Page 40 of Kingmakers, Year One

“Are all the dorms over here?” I ask him, wondering how far away Anna might be.

“No,” Johnny says. “They’re scattered all over. The Enforcers are in the Gatehouse. Spies in the Undercroft. Accountants over by the library. You lot will be in the Octagon Tower. The girls are separate from the boys—you’re not allowed in their rooms, so don’t get any bright ideas. There’s four guys for every girl at Kingmakers. You’re not supposed to be dating and the odds aren’t in your favor anyway. Half the girls here probably have some marriage contract lined up already, and if you get one pregnant, her family can have you castrated. So just keep that in mind.”

I can’t tell if he’s joking or not. Bram looks green at the thought.

“We’re in here,” Johnny says, shoving through a heavy wooden door studded with metal reinforcements. The thing looks like it weighs as much as a refrigerator, but Johnny pushes it aside easily.

He’s leading us into the second-tallest of the towers on the northeast corner of campus. Unlike the others, which are cylindrical, this particular tower is indeed octagonal. Its strange shape creates odd corners in the main common room, and awkward angles for each of the dorm rooms. At least our rooms are high up with good airflow and a stunning view of the limestone cliffs.

“Two to a room,” Johnny says. “Pick your own roommate, I don’t give a fuck.”

It’s an obvious choice to go with Ares. We only have to make eye contact and grin at each other to confirm it.

I expect Bram Van Der Berg to room with his Albanian friend Valon Hoxha, but to my surprise he gives a quick upward jerk of the chin to Dean, saying, “You wanna share?”

Dean eyes him warily.

“Alright,” he says. “As long as you’re tidy.”

“Of course.” Bram nods.

They take the room down the hall from Ares and me. I can’t tell if it’s a good thing or a bad thing to have both my antagonists teaming up. At least it puts them in the same place, so I can keep an eye on both of them at once.

Valon Hoxha looks disgruntled at being abandoned without so much as a second thought. He’s forced to turn sullenly to the blond Norwegian Erik Edman instead.

“You have a roommate already?” he mutters.

“Nope,” Erik says. “And I don’t snore, so you better not either.”

Jules Turgenev turns to the French-Canadian Emile Girard.

“Serons-nous colocataires?”

“Pourquoi pas?”Emile shrugs.

That leaves the boy with the dragon tattoo, Kenzo Tanaka, to room with the sullen and silent Hedeon Gray, who I believe is from London.

Ares and I take the room at the very end of the hall. It’s the farthest walk away from the stairs, but it has the best view and hopefully will be a little quieter than the bedrooms closer to the common room.

It’s a small space with two beds on opposite sides of the room, two dressers, and no closet. No desks either—I guess we’re supposed to do our schoolwork in the library. If there even is any schoolwork. Do we write papers at Kingmakers? I have no idea.

That’s when the strangeness of this place finally hits me. I realize that I have no fucking clue what class is going to look like tomorrow. This is not a normal college. I can’t picture what we’ll be learning, or how.

“You care which bed you get?” Ares asks me.

“Nope.”

“I’ll take this one, then,” he says, throwing his backpack down on the bed set against the right-hand wall of the room.

“Suits me,” I say, flopping down on the left.

The bed is hard and narrow. My feet hang off the end.

“Well, shit,” I say, realizing how poorly I’m going to fit in this room, especially with a guy as big as Ares. “Maybe we should’ve picked smaller roommates.”

Ares laughs. “It wouldn’t help you fit on that mattress any better.”

At least the rooms are clean—the stone floor is swept, and the walls have been freshly white-washed to remove whatever scuffs or scribbles the former occupants might have left.

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