Isabelle had her arms crossed, fingers curled into the dark plum velvet of her own jacket as if she was offering herself comfort. “None of this is fair. It isn’t fair that part of your life was ripped from you. It’s not fair that you were ripped away from me. I’m so angry, Simon.”

Simon took a step toward her and took one of her hands, uncurling her fingers from her jacket. He did not take her in his arms but he stood a little distance away from her, their hands linked across the distance. Her trembling mouth sparkled, and so did her eyelashes. He did not know if this was indomitable Isabelle crying, or whether it was sparkly mascara. All he knew was that she shone, like a constellation in the shape of a girl.

“Isabelle,” he said. “Isabelle.”

She was so much herself, and he had scarcely any idea who he was.

“Do you know why you’re here?” she demanded.

He just looked at her. There were so many things that question could mean, and so many ways to answer.

“I mean at the Academy,” she said. “Do you know why you want to be a Shadowhunter?”

He hesitated. “I wanted to be that guy again,” he said. “That hero that you all remember . . . and this seems like a training school for heroes.”

“It’s not,” Isabelle said flatly. “It’s a training school for Shadowhunters. And yeah, I think that’s a pretty cool thing, and yeah, I think protecting the world is pretty heroic. But there are cowardly Shadowhunters and evil Shadowhunters and hopeless Shadowhunters. If you’re going to get through the Academy, you have to figure out why you want to be a Shadowhunter and what that means to you, Simon. Not just why you want to be special.”

He winced, but it was true. “You’re right. I don’t know. I know that I want to be here. I know I need to be here. Believe me, if you’d seen the bathrooms, you’d know I didn’t make this decision lightly.”

She gave him a withering look.

“But,” he said, “I don’t know why. I don’t know myself well enough yet. I know what I said to you, at first, and I know what you hoped. That I could turn back into who I was before. I was really wrong and I am really sorry.”

“Sorry?” Isabelle demanded. “Do you know what a big deal it was for me to come here, to make a fool of myself in front of all these people? Do you know—of course you don’t. You don’t want me to believe in you? You don’t want me to choose you?”

Isabelle pulled her hands away from him, turned her face away as she had in the garden of the Institute that was her home. This time Simon knew it was absolutely his fault.

She was already leaving as she said:

“Have it your way, Simon Lewis. I won’t.”

*    *    *

Simon was so depressed after Isabelle had gone—after he had driven her away—that he didn’t think he’d ever move off his cot bed again. He lay there, listening to George chatter and scrub the walls. He’d removed an impressive amount of the slime.

Simon retreated to where he believed nobody would ever find him. He went and sat in the bathroom. The stone flags were cracked in the bathrooms; there was something dark in one of the toilets. Simon hoped it was just a result of people throwing away the soup.

He had half an hour of peace in the bathroom, alone with the horrible toilets, until George poked his head around the door.

“Hey, buddy,” said George. “Do not use these bathrooms. I cannot stress that enough.”

“I’m not going to use the bathroom,” Simon said drearily. “I’m a mess, but I’m not an idiot. I just wanted to be alone and think depressing thoughts. You want to know a secret?”

George was silent for a moment. “If you want to tell me. You don’t have to. We all have secrets.”

“I chased away the most amazing girl I have ever met, because I’m too much of a loser to manage being myself. That’s my secret: I want to be a hero, but I’m not one. Everybody thinks I’m some amazing warrior who summoned angels and rescued Shadowhunters and saved the world, but it’s a joke. I can’t even remember what I did. I can’t imagine how I did it. I’m no one special, and no one’s going to be fooled for long, and I don’t even know what I’m doing here. So. You have a secret that can beat that?”

There was a low gurgle from one of the toilets. Simon did not even look toward it. He was not interested in investigating that sound.

“I’m not a Shadowhunter at all,” George said in a rush.

Sitting on a bathroom floor was not an ideal way to receive monumental revelations. Simon frowned. “You’re not a Lovelace?”

“No, I’m a Lovelace.” George’s normally lighthearted voice was stern. “But I’m not a Shadowhunter. I’m adopted. The Shadowhunters who came to recruit me didn’t even think of that—of people with Shadowhunter blood wanting mundane children, giving them Shadowhunter names and thinking of them as their own. I was always planning to tell the truth, but I figured it would be easier when I got here—less trouble to decide to let me stay than to work out whether they wanted to bring me. And then I met the others, and I started the course, and I figured out I could keep up with them pretty easily. I saw what they thought of mundanes. I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to keep the secret and stay in the elite class and be like the rest of the guys, just for a while.”

George shoved his hands in his pockets, and stared at the floor.

“But I’d met you, too, and you didn’t have any special powers, and you’d already done more than all the rest of them put together. You do things now, like transfer to the mundane class when you didn’t have to, and that made me man up and tell the dean I was a mundie and get transferred, too. You did that. The way you are now, okay? So stop talking about what a loser you are, because I wouldn’t follow a loser into a slime-covered bedroom or a slime-covered bathroom, and I’ve followed you into both.” George paused and said aggressively: “And I would really like to change the phrasing of that last sentence, because it sounded so bad, but I’m not sure how.”

“I’ll take it in the spirit it was meant,” said Simon. “And I—I’m really glad you told me. I was hoping for a cool mundie roommate from the start.”

“Wanna know another secret?” George asked.

Simon was slightly terrified of another revelation, and worried George was a secret agent, but he nodded anyway.

“Everybody in this academy, Shadowhunters and mundanes, people with the Sight and without it, every one of them is looking to be a hero. We are all hoping for it, and trying for it, and soon we will be bleeding for it. You’re just like the rest of us, Si. Except there’s one thing about you that’s different: We all want to be heroes, but you know you can be one. You know in another life, in an alternate universe, however you want to think of it, you were a hero. You can be one again. Maybe not the same hero, but you have it in you to make the right choices, to make the big sacrifices. That’s a lot of pressure. But it’s a lot more hope than any of the rest of us have. Think about it that way, Simon Lewis, and I think you’re pretty lucky.”

Simon had not thought about it that way. He’d just kept thinking that a switch was going to be flipped, and he was going to be special again. But Isabelle was right: This could not just be about being special. He remembered seeing the Academy for the first time, how glamorous and impressive it had looked from a distance, and how different it had looked close up. He was starting to think the process of becoming a Shadowhunter was the same way. He was starting to believe it would all be cutting himself with a sword and having his horse run away with him, eating terrible soup and scraping slime off the walls, and figuring out slowly and awkwardly who he really wanted to be, this time around.

George leaned against the bathroom wall, which was an obviously rash and dangerous move, and grinned at him. Seeing that grin, seeing George refuse to be serious for more than a second, reminded Simon of something else about his first day at the Academy. It reminded him of hope.