Soren left the dorm at the seventh hour with Grimm at his heel and a stranger was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
That was new. Nobody waited for him in this building.
The stranger was a second-year with a banded lizard on his shoulder and he'd clearly rehearsed the opening because it came out too smooth.
"You're Kane," he said. "The one who took C off a proctor's boar."
"I passed an evaluation."
"That's not what people are saying."
Soren went up past him and the boy followed for three steps before the lizard hissed and he stopped.
He had not been recognized in this building for most of a season.
The whole point of Class Z was that nobody looked at it.
A class nobody could rank was a class nobody bothered to watch and that had been the only wall he actually trusted.
The wall was gone now.
He'd torn it down himself in a square of packed dirt in front of a table of evaluators, and the chime had told him so, and he'd read it once and moved on.
