My senses are overwhelmed by the level of luxury on display; every corridor gleams with buttery marble, oil paintings of improbable value hanging in golden frames along the walls. The headmistress herself—Madame Kerensky, a matronly figure in black cashmere and pearls—glides beside me, her steps so soft I wonder if she is even leaving footprints on the Persian rugs. She describes each gilded door as if revealing the secrets of a lost continent: the Olympic-standard aquatics center, the theater with velvet seats imported from Milan, the greenhouse in which peacocks preen among the orchids. We pass an open lounge where two girls in tailored gray uniforms converse in French while a third plays a Chopin nocturne at a baby grand, and it is impossible to tell if their laughter is sincere or cultivated for effect. The staff greet us with discreet bows—there must be a dozen of them within my line of sight at any moment, all dressed in crisp navy livery—and Madame Kerensky notes with pride that the school maintains a one-to-one staff-to-student ratio. Even the air here is perfumed, some rarefied blend of pine and white tea and privilege.
I am told the princess prefers to lunch in her private conservatory, and that I will be permitted to meet her once my background check is processed.
After the grand tour, I'm ushered up spiral stairs to the residential wing—my home for the foreseeable future. Here, as the admissions page so delicately hinted, the living arrangements are "coeducational by design, supporting the school's ethos of trust, partnership, and intellectual intimacy." Translation: each double suite houses a boy and a girl, often strangers, with the explicit hope that they might become something more by semester's end. They call it the "Courtship Curriculum," a grotesque blend of social engineering and classicist romance, but most students refer to it as The Arrangement.
My room is a sunlit rectangle at the end of the south wing, separated from the corridor by a glass door etched with the Casillas crest. Inside, two beds—identical, ruthlessly neat—face opposite walls, each with its own antique desk and a brass reading lamp bolted to the headboard. There's a faint scent of linen and eucalyptus, and the remnants of someone else's lemon shampoo from the shared bathroom. As I drag my suitcase over the threshold, I see a single white envelope resting on my pillow, addressed in elegant, looping cursive.
My assigned companion is already here, perched cross-legged on her bed with a textbook in her lap and a cup of milky coffee steaming by her ankle. She looks up when I enter—olive skin, sharp eyes, hair tucked into a glossy bun—and for a brief moment we regard each other with the mutual suspicion of cats introduced by force. She closed her book and said you must be Leondias she says. "I'm Amaira ." Her accent is hard to place: not quite Spain, not quite South America.
We exchange the usual summary of details—where we're from, what we're studying, how often we turn down the bedsheets—and then lapse into a silence as thick as the carpet. I realize with creeping dread that the administration expects us to become an item, to perform the rituals of teenage romance so the yearbook can feature another success story. Couples bred in the conservatory, matched by academic interest and genetic potential, ready to carry the Casillas legacy across continents.
I drift to the window, staring out at the stretch of forest beyond the tennis courts, wondering if anyone here ever falls in love by accident, or if even heartbreak is scheduled and simulated down to the last tear.
She rose from her place on the bed with the deliberate grace of someone who carried centuries of tradition in her gestures. Without a word, she moved to the corner alcove, where she slipped open a lacquered wardrobe and retrieved a sky-blue prayer rug, its edges frayed from years of folding and unfolding. In one fluid motion, she wrapped her hair in a navy chiffon hijab, tucking each strand as if composing a silent poem, and then layered on a black niqab that left only her eyes visible, so suddenly transformed it was as if a minor royal had entered the humble dormitory. I watched as she aligned her mat to face the window—due east, toward Makkah, I guessed—and checked her phone for the precise prayer time.
The sun, bold and low, cast a gold stripe across the rug. She knelt, her posture an axis of humility and composure, and began the ritual. Each motion—bowing, kneeling, pressing her forehead to the mat—felt both intimate and inviolable, a choreography of spiritual attention that seemed impossible to interrupt. There was no hesitation or self-consciousness in her worship, only a practiced immersion that made the rest of the room fade into afterthought. I noticed she prayed in whispers, lips forming syllables I could neither catch nor decode, but the effect was almost oceanic: a hush, a drawing inward, a gathering of something ancient and unbreakable.
