Chapter 69: On Purpose (Part 1)

Let go.

Some Studies girl with a bat could open her fingers on the whistle and walk off untouched.

Several hundred heads must have arrived at the same thought, since Cald raised his voice over the murmur.

"Dropping it at the start is permitted. It also scores nothing. A fight you lose does score, and we will be watching how you lose it." He lowered his arm. "Nobody may force an opponent to keep hold of a weapon. How badly anyone is hurt today is therefore decided by whoever is losing."

Spoken like the man who signed the medicals.

"The winners advance. They also keep what they won. The winning fighter takes the relic the loser dropped, and the winning thrower takes the losing thrower’s."

Milo’s grip closed on the stone.

A Crude baton bought nothing, but a knife off an upper tray was a different conversation at a market stall.

Two fights, maybe three, and a phone stopped being a thing he borrowed from frightened girls.

"Your partner has been chosen for you. We averaged Thursday’s run with this morning’s and matched each of you with the nearest time. Which of you fights and which of you throws is yours to settle."

The nearest time.

His had been fast on both days. Whoever shared it probably logged real years in Field. It would take one look at a Studies boy to hand him the bricks.

Layla’s partner, meanwhile, could come from the back of the dust.

What had they given her for seven? A knife, at the least.

Milo went looking, the gravel hissing at every step.

"Rows again, the same five." Cald’s voice followed him through the shoulders. "Each of you will be handed a name. Find its owner and settle your roles before your match is called."

A white sleeve came up ahead, but it belonged to a boy. Twice he caught pink at the edge of his sight, but each time it was a scraped face.

Instructors waded in from the sides with their arms out. The crowd folded back into rows and dragged Milo with it, nowhere near the faces he sought.

The queue shuffled forward.

At its head, slips of paper changed hands, and each one sent its reader’s eyes around the field.

He gave his name a second time and received a slip no wider than two fingers.

Paul Failes.

There was one Paul he knew.

Milo looked up.

Three places down the neighboring row, taller than everyone around him, the redhead was lifting his eyes from a slip of his own.

...

"We have similar times," Paul said, folding and straightening the slip in his palms. "Maybe you are hiding something, like Maigh said."

"So you guys do gossip behind my back." Milo tucked the baton under his arm. "And here I thought you’d gotten bored of me. Don’t worry, stressed by exams never even entered my mind. Right, tough guy?"

Still, he wouldn’t have expected Maigh, of all the people at this academy, to be keeping an eye on—

"Come on, tough guy. Show me what you got."

A hand had clamped around his.

Wearing a grin, Paul squeezed a little harder with every second Milo spent staring at it.

While his act as a bullied, wounded Studies boy had once talked him out of a vent inspection, his name was now written on the slip of somebody who’d finished among the first fifteen.

...Did that mean Seb also—

"Ow!"

His knuckles ground against each other.

"Well, I gotta say," Paul muttered, easing some of the force. "Took me a while to get a reaction out of you." He pumped his arm back and forth. "Come on, show me your strength."

"I’m Studies. My strength is on paper."

"Then pull, paper boy."

Milo’s shoulder nearly left its socket before he dug his heels in and pressed back, gravel grinding into his arches.

Without releasing his hand, the redhead stopped pulling and drove forward instead.

At 55 kilograms, Milo had no answer to that.

As his shoes slid on the dirt, he strained to find a dent or a slope in the ground to brace himself against, but no amount of leaning secured his footing.

The field tilted. His knee folded. With the baton clutched to his ribs, he fell to the ground on his free palm.

Paul let go as Milo lay amid the stalks of grass.

Predictable. Nobody had needed a contest to learn that a Field boy outweighed him.

What the redhead looked at afterward, though, was Milo’s chest.

Milo checked it himself. Just as on Cald’s treadmill, it rose and fell at its own slow pace.

In the meantime, the Field boy’s nostrils flared around a breath and the hand that had squeezed was flexing open and shut behind his thigh.

"All right, tell you what," Paul said. "How do you feel about being the fighter?"

One glance was supposed to have put him behind the line with the bricks. He’d grown so certain of that arrangement that now the thought of standing in a box across from another student quickened his heartbeat more than the pulling had.

"Fighter? Me?" Milo straightened and brushed the dust off his trousers. "But you’re stronger...?"

"Let’s just say strong hands throw hard. Do I really have to explain to you why I chose this split, Studies boy?"

"Don’t be mad if I get knocked out in the first round. The thrower loses along with the fighter."

"I will be mad." Paul slammed his hands together and cracked a knuckle. "You better not do something as stupid as losing in the first round."

"Failes and Zeuqe!" An instructor pointed them to an empty square. "You’re up!"

All around it, the matches had already begun. Bricks fell on the turf. A bat clattered down a second after its whistle, and a girl walked off with her zero and all of her teeth.

Farther out, wood cracked on stone, and one line of throwers cheered while the other groaned.

Was Layla in one of those boxes? Holding what?

Milo rose onto his toes, and Paul’s palm landed on his shoulder.

"Your girlfriend’s not in our box."

"..."

So Milo stepped over the paint.

After tightening his grip on the stone to steady his hand, he drew a deep breath just as a familiar face stepped in from the opposite side.

Maigh?!

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