The Academy at Night

There is a school in this city that opens only after midnight.

Its buildings are not on the daytime map. They are drawn inside the city's second map, and the only way in is through an entrance like Platform Thirteen. Anyone the city's earth-pulse has "marked" receives a notice of enrollment; those who do not go to be trained are said to be swallowed little by little by the noise of the city, until they cannot even keep hold of their own names.

What the notice looks like, accounts differ. Some say it is a slip of paper tucked in among your own things with a single character on it. Some say it is a lamp that burns a few extra nights on your way home. And there are older people who insist there is no such thing as a notice at all—that the road itself delivers the ones who are meant to go to the door. The three accounts refuse to grant each other anything, yet they agree on the same point: the notice comes once, and it does not ask whether the timing suits you.

What this school teaches is sorcery: how to draw talismans, how to set wards, how to strike a pact with yaoguai and Earth Gods, how to walk the reverse side of the city without losing your way. It has classes, it has teachers, it has jobs to go out and carry out. Teaching starts from midnight and breaks up before daylight, and on that line there is no room to negotiate; whoever comes back late is written into a book that has nothing to do with grades. As for how the classes are divided, how anyone finishes, and where they go after they finish, at least 3 versions circulate outside, none of which line up, and every one of them is relayed by somebody who swears he heard it from the person it happened to.

Its students are ordinary people by day. They have morning study, homework to hand in, and the standard set meal from the school cafeteria—braised chicken leg with greens and corn—to eat with their classmates. They have to live two lives between two worlds—and the people on the daytime side will never know the timetable of the other one.