It seemed somewhat ridiculous to point out that the valley looked nothing like a school, so I didn’t. Once we were outside the van, it became clear just how nauseatingly idyllic the place was. The grass under my feet was bright green and ridiculously soft, and the sun above was at just the right angle to provide perfect lighting even though we were surrounded on all sides by high grey cliffs. I eyed the cliffs for handholds and quickly dismissed them as unclimbable without proper equipment. Down one end, a small waterfall splashed into a little stream, which meandered through the flower-dotted grass for a bit before vanishing into a crack in the cliff.

“Did anyone see how he got the van in here?” I asked. Kylie shrugged.

“Follow me, please,” Mr Cooper said, striding purposefully towards what I’d taken to be a deep shadow in a cliff face, but turned out to be a tunnel. We all grabbed our bags and followed him.

The entrance was narrow but the tunnel quickly widened, a natural fissure giving way to hewn stone walls. Every few metres a glowing blue crystal about the size of my fist was set into the wall.

“Anywhere with blue lighting is a general area,” Mr Cooper explained. “Other colours mean restrictions. But as initiates, in your first six months, you won’t need to worry about them much.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To the cafeteria and initiate dormitories. I need to speak to you each individually and register you in the school system properly. You’ll each have an opportunity to settle in while I’m registering the others.

“There won’t be very many initiates here yet, so you’ll probably have first claim to whatever dormitories you want. When they – ah, here we are.”

The passage forked into two tunnels. Mr Cooper took the left and lead us into a large stone hall with several long wooden tables running through the middle. The outside of the room was ringed with more tables, but these ones were covered in white tablecloths and laden with cutlery. A few displayed food.

“There’ll be a better selection of food once all the students are back,” Mr Cooper explained. “We do a lighter fare during the holidays; it’s a waste of food otherwise. Nonus, if you would – ”

“My name’s Max,” Max insisted.

“Very well. Max, if you would come with me?” He led Max back out of the room, leaving Kylie and me to stare at a table of assorted cakes and sandwiches.

“I’m like you,” I told Kylie the moment we were alone.

“What?”

“I’m like you.” I lifted my shirt just high enough for her to see the witch mark. “I’m cursed, too. I think it’s pretty obvious that Max isn’t, but two out of three isn’t…”

I trailed off. Kylie’s expression reflected none of the surprise and gratitude I’d felt in seeing her mark. It was a mask of betrayal and disgust.

I dropped my shirt back down. “I just thought you should know,” I finished weakly.

“But I wasn’t worth telling in the van when that creep was staring at me,” she said evenly, selecting a tomato sandwich and dropping it onto a plate. “I guess you didn’t want to be too uncomfortable, hmm? Better let someone else deal with that. Am I just supposed to keep your secret now?”

“What? No. No, it’s… it’s not a secret. Any more. How about this – I’ll tell you how I ended up here, if you tell me how you ended up here.”

“No thanks,” Kylie said, adding an apple to her plate and wandering over to a table. Trying not to look too upset, I concentrated on getting some food for myself, then tried to choose a seat in the vast hall that didn’t look like I was trying to either crowd Kylie or avoid her. This took quite some time, so by the time I’d picked my way through all the parts of the salad I’d chosen that I actually wanted to eat, Max had returned and Mr Cooper was calling me over.

He led me into a small office. At least I assumed it was an office; the hand-carved stone walls of a vast underground complex worked great for large eating halls but tended to look a but silly surrounding flimsy filing cabinets and paper-strewn desks. The glowing crystal lighting this room wasn’t just a fist-sized chunk, but a flat sheet about the size of a small window, glowing faintly blue. Somebody had put a window frame over it to complete the illusion. I tried not to look amused.

Mr Cooper handed me a thick piece of clear perspex, about the size of an A5 piece of paper. There was the red outline of a hand on it. I pressed my own hand over the outline; the outline filled in red for a moment, then vanished.

“This is your tablet,” Mr Cooper said. “From now on, it’ll only respond to your touch.”

I inspected the device. It still just looked like a piece of perspex, but within it, some icons had formed, like a computer desktop. “I thought we couldn’t have electronics here,” I said.

“Students aren’t permitted to bring in electronics from outside,” Mr Cooper corrected. “The systems the school uses are not compatible with outside electronics and there have been… incidents. For the same reason, you won’t be able to access the internet from school grounds; we have our own intranet, build on a very different system.”

That sounded like bullshit to me – if the systems weren’t compatible, I didn’t see how one would affect the other at all – but I didn’t know much about electronics. The basics of the device weren’t hard to figure out; I found the word processor, camera and intranet browser within about thirty seconds.

“There’s also some language translation software,” Mr Cooper said, tapping a capital A in the corner of the screen. “You should be able to get by with just English for six months, but this is an international school, so you’ll need that to talk to some of the students and teachers. If you continue to study next year, you’ll be expected to start learning Ido, of course.”

“I only agreed to six months,” I pointed out.

“Of course. Touch your palm to this screen as well, please?” He held out a second perspex screen with a hand outline on it.

I did so. “Why?”

“It’s to put your imprint into our school system. So you can open locked doors and soforth, to areas you have access to. I just need to confirm some of your details. Your birthday is January fourth?”

“Yes.”

“Your blood type is A negative, and you have no health conditions?”

“Only this,” I said, tapping my chest. I’d just discovered that my tablet had minesweeper on it.

“Great! Now, your name…”

I braced myself. I hadn’t been looking forward to this part.

“I understand that you don’t use your birth name, correct?”

“That’s right.”

“The would you prefer to be registered in our system under the name you use instead?”

I looked up. “You can do that?”

