Silverleaf Academy did not, as a rule, get mid-term transfers. The school was old and selective and its places were spoken for years in advance; one did not simply arrive in the middle of a term. So when the word went around on Monday morning that someone had, the school reacted the way it reacted to anything genuinely novel, which was to talk of nothing else.

Leo heard about it before he saw it. He heard about it, in fact, approximately nine times before he reached his locker, in escalating tones of excitement, and the details accreted with each retelling: a transfer student, a girl, and not just any girl but a Sterling, of the Sterling family, which Leo gathered from the hushed reverence in which the name was spoken was a very large amount of money indeed. By the time he actually laid eyes on her, his expectations had been inflated to the point where he half expected her to arrive on a golden palanquin.

She did not arrive on a palanquin. She arrived, instead, in a car worth more than the building, which slid up to the front gates with the silent confidence of serious wealth and disgorged, from its rear door, the single most composed human being Leo had ever seen.

Veronica Sterling was tall, and dark-haired, and dressed in a uniform that was technically the Silverleaf uniform but had clearly been remade by someone whose hourly rate exceeded the school's catering budget. She moved through the gawking crowd of students as though it were weather - something to be passed through, not engaged with - her chin lifted at an angle that suggested she had never once in her life looked up at anyone and did not intend to start. A pair of older students trailed her with her things; she did not glance at them. She surveyed the historic facade of Silverleaf Academy with the cool assessing eye of a woman inspecting a property she was considering acquiring and finding it, on balance, adequate.

Leo's every instinct, finely tuned by two weeks of hard experience, told him to be somewhere else. This was exactly the kind of attention-magnet event he'd learned to give a very wide berth. He turned to go.

He was not quite fast enough to avoid hearing what she said, when one of the fluttering welcome-committee girls asked, breathlessly, whether Miss Sterling was excited to join Silverleaf.

"Excited," Veronica repeated, as though testing an unfamiliar flavor and not caring for it. Her voice was low, precise, and edged with a boredom so complete it was almost a form of art. "No. I'm here for a specific acquisition. My family's interests are best served by my securing a suitable match before I come of age, and the candidates available through the usual channels were" - a delicate pause - "disappointing. Silverleaf, I'm given to understand, has the highest concentration of eligible young men in the region." She said young men the way one might say promising assets. "So. Here I am. I intend to make my selection efficiently and conclude the matter."

The welcome-committee girl made a small sound.

Leo, frozen at the edge of the crowd, thought: a selection. She'd come to school - changed schools, mid-term - to shop. For a husband. The way you'd switch suppliers for a better catalogue. He filed it under the ever-expanding heading of things about this world that he was never, ever going to find normal, and made his escape before the conversation could involve him in any way.

He was unsuccessful in the longer term, which he should have predicted, because Leo's luck with avoiding things had been uniformly catastrophic since the moment he'd woken in this world.

It took Veronica less than a day to hear about The Charm.

It was, after all, the dominant topic of the school, and Veronica Sterling had not built her family's instinct for value by ignoring the dominant topic of any market she entered. By lunchtime she had collected the relevant intelligence with the ruthless efficiency of a due-diligence team: that there was a new boy, unusually self-possessed, unusually accomplished - he cooked, apparently, and tended injuries, and conducted himself with a baffling independence - who had, in two short weeks, captured the interest of the most formidable girls in the school. The President. The school's athletic idol. Even, the whispers said, the President's reclusive genius sister.

Veronica listened to all of this with the still attention of a buyer hearing that a property had multiple offers, and came, by her own logic, to the obvious conclusion.

A boy that contested was, by definition, the most valuable asset on the market. If the President wanted him, and the idol wanted him, and they were prepared to compete for him, then he was demonstrably scarce, demonstrably desirable, demonstrably the prize. Other people's demand was the truest measure of worth she knew. She did not need to evaluate Leo Evans on his own merits. The market had evaluated him for her, and the market said: this one. The best one. The one to acquire.

"Point him out to me," she said.

And so it was that Leo, eating his lunch in a quiet corner he'd specifically selected for its lack of foot traffic, looked up to find Veronica Sterling standing over his table, regarding him with the frank appraising interest of a collector examining a piece she has already decided to buy.

"You're the one they call The Charm," she said. It was not a question.

"I - people call me that, yeah," Leo said, with the resigned discomfort the nickname always produced in him. "I'd really rather they didn't. I'm just Leo. Can I - did you need something?"

