Chapter 10: Beaten (Part 3: Finale)

The lesson ended with Miss Lotte assigning forty pages on the storage of consecrated material. Milo copied the page numbers and packed his notebook. Once the corridor cleared, he went downstairs.

Studies were reserved for the upper floors, where dangerous things appeared as diagrams. On the ground floor, Survey opened into the garden. Between both were Field’s practice rooms, where a trainee launched into a wall had less distance to fall, and the stairs down to them worked Milo’s ankle at every landing.

He searched every face that came his way, and not one of them was Paul or Maigh.

It was disappointing.

Nobody looked at him twice. A boy even moved aside to make room for him on a bench.

The final door of the corridor was narrower than the practice-room entrances, with a plate stamped:

INSPECTION COLLECTION — STAFF ACCESS

Milo tried the handle. Locked.

Finding out whether relics could hurt him required one relic and somebody willing to misuse it, so he knocked, got nothing, and leaned in to put an eye to the keyhole.

A figure moved on the other side.

The door flew open into his eye.

"AH!!"

Milo staggered back with a hand clapped over half his face. One step short of going down, he blinked the water out.

Maigh leaned into the corridor.

"What’s this jerk doing here?" he asked over his shoulder, pitching it back to the three boys deeper in the room. His grin sharpened when he saw Milo clutching his eye. "Rumor came to check on us in person. What happened, Mommy couldn’t bear you and vanished?"

Milo bit his lower lip.

People at the academy quickly moved on from joking about his supposed schizophrenia; watching a child sob spoiled the sport. Even Maigh usually left the erased town alone.

All for the better. A temper this hot should answer question one from his notebook in short order.

Without a word, Milo walked in past Maigh.

Along both walls, relics lay under glass, one to a podium, each with its own placard. The four had taken an interest in the far case: a logbook open on top, two pencils beside it, and a dented hand-bell on a velvet block underneath.

Their own gear hung from straps outside the cases: knives at Paul’s and Maigh’s hips, bats on the backs of the other two.

Milo looked down upon the bell they were huddled over.

"Even Daddy’s money wasn’t enough to put such imbeciles inside an actual academy, huh?"

"He speaks," Paul said, leaning his elbows on the neighboring case. "Careful with the air in here, boys. It’s the Plague one."

Bored laughter went around the room.

Rather than answer it, Milo bent closer over the glass and squinted at the piece of metal.

"Come on, what is that? I’d eyeball it at maybe an... hourpiece?"

Paul came off the case. "You wouldn’t know an Hour piece if one broke your other ankle."

"I saw better yesterday."

After straightening, Milo wiped the glass where his breath had fogged it.

"Relax. This is my last day here," he added. "Wanted to see how you peasants live."

Let them work out the remainder on their own, what a boy might dig out of a marked ruin, and why he’d stop attending afterward.

Paul’s eyes flicked to Maigh’s.

"The examiner himself came out to the Misprint and treated us." Milo tapped the edge of the case. "What do you even do with a hand-bell?"

A breathless girl swung around the door’s frame, two folders hugged to her chest. The shortest of the four went red at the ears and squared himself up.

So they got something going on here?

"Mr. Cald wants you!" She opened one folder. "And the Commonpiece report. Which of you has it?"

"Commonpiece!" Milo pressed a hand to his chest. "Ah, poverty is so predictable. And what do you wear, hm? Crudepieces?"

The shortest one found his voice.

"Tessy, can you believe it?" He walked over to her, and the arm Milo expected around her shoulder never left his side.

Shy?

"This Ashpicker loser shows up out of nowhere and calls us out!"

"Ewww." Tessy winced, before she burst out laughing. "So that’s the Plague one?"

"What’s your name?" Milo asked, eyes on the short one.

The boy swallowed, checking with Tessy first, the other three second, and settling on Milo last. "Seb. What about it?"

Words alone were a dead end here.

The four had logged real years in the Field, and boys that seasoned didn’t lose their heads over a Studies runt. If one of them ever did swing, it would be careful and humiliating, nothing near the hard relic blow his notebook needed.

Left to it, they could toy with him all afternoon without leaving a mark.

Seb, on the other hand... a head shorter than the rest, in front of a girl he clearly liked, and blushing about it.

"All right. Listen very carefully, Seb." Milo lowered his voice and closed the distance.

The boy didn’t give up an inch of ground.

"Tessy didn’t come down here because she likes you. Girls get close to small, ugly things when they think they can fix them." He glanced at her folders, hand clenching into a fist. "She even brought instructions. And you—"

Seb’s face went tight. "You piece of—"

Milo punched him mid-word. From below, whole weight behind it.

Knuckles cracked into the boy’s nose, and red sprayed fine across Tessy’s face.

The girl screamed, hands flying up.

"Woah, woah!" Paul shouted.

"Seb!" Maigh yelled at the same time.

Hands clamped both of Milo’s arms and hauled him back.

Tessy stumbled into the doorframe, wiping the red fleck running down her cheek.

Seb came up from the stagger with his bat off its strap. There was nothing careful in him now.

"Put that—!" Paul got out.

The swing came anyway.

Bookmark!

Milo wrenched a hand free and shoved it into the arc. Wood slammed his palm, crushing it back into his chest as pain flashed from his fingers to his shoulder.

The blow tore him out of Paul’s grip. On the way down, he grabbed at a podium and brought it over with him, the case bursting. His back struck the wall, and he slid to the floor amid the falling glass.

"Khh!"

The room dimmed at its edges.

Over the noise, dry scratching sounded near his ear.

The yellow sheet floated there.

[ Bookmark set ]

[ Marked: Banded Oak Baton. ] 𓂃🖋

Full name and everything.

"I’m getting a teacher!" Tessy cried.

Her shoes slapped away down the corridor.

The toppled podium blocked half his view of the room, and through its wood, faint as ink bleeding from the far side of a page, a baton-shaped outline tilted in time with Seb’s steps.

When the boy rounded the podium, the shape settled into the bat itself.

Blood shone on Milo’s teeth as he smiled.

The Bookmark worked.

Paul caught Seb’s shoulder. The boy shook him off, slowing at the sight of the page.

"Huh? Maigh! Paul!" His eyes narrowed. "Why’s it showing my relic like it’s his?"

So much for a private test. The audience, at least, got a plain appraisal of the baton.

Milo’s second smile made it out before Seb drove the wood into his stomach.

"ARGH!"

Folding over his knees, he coughed blood onto the glass. His gut seized around an ache that clogged each breath high in his chest.

Relics could hurt him.

Very badly, in fact.

Holding what air he had, he listened for a second scritch.

The page hung there, quiet. Absorption wanted more from him than one hit. Question two took its no.

Milo sagged among the broken glass, beaten and satisfied that he was insane in one way and not in the other.

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