Lio was in the Refectory at breakfast. When I caught his eye, he glanced significantly at a big old book he’d dug up: Praxic Age Exoatmospheric Weapons Systems.

Cheerful.

Jesry skipped breakfast. Afterward, Ala and I squandered most of the morning getting things ready for this afternoon. You could announce a Tivian liaison at the drop of a hat but for the Etrevanean each participant was supposed to discuss it first with an older fraa or suur. I was finishing that up when Provener rang. This was one of those increasingly rare days when my old team was supposed to wind the clock. I found the cell where Jesry was still asleep, yanked him off his pallet, and got him moving. We ended up sprinting to the Mynster, late as usual. But it felt good to have the team back together, after all that had been happening lately, and I enjoyed the simple physical work of winding the clock more than I’d used to.

After, the four of us went to the Refectory to take the midday meal. But there was no question of talking about the spaceship there. Instead it was all about the aut that Ala and I were to celebrate later. Of all the team, I was the first to go so far as to join in such a liaison and so this was sort of like a rehearsal for a bachelor party. We became so loud and so funny (at least, we believed we were funny) that we were asked on two separate occasions to tone it down, and threatened with severe penance—which only made us louder and funnier.

At some point during all of this I mentally stepped back from it all and took a moment to enjoy the looks on my friends’ faces and to reflect on everything that had been going on lately. And as part of that, I recollected that Orolo had been Thrown Back and that he was out there, somewhere, extramuros, trying to find his way. Which made me sad, and even brought back a spark of the old anger. But none of it stopped me from being happy with my friends. Part of this was the sheer thrill of what had happened with Ala. But part of it too was the growing certainty that Ala and Tulia and I had scored a victory over those like Spelikon and Trestanas who had locked us out of the starhenge and tried to control what we knew and what we thought about. We just needed to find a way to announce it that wouldn’t lead to my getting Thrown Back. I didn’t want to leave the concent any more. Not as long as Ala lived here.

She and Tulia were nowhere to be seen, and before long we found out why: they had duties in the Mynster. Bells began to ring not long after we had finished eating. We sat and listened for a couple of minutes, trying to decipher the changes. But Barb had been memorizing these things and figured it out first. “Voco,” he announced, “the Sæcular Power will Evoke one of us.”

“Apparently Fraa Paphlagon couldn’t get the job done,” Jesry cracked, as we were draining our beers.

“Or he’s calling for reinforcements,” Lio suggested.

“Or he had a heart attack,” said Arsibalt. Lately he had been full of gloomy ideas like this, and so the rest of us gave him dirty looks until he held up his hands in submission.

We sauntered across the meadow to the Mynster. Even so, we got there in plenty of time, and ended up in the front row, closest to the screen. Voco continued ringing for some minutes after we arrived. Then the eight ringers filed down from their balcony and found places farther back. A choir of Hundreders came out into the chancel and began a monophonic chant. I thought of going back to be near Ala but it was part of the Discipline that you didn’t engage in any of that clingy couple-like behavior before your liaison was published, so it would have to wait for a few more hours.

This time Statho didn’t have any Inquisitors with him, as he’d had during Fraa Paphlagon’s Voco. He went through the opening rounds of the rite as before, and for the first time since the bells had begun to ring, it sank in that this was for real. I wondered which avout we would say goodbye to—whether it would be one of us Tenners this time, or someone like Fraa Paphlagon whom we’d never met because they were of a different math.

By the time Statho reached the place in the aut where he was to call out the name of the Evoked, I had become quite anxious. The Mynster was as silent as that sub-basement beneath Shuf’s Dowment. So I almost wanted to scream when he chose that moment to pause and fumble around in his vestment. He took out a page that had been folded in on itself and sealed shut with a dollop of beeswax. It took him forever to pick the thing open. He unfolded it, held it up in front of his face, and looked astonished.

It was such an awkward moment that even he felt the need to explain. He announced, “There are six names!”

Pandemonium was the wrong word to describe a few hundred avout standing still and muttering to each other, but it conveys the right feeling. A single Voco was rare enough. Six at a stroke had never happened—or had it? I looked at Arsibalt. He read my mind. “No,” he whispered, “not even for the Big Nugget.”

I looked at Jesry. “This is it!” he told me. Meaning the something different he’d been waiting for.

Statho cleared his throat and waited for the murmuring to subside.

“Six names,” he went on. The Mynster now became silent again, except for the faint wail of police sirens outside the Day Gate, and the rumble of engines. “One of them is no longer among us.”

“Orolo,” I said. About a hundred others said it at the same time. Statho’s face reddened. “Voco,” he called, but his voice choked up and he had to swallow before trying it again. “Voco Fraa Jesry of the Edharian chapter of the Decenarian math.”

Jesry turned and socked me on the shoulder, hard enough to leave a charley horse that would still ache three days later. Something to remember him by. Then he turned his back on us and walked out of our lives.

“Suur Bethula of the Edharian chapter of the Centenarian math…Fraa Athaphrax of the same…Fraa Goradon of the Edharian chapter of the Decenarian math…and Suur Ala of the New Circle, Decenarians.”

By the time I had regained consciousness she was already on the threshold of the door through the screen. She was as shocked as I was. Tears began to run out of her eyes as she hesitated, there, and looked my way.

When I’d watched Fraa Paphlagon step out, all those months ago, I’d understood clearly that no one in this place would ever see him again. The same thing was now happening to Ala. But it didn’t sink in. The only thing that got through to me was the look on her face.

They told me later I knocked two people down as I made my way over to her.

She hooked an elbow over my neck and kissed me on the lips, then pressed her wet cheek against mine for an instant.

When Fraa Mentaxenes closed the door between us, I looked down to discover a rolled-up page stuck in my bolt. It was perforated with tiny holes. By the time I’d finished taking that in, and stepped forward to put my face to the screen, Jesry, Bethula, Athaphrax, Goradon, and Ala had already walked out the same way that Paphlagon and Orolo had gone before. Everyone was singing except for me.