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beds were made and had the chest at the foot.
    There were no hiding places, just as there was no privacy.
    Kip tucked the dagger under the mattress. He made the bed quickly, trying to smooth out the wrinkles so the lump wasn’t obvious. Then he started walking back toward Samite.
    “So you know,” Samite said, “best way to get something stolen is to hide it under your mattress. It’s where the bullies and thieves always look first.”
    I’m
terrible
at this! I should have told my father about the dagger. Even if he took it away from me, that would have been better than having some sixteen-year-old butt fungus steal it. Damn it, mother, couldn’t you have given me a locket?
    Kip went back to his pallet, grabbed the dagger, and looked around. He walked down five rows to one of the unoccupied pallets, opened the chest under that bed, and tucked the knife under the blanket. Better than nothing. He slid the chest back under the bed, grimacing.
    “Fantastic,” he said. “What’s next?”
    Next was the tailors’, where Kip had to strip down for the fitting. The tailors were women. One of them was attractive, and as she knelt in front of him standing in his underwear, he could see straight down her cleavage. He spent the next half hour staring at the ceiling and praying. And just when Kip was finally leaving, thanking Orholam that his body hadn’t done anything to mortify him, the other woman cleared her throat and handed him an extra pair of clean underwear. “You
can
wash them once in a while,” she said conspiratorially. “And your armpits, too.”
    He almost died.
    They made him go sponge bathe—he angrily waved off the slave who tried to help him—and change into his new white tunic and new white pants, and new underwear, and a tower slave took his clothes to the barracks. Then they went and registered with some official who made Kip sign his name on a bunch of forms, and then Samite took him to the dining hall where he was allowed a very small and very fastlunch, and then she showed him where the toilets were on each level of the towers.
    And then she took him to his first class. “I can come inside or I can wait outside. Your choice,” she said.
    “Outside. Please, outside.” He was already embarrassed enough that he had a bodyguard. He looked into the lecture hall, trying to hide his nerves, while other students streamed past him. He was hungry. What wouldn’t he give for a pie right now. He asked, “Anything I should, uh, know?”
    “You’re expected not to know anything.”
    Ah, then I might even exceed expectations.

Chapter 12
     
    “Every time you draft, you’re hastening your death,” Magister Kadah said. She wasn’t yet middle-aged, but she already seemed wizened, mousy, with hunched shoulders, hair that hadn’t seen a brush or a pick in weeks, green spectacles on a gold chain around her neck, and a thin switch of green luxin in her hand. “Your death doesn’t matter, but depriving your satrap of an expensive tool does. Your death doesn’t matter, but depriving your community of what it needs to survive does. We who draft are slaves. Slaves to Orholam, to light, to the Prism, the satraps, and our cities.”
    Cheery sort. Kip tried to keep his expression neutral as he sat in on his first class at the Chromeria.
    “Lies first, lessons later,” a boy said behind Kip.
    “What?” Kip asked. He looked over his shoulder. The boy was, oddly, wearing clear spectacles with thick black mahogany frames in front of thicker black brows. The lenses made one eye look bigger than the other. But more intriguing than his Ruthgari looks—curly light brown hair, small nose, tan skin, brown eyes—were the mechanical spectacles themselves. Two colored lenses, one yellow, one blue, rested on hinges, ready to be clicked down over the clear lenses at a moment’s notice.
    The boy grinned, seeing Kip’s stare. “My own design,” he said.
    “It’s genius. I’ve never—”
    Something struck Kip’s