Veronica did not sit. She remained standing, looking down at him, and what followed was less a conversation than a presentation. "I'm Veronica Sterling," she said, in a tone that expected the name to do significant work. "I imagine you've heard. I'll be direct, because I find directness saves everyone's time. I've reviewed the situation, and I've decided you'll suit. The Sterling name opens every door worth opening. I can offer access, security, a standard of living the others competing for your attention cannot begin to match. Whatever they're offering, I assure you I can better it." She produced, from somewhere, a slim card and set it on the table beside his sad sandwich. "My private contact. I'd suggest you give the matter the serious consideration it deserves. Arrangements of this kind are not offered twice."

Leo looked at the card. He looked at her. He looked at the card again.

He'd been propositioned, in his short tenure here, in a great many strange ways. He'd been given chocolates and potted plants and earnest letters. But nobody had yet pitched him quite like this - like a merger, like an opportunity with a limited window, complete with a value proposition and a closing line about scarcity. There was something almost impressive about how completely devoid of warmth it was. She wasn't flustered. She wasn't dazzled. She was conducting a transaction, and she'd decided he was the inventory.

"That's - " Leo started, and then didn't quite know how to continue, because the politeness reflexes that handled the dazzled girls had no script for this. "I think there's been a misunderstanding. I'm not - I'm not really looking for, um. An arrangement. Of any kind. I just want to get through school. But thank you? For thinking of me?"

Something flickered behind Veronica's composure - not hurt, not yet, just a small recalibration, the look of someone who has named a price and received not a no but a confusing irrelevance.

"You don't need to decide now," she said, smoothly, filing his response under negotiating posture. "Reflect on it. Compare the offers honestly. I'm confident you'll reach the rational conclusion." She tapped the card once with a manicured finger. "Sterling. Don't lose it."

And she turned and left, gliding back through the cafeteria with her chin at its accustomed angle, leaving Leo alone with a business card, a sad sandwich, and the dawning sense that the cast of characters complicating his quiet life had just acquired a fourth, and most transactional, member.

What Leo did not see - what he had no way of seeing - was the rest of the lunch hour from Veronica Sterling's side of it.

He did not see her return to her own table, where she sat alone by choice, and replay the conversation with a faint persistent irritation she could not quite source. The boy had not jumped at the offer. That was unexpected. Everyone jumped at a Sterling offer; it was the closest thing to a law of nature she had ever encountered. She told herself it was a negotiating tactic - playing hard to get, holding out for a better number - because that was a behavior she understood, that fit her model of the world, in which everyone was always, ultimately, holding out for a better number.

But there had been something in his face when he'd said I'm not looking for an arrangement. Something that hadn't been calculation at all. Something almost like - puzzlement. As though the entire framework of the offer were foreign to him. As though he genuinely did not understand why a person would propose such a thing.

Veronica did not like things she did not understand. They were inefficiencies, and inefficiencies, in her experience, were where you got hurt.

And beneath the irritation, far down, in a place she visited even less often than Scarlett visited hers, was the thing that actually drove all of it - the cold foundational certainty around which Veronica Sterling had built her entire self. She had learned it young and learned it thoroughly: that everyone wanted something, that every kindness was an opening bid, that every person who had ever smiled at her had been smiling at the Sterling fortune standing just behind her, and that the only safe way to move through the world was to be the one who set the price first. Love was a word people used to dress up an acquisition. Affection was a line item. She had never, not once, been approached by anyone who wanted nothing from her, because there was always something to want - she was a fortune with a girl attached, and the girl, she had concluded long ago with the bleak practicality that passed in her for peace, was simply the part nobody was really there for.

So she bought. It was cleaner. If everyone was transacting anyway, better to do it openly, on her terms, with the leverage hers. At least a purchase was honest about what it was.

She looked at the distant corner where the strange boy sat eating his unglamorous sandwich, having declined the best offer she had ever extended to anyone, and felt the first faint stirring of something she mistook entirely for competitive interest.

"He'll come around," she murmured to herself, with a confidence that was, though she didn't know it yet, about to be the most thoroughly tested assumption of her life. "They always come around."

Across the cafeteria, three other girls had noticed the heiress's visit to the corner table, and three other expressions had hardened in three different ways - the President's into cool calculation, the runner's into open scowl, the genius's into furious recalculation - as Silverleaf Academy's quietly developing situation acquired, in the space of a single lunch hour, a fourth and formidable front.

Leo, oblivious at the center of all of it, picked up the business card, looked at the single embossed word - STERLING - and the private number beneath it, and sighed the sigh of a man whose life was becoming more complicated by precisely the same amount each day.

"All I wanted," he informed the sandwich, "was a quiet lunch."

The sandwich, like the universe, declined to comment.