Strangers

Lunch at Kuroyuri was served in a hall that could have belonged to any boarding school in the country — long tables, high windows, the particular echo of too many trays being set down at once — except that the seating, Souta noticed within his first two days, sorted itself by class rank without anyone ever posting a rule about it. A-class occupied the tables nearest the windows, where the light was best. E-class had the corner by the kitchen doors, where the light was worst and the noise from the kitchen never quite stopped.
Nobody had told them to sit there. They'd simply arrived, the first day, and found that the tables near the windows were already full of people who looked at their uniforms — same white and black, same insignia, no visible difference at all — and somehow still knew exactly which homeroom they belonged to.
"They can tell," Hana said, dropping her tray across from him with the easy directness he was starting to understand was just how she moved through a room, no calculation to it that he could find, which unsettled him more than calculation would have. "I don't know how. Maybe it's a smell."
"It's not a smell."
"It's something. Watch." She nodded, subtly, toward a table two down from the windows — third-years, going by the length of their ties, an unofficial marker Souta had clocked on his first walk through the halls. "That's B-class, probably. See how they're not looking at us? A-class looks. B-class doesn't bother. C and D pretend not to care and then look anyway. We're the only ones nobody looks at at all."
He watched. She was right, and he filed the observation away the way he filed everything — not because he trusted her read on it completely, but because a person who noticed patterns like that on day two was a person worth watching notice more of them.
Down the table, three other members of Class E had drifted into a loose cluster without any of them seeming to decide to. The boy from homeroom — Kaito Reisen, Souta had learned, quiet in a way that read as watchful rather than shy — sat picking at his food with the specific carefulness of someone raised somewhere food hadn't always been guaranteed. Across from him, a girl Souta didn't know yet, sharp-featured, hair cropped short, ate like she was timing herself.
"You're the one who didn't move," the sharp-featured girl said, not looking up, and it took Souta a second to understand she was talking to him.
"What?"
"Last night. In the dark. I was three seats back from you, before—" She stopped, the way most of them stopped mid-sentence when the subject came too close to itself, and started again on safer ground. "You didn't move for a long time. Everyone else was up and doing something inside the first ten minutes. You just sat there."
He hadn't realized anyone had been tracking him in the dark. It was, he understood now, a foolish thing not to have considered — of course people had been tracking each other, that was the entire mechanism of the night, everyone reading everyone else for a sign of who might be dangerous and who might be prey.
"I was thinking," he said, which was true, and also revealed nothing.
"That's either the smartest or the stupidest thing anyone did that night," she said, and went back to her food, apparently satisfied with the answer, or at least satisfied enough not to push for a better one. "I'm Yumeko Sato, by the way. C-Ranked in the entrance exams, if you care about that, which you shouldn't, since it clearly didn't mean anything — I still ended up here with the rest of you."
"Entrance exam rank doesn't carry over?"
"Apparently not." Something flickered across her face, fast, gone before it fully formed. "Apparently the only exam that matters is the one they don't tell you you're taking."
Nobody at the table had a response to that. Hana broke the silence by stealing a piece of fish off Kaito's tray without asking, and he let her, without complaint, in the manner of someone who'd already learned in two days that objecting cost more energy than it was worth.
Souta saw the upperclassman for the first time on his way back from the dining hall, alone, having peeled off from the others under the thin excuse of wanting to find the library before curfew. He didn't find the library. He found, instead, a boy leaning against the wall outside the courtyard doors, tie loosened, blazer slung over one shoulder in the specific way that only worked as a look if you had the rank to get away with the informality — and by the length of that tie, third-year, and by the crest stitched into the blazer's lapel, A-class.
The boy looked at him the way A-class had looked at all of Class E in the dining hall, except this time it wasn't a passing glance across a room. It was direct, unhurried, assessing.
"You're new E-class," he said. Not a question.
"Souta."
"I know. Everyone knows the names in E-class this year." A small, unpleasant smile. "Forty in, twenty out. That's not usually how they run it — usually it's tighter than that, five or six culled, not twenty. Somebody upstairs decided your year needed a harder lesson than most. I'd be curious what you did to earn that, except I already know the answer's going to be nothing, because that's always the answer. You didn't do anything. It's just what year you were born into."
Souta said nothing. He'd learned, a long time ago, that silence in the face of a stranger fishing for a reaction was rarely the wrong move.
"My name's Renji Asou," the boy continued, apparently unbothered by the lack of response, or perhaps expecting it. "Third-year, A-class, and before you get any ideas about what that means — no, I'm not here to threaten you. I genuinely don't care enough about E-class to bother. I'm here because I like watching what the bottom rung does in its first week, before the school's finished grinding the personality out of you. It's usually the most interesting you'll ever be."
"That's a strange hobby."
"It's not a hobby. It's research." Asou pushed off the wall, unhurried, already turning to leave, and delivered the last of it over his shoulder without breaking stride. "Ask your classmates sometime how many of last year's E-class made it to second year with the same twenty names on the roster. It's not all of them. It's never all of them. Might be worth knowing, before you get too attached to anyone at that lunch table."
He was gone before Souta could decide whether the warning had been a kindness or a threat, or whether, at a school like this, there was ever really a difference between the two.
That night, back in his dorm room, Souta sat at the narrow desk with a textbook open in front of him that he wasn't reading, and thought about the number twenty, the way he'd been thinking about it in one form or another since the folder had been placed under his desk two nights ago. Twenty who survived orientation. Twenty who might not all still be twenty by the time second year started. A whole school built in tiers around a number that kept shrinking, quietly, in the space between what the administration announced and what actually happened to the people underneath the announcements.
He thought about Sae, three doors down the hall — he'd noted her room number without meaning to, the way he noted most things, filed away for a use he hadn't decided on yet — and about the fact that neither of them had said a single word to each other since homeroom, as if daylight had drawn a line between the person she'd been in that closet and the person she was at a desk , and both of them had silently agreed not to be the first to cross it back.
He thought about Hana, stealing food off Kaito's tray like the whole conversation at that table hadn't been two people carefully not asking each other what they'd each done to survive the dark.
And he thought about his grandfather, who had never once, in sixteen years, told Souta what kind of school this actually was — only that if he ever wanted the truth about the address in that letter, this was where the road started.
He closed the textbook, finally, and turned off the desk lamp, and lay awake a while longer listening to the particular quiet of a dormitory hallway .