You don't get a full scholarship to the ancient Ashdown College - you are chosen. June Okonkwo understands on her very first evening that behind the ivy-clad walls and the perfectly rehearsed manners, something other than education is waiting. There is an order at Ashdown, older than the school itself, and June is the Ninth in a line whose purpose no one will explain to her. The deeper she is drawn into the rituals, hierarchies and unspoken rules of the elite, the clearer it becomes: those who want to belong here pay a price - and those who ask the wrong questions vanish from the photographs, from the lists, from memory. But June did not come to obey. An atmospheric, gripping dark-academia thriller about being chosen, about power, and about the courage to break a corrupt order. The first book in the 'Ashdown College' series.