The Rithmatist

food. “No. No, son, I can’t agree to this. Too unconventional. I have already caused enough trouble. I’m sorry, son.”
    It was a dismissal. Joel turned and walked away, shoving his hands in his pockets.



CHAPTER

    Joel hated nights.
    Night meant bed, and bed meant lying in the dark, feeling exhausted, yet completely unable to sleep.
    He and his mother shared a single room in the family dormitory. They had a closet that doubled as a changing room, and shared a communal bathroom at the end of the hallway outside. The room was tiny: brick walls, a single slit of a window, one bed. When his mother had a holiday from work, Joel slept on the floor. Other days, he made the bed and left it for her to sleep in during the daylight hours when she was off shift.
    They’d once lived in larger quarters attached to his father’s workshop in the basement of the dormitory. After the accident, Joel’s mother had requested that the principal allow them to move into another room. Joel hadn’t complained. The chalk workshop held too many memories.
    Joel stared at the ceiling. Some nights, Joel went out onto the lawn and read books by lanternlight, but that tended to get him into trouble. His mother was half convinced that his poor showing in school had to do with his nocturnal habits.
    Above him, sketched onto the ceiling, he could make out lines, illuminated by the faint light of the grounds’ lanterns outside. The Easton Defense, one of the most complicated of the traditional Rithmatic defensive circles. He traced the lines with his eyes, following the inner circle, then the inscribed nonagon with its missing sides, the outer circles.
    It was a clumsy sketch, though Joel had been proud of it when he’d drawn it two years back. The nine bind points were off, and a couple of the circles were uneven. If this defense had been used by a Rithmatist in a duel, the circle would have been breached in a matter of heartbeats. Even now, Joel often couldn’t do a nine-point circle without a sketch for reference. If he got even one bind point off, it could destroy the integrity of the entire drawing.
    The integrity of the drawing. It had no integrity. It was just chalk on plaster; it had no power. He blinked, gritting his teeth. Sometimes he hated Rithmatics. It was all about fighting and conflict. Why couldn’t it do anything useful ?
    He turned onto his side. Was Michael right? Was Joel too infatuated with Rithmatics? Everyone, from Fitch to his mother, told him that at one point or another.
    And yet … it was the one thing he cared about, the one thing that he seemed to be skilled at. Without it, what was he? He had been shown, pointedly, that a good education wouldn’t elevate him to the status of the other students.
    So what did he do now? Follow the course everyone expected of him? Do well enough in school to get a job as a clerk, one step up from a laborer?
    Or did he keep chasing a dream? Study Rithmatics at a university. Become a scholar of it, an expert. Fitch had offered him a nibble of something grand, but had snatched away the plate right afterward. Joel felt a flare of anger at that.
    He shoved it down. Fitch did want to teach me, he thought. He was so shaken by what happened today that he didn’t dare ask.
    Fitch would spend his summer tutoring students assigned to him by Principal York. A plan started brewing in Joel’s mind. A desperate, foolish plan.
    Joel smiled. He needed to fail history class.
    * * *
    “I must remind you, again, how important this exam is,” said Professor Kim. He was one of the few foreigners on the faculty. Even though he spoke without an accent—his family had moved to the United Isles when he was just a baby—his heritage was plainly visible in his Asian skin color and eye shape.
    Kim’s appointment to the general school had caused a ruckus. Parents had worried about him teaching history to their students—they’d feared that he’d present the JoSeun version of historical events. Joel wasn’t sure how the perspective could really get skewed beyond the truth. After all, the JoSeun people had conquered Europe. Could anyone really dispute that as fact?
    “The exam is fifty percent of your final grade,” Professor Kim said, handing out tests to the students as he moved between their desks. “You have two hours to complete it—take your time.”
    Professor Kim wore a suit and bow tie—even though other professors, those who had done their university studies in France or Espania,