The Freshman (Kingmakers)

by Sophie Lark

  “Over the next several weeks, we will be evaluating your performance in your classes,” Hugo says, staring down each and every one of us in turn with those black flinty eyes. “Each year of students will cast a vote for their Captain. The first challenge of the Quartum Bellum will take place the first week of November. That is all.”

  Abruptly, Hugo strides back the way he came, right hand tucked into the pocket of his formal double-breasted suit.

  The students sit in silence for a moment, then break out into excited chatter.

  “I want my picture in that hall,” Bram says fiercely.

  I don’t respond, because I don’t think there’s a chance in hell of Bram getting the student vote, let alone the endorsement of the professors.

  But I could . . .

  9

  Anna

  I’m settling into Kingmakers.

  The most challenging part was finding somewhere I could practice dancing without unwanted interruptions. I tried several different places, including a disused classroom and the old wine cellar next to the dining hall.

  In the end, I settled on the abandoned cathedral on the far west side of campus. It’s farther to walk than the other options, but no one ever comes in here to disturb me.

  Maybe at the time Kingmakers was built, our ancestral families still held some sort of religious sentiment. But it’s been so long since the island had a chaplain that the cathedral has fallen into disrepair. Weeds grow up through the cracks in the floor, and an entire pomegranate tree has sprouted up in the middle of the chancel.

  Some of the stained-glass windows have been broken by wind or birds, but most are still intact. Colored light speckles the floor. I can hear the cooing of doves nesting up in the clerestory.

  Dancing is the closest I get to a spiritual experience, so it seems fitting to practice here, in the cool, airy silence. It’s far enough away from everything else that I can play my music day or night without disturbing anyone.

  The other minor annoyance is that I don’t particularly like my roommate. There are only two other female Heirs in my year—Zoe Romero and Chay Wagner.

  Zoe is Galician. She’s tall, dark-haired, serious, and studious. I think we could have gotten along very nicely by sitting silently on opposite sides of our room doing our homework.

  Unfortunately, Zoe got the one private room on our floor, which may be the size of a cupboard, but at least belongs to her alone.

  I have a nice big room but I’m sharing with Chay Wagner, the Heir of the Berlin-based Night Wolves.

  Chay is irrepressibly loud, confident, and unbearably cheerful. Couple that with a healthy dose of German bluntness, and I have to hear Chay’s opinion on virtually everything I do throughout the day.

  She’s petite, with strawberry-blonde hair and full sleeves of tattoos on both arms. She tells me the tattoos were done by the best artists in Berlin as they passed through her father’s shops, and sure enough each is done in a different style, everything from pop-art to ultra-realistic black and gray portraiture.

  The Night Wolves are a fascinating mafia group, because they’re a mixture of rock n’ roll enthusiasts and bikers, from the era when both those things were illegal in Moscow. What began by organizing underground concerts has grown into a string of tattoo shops and rock clubs across Europe, along with custom motorcycle shops and even their own racing team.

  As heir to the Berlin chapter of the Night Wolves, Chay is something of a minor celebrity on campus, which is another reason our dorm room is never quiet. She told me that a German station tried to sign her up for a reality TV series, but her father flatly forbade it.

  “I’m going to make my own clothing line after I graduate,” she tells me. “Leather jackets, vest, biker gear, you know . . . I think Papa’s wrong to avoid attention. Ninety-percent of our revenue is mainstream anyway. I honestly think Papa only keeps up with the chop shops and the protection money ‘cause he can’t stand the idea of being fully law-abiding.”

  It’s clear that Chay views Kingmakers as something to get through to appease her father. She has almost no interest in our classes, and barely bats an eye at her failing grades.

  “Why do you study so hard?” she demands, as I’m poring over an ancient leather-bound library book on contract law.

  I shrug. “I like reading. I like learning things.”

  “You’re competitive, too,” Chay says slyly.

  “No. I just don’t think there’s any point in doing something, unless you’re going to do it well.”

  “It’s not just that—you want to be top of the class. I know you do.”

