Subject: Welcome to Your Future, Lewis Chambers.
FROM: Clarity Academy Administration (No-Reply)
TO: L.Chambers_Scholar2026@ClarityPrep.edu

Welcome to the Spectrum of Excellence!

Congratulations, Lewis; your academic record and psychological aptitude scores have placed you in the top 2% of your cohort! At Clarity Academy, we don't just educate; we refine.

Your Digital Onboarding is Complete:

The Student-Link ID: Your Student-Link ID is your passport to the future! This ID is tied directly to your phone and your choice of wearable (Watch, Ring, or Athletic Shoe Tag) and grants you access to authorized student areas as well as cashless payment at the Student Union and Cafeteria. Ensure that your parents have thoroughly read the school’s Privacy Policy—in short we will never sell your data or spy on you! This closed loop NFC system is strictly for your convenience!

The Precision Wardrobe: Your "Scholar-Standard" attire has been sized based on your submitted scans. Remember: A clear mind begins with a clean silhouette!

Focus. Precision. Perfection: Clarity.

There had been about three too many exclamation marks in that welcome letter for Lewis’ taste, as though it had either been written by an overly caffeinated secretary or, given that m-dash in the middle, an over eager AI helping an over caffeinated secretary. Not for the first time he stared at it, reminding himself he belonged here, at Clarity Prep, the top 2% of whatever a ‘cohort’ was supposed to be.

The big gray slab bore no resemblance whatsoever to the brochures, he knew that much. Oh sure, the main Admin building and the dorms looked like they had been built for the modern era, but the actual classrooms looked like hulking behemoths out of the 1970s brutalist prison architecture-for-a-school-design playbook - because they, apparently, were exactly that.

Instead of issuing a key card or physical key to every student, some genius installed NFC readers. The idea made sense on paper. Let students roam the building freely day or night, without the risk of outsiders burgling the place for the copper wire if a student lost their key or key card. The implementation, though? Let’s just say absolutely nobody chose to use a shoe tag because the “near” in near field meant “Right on top of the damned thing”. More than once Lewis found himself scanning, tapping, holding, swiping, anything to get the smart ring to just. Open. The. Damn. Door.

Combined with his frustration at being away from home, away from his friends, surrounded by complete strangers who looked like they belonged on the set of “High School Musical” - salon freshgirls, guys with glossy, perfect hair, jocks with rippling muscles, Lewis didn’t feel just like a fish out of water, but like an octopus on Mars - all arms with 8 brains wanting to go 8 different directions, and no oxygen.

He wanted to scream.

Before his voice cracked - not yet a deep baritone like his friends back home, but not the sweet, lyrical pre-pubescent soprano he had once been, he enjoyed choir. He enjoyed sounding like, and being able to sing, girls’ parts. That was behind him now. Now if he wanted to feel like himself, his true self, he had to do it online through World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2, where his guild knew him not as Lewis Chambers, scrawny ‘brilliant scholar’ but as Jessica, the max level blood elf Paladin (or level 80 Sylvari Guardian), in the case of Guild Wars 2) - a protector always willing to drop everything to help a newbie find their way. “Jessica” was safe. She was default.

“Oh my God just... Why do I even have to scan in?” he sighed, staring in frustration at the door to the music wing, and the flashing red light above the NFC scanner.

Suddenly, a pale hand in a girls’ blazer appeared in his peripheral vision, a ring pressed against the NFC reader, its nails manicured to perfection with a coating of powder pink polish. The light changed from red to green. He spun around to thank his would-be rescuer.

She was the Scholar Silhouette personified, long, raven hair in perfect glossy waves, piercing green eyes, her skirt precisely two inches above her knees, and a dismissive ‘I’m not even going to bother insulting you, peasant’ expression on her face. She retracted her hand and continued walking with her entourage.

“That was nice of you, Maddie,” one of the girls said.

“Whatever. The beep was getting on my fucking nerves,” Madison answered with the sarcastic bite of a grumpy crocodile. Lewis darted inside before the door could have a chance to relock on him. Even the mean girls were taking pity on him now. This was a new low for the week.

The contrast between the warm, sunny autumn day he had just left outside and the stark, chilled interior felt like the punctuation on a very long, drawn out sigh. It wasn’t air conditioning. It was malfunctioning air filters failing to fully recycle the breath of a thousand voices come before. At least the floor wax stink didn’t sting his nostrils so badly over here. The wax looked more worn down so they probably hadn’t bothered to put down a fresh coat or ten yet.

He trudged down the corridor past an open, dark room, but something caught his eye. Most of the rooms in this concrete bunker of a school didn’t have windows, or if they did, it was just one long, tall plexiglass window braced by steel, and set right where the walls met. He backed up and poked his head inside.

