The Drowned Vault by N. D. Wilson

walked from the bathroom to his bedroom, most of the red stripes on his skin were hidden by his T-shirt. Antigone and Arachne were eating on the floor beside a pile of books. They smiled. He didn’t. Books? And the pile wasn’t small.
    No sulking
.
    Cyrus stopped in the bedroom doorway.
    “Water got a little warm,” he said. “I feel bad for lobsters. Don’t eat all of that.”
    While they laughed, he moved inside to root through his cardboard box for his cleanest clothes.
    Day one: For Cyrus, it crept by like a snail parade. He could hear airplane after airplane descending, but he couldn’t see the sky. He could hear Acolytes laughing on the green and training on the gravel paths, but he couldn’t see the grass. For breakfast, he ate some cold bacon and a bowl of fiber flakes with what he was sure couldn’t be more than two teaspoons of milk. There was no lunch. Arachne said they were in training. He ate some stale crackers that had been around for months.
    And he cleaned. And cleaned. He scrubbed what hewas told, he swept where he was told, and he even dusted the ceiling, balancing on the back of the armchair. And for all of that, the rooms were only slightly less moldy and rotten—though now they reeked so much of lemon and pine that Cyrus’s nostrils burned and he couldn’t stop blinking his watering eyes.
    The training was as uninteresting as it was grueling. Arachne said she was only testing their physical starting points, and she needed to see their bodies in motion. Which meant push-ups and sit-ups and lunges and planks and frozen poses.
    Dinner was cold potatoes, sausage, and a pitcher of water.
    Nolan delivered yellow paint up through the heat vent, Rupert never came by, and Cyrus climbed into his hammock early, trying not to listen to the girls talk about ancient Greek syntax while he bounced his foot against the wall.
    Day two: Before breakfast, Cyrus did more push-ups and more sit-ups and more lunges while Arachne watched, hardly blinking. His legs burned with soreness from the day before, but he wasn’t going to tell her. Nolan delivered three plates of cold, slippery eggs up through the heat vent, but left before Cyrus could talk to him.
    After breakfast, Cyrus reslung his hammock. He resorted his cardboard box of clothes. He got the wobbly, clear Quick Water out of the wooden box on the manteland played with it. Arachne pointed out particular books in the Book Dump and Cyrus carried them out in stacks and set them wherever she told him to. Antigone thought they looked interesting, but the titles made Cyrus’s brain water.
    The Seven Depletions of Bajan Voo. The Neverwhere Voyages of Timothy Maggot. Soils and Salts. Theses on Economic Inversion. Your Best Maps Now: A Cartographic Memoir
. And more and more and more …
    Finally, Cyrus got out his two new patches and sat in the armchair while Antigone and Arachne talked and planned and sorted through the books Arachne had selected.
    Cyrus studied his patches. The basic circle patch of Ashtown with the black boat in the center—that hadn’t cost him anything. But the crest of the Smiths, well, he’d made big promises before Old Donald had let him have it. Donald had said that he didn’t think another Smith patch that old existed—at some point they’d all been burned. Some modern Smiths had worked up variations—all without the heads—but none of them had stuck around. The old Smith crest was too memorable, too rooted in the stories of grandmothers and thus in the imaginations of kids. Or so said Old Donald …
    Sic Semper Draconis
    Cyrus traced the motto, and then studied the three heads. Beard, mustache, and clean-shaven.
Thus to all
dragons. Thus always to dragons
—that was the better translation, wasn’t it? But he wasn’t exactly sure what it meant. All dragons should be beheaded? But they weren’t dragon heads. They were men.
    Cyrus rubbed the red silky-smooth shield with his thumb. He wanted it on his jacket already.
    His