  I pause in my reading, wondering if she’s right. Am I more like Leo than I realized?

  “Maybe I’m just trying to prove to myself that I’m good enough to do this job,” I say to Chay.

  Chay laughs. “With all the idiots who manage to be bosses, I think you’ll be fine.”

  The classes are challenging, but I really do like studying. It’s a hundred times more interesting than the shit I had to learn in high school. Who gives a fuck about the order of the presidents, or logarithms, or the history of the fur trade? Everything I learn now I’ll actually use someday when I take over my father’s empire.

  Leo and Ares are in most of my classes, which is nice. I hate the process of making new friends. I hate the part where you have to be polite and talk stupid nonsense to get to know each other. I already know everything about Leo, and Ares is so easygoing that he’s slipped right into our little group like he was always meant to be there.

  On Wednesdays Leo and I have a class called Environmental Adaptation. When I saw it on my schedule, I forgot for a minute what sort of school I was attending, and I wondered if it had something to do with “going green.”

  Of course it has nothing to do with environmentalism. Instead, it’s about acclimatizing to unexpected environments. In our first semester, this has meant learning to scuba dive.

  Our instructor is a man named Archie Bruce, who apparently was a Navy SEAL before he turned mercenary-for-hire. He’s got a shaved head, pale blue eyes, and a giant beak of a nose that adds to his air of authority.

  He teaches us in the underground pool dug out beneath the Armory.

  The pool began as a natural sinkhole in the limestone, into which seawater seeps. It’s been dug out and enlarged, but the walls of the pool are still rough, pale stone, and the water is salty. It’s much deeper than a normal Olympic swimming pool, and even with the pot lights set in its walls, you can’t see down to the bottom.

  The underground cavern is vast and echoing. Professor Bruce barks at us to shut the fuck up, because he won’t be repeating a single word of the lesson.

  I watch closely as he shows us each piece of equipment we’ll need, and how to operate it. I’m feeling anxious, because even though Leo and I have been swimming at Carlyle Lake together since we were kids, I’ve never been entirely comfortable in the water. The idea of breathing down on the bottom of the pool, with the full weight of a few thousand gallons of water on top of me, not to mention all the stone and the castle itself over my head, is triggering a particular type of claustrophobia.

  “You okay?” Leo says, his golden-brown eyes meeting mine.

  “Of course,” I say. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason,” he says with an easy shrug. But he grabs my hand and gives it a quick squeeze all the same. He lets go again after only a second. Still, the warmth of his hand seems to travel up my arm, spreading through my chest and slowing my heartbeat down just a little.

  A dark-haired girl stands on the opposite side of the pool, facing us. We’re taking this class with a bunch of the Spies, and I assume this girl is one of them. Her black hair looks almost blue in the reflected light of the pool. When I glance over at her, her eyes are fixed serenely on the professor. But I know she was watching us a minute earlier.

  “Suit up!” Professor Bruce shouts. “I want you all in that pool in two minutes.”

  Leo and I do
n our equipment, which is cold and damp from the previous class. I’m wearing a thin, one-piece bathing suit, and I can feel my nipples poking through the material as I shiver.

  I see Leo noticing. I expect him to make a joke about it, but to my surprise, he looks away abruptly, tugging a little too hard on the strap of his face mask so the elastic snaps.

  “Fuck,” he mutters.

  “Problem?” Professor Bruce says at once.

  “I broke the band on my face mask,” Leo says.

  “Figure it out,” the professor says coldly. “The point of this class is to adapt and overcome.”

  “Swap with me,” I mutter to Leo. “Your head’s bigger than mine. I can just tie it in a knot.”

  “I have a big head?” Leo laughs, trading masks with me.

  “You’ve got the biggest head I’ve ever encountered, in all ways,” I tell him sweetly.

  Leo chuckles and slips his mask into place. It’s full-face, and it looks disturbingly like a gas mask, like we’re in the middle of a war or a plague. I knot the back of mine and force it down over my head. It’s too tight, but I can make it work.

