“Not with sandals,” Simon said promptly. He hadn’t dated Isabelle all these months without learning something about proper footwear. “Never with sandals.”
They got dressed for the ceremony—choosing, after some deliberation, their most Simon-like and George-like outfits. Which meant, for George, jeans and a rugby shirt; for Simon, a faded tee that he’d had made back when the band was called Guinea Pig Death Posse. (This, fortunately, had been lying on the floor for a week, so was rat crap free.) Then, without much talking, they started packing up their belongings. The Academy wasn’t much for big celebrations—probably a good thing, Simon mused, since at the last all-school party, one of the first-years had misfired his flaming crossbow and accidentally set the roof on fire. There would be no graduation ceremony, no mugging for cameras with proud parents, no yearbook signings or tossing of mortarboard caps. Just the Ascension ritual, whatever that meant, and that would be it. The end of the Academy; the beginning of the rest of their lives.
“It’s not like we’ll never see each other again,” George said suddenly, in a tone that suggested he’d been worrying about exactly that.
Simon was going back to New York, and George was going to the London Institute, where, they said, a Lovelace was always welcome. But what was an ocean of distance when you could Portal? Or at least e-mail?
“Of course not,” Simon said.
“But it won’t be the same,” George pointed out.
“No, I guess it won’t.”
George busied himself with neatly tucking his socks into a suitcase compartment, which Simon found alarming, since it was the first time in two years George had done anything neatly. “You’re my best friend, you know,” George said without looking up. Then, quickly, as if to forestall argument, “Don’t worry, I know I’m not your best friend, Si. You’ve got Clary. And Isabelle. And your bandmate mate. I get it. I just thought you should know.”
On some level, Simon had already known this. He’d never bothered to think much about it—he didn’t think much about George, period, because that was the beauty of George. Simon never had to think about him, to puzzle out what he would do or how he would react. He was just steady, dependable George, always there, always full of cheer and eager to spread it around. Now Simon did think about him, about how well George knew him, and vice versa—not just in the big ways: their dead-of-night fears about washing out of the Academy, Simon’s hapless pining for Isabelle, George’s even more hapless, if more halfhearted, pining for most girls who crossed his path. They knew each other in the little ways—that George was allergic to cashews, that Simon was allergic to Latin homework, that George had a paralyzing fear of large birds—and somehow, that seemed to matter even more. Over the past two years, they’d developed a roommate shorthand, almost a silent language. Not exactly like a parabatai, Simon thought, and not exactly like a best friend. But not something less than. Not something he ever wanted to leave behind for good.
“You’re right, George. I do have more than enough best friends.”
George’s face fell, so slightly that only someone who knew him as well as Simon would have noticed.
“But there’s something else I’ve never had,” Simon added. “At least until now.”
“What’s that?”
“A brother.” The word felt right. Not someone you chose—someone the fates assigned you, someone who, under any other circumstances, might never have given you a second look, nor you him. Someone you would die for and kill for without a second thought, because he was family. Judging from George’s radiant smile, the word sounded right to him, too.
“Are we going to have to hug now or something?” George said.
“I think that may be inescapable.”
The Council Hall was intimidatingly beautiful, morning light streaming in through a window in its high domed ceiling. It reminded Simon of pictures he’d seen of the Pantheon, but this place felt more ancient than even ancient Rome. This felt timeless.
The Academy students huddled together in small clumps, all of them looking too nervous and distracted to do much more than comment blandly on the weather. (Which was, as the inhabitants always agreed, perfect.) Marisol gave Simon a bright smile and a sharp nod when she saw him enter the chamber, as if to say, I never doubted you . . . almost.
Simon and George were the last to arrive, and shortly after they did, everyone took their places for the ceremony. The seven mundanes were arranged in alphabetical order in the front of the chamber. There were meant to be ten of them, but apparently Sunil wasn’t the only one who’d reconsidered at the last moment. Leilana Jay, a very tall, very pale girl from Memphis, and Boris Kashkoff, an Eastern European with ropy muscles and ruddy cheeks, had both slipped away sometime in the night. No one spoke of them, not the teachers, not the students. It was like they never existed, Simon thought—and then imagined Sunil, Leilana, and Boris out there in the world somewhere, living alone with their knowledge of the Shadow World, aware of evil but without the will or ability to fight it.
There’s more than one way to fight evil in this world, Simon thought, and it was Clary’s voice in his head, and it was Isabelle’s, and his mother’s, and his own. Don’t do this because you think you have to. Do it because you want to.
Only if you want to.
The Academy’s Shadowhunter students—Simon never thought of them as the “elites” anymore, just as he no longer thought of himself and the other mundanes as the “dregs”—sat in the first two rows of the audience. The students weren’t two tiers anymore; they were one body. One unit. Even Jon Cartwright looked proud of, and a little nervous for, the mundanes at the front of the chamber—and when Simon caught him locking eyes with Marisol and pressing two fingers to his lips and then his chest, it seemed almost right. (Or, at least, not a total crime against nature, which was a start.) There were no family members in the audience—those mundanes with living relatives (and there were depressingly few of them) had, of course, already severed ties. George’s parents, who were Shadowhunters by blood if not by choice, could have attended, but he’d asked them not to. “Just in case I explode, mate,” he’d confided to Simon. “Don’t get me wrong, the Lovelaces are hardy folk, but I don’t think they’d enjoy a faceful of liquefied George.”