Chapter 60: Chapter 60: The first one from the orphanage

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Chapter 60: The first one from the orphanage

Amara kept clutching his arm, laughing, as Peter threw his hands up as if calling for silence from a crowd that wasn’t listening. “One second off Nathaniel Grey’s record,” he repeated the third time in just a few minutes. “One second!”

“Let’s go,” Kairan said, gently pulling away from Amara. “I want to get this blood off my arms.”

He turned toward the dormitory corridor. He took two steps.

A voice stopped him.

“Wait.”

The courtyard, slowly quieting down after the commotion, suddenly fell silent again. A boy stepped away from the Room One Hundred group which had remained clustered near a corner of the low wall, some sitting on flat stones embedded in the dirt, others standing with arms crossed. Edmund Slate walked calmly across the courtyard; people stepped aside wherever he passed, just as they did for Nathaniel.

“Number One is going over to talk to him,” someone whispered.

“Look, he stopped on purpose,” said another.

Edmund stopped a couple of paces from Kairan. He looked him in the eye for a long moment, then began to clap slowly, just three times with a smile spreading across his face.

“You did very well,” he said.

Amara stiffened. Peter stopped speaking mid-sentence. Even Gregory, who was usually unflappable, stood motionless.

Edmund stepped closer near enough to lower his voice to a level only Kairan could clearly hear.

“Enjoy the victories while you can,” he said, the smile never leaving his face. “When we face each other, I’ll show you the real difference between us.”

Kairan looked at him. He didn’t reply. After a moment, he simply turned back toward the corridor, as if the words had never been spoken. Edmund lingered a second too long, his smile fading slightly before he turned back to his own group without another word.

“Hey,” Gregory said, grabbing Kairan by the shoulder before he could actually walk away. “Where are you going?”

“To my room.”

“You can’t go to your room,” Peter said. “There’s still the arm-wrestling match.”

Kairan stopped. “Oh, right.”

A wave of laughter rippled through his own dormitory group. Amara covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes laughing more than she could hide. “You forgot,” she said. “You beat Silas Crane twice and forgot there’s another challenge.”

“Are you in or not?” a voice called out from across the courtyard.

It was Bartholomew Fitch, already on his feet with his sleeves rolled up; his arms looked bigger than Kairan remembered them being that morning.

Kairan looked at him, then at the sky above the courtyard the sun was lower now than when they had left lunch and said, without much ceremony, “I don’t want to waste any more time. How about we do it right here in the courtyard? It’s an easy win for me anyway.”

The courtyard, which had just come back to life after the race, went still again. Several people widened their eyes in shock. Someone laughed in disbelief, thinking it was a joke. No one laughed for long.

Bartholomew clenched his jaw. “Fine,” he said finally. “Let’s ask the judge; he’s right here anyway.”

Julian Wexford, who until that moment had been watching the race from the edge of the courtyard with the rest of his dormitory, stepped forward with an expression that seemed to say nothing could truly surprise him anymore that day.

“If both parties agree,” he said, “that’s fine. Bring two cushions from the crowd. Better to be comfortable than on the bare ground.” Within seconds, two cushions appeared out of nowhere one snatched from beneath someone sitting on a flat rock by the low wall, the other rushed over by a child from the crowd; both were handed to Julian with a speed that betrayed just how eager everyone was to see what was about to happen.

Julian placed them on the ground, facing each other, and motioned for Kairan and Bartholomew to kneel.

“Best of three,” he said. “Two hands on the ground wins the round. First to two wins it all.”

Bartholomew knelt on his side, cracking his knuckles; his neck muscles strained as he warmed up his shoulders with a few quick rotations. His breathing was already faster than usual not from fatigue, but from something akin to nervousness masked by concentration.

Kairan knelt on the other side, unhurried, his face devoid of any visible tension. His scratched arms still burned, the dried blood pulling at his skin with every movement, but he paid it no mind.

“Ready?” Julian asked.

“Ready,” said Bartholomew, his voice tighter than he would have liked.

“Ready,” said Kairan.

Around them, the entire courtyard had closed in to form a tight circle, hundreds of eyes fixed on the two boys kneeling face-to-face. The sun was slowly sinking behind the orphanage rooftops, while someone somewhere in the crowd whispered something to a neighbor that everyone, in one way or another,

They were thinking that the new boy with those impossible eyes and dried blood on his arms didn’t look at all like the typical, ordinary kid who had arrived the night before.