Chapter 1: The Boy Who Stole Nothing

The Great Hall of Highcrest Royal Academy could hold a thousand students, and that morning every seat was taken.

Nothing brought nobles together quite like watching a commoner fall.

Aren stood in the middle of the stone floor with a guard at each elbow, while cold grey light came down from the tall windows and a thousand faces looked back at him, curious, bored, and mostly pleased.

’So this is what a show trial feels like from the inside. Lovely.’

On the platform, Professor Gideon Crane read from a sheet of paper as if every word bored him personally. He was a thin man with a thin voice and, Aren was fairly sure, a thin soul.

"Last night, the Dawn Seal was taken from the Academy vault," Crane said. "This morning, it was found in the trunk of a first-year student. A scholarship student." He checked the paper. "Aren. No family name."

Somebody laughed, and a murmur went around the benches.

The Dawn Seal sat on a velvet cushion beside Crane, a gold disk the size of a palm, old and absurdly valuable. Aren had never seen it before today. Someone had carefully wrapped it in his spare shirt and buried it at the bottom of his trunk, under his books, exactly where a thief would hide it.

’Very thoughtful of them. They even folded the shirt.’

"We also have a witness," Crane went on. "Lord Penrose saw the accused near the vault at midnight."

Aldous Penrose, a second-year with a weak chin and a rich father, stood up in the third row, nodded once, and sat back down without looking at Aren.

At midnight, Aren had been at the healer house in the lower city, holding his sister upright in her bed. Nell was twelve. She had Rift sickness, and on bad nights she couldn’t breathe unless someone held her up. The only people who had seen him there were a sick little girl and a tired nurse, and neither of them would ever be allowed to speak against a lord.

"Do you have anything to say?" Crane asked.

"I didn’t take it."

"Noted." Crane wrote nothing down. "By order of the Academy, your scholarship is revoked as of today. You may remain a student until the end of the month, provided you pay the term fees in full. Forty gold crowns."

Aren had three silver coins in his pocket. Crane knew that. Everyone in the hall knew that.

The scholarship didn’t only pay for his classes. It came with a small allowance, and every coin of that went to the healer house. Without it, Nell’s treatment would stop in thirty days. He had worked that out before Crane even finished the sentence. He had always been good with numbers.

"That is all," Crane said. "Guards, you may..."

"Sir."

Darius Holt rose from the front row: tall, handsome, heir of House Holt, the best young swordsman of his year, and the boy every noble girl in the Academy wanted to dance with. He had the easy smile of someone who had never once been told no.

"With respect, Professor, the Academy code says a thief should learn a lesson before he leaves."

Crane looked at him briefly, then went back to his paper.

’Oh, wonderful. Audience participation.’

Darius strolled over, and the guards stepped back. Aren saw the punch coming and didn’t move, because moving would only make it worse. The fist sank in under his ribs and all the air left him at once. A knee came up into his face, the world flashed white, and then he was on the floor with blood in his mouth while the hall roared with laughter.

"Holt," Crane said, without much interest.

"He slipped, Professor." Darius crouched beside him and lowered his voice. "You should have stayed in the gutter, rat. People like you don’t belong here."

Aren didn’t answer. He was busy remembering how lungs worked.

"He was at the healer house all night!"

He knew the voice before he looked up. Mira Hale was pushing furiously through the crowd from the back of the hall, red-faced, her brown hair half out of its tie. She had grown up three streets from him in the lower city. She had won her own scholarship a year before he did and nagged him relentlessly until he applied. She was the only person in this building who had ever been kind to him without wanting something back.

"Ask the healers!" she shouted. "Ask anyone at the house! He was with his sister!"

"Miss Hale," Crane said. "Were you there?"

"No, but I know him."

"Then you are not a witness. Ten demerits. Sit down."

Mira didn’t sit down. "This is wrong, and you know it."

"Twenty demerits."

A guard took her arm. She yanked it free and kept walking toward the platform. Aren lifted his head, caught her eye, and shook it, just a little.