It was a strange kind of power, this faith. Not the kind that bent people like steel, but more like water—flowing, inevitable, shaping the vessel around it. I found myself embarrassed for my own lack of devotion, the threadbare rituals I'd abandoned in my own family years before. Even in this fortress of secular power, surrounded by blasphemous wealth and calculated desire, Amaira's performance of piety seemed to rearrange the molecules in the air.
She finished her prayers, folding the rug along its original creases, and smoothed her hijab before turning back to me. There was no flush of exertion, no sheepishness, only a placid readiness to resume whatever assignment or conversation came next.
The silence between us was companionable, measured. In that stillness, I mapped out the path the administration had designed for us—a path I was already expected to walk, or perhaps run—while Amaira went about the work of making her bed with military precision, each corner tucked so sharply you could draw blood on the seams. Here, the word "arrangement" wasn't a euphemism. It was a contract, written in the secret language of legacy and ambition. From the moment you arrived, you were paired off, your genetic signature and academic interests thrown together in a data-driven parlor game. I'd heard stories from upperclassmen: the "arrangement" was not just a means to an end, but a crucible, designed to see whether the raw material of teenage ego could be refined into something presentable for the world stage.
In Amaira, I saw the logic of their system. She was the ideal candidate for cohabitation and courtship—a person who would never collapse at the first sign of emotional turbulence, who would not mistake infatuation for purpose. I doubted she would ever cry about me, or anything else, unless it was for the sake of decorum. If I played my role even half-competently, we could coast through the semester as the model pair, our "intellectual intimacy" staged for the benefit of faculty and donors. This would be to our mutual advantage.
But I also knew my own limitations: I am a poor actor, especially when the audience is myself. The school's talent for matchmaking—so surgical and unerring—left me with the sense that I might never again experience real surprise, or real desire, in any form. It would all be managed, channeled, and made productive, just like everything else.
Still, Amaira was a better match than most. She didn't ask questions about my background or why my parents were rarely mentioned; she never made reference to the rumors circulating among the other students, the ones about my uncle's sudden windfall or my own lowly origins. At breakfast the next day, she slid a cup of coffee across the table in silent solidarity while performing calculus in her head, unbothered by the noise of my cousin's arrival.
Let us set aside—for now—the topic of my future wife. It is hardly a pressing concern, not in a place like this. Here, marriages are as much strategic alliances as affairs of the heart, and the true focus, at least for those with any sense of self-preservation, is the architecture of power itself. This is no ordinary finishing school or prep academy; it is a greenhouse for the rarest and most invasive species of ambition. The students are handpicked for their bloodlines, their cognitive gifts, and—above all—their capacity for duplicity. It is an institution renowned, even among cynics, for producing individuals who do not simply rise to the top but repurpose the very notion of a "top" to suit their ends.
The headmistress's welcome speech made it clear enough: "You are not here to learn facts, but to transform the conditions under which facts are made relevant." A former president's daughter, a startup founder's heir, a whole litter of minor royalty—every corridor, every seminar room was a petri dish for perfecting the next iteration of control. In the student body's unspoken code, you measured worth not by GPA, but by the quality of your manipulations: how elegantly you could turn a peer group into a voting bloc, or persuade a faculty chaperone to co-sign your academic fraud. The only sin here was lack of subtlety; getting caught was not a moral failing but an aesthetic one.
They taught ethics, of course—whole modules on the history and philosophy of justice—but always with a sly, meta-ironic inflection. My favorite teacher, Dr. Perrault, delivered a lecture titled "The Virtue of Self-Interest" and punctuated it with case studies of alumni who had manipulated entire student cohorts into voting for their policies, then went on to write constitutions or destabilize elections in countries I had previously only known as vacation destinations. Every lesson doubled as a warning: trust no one, least of all your own motives. Paranoia was less a symptom than a baseline.
