First Cut

Every autumn, Aldermont sends seven invitations no one will admit to writing. Esme Calder shouldn't have received one. She's the scholarship girl, the one who tailors her own secondhand blazer and memorizes the rules everyone else was born knowing. But the unsigned card is real, and so is the prize: a single seat in The Alcove, a two-hundred-year-old society whose members get everything they ever wanted and never say how. The tests begin as puzzles — elegant, brutal, the kind Esme is good at. Then they start bending the rules of what's possible. One of the seven doesn't remember applying. One of them won't survive the term. And the boy Esme can't stand — August Hale, all old money and easy cruelty — seems to be the only person who knows what the seat actually costs. To win, Esme will have to learn what Aldermont has spent sixty years burying: a fire the school swears never happened, and the price the Alcove has always, quietly, been willing to pay. For fans of Ninth House, A Lesson in Vengeance, and Ace of Spades.