Year Two started.
The difference between Year One's first day and Year Two's was not in the building or the schedule or the people occupying it, all of which were substantially the same. It was in the quality of the air between the remaining forty-two students. Eleven months of shared curriculum had produced a specific kind of familiarity — not closeness exactly, but the granular knowledge of how each person worked, where their capability actually sat versus where they presented it, which students performed under pressure and which degraded. The cohort that had arrived at orientation as sixty strangers had become a group that knew each other in the limited and precise way that people who have competed in the same space for a year came to know each other.
