Eclipse Core (School of Swords and Serpents Book 2)

by Gage Lee

  “Turn your head to the left,” she instructed. “Now to the right. Now face away from me. Hold out one or more fingers in your line of sight. Oh, that finger?”

  “You saw that?” I asked.

  “The eye-snapper sees all,” she said in an ominous tone. “Or at least everything that you see. And while it’s operational, I see everything through your eyes. Now, time is running short, we need to get moving.”

  By the time I turned around, Hagar had banished the shine from her eyes and held what looked like a fancy laser pointer in her right hand. The slender silver tube was covered in tiny dials, screws, and buttons. Its tip glowed ruby red, growing brighter and dimmer in regular pulses.

  “This is a key wand,” she explained. “Very rare, very expensive. No touchy. Like the eye-snapper, this is Shadow Phoenix jintech. None of the other clans know about this, and we’d like to keep it that way. Our little toys give us the edge we need to keep an eye on the heretics. Consider all these gadgets to be part of your geas. Don’t breathe a word about them. We don’t want the traitors to the Grand Design to know our capabilities.”

  “You keep saying that,” I said. “The Empyrean Plan. What does that mean?”

  “There’s no time for a full explanation. The short version is that the Empyrean Flame has a great design,” she said. “It gives each of us a purpose and protects us from the dangers that lie outside our society.”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about all that. The idea of some mysterious entity laying out a long-term plan for my life without my input didn’t really appeal to me. Mostly because it hadn’t really worked out very well for me, so far.

  Then again, being eaten by the Locust Court’s hungry spirits wasn’t very enticing, either.

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s next?”

  Hagar fiddled with her key wand for a moment. She pressed a button, and a beam of scarlet light lanced out from the wand’s tip onto the wall between the sitting room and the kitchen. She sketched a narrow archway on the wall in crimson light.

  My heart caught in my throat when she completed her drawing.

  There was a hole in the wall.

  As strange that was, what lay beyond the hole was even stranger. The sounds of city traffic reached my ears, and the faint soothing scent of a recent rainfall teased my nostrils. The side of a building, its damp concrete surface glistening with the green glow of a reflected stoplight, blocked my view of anything else through the arch. A rat, as big as my foot, peered back at me, then scurried off into the darkness.

  “That building’s your target,” Hagar said. “I have to close the portal behind you for security, but I’ll be watching the whole way. As soon as you find what we need, I’ll open another portal to bring you back.”

  “How am I supposed to get into the building?” I asked.

  “The storage facility is technologically inert. The heretics use a lot of jinsei tricks that don’t work well with modern gear,” Hagar said. “There’s no standard alarm system, no closed circuit television, nothing like that. Find a fire escape, break out a window, and slip right in.”

  “There are no defenses on this building at all?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say that,” Hagar said. “But this is why we brought you in, Jace. The spirit guardians who watch over this place use supernatural senses to find intruders. You shouldn’t have any trouble slipping by them with that veil around your core.”

  “If I get killed,” I said to Hagar, “I’ll haunt you forever.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Get moving. You only have a window of twenty minutes or so before the human security guard makes the rounds. You need to be gone before then. Your target’s on the eleventh floor, unit one one one five. This will be a piece of cake for you, Jace.”

  “Wish me luck.” I hoped Hagar was right.

  I stepped through the portal and across a few thousand miles. An illuminated billboard written in Spanish glowed from the sky on the left end of the alley I’d landed in. Puddles in the street reflected the advertisement’s brilliant light. The opposite street was darker, lit only by the sullen red glow of traffic lights I couldn’t see from my position.

  Wherever I’d landed, it was darker than it had been back at the School. That told me I’d traveled east, but that wasn’t much use to me. I stood still for a few seconds, fully expecting someone to show up and ask me what I was doing in the alley.

  The portal vanished with a faint pop.

  It was time to move.

