Chapter 68: Let Go (Part 2: Finale)

The cough was his own, and it tasted of grit.

Standing, he would have run above the worst of it, but a head at knee height took everything the front of the pack kicked up. Whoever fell behind in this first stretch would spend the rest of the kilometer breathing dirt in.

So he sped up, his palms rasping over the ground.

He did not look left or right, nor behind him, where Layla faded. Staying in her group began, of all things, with leaving her in his dust.

Would her coat still be clean after this?

...

The finish line passed under Milo’s palms, and the instructor in the blue sweatband clicked him into the digital board.

Around fourteen backs were already beyond it, most of them built enough for the muscles to stand out from underneath their clothes.

A Studies boy was not supposed to be counted among them. Today, that was the idea.

Straightening returned the gravel to his soles.

Swish-shush.

Grit lined his teeth, and both palms had gone the red of a scraped knee.

The kilometer behind him lay under a brown haze, heads and elbows surfacing out of it only to disappear again.

Finding no pink, only dust, he pressed a finger to his left pocket. The zipper was shut. Nothing inside crunched.

"Keep moving!" An instructor swept her arm toward the Turning land. "To the middle. Five rows, same as Thursday!"

As the haze was not going to hand him a vibrant ponytail, Milo walked.

Since Thursday, the engines had been hauled off. In their place, white paint divided the middle of the field into dozens of squares. Each came with short strokes, drawn about a dozen paces off two of its sides.

At the head of each row waited an instructor with a board and a tray cart.

Back when the carts carried the omens, Milo had wheeled three of them himself. The one parked behind his row still had the wandering wheel Eve had coaxed straight around every corner.

On the trays now lay relics, stacked like firewood.

"Name?"

"Milo Zeuqe."

The woman’s pen traveled down her board.

"Zeuqe... two."

Without looking, she reached to the bottom tray and held one out.

"Next!"

Rough stone bit into his palm with the moist chill of a stalactite. The gray baton was as long as his forearm and thicker toward the head.

Take the bands off Seb’s and dip it in ash, and the two would have hung from the same strap.

Scritch-scritch!

The sheet snapped open beside him.

[ Grade: Crude ]

[ Name: A Gray Stone Baton ]

[ Type: Arms ]

[ Longevity: Minute ]

[ Mercies: None ]

[ Litany: Unavailable ]

[ Description: A stone baton. One of several hundred. ] 𓂃🖋

Two omens at half a Minute each made a Minute. That much they had gotten right.

But stone? Wasn’t it supposed to be amber?

He had never watched a consecration. For all he knew, amber went in and came out gray, the way dough came out of an oven as bread. Or the amber had gone somewhere worth more, and the academy had consecrated whatever had been around.

His shoes were full of the same material, and nobody called that a relic.

Either way, no one handed over a phone for a Crude piece with a Minute left in it.

More pages snapped open around him, white and smooth, one over every pair of hands the carts had filled.

Though no one else could read what he saw on his yellowed, crumpled Appraisal, he still skittered out of the row.

Most of the pages displayed the same baton, or at least a stick similar enough to it.

Here and there a knife turned up, and two rows over, a boy weighed a hook in his hand.

It did follow that the more omens a student had collected, the higher the instructor’s hand went on the cart. Those who had dug up nothing got a wooden bat, and no page was snapping open for that one.

As the haze emptied itself into the rows, the crowd thickened, and every coat that arrived was the color of the field.

Despite searching, Milo found no pink ponytail among them.

Ollie and Rosaline were no easier to find, and he’d rather not risk embarrassing himself by approaching someone who merely resembled a classmate.

SCREEEECH!

At the center of the squares, Mr. Cald had returned with his arm high up.

"Dear students! Before any of you takes another step, I must ask for your full attenti—"

Half the field dropped.

Milo was on one knee with the baton across his thigh by the end of the sentence. Around him, hundreds of students who had spent Thursday in the air hugged the ground they had just crawled over.

No engine roared. There was none left to roar. The instructors must’ve prepared something else. The ground itself, maybe. One lever, and the squares would tip open, sending a town’s worth of students tumbling into hell.

It burns! Save us! We don’t want to die... Already, Milo could imagine the bloodcurdling screams.

But Mr. Cald only waited.

"The second part of the Field examination happens here," he said. "May I explain the rules?"

As the last of the students stood back up, the man continued.

"You will fight in pairs. One of you is the fighter and stands in the box. The other is the thrower and stands behind the line outside it. Across from you will be another fighter and another thrower."

So that was what the paint was for. No hell this time.

"The fighter uses the relic handed out just now. Those of you who brought your own may use it instead, provided it does not exceed Common grade. Bricks and balls, both hard, are stacked behind the thrower’s line. The thrower does not step over it."

Bricks Milo had thrown before, at a worse target.

"A fighter loses when the weapon leaves the hand. It makes no difference whether it was knocked out or let go. When a fighter loses, the thrower is out as well."

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⋆˚࿔ Coming right up: "On Purpose (Part 1)" ... ⤵︎ [!]