Bound To The Wrong Alpha

POV: Calla Voss

The shuttle doors hissed shut before I realized none of the faces inside matched the list I had memorized.

Scholarship students, lower residences, transport group C. I had read it four times on the train and twice more in the loading zone. And somehow I was still standing in the middle of a shuttle full of people.

I should have turned around immediately, but the doors were already sealed and the shuttle was moving, and the boy in the nearest seat was watching me.

I found a handhold near the back, held it, and pretended to be fine.

The gates we pulled through were old stone. Forty-seven seats in the shuttle and I was the only one standing.

The shuttle stopped.  About thirty seconds after I stepped off, a boy walked past me, reached down, grabbed the strap of my bag from the ground, and dropped it into the puddle to his left.

Not an accident. There was no puddle near where I had set the bag down, which meant he had aimed for it deliberately.

The watching started after that. So I smiled and walked to the puddle and picked up my bag.

The handle was wet. The side panel was soaked through. My notebook, which I kept in the outer pocket, had caught most of the water. I shook the bag once, shouldered it, and turned to find the path to the scholarship residences.

Someone behind me said, not to me: "Is she scholarship?"

Another voice, quieter: "Has to be."

The first voice again, lower: "Vex sent for a human."

I kept walking. The path split ahead and I took the left fork because it angled downhill and the scholarship residences were on the lower grounds. I had memorized everything I could find about this place in the three weeks between getting the acceptance letter and today, and apparently it still was not enough.

I made it twenty steps before the words landed properly.

Not the word human, which was just accurate. The other part. Sent for.

I turned it over while I walked the rest of the path. Campus gossip traveled fast and someone had heard something partial and repeated it wrong.

The lower residences building came into view. Brick, three storeys. I went through the main door, found room fourteen, punched in the code from the email.

Inside was smaller than the website suggested. One window, a desk shoved under it, a bed that was longer than I expected. I dropped my wet bag on the floor and sat on the edge of the mattress.

Sent for.

Two words. Probably nothing. But probably sat wrong in my chest tonight, because I had come to Blackthorn with one plan: keep my head down, finish the degree, leave clean. I had not planned for someone to already know I was coming before I arrived.

I pulled the wet notebook out of the pocket and   opened to the first blank page and wrote the two words at the very top Sent for.

Down the hall, a door opened. Footsteps came toward my room and stopped just outside. No knock. Just a pause.

The footsteps moved on.

I counted to five. Then looked back at the two words on the page.

Someone at Blackthorn had known my name before I arrived. I had walked through the wrong gate, in front of the wrong people, and made myself visible in the first ten minutes.

The burning came back into my palms, slow and certain, and this time I did not try to stop it.