  There was, indeed, a rickety fire escape near the end of the alley. Its rusted bars glowed purple and pink in the neon lights from businesses across the street, and I hoped no one would see me as I scrambled up its lowered ladder. My hands picked up dirt and grime from the rungs, and I wished I’d thought to bring some gloves. I’d have to be very careful not to leave fingerprints behind once I was inside. My core was veiled, but the rest of me wasn’t.

  The fire escape rattled and banged against the side of the building as I hurried around and around the flights of metal stairs leading from floor to floor. I hunched my shoulders and tried to quiet my steps, to no avail. I expected someone to stick their head out through one of the windows I’d passed and yell at me to knock it off or get lost, but it never happened. Maybe Hagar had planned this thing right after all.

  I peered through the window on the eleventh floor. The dirty glass and reflection of neon lights from surrounding businesses made it hard to see much. I could just make out an empty hallway on the other side of the glass. It was now or never.

  The window was locked, which was just my luck. I looked down at the sidewalk and didn’t see any passersby. Hopefully it was late enough no one would hear what came next.

  I grabbed my right fist in my left hand, turned my back to the window, and slammed my right elbow through the glass.

  It shattered, and chunks of square safety glass bounced away in every direction. The glittering greenish cubes cascaded down the fire escape like balls in a pachinko machine. Their echoes rattled through the alleyway for what felt like half an hour. I froze, sure that someone had to have heard that and would come investigate. I took a deep breath, then another. No one came.

  The window had broken cleanly from its frame, and I stepped over the wooden sill into the hallway. The carpet in the narrow passage was old and rubbed through to bare concrete in places. The dropped ceiling was splotched with brown water stains, and the paint on the walls had peeled like old scabs to reveal patches of rotting drywall. The stink of mildew filled my nostrils, and I fought it by taking slow, shallow breaths through my mouth.

  It only took me a few minutes to find the right unit. The heavy door that barred my way was held in place by a thick padlock. The numbers on its dial had been almost worn away by years of twisting and turning. Despite its obvious age, the lock’s U-shaped hasp still looked sturdy and unmarked by rust or wear.

  I gave it an experimental jerk. The lock scarcely rattled, much less opened.

  “Okay,” I said, “I guess we do this the hard way.”

  Like every building in every city, the storage facility was teeming with rats in its hidden spaces. It took no effort at all for me to forge connections to dozens of the hardy little creatures. I cycled my breathing and pulled their beast aspects into my aura, where I could put them to use.

  Individually, the rats weren’t terribly strong. Combined, though, and properly focused, the strength I had taken from them was more than enough to do the job at hand. My serpents flowed out of my core and hovered above my shoulders like hooded cobras. My thoughts refined their shapes, narrowing their tips until they were flattened wedges less than half an inch across.

  I pushed the heads of my serpents into the half-circle opening formed by the hasp. I closed my eyes, concentrated, and used them like a pair of crowbars. It wasn’t subtle, and I hope Hagar wouldn’t be angry with me for leaving a trace of my presence. On the other hand, she hadn’t given me the lock’s combination,
and I didn’t have time to figure it out by trial and error. The heretics would just have to know someone had rifled through their stuff.

  The metal groaned, and the serpents pushed against one another and the metal in a frenzy of activity. Beads of sweat dotted my forehead, and the effort left my aura feeling bruised and battered. Finally, when I felt as if I couldn’t push any harder, the latch on the door gave way with a terrific squeal and the broken lock fell to the floor.

  “Okay, then.” I slipped inside the door and pulled it closed behind me. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  The darkness inside the cube made it impossible to see anything. A sliver of light leaked in under the door from the hallway. When my eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, I stumbled toward what looked like a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling in the center of the unit.

  And promptly barked my shins on something. I yelped in pained surprise, then clapped my hands over my mouth. I took a long, slow breath, then let it out, and the pain eased away. I reached up to the lightbulb and groped at its smooth surface. My fingers found the switch on its socket and turned it sharply to the right, careful to use my knuckles rather than my fingertips to avoid leaving prints.

