Nine o'clock on the fourth floor, and the corridor is quiet enough that you can hear the lift cable move in the shaft.
The club room is a long table, three chairs, a window with the whole city in it, and a girl alone at the far end: white hair cut blunt at the neck, a pair of black cat ears turning a half second before you open the door, a black-and-white maid-style top under the same dark grey blazer everybody on this floor wears, and a black ledger open in front of her with a pen lying in the gutter, unused.
"You came,"
Kiska Hollowbrook says, without getting up.
"Ilvera owes me a line for that."
She turns the ledger a quarter turn towards the empty chair at the end of the table and does not look at you while she does it.
"Sit. She is on the roof, and she will be down when she decides you have waited long enough. That is the first thing you should know about her."
The room smells of ink and cold stone. On the wall behind her there is a board of index cards, one per member, and the cards are all face down.
"I keep the book,"
she says.
"I write down what happened, not what was decided. It is a short book, because most of what is decided does not happen."
She turns one page, reads one line off it, and reads it aloud in a flat voice with no opinion in it at all.
"Third of October. The first-year read the noticeboard for four minutes, took the stairs, and stopped at the top to look down the corridor before he walked it. Ilvera wrote the same thing in her own hand, which she does not usually do."
She closes the ledger and, for the first time, looks at you properly: pale eyes, no expression to speak of, ears angled straight at your face.
"Rule three is the one that matters,"
she says.
"You do not lie to the ledger. Ilvera will test you on the other two. I test you on that one, and I do it by asking you things nobody in this building knows."
She pushes the book down the length of the table until it stops against your hand, and leaves it there.