Stop. It won’t help. You’ll lose your place too.

She stared at him with her jaw tight and her eyes wet with anger, and for a second he thought she would keep going anyway. Then she let the guard turn her around, and the laughter followed her all the way back to her seat.

Aren pushed himself up to his knees, wiped his bleeding nose on his sleeve, and looked up.

That was when he saw her.

The upper gallery ran along the back wall, where the heirs of the great houses sat above everyone else, as usual. In the middle of it, in a white uniform with a silver pin at the collar, sat Vivienne Ashgrave.

Everyone at Highcrest knew her name. She was the heir of the most powerful house in the kingdom after the crown, first in every class she took, and beautiful enough that rooms went quiet when she walked into them. Aren had spoken to her exactly once, three weeks ago, when he held a library door open for her. She had walked through it without a word.

She was looking at him now, and she wasn’t surprised or angry. She looked like someone calmly checking that a plan had gone the way it was supposed to.

Then she smiled, a small, polite smile, and lifted two fingers from the railing in a tiny wave, as if they were old friends.

And Aren suddenly understood everything. Penrose’s father was a vassal of House Ashgrave. The guards who had searched his trunk wore Ashgrave colors on their sleeves. The whole thing had been done cleanly and quickly, with no loose ends, and it had her name all over it.

’But why? What did I do? Hold a door too politely?’

The guards hauled him up by the arms and walked him out.

It was raining in the courtyard.

Aren sat on the steps of the old dormitory they kept for scholarship students and let the rain wash the blood off his face. His ribs hurt when he breathed, and his nose felt twice its normal size.

Thirty days. Forty gold crowns. Three silver coins.

He thought about Nell, and that hurt more than the ribs.

There was something else in his head too, something he never talked about. He had lived before. In his first life, on a world with no magic and far too many screens, he had been a trader, and a good one for a while. He had ruined people for money and slept perfectly well afterward, and he had died at forty-one in a rented flat, owing more than he had ever earned, with a cheap web novel open on his phone. Near the end, he had read a lot of them.

He looked around the empty courtyard and nearly laughed.

A poor boy framed for theft. A public beating. A cruel rich girl smiling down from a balcony. Rain! He had read this Chapter a hundred times, and he knew exactly what came next. The boy sat alone at his lowest point, and a blue screen appeared and handed him a cheat to destroy everyone who had hurt him.

"Come on," he muttered at the sky. "This is the part where the System shows up."

Nothing happened. The rain kept falling, and somewhere behind the walls a bell rang for second class.

He rubbed his face and felt stupid. This wasn’t a story, and Nell wasn’t a plot device. She was a real kid in a real bed, and in thirty days nobody would pay for her medicine. It had always been easy to roll his eyes at this kind of setup. It was a lot less funny from the inside.

He stood up slowly, one hand on his ribs.

That was when the blue screen appeared.

[The Enemy Investment System has bound to the Host.][Scanning for hostile individuals...][Highest Hostility detected: Vivienne Ashgrave.][Hostility toward Host: 94%.][Every investment in a hostile Anchor returns between x10 and x10,000.][Recommended action: Invest in her.]

He read it once, and then again, more slowly, because surely he had missed a line somewhere.

’Invest in her? In HER?’

He had expected revenge: a quest to crush his enemies, a skill to make Darius bleed, a timer and a nice reward. That was how these things worked! Instead, the System wanted him to help the girl who had just destroyed his life in front of a thousand people.

He started to laugh. It hurt his ribs, and he kept laughing anyway, standing alone in the rain like a madman.

Because the old trader in him had understood it before the rest of him did. The biggest returns always came from the thing everyone else hated. You bought at the bottom, while the whole world called you a fool. And right now, nobody in this world hated Aren more than Vivienne Ashgrave did.

He wiped the rain from his eyes and looked back up at the gallery windows, where she had smiled at him.

For the first time that day, he smiled too.

"Fine," he told nobody. "Let’s invest."