“Oh, yes. You’d be surprised just how many students don’t use the names they were given at birth here. A lot of the older mage families have legacy names; once they pick who will be the family mage in a generation, that child takes on the family mage name instead of their childhood name, so our systems are developed with this in mind. I’ve taught four generations of Quartez girls who, so far as I know, are all named Um Dourado.”

“So even the teachers can’t tell who they were born as?”

Mr Cooper shrugged. “There’s a reference number somewhere in the system to link our student’s identities with their national legal identities, so school records and soforth can be transferred. But it doesn’t check actual details, which is why I have to confirm everything manually. Do you want me to put you down as Kayden?”

“Yes, please.”

“I’ll get you to put the name in, to make sure the spelling’s right.” He handed me his tablet. I erased KELSIE MARIE JAMES, replaced it with KAYDEN MARK JAMES, and handed it back.

“If you’ll look at me, I need a photograph for the records,” he said, raising the perspex to make a little window between us. I did my best to look like someone who didn’t just clamber out of a mysterious van and find themselves in a network of strange caves until he lowered it again.

“Great!” he said. “Almost done…”

When I walked back into the cafeteria, Max and Kylie were engaged in conversation. They didn’t seem to be fighting, which I supposed was a good sign. Mr Cooper called Kylie away, leaving me and Max alone.

He grinned at me, looking a lot more relaxed than he had in the van. “Kayden! How are you liking Skolala Refujeyo so far?”

“Well, the two rooms I’ve seen sure are fascinating,” I said. “How about you?”

“I’m ready to explore, now that we have maps,” he said, withdrawing his tablet from his little suitcase. “Should we go find a dormitory to put our stuff in?”

“Yeah, let’s.” I pulled up the map on my own tablet and realised immediately that it wasn’t a very good one. It centred on where I was, showing me the area around me in a radius of about 50m, but there didn’t seem to be any way to view the whole school. I found a drop-down menu on one side and selected ‘initiate – dormitories’. A red line appeared on the map, indicating the path I should take.

“Oh, it’s a GPS,” I muttered as we left the cafeteria. “I wonder if there’s an option to give it a snarky voice.”

The map led us through a couple of winding tunnels to a long, perfectly straight hall, with an actual wooden floor instead of stone worn smooth by generations of feet. The crystals lighting the path were blue, the colour of universal access, and the walls were lined with seemingly endless wooden doors, each with an A5-sized piece of transparent perspex in the middle. Each panel had the outline of a spread hand on it. I wandered over to touch one, but Max grabbed my wrist.

“We should probably read the instructions first,” he pointed out, searching through something on his tablet.

I looked meaningfully at the hand outline on the panel. “You know, I think we might be able to figure it out,” I said.

“And what happens if, when you touch it, it locks that room to you, like with these?” he asked, waving his tablet. “What if the rooms are different sized, with different facilities? Do you want to be stuck in the first room you happened to see?”

I rolled my eyes and stepped back while he skimmed through detailed documents on how doors worked.

“Okay,” he said, “it should be fine.”

I pressed my hand to the panel and opened the door.

The room inside looked impractically designed. There was a straight expanse down the middle of the room a couple of metres wide, and the door at the other end was slightly ajar, revealing a bathroom. The middle area was lined with six beds, three to a side, each one made up with a very tacky quilt cover that matched an equally tacky set of bed curtains. The one to my immediate right had a pale blue bedspread covered in gold and silver stars with matching blue curtains; the one to my left was black with some kind of magic circle design stitched into it, and had multiple layers of black and silver gauze for curtains as if a thirteen-year-old goth girl had been given a credit card in the manchester department and told to go nuts. The one behind that was a plain cream colour, but what looked like alchemical formulae had been printed on the curtains like a very intrusive study aid.

But the thing that was odd about the beds wasn’t their presumably-hilarious smattering of vaguely magical-themed designs; it was that they weren’t against the walls. Their curtains were open, and beyond each bed I could see a chest of drawers, a desk and chair; a little private space for the bed’s occupant, separated from the space of the next bed’s occupant by a wall of stone. I was relieved to see that everyone had some personal space, but I figured there was an easier way to get that effect than by putting such a space behind a bed they’d have to climb over to get into it. Perhaps by using an amazing new invention known as a ‘door’.

I reached out to smooth a pillow, only for my fingers to slam into something invisible and unyielding.

“There’s a force field there,” Max remarked drily as I yelped and stuck my fingers in my mouth. He scrolled through a document on his tablet. “Apparently only the owner of the bed can move through it.”

“And how do we get to be the owner of a bed, smart guy?” I mumbled around my fingers.

“Access panel,” he said, pointing out yet more little perspex panels on the stone next to the beds that I hadn’t noticed. “You can claim whatever bed you want, but only have one bed at a time; so if you touch a new panel, you relinquish your claim to the previous one.” He read further. “Oh, and the dorm room locks, too. I was worried about that. If a bed’s claimed, only someone with a bed claimed in the room can open it. So if you want to share the room with someone else, you have to let them in so they can claim a bed, then the room door will open for them, too. So don’t leave your stuff in one room and then go claim a bed in another, I guess.”

I glanced around the room. Six beds. That was a lot of roommates.

“Are all the rooms the same size?” I asked.

“They range from four to twelve beds, apparently. The only real difference I can find is the more beds, the bigger and nicer the bathrooms, which makes sense I suppose. I happen to know that the number of initiates this time of year is really low, so I think we’re going to have a lot more rooms than we need. I’m going to claim a bedroom with lots of beds, since it won’t fill up anyway and I get a super nice bathroom.”

“You’ve thought this out,” I noted.

“Rooms with ten or twelve beds come with televisions and coffee machines,” he noted, like this was a big deal.

“Great.” I glanced around the room once more, taking in the tacky bedspreads, the stone walls, and the softly glowing crystals. For the next six months this, I supposed, was my home.