Midnight Academy. Born at midnight

I pushed D-Rolly in the right direction with all my might.

– Don't know. But personally, I wouldn't want to run into any of them. What they tell about them in class instills real fear. Have you finished eating? You need to get in line for the showers.

There were two bathrooms on each floor of the two-story building. In any of them you could find four sinks and a large full-length mirror above them, two showers behind separate doors and two offices for deep thoughts.

Considering that two students lived in each room, and there were eight rooms on the floor in total, this was enough to avoid standing in line for hours.

I was also immensely pleased that the second floor of the building was allocated exclusively for girls. The guys lived on the first floor, and, unlike us, they had noise until the very night yesterday. However, I also heard girls’ voices, which means we were allowed to move between floors.

Between floors, but not between rooms. Both the first and second floors had their own common living rooms, and they were the place for gatherings. The neighbor also showed me the room for washing and drying clothes, the storage room where they got clean towels if yours with the academy emblem became unusable, as well as the curator’s room.

There were five buildings in our part of the academy, depending on the number of years of study. There was a separate building dedicated to the work of healers. They were witches and witchers, and sometimes students were transferred here for practice. This is how D-Rolly met our neighbors in the territory.

– You won’t get lost alone, right? – the neighbor asked for the second time, as soon as we returned from the showers to our room. “I need to transfer Rory to the witches’ side before class.” They have sun there, and it grows better,” she explained, as if apologizing.

I took out from the common closet the uniform the curator gave me yesterday.

– Go, of course. Meet me in the dining room.

Grabbing her ward, for whom she was either writing a course paper or doing a lab, the redhead ran out of the room like a whirlwind. I just shook my head and smiled, looking after her.

In general, I was given three sets of casual clothes. The first is red and black: black turtleneck, black trousers and burgundy jacket. The second one is completely black – a sports one, consisting of pants and a T-shirt with long sleeves.

But I was going to wear the third one.

It consisted of a simple white shirt, a blue jacket, a short skirt and a matching tie. It seems to be strict, but not entirely official. Rather mischievous.

Having changed my clothes, putting on sneakers instead of the soft slippers given to me, I went out into the corridor. Having greeted the curator of our floor, I preferred to quickly hide from under her gaze, because Mademoiselle Ornina Welby fully lived up to her name.

Dark-haired, brown-eyed, a little on the body and about my height. She created a pleasant impression until she opened her mouth. The woman screamed at her charges from the bottom of her heart, without really understanding who was right and who was wrong.

But that was precisely her job. Maintaining discipline was why she was here in the first place. However, she could equally be called a business executive. Bed linen, towels, household products and uniforms – she was responsible for all of this, as well as for the safety of furniture and repairs in our rooms.

But the most important thing is that she was the one who decided who would receive permission to visit the city. One-time passes were given to students only for good grades. I found out about this when yesterday I asked to be allowed to go pick up my office for a while to study. I tried to cheat, but they simply gave me a whole box of everything I needed.

Then I decided to go the other way. She asked me to be released into the human world for an hour in order to give my mother important documents that she had forgotten in my backpack, which was a lie. But she was refused again. Because I didn’t yet have a dagger – an artifact enchanted by witches.

It was issued to all graduate students, and only with its help could one open a passage to the Light Side using the doorway on the second floor of the city library.

True, there was another way to get to the other side – together with a teacher for a practical lesson. That is, whatever one may say, in the current conditions I had only one option – to study. Of course, unless I come up with something else.

Having passed the stairs, I, along with other first-year students, climbed out onto a small porch. I felt unusual going out under the starry sky. The body said that it was early morning, but the eyes saw something else – a solid dark canvas and the absence of the moon. And also lanterns, trees and darkened paths among flowering bushes and neat flower beds.

The air smelled of something sweet, but unobtrusive. The slight coolness did not constrain the body. On the contrary, I felt the freshness that happens on an early summer morning, when the dust of the day is still nailed to the roads.

I felt great. For the first time I didn’t put on lenses, and without them it was as if I could even see more clearly, sharper. And I was breathing completely differently – more freely, as if a rope to which a heavy stone had been tied had finally been removed from my neck.