This culture bred excellence, but also an exquisite loneliness. There were nights when I could hear, through the paper-thin walls, the stifled sobs of a would-be chess grandmaster who'd been outmaneuvered in class, or the low, venomous laughter of a girl who'd just orchestrated her roommate's social demise. No one was immune, least of all me, though I clung to the hope that I'd at least see my own downfall coming.
The Casillas legacy was everywhere, embossed on every surface and stitched into the DNA of the curriculum. The family's reach extended into the faculty, the donor base, the governing board. Every day, I received reminders—in the form of cryptic notes, sudden schedule changes, or the casual references of upperclassmen—that my success or failure here was not my own, but a matter of organizational reputation. It was as if I had been assigned, without my consent, the role of a favored lab rat in a generations-long experiment.
Yet for all its cutthroat intensity, the place had its rituals of mercy. On Fridays, the kitchen staff served a communal meal—slow-cooked lamb, spiced rice, sugared figs—at long tables in the sunroom, where rivals would set aside their vendettas for the duration of a shared dessert. Even here, alliances were forged over baklava, enmities suspended in the haze of cardamom and honey. For a moment, the war was only background noise.
So yes, this school produces some of the most powerful and conniving people in the world. And every day, we wake up knowing we are expected to become one of them.
Let us set aside—for now—the topic of my future wife. It is hardly a pressing concern, not in a place like this. Here, marriages are as much strategic alliances as affairs of the heart, and the true focus, at least for those with any sense of self-preservation, is the architecture of power itself. This is no ordinary finishing school or prep academy; it
The estate's main building, a cross between a Venetian palazzo and a high-security psychiatric hospital, could be seen from kilometers away—its marble colonnades and gunmetal-tinted windows looming above a moat patrolled by bored, underpaid ex-military contractors. There were rumors about the blueprints: mile-long tunnels, panic rooms stocked with vintage Armagnac and anti-migraine ampoules, entire wings built for the ironic amusement of visiting oligarchs. Admittance to the upper floors required two biometric scans and, some whispered, the headmistress's personal approval.
But even with its dystopian grandeur, the place throbbed most with the feral energy of its student body. Here, the word "school" was a misnomer; a better term might have been "incubator of apex predators." At orientation, the faculty made no effort to hide it: half of us would be gone within the year, victims of academic attrition or—more commonly—psychological incineration. The rest would emerge, if not victorious, then at least so thoroughly weaponized that we'd never again feel the chill of ordinary suspense.
Most of us knew the risks. We embraced them. Our fathers (and, more rarely, mothers) were heads of state, biotech magnates, warlords-turned-ministers, or, in the case of my own bloodline, stewards of a family cartel so old that its founding document was an illuminated manuscript. The point was never to graduate with honors or charm the alumni; the point was to prove, in a petri dish of the world's most volatile personalities, that you could survive and thrive when surrounded by equally gifted sociopaths.
From day one, the school was a gauntlet of gently disguised gladiatorial contests. Some were obvious: the annual Risk Tournament, for which students ran illegal side bets in the millions, or the cryptic "Summit" simulation, where first-years played at nation-building while seniors ran black-market arms deals behind the scenes. Others were subtler—a zero-sum race for the favor of certain faculty, for the best dorm view, for the rarest psychoactive substances that floated in from the city each weekend. Even the food was gamified; the dining hall ran like the trading floor of a commodities exchange, where seating arrangements were reset weekly to reflect the shifting tectonics of popularity.
The most popular extracurricular was a hybrid of chess club and fight club, conducted in the sub-basement by candlelight and only accessible to students who'd cracked the entry code: a rotating cipher hidden in the Latin inscription above the library door. There, you could lose your allowance or your dignity in a single night, and winners got more than bragging rights—they received tokens, literally poker chips made of mother-of-pearl, that could be cashed in for favors from the mysterious student council known only as The Cabal.
