Page 21 of Legacy Found

"It's a protest."

Sophia yanks at her own collar for the hundredth time, coffee already in hand because some things survive the apocalypse. "How does Declan look ironed? We moved into the dorms yesterday. I unpacked by throwing my suitcase at a wall. How are you pressed?"

Declan shrugs, enormous and immaculate. "I hung it up."

"He hung it up," Sophia repeats, scandalized, like he's confessed to witchcraft.

I keep smoothing my sleeves, which is a nervous habit I've apparently developed in the last twelve hours, and I take it all in — because it's a lot to take in. The dining hall at Luftis is not a dining hall. It's a cathedral that happens to serve breakfast. Stone arches soar up into shadow. Ancient banners hang the length of the walls, deep colors faded soft with age. Stained glass throws pools of red and gold and blue across the long tables, and the whole far wall is portraits — stern men and women.

And it's full. Hundreds of students, all in the same uniform, and every single one of them looks completely, effortlessly at ease, like they've been eating breakfast under thousand-year-old banners their entire lives. Which, I'm slowly realizing, a lot of them probably have.

We are, unmistakably, the new kids. You can spot our table from across the room by the sheer volume of fidgeting.

"We got lost twice getting here," I admit. "Twice.”

"I swear the staircases move," Sophia says darkly. "I'm telling you. I totally had the way here memorized, but still Jess and I got lost!"

"We'll learn it," Torres says, easy, biting into something. He's the only one of us not visibly rattled by any of it, but then, he's had some time to come to terms with the whole ‘I’m a wolf-thing’.

"I'm not so sure. Do you see how they're all looking at us?" Renzo says, then immediately ruins it by adding, "Although the food is unfairly good, so... we'll see."

I laugh, and for a minute, it almost feels normal. Almost feels like six friends at breakfast at the castle before we watched a professor turn into a wolf. I still can't quite believe I'm here, at the Luftis Academy from the brochure, sitting under these banners, wearing this ridiculous blazer, actually enrolled.

"Does anyone else keep expecting to wake up?" I ask.

"Every ten minutes," Sophia says immediately.

"Constantly," says Declan, quiet.

"I've decided this is a very elaborate dream and I'm going to enjoy the pastries while it lasts," Renzo says, and I'm mid-laugh, the whole table grinning —

when the room starts to change.

I don't notice it all at once. It's more like a draft you feel before you understand a door's been opened. The conversation nearest us thins, then drops. A chair scrapes back somewhere behind me. Then another. Then — more, a dozen, two dozen, a soft scattered thunder of wood on stone rolling across the hall.

Students are standing up.

Not all at once, not to any announcement, nobody said a word. It just — spreads. Table by table, the whole enormous room rising to its feet, quiet and unprompted, like the tide coming in.

I look at my own table, and the laughter's gone out of it. Sophia's mouth has closed mid-sentence. Declan has gone very still. Freya's whole attention has snapped to the doors at the far end of the hall. Beside me, Renzo pushes slowly to his feet, uncertain, glancing around to copy everyone else. And Torres is already standing — I didn't even see him rise.

I stay in my chair, because I have no idea why anyone's out of theirs.

"What the hell is going on?" I ask, low.

Nobody answers me. They're all looking at the doors.

So I turn to look too.

Three young men are walking into the dining hall.

And my first, entirely involuntary thought is: Good Lord.

Because they're — okay. They are, without any competition, the three most attractive men I have ever seen in my life, and I've seen Jon's forearms, so that's saying something. One is tall and golden — blond hair, sapphire-blue eyes, the kind of face they carve into things. The one in the middle is enormous, easily the biggest person in the room, black hair cropped short, ice-pale eyes that move over the hall without landing on anything, an expression like a locked door. And the third has dark brown hair and startling green eyes and moves through the room with a casual, absolute confidence that says he has never once in his life wondered whether he belongs somewhere.

The whole hall seems to bend toward them. It's the strangest thing. Every standing student oriented like plants to a window.

I get why everyone's staring. I'm staring. They're objectively staggering to look at. Then I watch as everyone’s gaze hits the floor.