Chapter 11: Blessed

"You’re expelled."

On the far side of a wooden table, Mr. Thwaite read on as he spoke, gray head bent over two reports and a chipped cup.

Milo shifted in the chair. His ribs throbbed. The palm Seb had struck with the baton hurt worst of all. One side of his face was swelling, drawing the skin tight around his eye, and the split in his lip tasted of iron each time he tested it with his tongue.

Seb sat in the next chair, both feet wide.

"This is your last day here, isn’t it?" he scoffed.

Mr. Thwaite stopped reading.

"You have no right to speak to him that way." He rubbed the gray stubble on his chin and pointed at the door. "You’re suspended. Go to Mr. Cald, now!"

Seb lowered his sleeve from his nose. "It’s a nosebleed. He’ll have me there all day."

The boy got up, rammed his chair in, and walked out.

For hitting a peer with a relic on school grounds: suspension. For getting hit with one: expulsion. No Studies lesson had ever covered that distinction.

The principal squared the reports into a single stack, read the top page again, sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

So the meeting had ended. Inhaling carefully, Milo eased himself out of the chair without a sound. He was reaching for the door when Mr. Thwaite spoke.

"You stay."

Calmly, Milo sat back down.

"Mr. Thwaite," he began, his sore mouth flattening the words. "Is there anything els—"

"What were you thinking?"

The man took off his glasses and set them beside the cup.

Testing whether relics can hurt me had the advantage of honesty and the disadvantage of every other quality an answer could possess.

"About what?"

"You don’t come to school. I offer you any psychological help a person might need, and you deny it. When you do come, you walk into a staff room and pick a fight with a Field trainee..."

Gaze dropping back to the pages, he gave up on the list and rubbed his face with both hands.

"What were you thinking?" he asked again.

Milo looked at the meadow painted on the office wall where green hills rolled under a clean blue sky. Somebody had spent a great deal of time imagining a place nobody needed to inspect before stepping into it.

"I don’t like them."

"You don’t like them."

"No."

Mr. Thwaite leaned back and stared at the same painted meadow. He opened his mouth, decided differently, and pushed a slow breath out of his nose.

"It’s that simple?" he said at last. "You don’t like them?"

He pulled one sheet from the stack and slid it over the table, an academy crest pressed deep into dark-yellow wax at the lower corner.

"I’m giving you a recommendation, and I’m submitting you to mandatory psychological consultation," Mr. Thwaite declared. "After the consultation, you may present this to another school."

Milo glanced at the first line, his bruised eye making the smaller writing swim.

"A recommendation?"

"You were a good student when you gave your best. You can be one again." The principal put his glasses back on, though he had nothing left to read. "I know how hard it can be. But what happened?"

Milo said nothing.

"As the principal of the Hollins Cross Academy, I cannot tolerate this behavior. I also won’t send you away with nothing."

Milo folded the recommendation once and tucked it inside his jacket, the crease digging into his ribs.

"Grace! Please walk Milo Zeuqe to the exit."

The secretary appeared in the doorway, a narrow woman with dark hair and a ring of keys at her belt.

Bracing one hand on the chair, Milo stood up.

Mr. Thwaite gave him a small nod and waited, for an apology, maybe, or the speech where Milo repaired everything on some agreed schedule.

As Grace led him out, neither came, and the door shut on the office.

This was fine.

Milo put a hand over the paper in his jacket.

Expulsion had a poor reputation, and he could see around it. Attend the consultation, submit the recommendation elsewhere. Another school might even take him for Field, if he proved himself.

Maybe Mr. Thwaite had written that Milo possessed remarkable instincts. Called him courageous under pressure. With sufficiently vague wording, a twice-a-month Studies student might read as Field material.

The fighter who knew everything.

He almost smiled.

Lessons were running, so shut doors lined the corridor, muffled voices leaking from behind them. Grace stayed a step ahead the whole way, her keys chiming at her belt, and matching her pace put a slow burn in his ribs.

The consultation could complicate a transfer, though. If they prescribed treatment, he would have to submit to that too, and the wrong examiner might hear about the yellow page, or dig into why a Studies boy had provoked a Field trainee into a beating, and conclude that school was not the institution Milo needed.

He would discuss grief.

That earned sympathetic noises and very few follow-up questions.

At the doors he glanced back the way they had come, in the general direction of a room full of glass cases and unattended relics.

They were already outside.

Eh, stealing an academy relic on the way out would have weakened his recommendation anyway.

The stone path ran downhill to the front gate, each step jolting up into the swollen side of his face. Beyond the gate’s black bars, the empty capsule rails divided the school from the city blocks.

Grace fed a long steel key into the gate lock, but it stopped at half its length.

Frowning, she pulled the key free and tried another. This one went in and clicked, but the gate wouldn’t budge when she pushed.

"Weird," she muttered.

Milo followed the bars upward. Steel bolts had dropped into place along the gate’s inner edge, up where no key and no secretary could reach them.

Emergency seals. Studies had covered that one.

Grace put her shoulder into the gate, the bars rattling.

Since the gate stayed shut, she drew her phone from her pocket to call it in.

The screen lit up first.

Mr. Thwaite’s name was on it.

"Milo!"

Layla was hurrying down the path, white coat open, pink coils loose from their tie. At the sight of his face, her pace faltered.

"Milo, what happened to you? I waited after class, but you never came out."

"Nothing that won’t heal. Don’t you have a lesson right now?"

Grace stepped away from them and cupped one hand around the phone.

Layla looked at the secretary.

"I think something’s..."

She glanced back at the building, where faces began to appear at the upper windows.

"Miss Grace is on it. She’ll know more than me."

The voice in the phone locked her shoulders, her free hand coming up over her mouth.

"How many?" she whispered.

Only muffled shouting came out of the speaker.

"Where?"

Milo stepped closer. Her eyes had gone wide and wet. She looked right at him, and the call went on.

"Miss Grace?" Layla asked.

The woman lowered the phone.

"The academy has been shut down," she said, barely above a breath. "We have a Plague outbreak."

Plague?

Every ache in Milo’s body quieted at once.

Had the medical workers missed it after all? Had he brought it here himself?

He faced the school. More people crowded the windows now. At one of them, a teacher drew the curtain shut, and along the upper floor the others followed.

Black moved inside the brick.

Milo blinked.

The shape was still there. A narrow black bar gliding beyond brick and stone, clear to him despite every wall in between.

Seb’s baton, heading deeper into the academy.

Bookmark.

His Bookmark.

Milo pressed the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. His breath came clean, and the beating explained his physical condition.

Room by room, the black outline slid along some unseen corridor. The Plague sealed the academy with Milo on the useful side of the gate.

He smiled.

The split in his lip opened, warm blood spilling over his tongue.

He had been blessed.

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⋆˚࿔ Coming right up: "Shame" ... ⤵︎ [!]