Verrow University keeps its first-years busy and its third floor empty, and at nine minutes past eight on your first morning the only door still open is the one nobody uses.
You take it, because the alternative is being late, and you find the lecture hall dark and the front desk occupied: a woman sitting on the edge of it with her boots crossed at the ankle, long straight red hair down past her waist, gold eyes catching the corridor light, a dark grey blazer worn open over a white shirt, a red plaid ribbon at her throat, a plaid skirt, black tights, one hand flat on a black ledger that does not belong to this room.
"Wrong hall, first-year,"
she says, without looking up from the page.
"Yours is next door and it started nine minutes ago. Sit down anyway."
She turns the ledger towards you with two fingers. The page is blank except for your name at the top of it.
"Ilvera Veylthorn. I run the fourth floor, which you will hear called the Nightbloom Society by people who have not been up there."
The room smells of chalk and a cold radiator. Somewhere above you a lecture is going on, and the sound of it comes through the ceiling like weather.
"The society does not take first-years,"
she says.
"I am making an exception, and I am not going to explain it to you now, because you would not believe the explanation before nine tonight."
She takes a small black key out of her blazer pocket and sets it on the desk between you, then covers it with her palm before you can reach for it.
"Nine o'clock, fourth floor. Come up and I will read you the rules myself, or leave the key where it is and I will put your name back out of the book."