Chapter 9: Beaten (Part 2)

Five in the morning, and Milo had managed three hours of sleep.

He spent most of the night flat on his back with his eyes shut, whispering the same questions at the ceiling and waiting for the yellow sheet to knock him out for wasting its time.

It did not.

He gave up and dressed in the dark, his good foot shoving yesterday’s clothes aside while he pulled on a blue sweater.

As he packed a water bottle and two notebooks into his bag, a chilly draft slid in from the balcony and got him in the back of the neck. Colder out there today. That decided it; the silver jacket came off its hook too.

Once dressed, he added a pencil to the bag and checked the first notebook. The opening page contained a list written sometime after midnight.

- Can relics hurt me?

- Can I absorb one by getting hit?

- Does Bookmark work?

Milo locked the flat behind him.

Under a gray sky, the station lamps cast circles over workers crowded into the boarding lines, collars up and cups steaming between their hands. Favoring the bad ankle, he eased among them and reached Layla at the capsule gate.

The girl spotted him in the crowd.

Her whole face brightened. She waved overhead, pink coils bouncing over her cotton white coat.

Milo checked behind himself. Nobody worth that smile had appeared.

"You came!"

"I do attend the academy."

Him appearing on a school platform alone rated as a minor event. Her arm stayed up the whole time it took him to reach her, and a man behind her had to duck under it.

Boarding like nothing had happened, they took two seats by the door, four strangers breathing around them.

"Been drinking your water?" Layla asked.

A few of the strangers’ eyes flicked over.

Milo lowered his voice. "I did."

That was all.

At the academy stop, only the two of them got out. Beyond the gate, four joined sections of red brick enclosed a square garden, window widths and rooflines shifting at every turn.

Milo and Layla followed the main path between clipped shrubs, one behind the other where students spilled off the benches. Heavy boots crowded a desk with unrolled maps, and from an open practice hall came a crack of wood, chased by a cheer.

Inside the main building, the smell changed from wet soil to chalk dust and boiled grain from the dining hall. Voices swarmed the arched corridor, and the stares found him well before the first stair.

Layla pointed down the corridor. "I’m this way."

"I remember."

"Do you remember where your class is?"

"Third floor."

"Second."

"Yeah, I know, I was testing you."

"See you after class!" She hurried off to the Survey classes.

By the time Milo reached the corridor outside his own class, a boy had peeled off the wall. A year older and a head taller, he had a small smile and an eye on the nearest group.

"Sick again?" The boy’s eyebrow rose. "What’s it this time? Vomiting?"

"Believe it or not, yes."

"There are schools for special needs." The boy’s mouth pulled into a shape like sympathy. "Don’t strain yourself."

Milo said nothing.

Starved, the boy drifted back to the main group and picked up his laughter as if he had never stepped away.

So they were getting bored of him at last. Attending regularly would spare him the doorway interviews, but that cure had school in it.

He searched the corridor for Paul, Maigh, and the two other bullies from the roadside.

Not here yet.

Instead, light from the tall windows gleamed on a polished placard fixed to the stair rail.

Central Campus Trainees support Warden during successful Host Turning. Field placements considered for University recommendation!

Below the words, six Survey students posed around a covered shape on a wagon, a different region’s Warden in the center with one hand raised to the camera.

"Ugh." Milo leaned closer to read the smaller names. "What was I thinking?"

A palm landed on his shoulder.

"Never too late for a transfer, bro. Never too late."

That was Ollie. Green eyes, brown hair stuck up at the back of his head, as it did every morning regardless of how late his day began. The one person who treated Milo as a classmate rather than a rumor.

He was easy with everyone, Ashpickers included, and on the days it counted, he listened.

By the second week of the year, the class had settled its circles. A boy who appeared twice a month fit into none of them, which left him the window seat and Ollie.

Milo’s heel clipped the stair lip. "You scared me."

"Easy, bro. Don’t wanna get as clumsy as Aldous." Ollie rapped a knuckle on the railing. "He went down those on his back. Miss Rolt made them put a railing in. Said she wasn’t going to be a widow over a staircase."

"I’d do better at exploration, is the thing." His eyes went back to the placard. "I’m curious. That’s most of the job. Fighting, even. I’d take fighting. How does a Studies name get onto a placard like that?"

"Never too late," Ollie replied, almost thoughtful. "Long as you prove you can actually explore and fight. You might even come out ahead, starting from studies. You’re half out the door with those field runs of yours. Maybe they don’t count for much on paper, but it’s experience. Lock in, bro." He clicked his tongue. "Lock in."

"Prove myself..."

The bell rang them all inside.

Milo took the seat by the window and had not even opened a notebook before the temperature next to him changed.

Today the girl he shared the bench with had a friend in tow, hovering in the aisle beside them. Chair legs scraped as the bench’s rightful owner got to her feet.

"Miss Lotte!"

At the front, the teacher looked up from a stack of papers.

"Can Milo please sit in the back?"

Milo opened his notebook, saw the three questions, and turned the page. "Good morning to you too."

"He’s never here!" The girl gestured at her stranded friend. "Amelia sits there now. She’s been sitting there the whole month!"

"Was this seat assigned to Milo at the beginning?" Miss Lotte asked the class.

Students whispered around the room. Ollie gave a vigorous nod on behalf of the undecided.

"Milo has his assigned place." The teacher shrugged. "Amelia has hers."

Amelia mouthed leave it, but the girl twisted in her chair and raised her voice.

"But ewww! He has the Plague!"

The class went off like a dropped tray, breaking into laughter smothered badly on purpose and one clear disgusting from the back rows.

Milo uncapped his pencil.

By lunchtime, they will have me vomiting black blood, he noted his predictions. Tomorrow, extra limbs. Another absence and they’d have time to kill me off without further research.

The roadside story had beaten him to the academy, all four of them telling it. Minus the three beeps and the thumbs-up, of course.

"Miss Lotte!" Rosaline called from the front row. Two blond braids hung straight down the class leader’s back, her textbook open since the first snort, both hands planted on either side of it. "Can we please start the lesson already?"

A flat thud came off Miss Lotte’s desk, the stack of papers landing at once, and the room quit talking.

"Rosaline is right. You two will spend the morning apart if you can’t settle down together."

The girl stamped her foot, and the lesson began over her head.

He sighed and rested his cheek on one hand, looking out the window.

Below, a broad rectangle of earth had been dug into shallow steps for Survey practice. Students knelt in them with brushes and wooden trays while an instructor paced along the edge.

Layla was near the middle.

With her white coat folded at one corner and her pink coils tied high, she brushed around the rim of something hidden in a dark patch. A curved edge of blue glass emerged. She freed it from the last of the soil and raised it for the instructor.

He nodded, and she smiled.

Up here, Milo had a notebook with three deranged questions, an assigned chair, and a classmate pressed to the far edge of the desk.

Down there, Layla found something.

Bad influence...

Prove himself first, and next time he’d be on her side of the window.

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⋆˚࿔ Coming right up: "Beaten (Part 3: Finale)" ... ⤵︎ [!]