Chapter 63: Warden (Part 1)

Milo took his shoes off, leaving the gravel inside. His feet did not patter across the tile of the nursing office.

Mr. Cald placed the stack of sheets on the table and rolled toward him in his chair. "Milo Zeuqe, age sixteen, born October 30th of 608."

Since his town’s erasure included the facts of his own birth, his birthday had been assigned according to a test measuring the age of his cells. Despite his insistence that it fell on Halloween, which was true, they had stuck to the lab results.

"Your birthday is coming up soon. How do you feel about that?"

"So we’re just gonna ignore your secret agenda for me, sir?"

"Today I’m examining your health to see whether you’re fit for the expeditions."

"Then anyone who fails gets to withdraw without being expelled?"

"An unfit student is unlikely to score well in Survey or Field." Mr. Cald pointed to the stadiometer. "Onto the base plate, please."

As Milo stepped onto the platform, the man reached for the headpiece and slid it down to the crown of his head.

"178 centimeters..." The digital pen scratched the data onto the digital board in his arms. "You’ve grown three this year."

"How is my height relevant to the expedition?"

"If something compressed you on the way, we’d better catch that."

"...Compressed?"

Maybe Mr. Thwaite was growing increasingly insane. Who knew what the man had in mind after Aldous’s death? To expel anyone who wished to withdraw was radical enough, but no one had said this wasn’t just the beginning.

His question never got out, as Mr. Cald redirected him to the scales with a flick of the pen.

"Step on, please. I have more students to examine."

Milo crossed the office in the same unhelpful silence. The instructor followed his bare feet all the way.

Once the scales registered 55 kilograms, he worked his shoes back on and spread the gravel with his toes.

Next came a sprint on the treadmill, sticky patches distributed all over his torso while Mr. Cald watched the heart monitor from his chair.

"Your heart rate is slow," he observed as the belt wound down. "Your breathing’s steady, too."

"Is that good?"

"You tell me, Studies boy. If you really don’t know, you’ll end up in a Field group. Your ribs have healed. The bruising’s gone."

"I started eating."

"Good to know. Protect the collection. You don’t know when it’ll become fragile."

After that, Mr. Cald waved him to the exit. The clock approached 11:50.

In the current of bodies streaming toward the dining hall, the ten minutes to his Studies exam began to look very short.

It was set to begin at 12:00, and all Milo had done to prepare was read the stupid travel guide at home and twist around in class to look at the empty desk behind him.

All that was left of Eve’s presence was the torn piece of a page wedged in a groove in the wood.

Seeing two familiar blonde braids in the crowd, he threaded through toward them and raised his voice over the noise.

"Rosaline, have you seen Eve? Thwaite won’t let anyone miss the exam. I thought she was going on the expeditio—"

"Eve’s been expelled."

"W-What?"

"She stole a lot and got punished for it."

The current carried her away, Milo a stranded rock that everyone dodged.

At Henry’s office, the sight of Eve’s awkward demeanor crumbling had almost made him smile. Now the memory made his lips tighten into a downward pull.

Detention was all he’d braced for. Thwaite coerced everyone onto those expeditions with the threat of expulsion. Why throw out a girl who’d actually wanted to go?

He shook his head and resumed his pace toward the exam hall.

Bad news couldn’t derail him now.

Forcing the full extent of your knowledge onto the page was one thing, but judging how many questions you could deliberately fail without dropping below a certain threshold was another.

Inside, the desks sprawled over a space designed to hold over a thousand students at once. Handling that many while also making sure no one cheated was impossible.

But cheating wasn’t necessarily a good thing to do. On an expedition, you wanted to take a role in accord with your ability.

Teachers steered the arriving students to empty places where the examination sheets lay face down.

Being one of the last to enter, Milo made his way to a seat at the far end.

Opposite him, Grace stood on top of a bench with a microphone in her right hand and a sheet of paper in her left.

The clock ticked to 11:59.

"Everyone, please take your places and settle down," the secretary said. "We begin at twelve, whether or not the hall is quiet. Anyone who disrupts the others will be escorted out to finish under a teacher’s individual supervision. You will lose the time it takes to move you, and I believe I needn’t explain what that could do to your result."

The voices subsided. Clothes rustled as students squirmed in their seats.

"Good." The woman gave a nod, which stuttered and exposed the tension in her own neck. "Welcome, everyone," she went on reciting the text on the paper. "The rules are on the first page of your examination paper. You’ll have ten minutes to read them and look through the kinds of questions you’ll be answering. The timed examination runs from 12:10 to 13:10, though you’re welcome to begin answering during the preliminary period. Everyone finishes at 13:10, whichever you choose."

That was all Milo needed to know. He flipped the page over, and a pen attached to the sheets came into view.

Rustle-rustle!

Other students were quick to follow.

After skimming the clauses, he figured it was a waste of time and jumped straight into the tasks.

"You’re responsible for following the rules, even if you choose not to read them before you begin."

The first question was about the underlying geography of some region. Except it did not list any of the stops that the journal had provided him with.

It required the student to be well versed in the details of some other town that was not even on the capsule’s route.

"Raise your hand if you need help and a teacher will come to you. Please remember that there are over a thousand candidates in this hall. Each call will come with a delay."

Milo flicked a thumb to uncover the second page, where he recognized a town’s name.

Marling. Phone’s station.

...assess whether the shown en échelon fault scarps along its southern flank are indicative of post-orogenic extension or of differential compaction within the adjacent synclinorium?

Flipping through the rest of the exam at least showed him where the subjects changed.

Geography was beyond saving, which left him trying to recover marks he’d expected to throw away. Appraisals looked more promising, since his own crumpled sheet had given him an education of sorts.

He was able to fill in the answers about relic consecration intuitively, and the next section, supposedly about arithmetic, involved no arithmetic at all but instead tackled dense algebraic expressions.

Moving on to history... he paused at the last question of the exam.

"How many Turnings did Warden Aldous live to perform?"

Milo wrote the number two down and lingered over it.

"..."

With a single loop of his pen, he completed the answer.

Twenty.

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⋆˚࿔ Coming right up: "Warden (Part 2: Finale)" ... ⤵︎ [!]