could tell were the remnants of chalklings that had been destroyed. Inspector Harding motioned for his officers to remain outside the room, then edged around Fitch and carefully picked his way through the hallway with Joel.
“There,” Harding said, pointing to the last circle in the line. “Blood.”
Indeed there was. Just a few drops, like at the other scenes. Joel rounded the defense and whistled softly, squatting down.
“What?” Harding asked.
“Shoaff Defense,” Joel said. “A nine-pointer. He got it right on, too.” He reached over, picking up a slip of paper that lay discarded near the circle. It detailed the Shoaff Defense.
Joel held it up for the inspector. “Cheat sheet. Even with a pattern, it’s hard to do a nine-pointer.”
“Poor lad,” Harding said, taking off his round policeman’s hat and tucking it under his arm in respect. He looked back past the line of seven circles leading out of the room. “He put up one dusting good fight. Real trooper.”
Joel nodded, glancing at those drops of blood. Again, there was no body. Like at the other scenes. Everyone assumed the students were being kidnapped, but …
“How did they get him out?” Joel asked.
The others looked at him.
“We had to go through a Line of Forbiddance at the doorway,” Joel said. “If they’re kidnapping the Rithmatists, how did they get him out of the room?”
“They must have redrawn the line,” Harding said, scratching at his chin. “But it had holes in it, as if attacked. So they redrew it, then attacked it again? But why would they do that? To cover up taking the boy? Why bother? We’re obviously going to know he was kidnapped.”
None of them had an answer to that. Joel studied the defenses for a moment, then frowned, leaning closer to the broken, ripped Shoaff Defense. “Professor Fitch, you should look at this.”
“What is it?”
“A drawing,” Joel said. “On the floor—not a Rithmatic pattern. A picture.”
It was done in chalk, but it looked like a charcoal drawing someone would do in art class. It was hastily done, more a silhouette than a real drawing. It depicted a man wearing a bowler hat and holding a long, oversized cane to his side, tip down against the ground.
The man’s head seemed too big, and there was a large undrawn section on the face, like a gaping open mouth. It was smiling.
Beneath the picture were a few short, hastily written paragraphs.
I can’t see his eyes. He draws in scribbles. Nothing he does keeps its shape. The chalklings are distorted, and there seem to be hundreds of them. I destroy them, and they return to life. I block them, and they dig through. I scream for help, but nobody comes.
He just stands there, watching with those dark, unseen eyes of his. The chalklings aren’t like any I’ve seen. They writhe and contort, never keeping a single shape.
I can’t fight them.
Tell my father that I’m sorry for being such a bad son. I love him. I really do.
Joel shivered, all three of them silent as they read Charles Calloway’s final words. Fitch knelt and drew a chalkling on the ground, then used it to check the sketch, in case it was Rithmatic. The chalkling just walked over the picture, ignoring it. Fitch dismissed the chalkling.
“These paragraphs make little sense,” Fitch said. “Chalklings that return to life after they’re destroyed? Rithmatic shapes that don’t hold their forms?”
“I’ve seen such things,” Harding said. He looked up and met Fitch’s eyes. “At Nebrask.”
“But this is so far from there!” Fitch said.
“I don’t think we can deny it any longer, Professor,” Harding said, rising. “Something has escaped the Tower. It got here, somehow.”
“But it’s a man who is doing this,” Fitch said, hands shaking as he tapped the drawing Charles had done. “That’s no Forgotten shadow, Harding. It’s in the shape of a person.”
As Joel listened, he realized something: there was a whole lot more going on at Nebrask than people knew.
“What is a Forgotten?” Joel asked.
Both turned to him, then grew quiet.
“Never mind that, soldier,” Harding said. “You’re a great help here, but I’m afraid I don’t have clearance to tell you about Nebrask.”
Fitch looked uncomfortable, and suddenly Joel knew what Melody felt like, being excluded. He wasn’t surprised, though. The details of what happened at Nebrask were kept nearly as quiet as the secrets of complex Rithmatics.
Most people were actually fine with that. The battlefield was a long way away, out in the central isles. People were content to ignore Nebrask. The fighting had been pretty much