The girls are sitting cross-legged in a U shape and Layla and I are among the last to join them. I do a quick count and come up with twenty-five girls, including me. Maybe it’s only the advanced students, then?

Aarya sits on the opposite side of the U, smirking at me while her quiet friend with the red dreads fidgets with the hem of her cloak. I stare back at Aarya, wondering what her Family has to do with a make-believe game I played with my mom when I was little. At least, I always thought it was make-believe.

“Welcome,” Blackwood says, emerging from the staircase. She wears the same ruffled shirt with a blazer and black pants she did last night. It’s eerie the way no one’s clothes ever change in this place. Even her hair remains in the same forehead-abusing bun.

“I trust that when we search your rooms tonight, we’ll find that everything is in order,” Blackwood says, and scans the group of us. Everyone nods. I swallow, remembering the fork, and make a mental note to ask Layla if Felix could have somehow known they were doing a search tonight.

“As you all know, we have a new student,” Blackwood says, and looks at me. “So I thought we would play a strategy game.” She shifts her weight and smiles a strained smile. “We often talk about this school’s best students, about their accomplishments and their awe-inspiring feats. But we seldom talk about their failures.” She pauses. “Twenty-five years ago, there was a girl at this school who won every single midnight strategy challenge her fourth year. Every. Single. One. What’s interesting, however, is that she lost so often in her first three years people would roll their eyes when they had to go up against her. How do you explain that?”

“She spent three years strategically identifying flaws in other people’s strategies,” Aarya says, now speaking with an Italian accent. “And when she accumulated enough information, it provided a map to people’s strengths and weaknesses, allowing her to navigate them as she pleased. She also had the element of surprise after everyone assumed she would lose.”

“Very true,” Blackwood says. “There is untold advantage to true observation. Take Ines, for example—she catches details most of you miss.” She looks at Aarya’s quiet friend, who recoils ever so slightly from the compliment.

There’s a petite girl on the other side of Aarya who shoots Ines a look that I can only guess is a sort of angry jealousy. Aarya looks at her and the girl turns away, but there is definitely something going on there.

“You all are trained in verbal and body language clues,” Blackwood continues. “You analyze masterfully, but you also have egos. And if you allow your need to win to compromise your ability to truly observe, then you have missed a great deal. This girl did not make that mistake.”

Blackwood braces her hands behind her back. “Consider this example, too: In the mid-eighteen hundreds, twelve-year-old Margaret Knight witnessed a machine malfunction at a cotton mill that resulted in the injury of a worker. As a result, she invented a protective cover for that same machine that wound up being immensely popular. Unfortunately, she never got credit because she was too young to apply for a patent. But the patent wasn’t what concerned her in the moment of invention. It was the problem at hand. If you want to be truly great, you need to find solutions even when they don’t directly serve you. What else can we surmise about our former student?”