I slept on Sunday night.
Two nights in a row, which is not a sentence I expected to be proud of at any point in fifteen years of a life largely constructed around the activity.
Nothing looked at me.
No gold. No lines. No five points and nothing turning its head somewhere underneath the floor of the world.
Just sleep. Ordinary and unremarkable and free, the way mortals have it every night without once stopping to notice what they are being given.
I woke on Monday feeling almost human.
That lasted until roughly nine o'clock.
***
They put all one hundred and eighty-seven of us in the orientation hall.
That was the first thing I did not like.
The notice had been read separately, in five rooms, on Friday. Whatever was coming had been deliberately kept out of any space where five classes could look at each other while they heard it.
Now they wanted us in one room.
Which meant somebody wanted us watching each other's faces.
'That's not a good sign.'
[No.]