The room was heavily carpeted, not just on the floor, but the walls as well. The ceiling had that ‘popcorn stucco’ look of heavy acoustic absorption designed not to look like acoustic padding that he knew so well from his time in his old choir, back home, back then.

The icing on the cake though? Between the high window that ran the length of the practice room, letting in natural light, shone that natural light upon a big, old, very dusty upright piano against the far wall. In the halflight of the room it practically glowed in the sunlight. Lewis pushed the door closed behind him, made sure that it latched fully closed and even knelt to check that the bottom and sides of the door were properly acoustically treated.

They were. And so, he braced his back against the door, threw his head back, and let out a primal scream at the top of his lungs, emptying them completely.

“Hey,” he said to himself softly after getting his breath back. “I... I think that was a D5. Not bad for a scream.”

He slowly walked over to the piano and pulled out the bench, easing himself down. He lifted the tawny fallboard off the keys. It didn’t slide back into the piano, but simply rose on old, brass hinges and sat in place, threatening to slam down on some poor pianist’s fingers if they weren’t diligent enough to push it far enough back.

He depressed the ivory E5 and struggled to sing the note, but his voice cracked. He slammed a fist onto the keys and glanced down. As he wiped away a tear, he noticed, right by his fist, on the inside of the fallboard, a yellowing piece of masking tape sat haphazardly taped down. Someone had scrawled a note on it in black felt marker.

‘Don’t let the bastards grind u down! -WW’ and there was an arrow pointing straight down. He blinked. Was... Was there something under the piano? Or maybe the bench?

He cautiously reached a hand up under the bench. A piece of paper had been taped there. He stood up and turned the bench on its side, kneeling down to read it in the afternoon light.

‘The walls have ears. Find the space between spaces.’

Instead of a signature, someone had drawn the silhouette of a raven in flight - a black bird with its wings spread apart, but the head tilted to one side so that the beak could be seen, a noticeable hook-like curve to it, and a fanned, almost diamond shaped tail. There was no mistaking it for a sleek crow, even to a layperson like Lewis.

He shrugged his shoulders, righted the bench, and sat down again, staring at the ‘WW’ note. He tried again, only just managing another D5.

“Oh sorry dude,” he heard a girl’s voice from behind him. He didn’t even hear the door open. He jumped to his feet and spun around. A girl with sun kissed blonde hair and the scholar standard uniform, a white Alice band in her hair, was pulling the door closed again. She was holding some sheet music, he noticed, and he practically leapt across the room to catch the door.

“No I’m sorry, I didn’t rent out the room or anything,” he said. “I was just venting. It’s all yours.”

“You sure?” she asked. He nodded.

“Yeah, go ahead. The D#5 is a tiny bit flat though.”

She laughed. “You noticed that too. I’ve been begging someone to come tune it for weeks.”

She smiled at him as she walked past and sat down seemingly ignoring the masking tape. They didn’t exchange names beyond that simple pleasantry, but as he glanced over his shoulder at her, he sighed to himself. She was just as pretty as Madison had been, albeit not as terrifying. He wanted to stay and listen, but she obviously had no interest, so he just pulled the door closed behind him as he left, tugging at the collar of his starched shirt.

It suddenly felt suffocating, like a jagged, saw-toothed chain around his neck, and he just wanted to tear it off and burn it.

“I might be a top 2% or whatever,” he mumbled, “But I’m the bottom of Clarity’s barrel.”

He started humming ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ to himself, partly because it was one of the pieces of sheet music he’d seen the girl carrying. In a school full of digital everything, seeing someone with physical paper stuck out, especially one covered in notes and pencil marks as hers had been.

He trudged toward the door, bracing himself for another round of the ‘Clarity Shuffle’ with the NFC reader, but didn’t see any locks on this side to deal with, at least.

Despite being September the oppressive heat weighed on him as much as the “scholar silhouette”. The heavy slacks didn’t help, and for once he longed to have the girls’ skirts for more than just dysphoric reasons. At least the clouds seemed to be banking up, which meant possibilities of rain although the way Lewis felt, he fully expected a localized rainstorm right over his head instead.

Author's Note:
I'm finally ready to share one of two new manuscripts with y'all! This is the more serious, grounded character drama to the more high energy thriller that is "Split Victory" which I'll start posting next week (likely on Wednesday). Chapters will follow at one per week for each manuscript.

I AM proud to at least announce that both manuscripts are completed as of this posting of chapter 1, and will be fully available here on TopShelf. They are both in pre-publication phase with Doppler Press so they will eventually be up for sale as well, if you don't want to wait to see what happens! <3
- Zoë