Harper Vale introduced herself by nearly walking into Jasper. She came up the gangway looking over her shoulder toward the harbour, turned at the last possible moment and stopped close enough that Jasper had to shift his bag to avoid hitting her.

"Sorry," she said. "First year?"

"Yeah."

"Good. I'm Harper. Do you know if we're allowed at the front?"

"No."

"Excellent."

She vanished up the stairs before Jasper could ask why not knowing counted as excellent. He met Ava Rees three minutes later beside the luggage racks. Ava was holding two identical luggage cards and staring at them as though one had committed fraud.

"They've labelled Row C twice," she said.

Jasper looked around to make sure she meant him. "What?" She pointed. Two racks did indeed carry C signs.

"That's going to cause a problem later."

"Probably."

Ava looked at the tag attached to Jasper's suitcase. "You're D."

"I know."

"Good."

There was a pause.

"I'm Jasper."

"Ava."

She nodded once, apparently satisfied that the conversation had achieved its objectives. By the time the boat left the harbour, Jasper had somehow ended up sitting with both girls near the bow.

The coastline followed them north beneath a fierce white sky. At first the deck was noisy with new students comparing rumours, food, old schools and the increasingly ridiculous things older siblings had told them about Tidefall. One boy claimed a staircase changed destination every Tuesday. Another said the Academy had an underwater dining hall. Harper considered both claims equally plausible. Ava considered both deeply irritating until evidence appeared.

"There is absolutely no reason a staircase would need a weekly schedule," she said.

"Maybe it likes Tuesdays," Harper replied.

"Stairs do not like things."

"You don't know that yet."

Jasper decided he liked them both. The boat staff handed out lunch boxes and a card of safety rules. Harper read the rules aloud until she reached DO NOT FEED SEABIRDS, at which point she looked personally offended. A gull answered the question by swooping past with half a sandwich stolen from somewhere behind them.

"Fine," Harper said.

For most of the morning, nothing remotely magical happened. That began to feel strange in its own way. Jasper had spent weeks imagining a school full of glowing towers and impossible transport, yet the boat had an engine, the crew wore ordinary uniforms and the lunch boxes contained sandwiches that did not sing or vanish.

The coast gradually changed. Suburbs thinned, then disappeared. Beaches narrowed into rock and scrub. The water darkened from bright blue to a deeper colour that made it difficult to judge depth. Jasper kept looking over the rail. Ava noticed after the fourth time. "Are you looking for dolphins?"

"No."

"Sharks?"

"No."

Harper leaned across him. "Bodies?" Ava turned to stare at her. "Why would that be your third guess?"

"It is a thing people look for in water."

Jasper laughed. "I'm just looking." Ava accepted this with a small nod, although Jasper suspected it had been entered into some internal file marked insufficient explanation. Near midday, the wind changed. Staff began closing windows in the lower cabin, and a pale wall appeared across the horizon ahead. Mist. Except it was too straight.

Jasper watched the white band grow until it seemed to stretch from sea to sky. A crew member asked everyone to remain seated while the boat entered the approach channel. Harper stood immediately. Ava caught the back of her jumper. "They said seated."

"I was adjusting."

"Vertically?"

The mist swallowed them. Sound changed first. The engine became dull and distant. Conversation seemed to stay close to people's mouths. Beyond the rail was nothing but grey. Jasper's chest tightened. The dream returned with unpleasant clarity. Warm black water. Silver haze. Something below. He gripped the edge of the bench. Ava saw. "You okay?"

"Yeah. It's just weird."

That part was true. Then something passed beneath the boat. Jasper did not see it. He felt a slow pressure travel through the soles of his shoes, crossing from one side of the hull to the other. The surface outside dipped almost too slightly to notice. His breath caught. The mist brightened. A dark shape emerged ahead and resolved into white cliffs rising almost vertically from the sea. Everyone on deck went quiet.

Tidefall Academy had been built into the cliffs rather than on top of them. Pale stone towers rose from the rock itself, joined by arched bridges over narrow cuts in the headland. Covered walkways followed the cliff face at several levels. Windows flashed in the afternoon light, and lower down, platforms and stairs descended toward a sheltered harbour carved into the stone. Farther inland, roofs stepped upward between trees and wind-bent scrub. Silver pennants snapped above the highest towers. Harper stood again. This time Ava forgot to stop her.

"That's enormous."

Ava slowly unfolded the printed map she had been carrying. "This is not to scale."

"That's your first thought?"

"It is extremely not to scale."

Jasper barely heard them. The sea near the cliffs behaved differently. Currents curved along the rock in long deliberate lines, forming and reforming bands of foam. The boat turned toward the harbour entrance, where a stone arch carried the academy crest.

TIDEFALL ACADEMY was carved above it.

Jasper felt the pressure behind his ribs again. Not strong. Not even close to the dream. But familiar. He looked down into the dark water beside the hull. For a moment he thought he saw a shadow moving far below, too broad to belong to any boat in the harbour. Then the sun shifted and it was gone.

"You look seasick," Harper said.

Jasper glanced at her. "I'm not."

"Good, because we're here."

The boat touched the dock with a gentle bump. Ropes flew. Teachers called rows and luggage groups. Jasper looked up at the stone stairs climbing from the harbour toward the Academy. He had spent six weeks wondering what Tidefall would be like.

Once the harbour had fallen behind them, the three new acquaintances settled into the strange process of deciding how much to tell one another. Harper volunteered information freely. She had a younger brother, hated mushrooms, had already searched photographs of Tidefall online and was disappointed that every official image seemed taken from approximately the same three angles.

"Suspicious," she said. "If a school only shows one side of itself, the other side probably contains something excellent."

Ava had downloaded every public map she could find and discovered that several contradicted one another.

"Which is probably construction history," she said. "Not conspiracy."

"You say that now."

Jasper contributed that his father had spent the previous week pretending Tidefall would teach him to levitate household chores. He did not mention the dream. The conversation moved easily after that. They compared old schools and magical assessments. Harper admitted that during hers she had become annoyed at a wooden block refusing to move and kicked it across the room.

"With magic?" Jasper asked.

"No. My foot worked."

Ava laughed, the first time Jasper had heard her do it. That moment did more to turn the three of them into friends than any dramatic shared secret could have. By the time the coast grew wild, they had begun speaking in the careless shorthand of people who expected the conversation to continue. The mist interrupted them all at once.

Even Harper stopped making jokes when the grey swallowed the horizon completely. Jasper noticed tiny droplets collecting on the rail despite the wind. The boat slowed without anyone announcing why, and crew members moved with the calm precision of people following a route they had travelled hundreds of times. Ava unfolded the map again.

"The approach channel isn't drawn."

"Maybe secret," Harper whispered.

Ava looked at the grey around them. "Or deliberately omitted from public maps."

"That is a more official way to say secret."

Jasper would remember that exchange years later because it was the first time Tidefall stopped being a destination and became a place with boundaries. He was beginning to suspect six weeks had not been enough.