outside. “Come, child,” he said. “The others needing inception will arrive soon. Whatever has happened has happened, and we shall see the result.”
He held out a piece of chalk.
Joel left the chamber feeling shocked and confused. He took the chalk numbly, walking over to a stone placed on the ground for the purpose of drawing. He knelt down. Melody, Fitch, and his mother approached.
Joel drew a Line of Forbiddance on the top of the block. Melody reached out with an anxious hand, but Joel knew what would happen.
Her hand passed through the plane above the line. Her face fell.
Father Stewart looked troubled. “Well, son, it appears that the Master has other plans for you. In his name, I pronounce you a full member of the Church of the Monarch.” He hesitated. “Do not see this as a failure. Go, and the Master will lead you to the path he has chosen.” It was the same thing that Stewart had told Joel eight years ago.
“No,” Melody said. “This isn’t right! It was supposed to … supposed to be different this time…”
“It’s all right,” Joel said, standing. He felt so tired. With a crushing sense of defeat on top of that, making it difficult for him to breathe.
Mostly, he just wanted to be alone. He turned and walked slowly from the cathedral and back toward campus.
CHAPTER
Joel slept through most of the day, but didn’t try to go to bed that night. He sat up at his father’s table, a springwork lantern whirring on the wall behind him.
He’d cleaned the books off the table, making way for his father’s old notes and annotations, which he’d placed alongside a few pieces of the man’s best chalk. The notes and diagrams seemed unimportant. The mystery had been solved. The problems were over.
Joel wasn’t a Rithmatist. He’d failed his father.
Stop that, he told himself. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
He wanted to throw the table over and scream. He wanted to break the pieces of chalk, then grind them to dust. Why had he dared hope? He’d known that very few people got chosen.
So much about life was disappointment. He often wondered how humankind endured so long, and if the few moments when things went right really made up for all the rest.
This was how it ended. Joel, back where he had begun, the same as before. He’d done too poorly in his classes to earn himself further education once he was done with Armedius. Now he didn’t even have the slight, buried hope that he might find a way to be a Rithmatist.
The three students who had been taken were dead. Gone, left in unmarked graves by Exton. The killer had been stopped, but what did that mean to the families who had lost children? Their pain would continue.
He leaned forward. “Why?” he asked of the papers and notes. “Why does everything turn out like this?”
His father’s work would be forgotten in the light of Exton’s horrible deeds. The clerk would be remembered as a murderer, but also as the man who had finally solved the mystery of a new Rithmatic line.
How? Joel thought. How did he solve that mystery? How did Exton, a man who failed his classes, discover things that no Rithmatic scholar has been able to?
Joel stood up, pacing back and forth. His father’s notes continued to confront him, seeming to shine in the light of the lantern.
Joel walked over, digging through them, trying to find the very oldest of the notes. He came up with a yellowed piece of paper, browning on one edge.
I traveled again to the fronts of Nebrask. And discovered very little. Men speak of strange happenings all the time, but they never seem to occur when I am there.
I remain convinced that there are other lines. I need to know what they do before I can determine anything else.
The page had a drawn symbol at the bottom, the Line of Silencing, with its four loops. “Where?” Joel asked. “Where did you get this, Father? How did you discover it? At Nebrask?”
If that had been the case, then others would know about it. Surely the Rithmatists on the battlefront, if they saw lines like these, would intuit their meaning. And who would draw them? Wild chalklings didn’t draw lines. Did they?
Joel put the sheet aside, looking through his father’s log, trying to date when he’d written that particular passage.
The last date on the log was the day before his father had died. It listed Nebrask as the location of