  Once we’ve got our flippers and tanks on too, we drop down into the water.

  Immediately, my heart begins to race. I haven’t even put my face under yet. Sensing my stress, Leo sticks right beside me. Even though he’s never done this before either, he already looks comfortable bobbing up and down in the water, as if his gear weighs nothing at all.

  Professor Bruce gets into the pool with us. With his flippered feet and the powerful kicks of his legs keeping him buoyant, he looks like a burly frog.

  He takes his respirator out so he can shout at us. “While we’re on the surface, we’ll practice hand signals, clearing our mask, and recovering our respirator. After that we’ll descend.”

  He teaches us the signals for Ok, Stop, Level Off, Ascend, Descend, and Follow Me. Then he goes over the mask and regulator techniques. It all seems to fly by much too quickly, and I wish he’d run through it again. With each new instruction, the one before seems to dissolve in my brain. It doesn’t help that I’m continually thinking of the hundred feet of empty water directly below.

  “Do you understand it all?” Leo whispers to me.

  “I . . . I think so,” I say.

  “Just copy me,” he says in his warm, reassuring tone. “I know what to do.”

  A lot of people think that Leo is overconfident. But when he says he can do something, he’s almost always right. I’m keeping my heart rate under control because I trust him. I feel safe with him here beside me.

  Too soon, it’s time to descend. I fit my regulator in place and follow Leo as Professor Bruce takes us down to the bottom of the pool in measured stages. He uses our newly-learned hand signals to tell us when to pause, when to pop our ears, and when to drop further down.

  Every few feet we descend adds an immense amount of pressure from the weight of the water overhead. I try not to think how far it is to the surface. I try not to consider how dependent I am on the little tank of air strapped to my back.

  Leo stays right beside me. The release of bubbles out of the side of his mask seems slow and steady. I try to match it, so I don’t hyperventilate and use my oxygen too quickly.

  We sink all the way to the bottom of the pool where we sit cross-legged in a big circle, with Professor Bruce at the center. The dark-haired girl and her redheaded friend are still directly across from Leo and me. It’s hard to tell if they’re smiling or not beneath their masks. Hard to tell if they’re staring at us as much as it seems.

  I try to feel the sense of calm weightlessness that is supposed to be pleasurable in this activity. Shouldn’t diving be something like dancing?

  It doesn’t feel like that to me. It feels like being encased in wet cement while breathing through a straw.

  I’m relieved when Professor Bruce takes us all back up to the surface. That relief doesn’t last long—he lifts his mask to say, “This time we’re going to practice buddy breathing. If your regulator is broken or you’ve run out of air, you can make use of your partner’s. This is the signal that means, ‘I have no air.’ ” He demonstrates the slashing movement of the hand across the throat. “We’ll descend. Then I’ll come around and take half the tanks.”

  My stomach lurches. I don’t in any way feel ready to be down there without any air.

  But there’s nothing I can do except follow him back down under the water.

  At least I’ve got Leo as my buddy. He isn’t joking around like usual, probably because he knows I’m wound up tight as a guitar string. He sits right next to me on the rough and rocky bottom of the pool, waiting patiently for Professor Bruce to approach.

  Leo is already undoing the straps of his tank, planning to offer it to the professor.

  Our teacher senses weakness. He narrows his pale blue eyes behind his mask and shakes his head, pointing to me instead. With trembling hands, I unclasp my tank and hand it over.

  The moment the respirator is out of my mouth, I start to panic. I look up at the distant, shining surface of the pool, impossibly far overhead. I couldn’t swim all the way up there with the single breath captured in my lungs.

  Leo removes his respirator and fits it in my mouth, resting his hands on my shoulders and looking in my eyes through our masks. He waits patiently while I take several breaths, watching my face. I don’t need to be able to speak to know what he wants to say to me—with his brown eyes looking into mine, I can hear his voice in my head:

  Relax, Anna. I’m right here. You’ve got this. I’m not gonna let you drown on the bottom of this pool. For one thing, your dad would kill me . . .

