus buckets next to the door, then turned to follow Clem and Eric out of the dining hall.
And almost ran into Rafael on his way back from the buffet line.
The Disciple dodged around me, eyes averted, and crashed into Rachel Lu, who’d been headed in my direction with a big smile on her face.
“Watch where you’re going!” Rafael boomed at the initiate.
The scrawny girl bounced off the Disciple, who gave her a hard shove. Her feet slipped out from under her, sending her crashing toward the floor with her black braid whipping through the air.
I dropped to one knee and caught the girl’s shoulders before she could hit the tiled floor. I helped her back to her feet, then lunged after Rafael as he tried to escape into the crowd. My fingers closed around his collar and dragged him back to the girl with me.
“Apologize for that,” I demanded of him as I gave the girl a quick glance to make sure she wasn’t badly injured. “You should treat members of your own clan better than that.”
“I’m not apologizing to her...” Rafael started, but the rest of his sentence died on his lips when he saw my dark glare.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered.
“For what?” I said.
“For knocking you over.” Rafael forced the words through gritted teeth and glowered at the new student.
“Thank you,” I said, and patted him on the shoulder. I leaned in close so only he could hear the rest of my words. “I catch you doing anything like that again, and it’s a duel. Understand?”
He nodded, and I squeezed his shoulder to make sure he got the point. I didn’t let up until Rafael winced and nodded.
“Thanks!” the girl I’d saved said as she vanished into the dining hall’s crowd.
I waved over my shoulder and hustled to catch up to my friends. I wasn’t in the mood to fight Rafael, but I also wasn’t going to let him bully younger students. I’d suffered with that enough, and no one else would have to while I was around.
“Oh, there you are,” Clem said as I stepped up beside her on the stairs from the main hall. “Like I was telling Eric, the quarters are still divided by clan. We all share a common area, though. They used it for duels a lot, but that’s been banned this year. Along with the challenges.”
“Seriously?” Eric asked. “No duels or class rankings?”
“Nope,” Clem confirmed. “Mom says the sages decided we weren’t doing any of that this year. I guess the big focus is on working together in harmony, not competition.”
That made sense to me. The clans were all in an uproar after what had happened last year. The anti-Flame protests hadn’t helped matters, either. The sages needed to pull the Empyreals back together, not push us further apart with competitions.
“That sucks,” Eric said. “This was going to be my year to be the top-ranked student.”
“Sure it was,” I teased. “Did you forget I was here?”
Clem laughed at that, and Eric snorted.
We walked in silence until the school finally took pity on us and dumped us out into an open chamber the size of our exercise yard. Eight hallways led off it, like spokes from a wheel. Other students had gathered in small knots all over the room, friends renewing their acquaintances, rivals sizing one another up. I didn’t recognize most of the students and realized just how many more upperclassmen there were compared to the initiates. We had to outnumber them at least a hundred to one.
My eyes drifted across the students that surrounded me, searching for potential threats. The dark urge wanted me to find Deacon and let him know I hadn’t forgotten or forgiven that he’d tried to murder me last year. He needed to know—
“Hey, Warin,” a harsh
