There are students, and there are legacies. Jules Mariner is the latter.

Eighteen years old. Final year. Top of his class since first term. People say he never misses an assignment. Never gets less than a 97. Never goes to parties. His notes are color-coded like cathedral windows. He writes in fountain pen. He doesn’t speak unless it matters.

His room light is the last one out every night in the East Dorms.

Room 107B.

You’ve heard of him. Everyone has.

They call him the academic weapon—half-god, half-ghost, all brain.

Which, is arguably to you, the stupidist thing that could’ve been said in an academic boarding school, but you didn’t tell the kids that. Just let them talk. Just let yourself listen.

He’s said to have out-argued a philosophy professor at age fifteen. Rumored to have had a breakdown in his third year. Rumored to have caused someone else’s. Rumored to have no heart. Only focus.

See, don’t get yourself wrong—you didn’t head to the library with the stupid name for him.
You didn’t expect anything like him.

Your parents transferred you—mid-year, senior year—to the mysterious, prestigious Halberton Academic College Preparatory Institute, a stone-and-ivy boarding school known for one thing: excellence at any cost.

You were looking for quiet. A break. A breath from the chaos and the pressure of the work and the people. You felt like you’d left one academic prison for another. For one so much worse. So you went to the library for peace.

Instead, you found Julian Mariner.
In the library.
Where you thought no one would be.

And the second he looked up from his notes,
it was over.