My cousin, Isandro, was a prodigy of these games. He treated the student population like a herd to be culled and curated, deploying rumors like botulinum and never making a move without at least three layers of plausible deniability. He would invite me to his rooms, which were always filled with the scent of ozone and Turkish tobacco, and explain the day's moves as if talking to a toddler: how he'd engineered a scandalous leak about the finance-track prince from Luxembourg, or how he'd gotten a rival's private messages intercepted and read aloud, to gales of laughter, during morning assembly. There was an etiquette to the violence: no physical harm, only the exquisite ruin of reputation and future possibility.
If there was an underlying logic to these rituals of humiliation, it was this—no one here believed in the future as a stable, predictable line. Everything was contingency, everything could be upended, and the only constant was your capacity for adaptation. I learned to move quietly, to delete texts after sending, and to treat even the politest gestures as tactical feints. I also learned that, at the end of each day, the only person you could trust was the one who'd already betrayed you and had nothing left to gain.
In the rare moments when the tempo slowed, and the orchestrated chaos gave way to something resembling normal adolescence—late-night walks by the ornamental lake, illicit bottles of Sancerre shared on the chapel roof—you could glimpse the cost of all this vigilance. The girls from the Gulf states would talk about their future husbands: which ones were still up for grabs, which ones had already been bought off by European pharmaceutical dynasties. The American trust-fund kids would trade horror stories about their fathers, or swap pill bottles with the weary resignation of retiring metronomes. Even the most radiant, unassailable figures—like Amaira, whose composure never once cracked—carried a subtle tension in their eyes, as if waiting for the moment when their own story would be rewritten, violently, by someone else's pen.
The faculty saw all of this and encouraged it. There were never consequences for outsmarting the system; on the contrary, most instructors quietly admired the best schemes. "Don't waste your brilliance on mere honesty," Dr. Perrault once said in class, and the phrase stuck, passed down like an heirloom. There was, of course, an official code of conduct, but it was tacitly understood that following the rules was the one sure way never to be remembered.
It was a perfect storm for anyone who, like me, had grown up on the margins of power and then been offered a seat at the banquet table—on the condition that I never once reveal how hungry I really was. I acted the part of the slightly daft, harmless cousin, always two steps behind the conversation, always a little too earnest. But I watched. I internalized every slight, every shifting alliance, every nervous laugh at the wrong joke.
My own reputation was not so carefully managed as Isandro's, but it evolved into a kind of camouflage. I became the confessor of choice for the most anxious and brittle students, the ones who suspected (rightly) that they'd never be truly accepted by the inner circle. They would come to my room late at night, faces streaked with the salt of luxury-branded tears, and I would listen without judgement. Sometimes I even told them the truth about myself, or at least a version of it: that my only real skill was recognizing which voices in my head were mine, and which were planted by someone else.
It didn't make me popular. But it did make me resilient, and in a place where the ground shifted daily, that was currency enough.
If you asked why we stayed—why we didn't simply defect to a friendlier, less Darwinian institution—the answer was simple: no other school could offer what this one did. Not just the promise of power, but the certainty of context, the guarantee that your every move would be witnessed and judged and remembered. Prestige meant nothing in isolation; it required a population of equally ambitious witnesses, and here, we had that in spades.
It was, in its own way, a kind of intimacy. Not between two people, but between an entire generation of would-be world-shapers, each of us learning by painful increments the value of loyalty, the price of betrayal, and the precise point at which self-preservation shaded into self-annihilation.
You might think this left us isolated, or numb, or incapable of anything so simple as affection. But you'd be wrong. The paradox of the place was that, even as it trained us in the arts of sabotage and subterfuge, it also bred a desperate yearning for connection. It was not uncommon to find, after a night of mutual character assassination, the same adversaries holding hands at dawn, their faces open and unguarded in the predawn chill. Sometimes, the most intense rivalries birthed the most enduring friendships, forged in the knowledge that neither party would ever fully trust the other, but both would always be there at the finish line—if only to bear witness to the other's victory, or defeat.
So yes, the school was a crucible for monsters and masterminds, but it was also the last, best hope for learning how to coexist at the apex of the food chain. And if I sometimes lay awake in my overpriced bedding, listening to Amaira's quiet breathing from across the room, wondering if any of this would matter in the long run—well, that was just another part of the curriculum.