  The bulb turned on with a loud click and filled the cube with a warm glow. It was ten feet on a side, though most of that space was unused. The room’s only furnishings were the desk that had attacked my poor shins. It crouched in the center of the bare concrete floor, the lightbulb directly above it. The walls were naked cinder blocks streaked with glistening rivulets of rust-colored water that leaked through the dropped ceiling’s spongy tiles.

  “What’s in the desk?” Hagar’s voice crackled in my thoughts.

  I jumped at the unexpected question and got to work.

  To keep my fingerprints off anything in the room, I pulled the sleeves of my robe down to cover my hands. Being a little clumsier was a fine tradeoff for not making it obvious who’d been in here.

  The desk’s shallow sliding drawer held a pair of fountain pens that had leaked black ink from their exposed nibs onto a sheet of pink blotter paper. There was nothing else in the drawer, and its back seemed solid when I rapped against it looking for secret compartments.

  The file drawer to the right of the seat, though, was filled with hanging folders. I had no idea which of those held important information, so I took a seat in the chair and pulled half of them onto the desk in front of me. I made a neat stack at my left hand, took the top folder off it, and dropped it on the desk. It held a short stack of plain white paper covered in dense rows of handwritten block letters.

  “Look at a page, then blink to take a picture,” Hagar advised me. “I’ll store the pictures on my end.”

  A golden frame appeared around the page the instant my eyes focused on the text. When I blinked my eyes, the light stayed superimposed on the darkness behind them and flickered to green before returning to gold. I had no idea how Hagar could store the pages I sent to her, or what she’d do with the information. That was above my pay grade. I flipped through page after handwritten page, blinking at each one, taking time to skim only a few of them out of sheer curiosity.

  What I saw was confusing. I’d expected to see some mention of the Locust Court. After all, those were the biggest enemies of the Empyrean Flame and its Grand Design. If they were notes from a heretic cell, I’d assume they would have reams of spirit propaganda. Instead, most of what I saw seemed to have something to do with a technical theory of something called the Machina. There were hand-drawn diagrams, too, of some sort of complex mechanism. None of it made any sense to me, and I wasn’t sure it would even if I took more time to read it.

  I’d gone through three-quarters of the stack from the file folder when I saw something that stopped me. A list of names in two columns. My eyes landed on three names in the left column: Grayson Bishop, Tycho Reyes, and Eve Warin. They were near the top of the page, surrounded by names I didn’t recognize. My interest piqued, I scanned the right column for any other familiar names.

  Hagar Inaloti.

  Elder Sanrin.

  Melody Hark.

  Jace Warin.

  My name was the last on the right-hand list, in black ink where the rest of the list was in blue. I’d been added to this page last. The implications of that whirled through my thoughts. The bad guys knew my name, and it was on the same side as Hagar and Sanrin. That could mean the right column was their enemies list. But Adjudicator Hark’s name was on that side of the list, too, and I wasn’t sure she was working with the Shadow Phoenix.

  And if the right side was the enemy list, then the left side would be friends. But that list had both Tycho’s and Grayson’s name, and they absolutely hated each other. It also had my mom’s name, and—

  A faint warbling sound from the hallway raised goose bumps on my arms and sent chills racing up my spine.

  “Guardian.” Hagar’s thoughts were a faint whisper in my head. “Get out of there.”

  I restacked the folders and replaced them in the file drawer, then stood carefully from my chair so as not to make any noise. The guardian might just be on the prowl. If it didn’t know I was in the storage unit, maybe it would move on by.

  The strange sound was closer, now. It had to be right outside the door.

  I reached up and covered the lightbulb with my hand to shield the light. Turning it off would have been better, if the switch hadn’t made so much noise when I turned it on.

  I held my breath, unsure what to do next.

