Evening count ended the way it always seemed to end in Ash Court — a slate, a gravel voice, a line of tired first-years pretending they were not still listening for horns that would never sound again.
Kai drifted back toward the common room with Bram and two other boys from their tag range. One was a heavy-shouldered kid named Orlen who had barely spoken since the bridge. The other was thin, quick-eyed, and had already learned where the better leftover bread sat on the side table. The hearth was going. Someone had dragged three stools close enough to feel it. For a few minutes it almost felt like a normal place.
Almost.
"I’m just saying," Bram muttered, tearing a crust, "if they wanted us dead they could’ve left us in the yard. Instead they climb us up a mountain, give us beds, and act like the hard part is over."
Orlen snorted.
"Hard part’s never over. My cousin said the first month is where people find out if their Crucible score was luck."
"Your cousin went here?" Kai asked.
"Started here," Orlen said. Then he shut his mouth like the sentence had slipped.
The thin boy — Sem — glanced at the wall near the hearth. There was a long framed board there, dark wood, rows of small painted faces behind glass. Intake groups. Older ones. Names under them in neat script. At first glance it looked ceremonial. Pride on a wall.
Kai only really saw it when Sem nodded at it.
"Don’t stare too long," Sem said. "Ash Court loves that thing."
Kai stared anyway.
Three rows down, a set of faces had been left in place, but the name-plates under four of them were scratched out so deep the wood showed. Not removed cleanly. Defaced on purpose, or worn by hands that kept touching the same spot. One face near the end of that row was younger than the rest, smiling like he had not known the pose would outlive him.
Bram followed Kai’s eyes and lost the easy tone.
"Last spring’s low board," he said. "People say different things. Failed terms. Transfers. Family pulled them out."
Orlen’s voice went flatter.
"My cousin was on a board like that. Not this wall. Higher terrace. He wrote home for two months. Then the letters stopped. Family went to ask. Academy said he was struck off after rankings and left through administrative processing. No escort record. No city arrival. Nothing."
The hearth popped.
Nobody joked for a stretch.
Sem rubbed his thumb along his own dull tag mark.
"That’s why the numbers matter," he said. "Not because some instructor wants neat handwriting. Bottom of the board is not a bad grade here. Bottom of the board is when people start talking around you instead of to you."
Kai felt the low number on his palm like a bruise.
Bottom margin from the yard. Public save. Already a story. And these idiots have a memorial wall for classmates who just... stopped existing in the paperwork.
"Struck off where?" he asked.
Bram looked at the scratched name-plates, then away.
"Later," he said. "Not in the common room. Not if you want to sleep."
That was enough to put a cold line under the whole conversation. The boys went back to bread and smaller complaints — cold water, thin blankets, which steward hated questions — but the wall stayed in Kai’s peripheral vision the whole time, smiling scratched-out faces and all.
---
After the room thinned, Kai waited near the painted post where the girls’ branch fed back into the court.
Lira came first, hair still damp from whatever passed for washing on this level. Sera followed a step behind, eyes already doing inventory of who was still awake. For a moment the three of them stood in the stone mouth between corridors like they had on a hundred lower-district corners, only the drop outside these walls was cleaner and somehow worse.
"You look like someone told you a ghost story," Lira said.
"They kind of did." Kai tipped his head toward the common room. "There’s a wall of old intake faces. Some names are carved out. Bram’s batch started talking about board numbers like they’re fever charts."
Sera’s expression did not change much.
"That tracks."
Lira leaned her shoulder to the stone.
"So the academy doesn’t only test you to get in."
"No," Kai said. "Looks like it keeps a list after."
They went quiet. A pair of girls passed behind them, arguing softly about a morning placement slot. Normal words. Normal irritation. Under it, Ash Court felt one shade less like housing and one shade more like a waiting room.
Lira’s gaze stayed on the floor a second longer than it needed to.
"You know why I came," she said.
Kai glanced at her.
"Because I asked."
"Because you stood in Rena’s room and said you wouldn’t take the seal unless we got one too." Her mouth tightened, not angry — remembering. "I didn’t care about a mountain school. I cared that if you walked into something this big alone, you’d do something stupid with no one allowed to stop you."
Sera made a small sound that might have been agreement.
"I came because the lower district was finished with us either way," Sera said. "Rena’s cover, Quiet Ones, South Cut — all of it was going to turn into a shorter leash or a knife. A recommendation was leverage. I don’t climb for dreams. I climb for position."
Lira’s eyes flicked to her, then back to Kai.
"I climb because you made it the only road that still had you on it." She exhaled. "And because if this place is going to try to erase people by number, I’m not letting your number stand by itself."
Kai’s throat worked.
There it is. Not destiny. Not academy glory. Me refusing to go without them, and them refusing to let that refusal become a lonely death in nicer clothes.
"I don’t plan on dropping," he said.
"Good," Lira said. "Because I didn’t walk through that yard so you could get quiet on a wall."
Sera pushed off the arch.
"Count’s done. Curfew’s close. If the board matters as much as your hearth ghosts say, then sleep is part of not ending up scratched out."
She left first toward the girls’ corridor. Lira lingered half a breath, knocked her knuckle once against Kai’s chest like a blunt promise, and followed.
Kai stood alone at the painted post until the lamps lowered.
From the common room doorway the intake wall was still visible, neat rows of faces and the ugly gaps under them. Somewhere higher in the mountain, cleaner halls would have cleaner portraits — graduates with crests, names polished, no scratch marks. Down here in Ash Court the academy had hung its warning in the open and let first-years discover it between bread and bedtime.
Kai looked at the dull mark on his palm.
So board numbers aren’t school pride. They’re oxygen. And I’m already breathing shallow.
He turned back toward cell nine with Bram’s unfinished later sitting in his ears, and the scratched faces still smiling in the glass like they knew the next part of the story would not be told in a common room.
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