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Eighty-four. That’s how many Merit points I had. Which meant I’d need to earn at least one hundred and four points a day for the next four days, or I’d be cut from the Program.

“Remember, Apprentices,” Ms. Featherdale told us. “There are no losers here. You are all winners.”

“Except Savannah Winters.”

I didn’t turn around. There was no point. I knew that nasally voice. It belonged to Zoe, the bully who’d made a point of annoying me yesterday in the Garden.

“Ignore her,” Bronte whispered to me.

Easy for her to say. She was at the very top of the list. Literally, in first place. And Dante and Nevada weren’t far below her. In fact, I was the only Apprentice who had fewer than a hundred Merit points.

“Did you hear what I said, shorty?” Zoe demanded, pulling me around to face her.

My only response was a silent glare.

Zoe casually pushed out one of her hips. “I said you won’t make it.”

I could feel a comeback sizzling on my tongue, but I bit it back. If I got into a fight with Zoe, I’d probably lose even more points.

“No matter how much you try, it will never be enough.” Zoe took a step closer, so close that I could see the individual drops of sweat dripping down her neck.

“No matter how much you study or how much you train, you will never peel yourself off the bottom of the Scoreboard,” Zoe told me with a sneer. “Do you know why that is?”

The words shot out of my mouth before I could stop them. “I suppose you’re going to tell me,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“If you insist.” She flashed a grin to her sidekick, a very tall, very blockish girl. Then she looked at me again. “It’s quite simple, really. You’re a loser.”

I laughed. “If that’s the best you’ve got…”

Zoe snatched my arm as I tried to turn away from her. “I wasn’t done.”

I stood still and silent, and waited for her to get bored and go away. Unfortunately, she didn’t take the hint.

“You’re a loser,” Zoe repeated. “And your mother is a loser. What happened to her again?”

I blinked in confusion.

“You don’t know, do you? Well, let me educate you.” Zoe smirked at me. “I looked up your whole pathetic family last night. And being a loser must be genetic. Your mom Alara Winters was once a famous professor of biochemistry, back before the Curse. But then she lost everything.”

“Everyonelost everything when the Curse hit,” I snapped.

“Oh, but your mom didn’t lose everything because of the Curse. She lost everythingbeforethe Curse, when she got herself tangled up at the center of a horrible scandal. And then she wasn’t Professor Winters anymore at all. After that, no university would touch her. The only people who would hire her were a few second-rate actors. And they only hired her so they could brag to their second-rate actor friends that they had a physical trainer called ‘the Doctor’.”

Zoe glanced at her friend, and the two of them burst into hysterical laughter.

“You’re a loser. Your mother’s a loser.” Delight danced in Zoe’s poison-green eyes. “And your dad’s the biggest loser of them all because he’s dead.”

My fists clenched. In about two seconds, I was going to lose it and punch Zoe in the face.

“Don’t.”

I turned around, following the sound of the voice. It belonged to a boy with dark eyes and meticulously-styled hair. I wasn’t sure how he’d managed to get his hair to sweep up like that—and stay up—but it must have taken him forever to do it. The name tag on his black t-shirt read ‘Ansel’.

“Don’t listen to them,” Ansel told me. “Don’t let them win.”

“Oh, what do we have here?” laughed a familiar, mocking voice.

It was Rhett, the boy Dante had nicknamed Tweedle-Dum. And he’d planted himself directly in front of Ansel’s wheelchair.