  The door creaked open and an amorphous haze drifted into the storage unit. The cloud twitched and pulsed in strange rhythms, extending tendrils from its mass to grope around the edges of the room. The warbling sound it made set my teeth on edge and amplified the headache the eye-snapper had started. I was sure those tentacles would close in until they’d touched every inch of the cramped room.

  My veiled core kept me hidden from the guardian for the moment. If it touched me, though, all bets were off.

  “Hold still,” Hagar said. “It didn’t sound the alarm when it found the door open. Maybe it’s just doing a cursory check.”

  The tendrils had finished with the walls and moved on to the ceiling and floor. They’d picked up the pace and spread out. Hagar was wrong. This thing would find me if I didn’t do something.

  The guardian had moved into the room and blocked the door with its amorphous body. Its tentacles were closing in on me from every direction. I had to make a move before it found me and sounded the alarm.

  I leaped over the desk and used the dregs of the beast aspects I’d taken from the rats to fuel a knife hand strike. The blow drove my fingers deep into the spirit’s body, and I strained to reach its core. Another inch, and the spirit watchdog would be dead.

  The creature’s tendrils lashed at my back in a pained frenzy. The beast’s attacks were ineffective, so it switched to evasion. Its body morphed, and it pulled its core further from my grasping fingers.

  My Eclipse nature responded instantly. It hungered for the core almost within my grasp and wasn’t about to let the tasty morsel slip away. The urge pushed jinsei into the channels in my arm, and I used that new strength to thrust my hand deeper into the guardian. My fingers found its core and seized it like the talons of an eagle around its prey. The urge swelled inside me, demanding that I tear the core out and devour it.

  For a moment, my mind flashed to Singapore.

  No, I didn’t have time for that. The guardian wasn’t a person, it was a mindless spirit construct that would get me killed if I didn’t destroy it. I ripped the spirit’s core out of its body and threw it on the ground.

  My Eclipse nature wanted me to snatch it up and devour it. The dark urge demanded I consume the core, take it all into me, and leave not a scrap to be wasted.

  “No,” I growled. Giving in to my shadow nature was a slippery slope. If I let the darkness have its way, it would demand more and more from me. Better to keep it shut away where it couldn’t hurt anyone else.
>
  Without its core, the guardian spirit’s body began to dissolve into the raw jinsei that had been used to craft it. Its tentacles thrashed at the desk, overturning it and spilling papers everywhere. Then it flopped to the ground and let out a long, warbling cry. The sound went on for a long breath, then faded away.

  Other curious warbles answered the guardian’s death cry. They were far too close to my location for comfort, and I knew I was out of time.

  I bolted out into the hallway and rushed for the broken window, heedless of the damage I’d left behind. There was no hiding the fact that someone had broken into the heretics’ storage unit. The best I could hope was that they didn’t know it was me.

  I scrambled through the window and raced down the fire escape. My feet banged off each rain-slicked stair, making a terrible racket. I ignored the ladder at the bottom of the escape and dropped to the concrete with a single step.

  The portal was back, its red glow comforting in the alley’s darkness. I raced to it, took a deep breath, and threw myself back to my comfortable cottage.

  Hagar scrambled out of the chair she’d been slumped in when I arrived. She aimed the key wand at the portal, and a blue light from the device banished the door behind me.

  “That wasn’t the most subtle thing I’ve ever seen,” she said with a groan. The warden returned the key wand to her belt, then held her hand out to me. “Eye-snapper, please.”

  “Here.” My headache receded the instant I plucked the black bead off my temple. I was glad to be rid of the thing. “What was all that stuff about the Machina in those papers? And what’s the deal with the list of names?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. It was hard to tell whether she was telling the truth or not. “I’ll take all this back to the elders tonight. The analysts will go through all of it.”

  “When will they tell us what they find?” I asked. “My mother’s name was in those papers, Hagar. I need to know—”

  “Jace, calm down.” Hagar put her hand on my shoulder. “You did good work tonight, and that’s all you need to be concerned with. You got the information. What happens to it after isn’t your job.”