  It almost makes me smile, picturing what Leo would say.

  Only Leo’s sense of calm allows me to maintain mine. If he would have taken the air back too soon, or even stared at me impatiently, I don’t think I could have handled it.

  I know what a good swimmer he is. I know how long he can hold his breath.

  I take my time getting the oxygen I need, and then I pass the respirator back to Leo. He takes two quick breaths and gives it to me again, watching me closely through his mask. I can see his concern. I know he’d never leave me without air.

  Professor Bruce makes us sit down there for over twenty minutes, sharing air. Two of the sets of students can’t handle it—one of the Spies starts squabbling over the respirator and nearly pulls the hose right out of the tank before the professor intervenes. On the opposite side of the circle, an Albanian Heir named Valon Hoxha loses his nerve completely and goes kicking off the bottom without any tank, trying to swim for the surface.

  He only makes it halfway before he takes an involuntary gulp of water and starts to drown. Lucky for him, the professor is right behind him. He puts the thrashing Hoxha into a headlock and forces the respirator into his mouth. Still thrashing and fighting, Hoxha is dragged up to the surface and tossed out of the pool by the irritated professor. They both disappear for a period of time, then Professor Bruce comes back down alone. He signals for us to follow him up.

  I still don’t have an oxygen tank.

  Leo grabs my hand and starts swimming slowly upward. He pauses frequently so we can control our rate of ascent, and also pass the respirator back and forth.

  Even with all his help, I’m wildly relieved when my head breaks the surface again and I can take full, unobstructed gulps of air. Leo pushes his mask up on his head, grinning at me.

  “You did it!”

  “Only because of you,” I say honestly.

  Leo shrugs. “I’m only passing History because of you,” he says. “But don’t tell Ares that, ‘cause he’s under the impression that I’ve been studying on my own.”

  “Who would have told him that?” I snort.

  “Somebody who didn’t want to accept another invitation to the library.” Leo grins.

  I strip off the wet, chilly scuba equipment.

  All around me, my fellow students are doing the same.

 
I notice that Hedeon Gray wore a t-shirt down into the water, even though he’s in good shape and has nothing to hide.

  As he pulls off his tank, his shirt rides up and I get a look at his bare back.

  He’s covered in scars, layer upon layer of them. Thick, twisting, overlapping bands running in all directions.

  I don’t mean to stare, but I’m frozen in place for a moment, having never seen anything like it.

  Hedeon jerks his shirt back down, glowering at me. The expression on his face is pure fury.

  I turn around quickly, trying to pretend like I didn’t see, though we both know I did.

  “What?” Leo says.

  “Nothing,” I say, shaking my head.

  My stomach is churning. Those aren’t the scars of an accident or injury.

  Someone did that to him.

  Even though Leo’s in most of my classes, our schedules don’t entirely align.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have International Banking while Leo and Ares take Torture Techniques. Most of the rest of the students in my banking class are Accountants.

  I don’t mind—I like the Accountants. They’re focused and methodical. Not a bunch of aggressive meatheads like the Enforcers, and not sneaky and suspicious like the Spies.

  The class is competitive, though. Some of the most brilliant kids in our year are Accountants. It’s been a struggle to even stay in the top twenty percent.

  If I want the absolute top spot I’ll have to beat out Dean Yenin. He’s in this class too, though thankfully not with his henchman Bram. He sits two rows behind me, and I can often feel his eyes boring into my back, especially if I’ve just answered a question correctly.

  I’ve tried to avoid speaking to him since the changing room incident. He seems perfectly content to avoid me, too, though I’ve caught him glaring at me more than once.

  I don’t know if he hates me because I’m best friends with Leo, or if he knows that my father helped Sebastian Gallo secure his hold on the Chicago territory contested by the Bratva. My dad wasn’t directly involved in the killing of Dean’s grandfather or the mutilation of his father, but he did kill some of the Yenins’ men, and there’s plenty of bad blood to go around.