The Rithmatist

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 that trip.
    Joel sat down, thinking about that. He flipped back to the very first dates of travel. A visit to the island of Zona Arida.
    Zona Arida, near Bonneville and Texas. They were all southwestern islands. Joel’s father had gone there several times, according to the logs.
    Joel frowned, then glanced at the books on the floor. One was the one that Nalizar had checked out, about further Rithmatic lines. Joel picked it up and opened it to the back, looking at the stamped card that listed the book’s history. The volume had only been checked out a few times over the years.
    Joel’s father was one of the first on the list. His father’s first visit to Zona Arida had come only a few weeks after he had checked out the book.
    Joel flipped open the volume, scanning the chapter lists. One was called “Historical New-Line Theories.” He flipped to that one, skimming the contents by the light of a single lantern. It took several hours to find what he wanted.
    Some early explorers reported strange designs upon the cliffs of these islands in the southwest. We cannot know who created them, since much of America was uninhabited at the time of European arrival.
    Some have claimed that lines drawn after these patterns have Rithmatic properties. Most scholars dismiss this. Many odd shapes can be drawn and gain chalkling life from a Line of Making. That does not make them a new line.
    Joel turned the next page. There, facing him, was a sketch of the very creature he’d seen in the chamber of inception earlier that day.

    What is