Even the architecture was designed for surveillance: the corridors curved in ways that made it impossible to see what lay ahead, and the convex mirrors mounted at every turn ensured that you could never quite escape the gaze of your peers. The bathrooms had no locks, only a polite suggestion of privacy, and even the library carrels were positioned so that your notes could be glimpsed by anyone passing behind. Nothing was hidden for long.
And yet, beneath this regime of exposure, secret societies flourished. There was the Order of the Black Lotus, rumoured to run midnight tribunals in the abandoned chapel; the Sapphire List, which published an anonymous zine ranking the week's most impressive academic manipulations; and the Lambda Cell, whose membership was so secretive that no one was sure it ever really existed, though every few months a perfectly plausible scandal would erupt, only to dissipate without a trace. Some nights in the common rooms, you could practically taste the adrenaline in the air.
I made a point of never joining any of these groups. Not out of principle—there was no room for that here—but because I found the overhead too high. The more you belonged, the more you had to lose, and I preferred to move between cliques and alliances with the indifference of a well-fed cat.
This was probably why Amaira tolerated me. Unlike the other pairs, we never argued or staged dramatic breakups for the benefit of onlookers. We did our assignments, shared the minimum of personal history, and otherwise ignored each other's existence. There was no romance, only an accidental truce—an understanding that neither of us would use the other as a pawn, at least until more interesting opportunities presented themselves.
She wore her faith like armor, and I respected that. Sometimes, I even envied it: the unbreakable clarity of her boundaries, the way she could move through the world untempted by the thousand pointless appetites that consumed the rest of us. I once asked her, late one night when the power had gone out and the emergency lighting bathed our dorm in a sickly blue, if she ever regretted being sent here, so far from home.
She considered it for a moment, then replied, "We are not exiles. We are seeds. This is our garden of stones." She left it at that, and so did I.
The week before the midterms, an anonymous message appeared in everyone's inbox: a challenge, written in the cadences of a legal summons, inviting the student body to participate in "The Gambit." No details, just a time and a place—midnight, the domed rotunda at the heart of the estate. The rumors began instantly: some said it was a bloodless coup against the Cabal, others whispered of a paramilitary hazing ritual imported from Eastern Europe. The only certainty was that attendance was mandatory, and that refusing the invitation meant immediate expulsion.
On the night of, the air crackled with a kind of carnival paranoia. Every student arrived in full regalia—tailored suits, ceremonial sashes, disguises borrowed from their parents' worst diplomatic rivals. The headmistress presided in a dress that glittered like shrapnel, her lips stained the color of dried blood. For the first time since my arrival, I felt the old excitement—the sense that, for one night at least, the hierarchy would be suspended, and the game would start fresh.
At the stroke of midnight, the lights cut out. The domed ceiling was illuminated from within, casting a kaleidoscope of shadows that made everyone appear doubled, or tripled, or monstrous. A voice, disembodied and amplified, announced the rules: "Each of you is a piece on the board. The object is not to win, but to see how far you are willing to go to avoid losing." The first challenge came instantly—a logic puzzle disguised as a diplomatic crisis, followed by a physical dare that involved scaling the balustrade and retrieving a token suspended above the rotunda floor. The crowd surged; alliances dissolved and reformed in real time, and even the most cautious players found themselves swept up in the momentum.
Isandro played brilliantly, sacrificing a minor ally to buy time and then using a counterfeit token to bluff his way to the penultimate round. Amaira watched from the edge, her expression unreadable, until she stepped forward to solve the final puzzle—a riddle that demanded you understand not just the history of the school, but the precise arrangement of stars above the rotunda dome. She solved it in thirty seconds.
The game ended with predictable theatrics—a simulated coup, a staged "reconciliation," the headmistress offering a toast to the survivors. But in the aftermath, as we poured out into the marble corridors, I realized that something real had shifted: the ranks had been winnowed, the order reshuffled, and for the first time since my arrival, I found myself not at the bottom, but somewhere comfortably in the opaque middle.
