The Awakening Stone glowed for everyone who touched it.
Kael had been sitting there for two hours already. Each student took three seconds, maybe four. The Stone read you, gave you a grade, and that basically determined your life. He understood why people were nervous. He was nervous too, though he had gotten good at not showing it.
"Harvan Delt. Grade: D. Congratulations."
Harvan's family cheered. D was a good result if your family ran a shop, and Kael had understood this not because anyone told him but because he had spent sixteen years watching how people in Valdris treated each other. Your grade was your ceiling and your ceiling was your worth. He had always found that part interesting, the way everyone in a room could organize their opinion of a person around a number a rock handed them at sixteen.
"Seryn Asholt. Grade: B."
The applause was louder for her. B meant she was actually going somewhere. Seryn walked off the platform with her chin up and a thin smile on her face.
Two more students went up and Kael looked at the stands while he waited.
His father was in the third row in the coat he saved for things that mattered, sitting straight in the way of a man who had decided that not moving meant he wasn't worried. His mother was next to him with her hands in her lap. Rhett was on her other side, ten years old and small enough that most people in the crowd weren't really seeing her, not that they were paying attention to the stands anyway. She was watching Kael and not the Stone, and when he caught her eye she grinned a little and held up two fingers. Their signal. He nodded and looked away before she could see anything on his face.
"Kael Ashborne."
He got up and walked to the Stone. He put both hands on it and slid them on it, it was cool and smooth.
Three seconds passed and then six. At ten seconds the official beside the podium looked up. By fifteen the crowd had started doing that thing where everyone goes quiet at the same time because something is wrong and nobody wants to be the first to say it. Kael kept his hands on the Stone and let it work though he felt slightly awkward as the silence was getting unnerving. He could feel it doing something, searching for a category it kept not finding, and the strange part was that it didn't feel like being rejected. It felt like it was looking for a way to diagnose him.
He had noticed something like this before. The Firmament had always felt slightly off around him, like a room where one wall isn't quite straight. He'd mentioned it to his father once when he was young and his father had said something reassuring that didn't mean anything, and Kael had stopped bringing it up after that.
Twenty seconds.
The Stone cracked. One line from the bottom to the top, and every Awakened person in the amphitheater felt something go wrong in their Codex at the same moment, a small skip, like a record catching. A woman two rows back made a sound and Kael waited to see what the display would say.
GRADE: NULL
ERROR: Classification impossible. Result recorded as system anomaly.
He read it twice. At least it hadn't given him nothing. It had tried to give him something and run out of room. He knew the difference because he had spent a past life building systems that evaluated inputs and returned outputs, and he knew what a broken evaluation looked like compared to a low score. A low score was still a score. A broken evaluation meant the input was outside the range the system was ever meant to handle.
He was still thinking about that when he noticed Chancellor Veyne was already moving.
Kael hadn't paid much attention to Veyne during the ceremony but now he was. The man crossed the platform at a pace that looked calm and got there much faster than calm should allow. He said something to the ceremony official and the official raised the announcement staff.
"A Firmament Anomaly has been registered. By order of the Academy, the subject is to be placed in protective custody pending evaluation."
His father immediately stood up.
"That subject is my son!," Aldric said. "And that result is a problem with your Stone, not with him."
The room went quiet. Aldric Ashborne didn't have any official standing worth mentioning anymore but he had a voice built for rooms where he wasn't supposed to be heard, and he used it. He cited three precedents by name. He even made a clear argument that a classification error in the Stone was different from an error in the person being classified. Kael didn't even know where his father had found three precedents for a NULL result. He also hadn't known his father was looking. "How'd he know?", he thought.
Veyne let him finish and then he turned to the amphitheater.
"Every Awakened person in this room just felt a disruption through their Codex," Veyne said. His voice was patient in a way that wasn't quite kind. "A NULL result has no precedent because it has never occurred. We don't know what it means. We do know that an unknown Firmament event just affected every person in this building, and the safety of this kingdom requires us to treat that seriously." He looked at Kael. "Expunction will be carried out at first light."
Wow, he had just sentenced a 16 year old to death because of this. Also, an expunction.Kael had known that word since he was a kid. It was a forced Codex removal. He had known it the way you know words for things that happen to other people.
A guard came up to him on the platform. "Come with me."
Kael reluctantly went. He looked at Rhett once before they turned him toward the corridor. She was standing on her seat to get a better view to see over the people in front of her. She wasn't scared. She was furious, in the total way that only kids can be furious, like the whole situation was personally offensive and she was already figuring out who to blame. That had helped a little.
As he left, he had also noticed the looks of pity the crowd gave him. He pity'd himself too.
The room they put him in had one cot, one window that faced an interior wall, and a basic lock. Kael sat down and looked at the floor.
He was actually going to be executed in the morning. That was the actual situation. Veyne had called it something else but Expunction was Expunction. Nobody performed it for containment.
He tried to think about what he could do. His father had no leverage left and whatever legal process existed moved slower than dawn. He had no combat ability and didn't know anyone inside this building who had a reason to help him. He sat on the cot for a while and didn't come up with anything better than wait and hope someone opened a door.
Sometime after midnight Rhett's voice came from down the corridor.
She was telling a guard that she needed to see her brother. The guard was explaining why that wasn't possible. Rhett wasn't finding the explanation convincing. Kael listened to them go back and forth for a while, and it didn't fix anything, but it was good to hear her.
Then a door closed and it went quiet.
He layed back and looked at the ceiling.
The lock turned maybe two hours before dawn. The woman who came in was from the research faculty, one of the anomaly labs. She pulled the door mostly closed and stood with her back to it.
"Your readings broke three of my instruments," she said. "I've been going over the data since the ceremony. Veyne is wrong about what happened to you."
Yeah well, no duh. Kael looked at her.
"The Stone read you fine. It just came back with something it had no category for. That isn't corruption. That's completely different." She stopped. Then: "There's someone at the east passage. You've got maybe nine minutes before the shift changes."
"Why are you doing this?" Kael asked.
She looked at him. "Because they're going to kill you in three hours and you broke three of my instruments and I want to know what you are." She stepped away from the door. "Nine minutes."
Kael stood up.