Then I have time, Joel thought. Exton won’t be tried for a while, and the campus is still safe. If it ever was.
That seemed enough for now. Joel was exhausted, worn thin, and he still had his inception to deal with. He would do that, then maybe have time to think, figure out what was wrong with all of this.
“I have a request of you,” Joel said. “My friend, Melody. I want her to attend my inception. Will you let her out of the lockdown for today?”
“Is she that redheaded troublemaker?” Harding asked.
Joel nodded, grimacing slightly.
“Well, for you, all right,” Harding said. He spoke to a couple of officers, who rushed off to fetch her.
Joel waited, feeling terrible for Exton sitting in jail. Potentially becoming a Rithmatist is important, Joel thought. I have to go through with this. If I’m one of them, my words will hold more weight.
The officers eventually returned with Melody, her red hair starkly visible in the distance. When she got close, she ran toward him.
Joel nodded to Harding and walked over to meet her.
“You,” she said, pointing, “are in serious trouble.”
“What?” Joel asked.
“You went on an adventure, you nearly got killed, you fought chalklings, and you didn’t invite me!”
He rolled his eyes.
“Honestly,” she said. “That was terribly thoughtless of you. What good is having friends if they don’t put you in mortal peril every once in a while?”
“You might even call it tragic,” Joel said, smiling wanly and joining his mother and Professor Fitch.
“Nah,” Melody said. “I’m thinking I need a new word. Tragic just doesn’t have the effect it once did. What do you think of appalling?”
“Might work,” Joel said. “Shall we go, then?”
The others nodded, and they again began walking toward the campus gates, accompanied by several of Harding’s guards.
“I guess I’m happy you’re all right,” Melody said. “News of what happened is all over the Rithmatic dorm. Most of the others are red in the face, thinking that the puzzle was solved and they were saved by a non-Rithmatist. Of course, half of the red-facedness is probably because none of us can leave yet.”
“Yeah,” Joel said. “Harding’s a careful guy. I think he knows what he’s doing.”
“You believe him, then?” Melody said. “About Exton, I mean.”
Things belonging to each of the students, Joel thought. And pages of rants about wanting revenge against them.…
They walked the same path Joel had run the night before, terrified in the dark, approaching the police officers. “I don’t know,” he said.
* * *
Joel remembered much of what Father Stewart said from the last time he’d gone through an inception ceremony. He’d been less nervous that time. Perhaps he’d been too young to realize what he was getting himself into.
Joel’s knees ached as he knelt in a white robe before Father Stewart, who sprinkled him with water and anointed him with oil. They had to go through the whole ceremony again if Joel wanted to enter the chamber of inception.
Why did everything have to happen at once? He was still fatigued from lack of sleep, and he couldn’t stop thinking about Exton. The man had seemed truly frightened. But he would have been, if his own chalklings had come back to attack him.
Joel felt like he had been swept up in something so much larger than he was. There were new Rithmatic lines. He’d solved his father’s quest, yet wouldn’t get paid for it—all of his father’s contracts of patronage had expired when no line had been produced within five years. Still, the world would be shaken by the discovery of a Rithmatic pattern that was so different from the others.
Father Stewart intoned something in Old English, barely recognizable to Joel as from scripture. Above, the apostles turned their springwork heads. To his right, down a hallway, PreSaint Euclid stood inside a mural dedicated to the triangle.
Joel was about to be one of the oldest nonconverts to ever go through the inception ceremony. The world seemed to be becoming a more uncertain place. The disappearances—probably deaths—of Armedius students made the islands bristle, and there was talk of another civil war. The realities of world politics were starting to seem more and more real to Joel. More and more frightening.
Life wasn’t simple. It never had been simple. He just hadn’t known.
But how does Nalizar play into all of this? Joel thought. I still don’t trust that man. Exton had expressed dislike of Nalizar on several occasions, but perhaps it was something to think about. Could