That night, instead of returning to my room, I wandered the estate. The moon was bright enough to cast cold shadows on the manicured lawns, and somewhere in the distance I could hear the laughter of the victors as they celebrated in the forbidden garden behind the old stables. I sat on a bench and tried to imagine what it would be like, years from now, to look back on all of this and feel nostalgia instead of dread.
I doubted I would ever get there. But for the first time, I understood the logic of the place: you did not survive by outsmarting the rules, but by learning to thrive inside the chaos they created.
And that, paradoxically, was the closest thing to freedom any of us would ever know.
You might think this left us isolated, or numb, or incapable of anything so simple as affection. But you'd be wrong. The paradox of the place was that, even as it trained us in the arts of sabotage and subterfuge, it also bred a desperate yearning for connection. It was not uncommon to find, after a night of mutual character assassination, the same adversaries holding hands at dawn, their faces open and unguarded in the predawn chill. Sometimes, the most intense rivalries birthed the most enduring friendships, forged in the knowledge that neither party would ever fully trust the other, but both would always be there at the finish line—if only to bear witness to the other's victory, or defeat.
So yes, the school was a crucible for monsters and masterminds, but it was also the last, best hope for learning how to coexist at the apex of the food chain. And if I sometimes lay awake in my overpriced bedding, listening to Amaira's quiet breathing from across the room, wondering if any of this would matter in the long run—well, that was just another part of the curriculum.
is a greenhouse for the rarest and most invasive species of ambition. The students are handpicked for their bloodlines, their cognitive gifts, and—above all—their capacity for duplicity. It is an institution renowned, even among cynics, for producing individuals who do not simply rise to the top but repurpose the very notion of a "top" to suit their ends.
The headmistress's welcome speech made it clear enough: "You are not here to learn facts, but to transform the conditions under which facts are made relevant." A former president's daughter, a startup founder's heir, a whole litter of minor royalty—every corridor, every seminar room was a petri dish for perfecting the next iteration of control. In the student body's unspoken code, you measured worth not by GPA, but by the quality of your manipulations: how elegantly you could turn a peer group into a voting bloc, or persuade a faculty chaperone to co-sign your academic fraud. The only sin here was lack of subtlety; getting caught was not a moral failing but an aesthetic one.
They taught ethics, of course—whole modules on the history and philosophy of justice—but always with a sly, meta-ironic inflection. My favorite teacher, Dr. Perrault, delivered a lecture titled "The Virtue of Self-Interest" and punctuated it with case studies of alumni who had manipulated entire student cohorts into voting for their policies, then went on to write constitutions or destabilize elections in countries I had previously only known as vacation destinations. Every lesson doubled as a warning: trust no one, least of all your own motives. Paranoia was less a symptom than a baseline.
This culture bred excellence, but also an exquisite loneliness. There were nights when I could hear, through the paper-thin walls, the stifled sobs of a would-be chess grandmaster who'd been outmaneuvered in class, or the low, venomous laughter of a girl who'd just orchestrated her roommate's social demise. No one was immune, least of all me, though I clung to the hope that I'd at least see my own downfall coming.
The Casillas legacy was everywhere, embossed on every surface and stitched into the DNA of the curriculum. The family's reach extended into the faculty, the donor base, the governing board. Every day, I received reminders—in the form of cryptic notes, sudden schedule changes, or the casual references of upperclassmen—that my success or failure here was not my own, but a matter of organizational reputation. It was as if I had been assigned, without my consent, the role of a favored lab rat in a generations-long experiment.
Yet for all its cutthroat intensity, the place had its rituals of mercy. On Fridays, the kitchen staff served a communal meal—slow-cooked lamb, spiced rice, sugared figs—at long tables in the sunroom, where rivals would set aside their vendettas for the duration of a shared dessert. Even here, alliances were forged over baklava, enmities suspended in the haze of cardamom and honey. For a moment, the war was only background noise.
So yes, this school produces some of the most powerful and conniving people in the world. And every day, we wake up knowing we are expected to become one of them.