Eclipse Core (School of Swords and Serpents Book 2)

by Gage Lee

  “You said they’d help me find my mother,” I started.

  Hagar shut me down with a quick squeeze of my shoulder and a shake of her head.

  “That isn’t how this works,” she said. “If they find anything about your mother, they’ll tell you. If they find anything useful for our next job, they’ll tell you. But that’s it. We compartmentalize the data we retrieve from the heretics to keep it safe. You can’t know everything. I don’t even know everything. Get some rest. Control put some food in the kitchen for you. Try to relax. I’ll get back to you when I have anything.”

  Hagar surprised me with a short hug, then left the cottage. I stood in the main room, alone, and wondered what I’d gotten myself into.

  The Clash

  WE KEPT UP OUR TECHNIQUE work in martial arts class the next day, and it was my turn to attack Clem. My focus was on using the power of my Eclipse core to steal aspects, without triggering the dark urge that made me want to rip the core out of anyone and anything who got too close to me. My idea was to use my serpents to pull the aspects directly into my aura without also stealing jinsei from my target. That should, in theory, bypass my core entirely and not alert my Eclipse nature. I could then push those aspects back into my serpents to make them even stronger.

  It was a pretty smart idea, if you asked me.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite get it to jell together. The first part of it worked well enough, and I scooped aspects out of Clem’s aura without her even realizing what had happened. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stop small amounts of jinsei from entering my core at the same time. That woke my Eclipse nature and forced me to spend a minute or two calming it back down before I could try again.

  Clem was understanding through the whole process, though by the end of the class her patience had begun to fray.

  “Whatever you’re doing seems awfully difficult,” she said. “If you tell me what it is you hope to accomplish, maybe we can figure it out together.”

  “Maybe,” I said with a dejected sigh. I couldn’t tell Clem, or anyone else, what I was trying to do without revealing my Eclipse core. “Let me think about it some more.”

  “Up to you.” Clem shrugged.

  I knew I’d irritated her by dismissing her offer to help, but there was no helping it. Until I came up with a suitable cover story for why I could only try the technique every couple of minutes, she’d just have to think I was being a jerk.

  That sucked, but there wasn’t an alternative.

  I puzzled over my technique problem for the rest of the day, barely paying attention through history and struggling to keep my focus on the Intermediate Scrivenings course.

  “Due to some unforeseen circumstances, Professor Ishigara will no longer be instructing the other half of your class in the fine art of scrivening. All second years now fall under my purview,” Professor Shan said. The way she twisted her mouth into a disgusted little grimace told me she wasn’t thrilled by the added responsibility. “As a result, there will be more group projects, starting now.”

  As if on cue, the door to the scrivenings hall opened and the rest of our classmates from the second year spilled in. They all looked around, confused and unsure of where to sit.

  Except for Ray.

  She spotted me immediately and waved enthusiastically as she headed in my direction.

  “It’s going to get crowded in here,” Clem grumbled from the chair on my right. “There goes all our individual attention from the professor.”

  “Like you need it,” Eric said with a grin from Clem’s opposite side. “You’re the best in the class. This won’t affect you at all.”

  “It’s already affected me.” It was hard not to notice that Clem’s eyes didn’t waver from Rachel as she spoke, and it was equally clear she didn’t like what she saw.

  The new students found seats, and it got more crowded by the moment as they filled in all the gaps. A burly kid I didn’t recognize pushed his way past the other students, his eyes on the seat to my right. Fantastic. I didn’t want to spend the rest of the year with an oversized neighbor constantly jostling me with his elbows. I had enough trouble keeping my temper under control in this class without the added grief.

  “Taken,” Rachel said as she slipped past the big guy from the other direction and plopped into the chair next to me. She pointed to an empty seat down near the front of the classroom. “Try over there.”

  “That was my seat,” he protested.

  “I don’t see your name on it,” Rachel said with a smirk.

  “Making friends,” Clem muttered.

  Rachel turned toward my pink-haired friend and thrust her open hand past me.

  “I’m Rachel Lu. You must be Clem. I’ve heard so much about you. I’m so excited to get to see the best scrivenings student in school at work in such close quarters!”

  “Yes.” Clem took Rachel’s hand and gave it a firm shake. “It’s nice to meet you too.”

  For a moment, the girls were very, very close to me. Their hands were clasped in front of me, their shoulders pressing against mine from either side. A faint wisp of perfume, delicate and citrusy, tickled my nostrils, but I wasn’t sure if it came from Clem or Rachel. Their eyes sparked, and I felt a sudden tightness around my heart.

  “All right, students,” Professor Shan called from the front of the room, “looks like you’ve all got seats. Excellent. This is today’s group assignment.”

  The professor flicked her hand toward us, and tiny squares of metal fluttered through the air like confetti. They grew as they spun across the room until they were three inches on a side. One of the squares landed in front of me, and another in front of the girl to Eric’s left. More squares dropped onto the shared tables until exactly one third of the students had one.

  “If you have a square, then your partners are to your left and right,” Professor Shan continued. “It is up to each team to repair the scrivening on their square. Do not activate them until after I’ve given you approval.”

  Rachel and Clem both looked at the square, then at me. There was something strange in their eyes, and I didn’t like it even a little bit.

  “This will be fun,” I said. I groaned inwardly and hoped the hostility I felt building between my two friends wouldn’t explode into an open argument.

  “Yes,” Clem said, her voice cheerful. “It will be.”

  “It looks simple enough,” Rachel agreed.

  We all bent our heads over the square, analyzing the scrivening for its flaws. There were some obvious gaps in the connecting swirls, and a strange set of vertical slashes on some lines needed to be smoothed out.

  “We should start here,” Rachel offered. “If we inscribe a new connector between these two lines—”

  “We’ll end up disrupting this pattern here,” Clem responded. “It’s subtle, but these secondary effects are connected to the primary script through the border. We have to be careful not to remove those connections accidentally.”

  The two girls gave each other wide smiles filled with straight white teeth.

  “Have either of you ever heard of the Machina?” I blurted out to draw their attention to me instead of each other.

  “Just rumors,” Rachel said. “The labor unions say it’s some new kind of core that can be programmed to run a machine. It’ll take a lot of jobs out of the undercity if it’s true.”

  “That’ll never work,” Clem shot back. “Merging jinsei into traditional technology has never been done on any significant scale. The two types of power don’t work well together.”

  “Is that what they taught you in your precious overcity elementary schools?” Rachel said, venom dripping from her words.

  “Yes, that is what they taught us in the overcity,” Clem shot back, her eyes sparking dangerously. “It’s simply a fact of Empyreal science. Combining different types of energy work can have unpredictable results.”

  “And no one wants to be unpredictable,” Rachel said. “After all, if we start questioning the status qu
o, what would become of the traditions that keep the overcity’s boots on the necks of all the little people?”

  The temperature between my friends had risen several uncomfortable degrees. Anger aspects danced in their auras, and my stomach clenched into a knot. The two girls came from very different backgrounds and clearly had incompatible points of view on many, many things. I needed to distract them before things really blew up.

  “I’ll just do this,” I said and dragged a polishing tool across one of the jagged slashes that marred the scrivening on our square. “It should—”

  “No!” Both girls exclaimed together. Ray snatched the polisher out of my hand, and Clem used her inscriber to redraw what I’d erased.

  “Ugh, we’re never going to get this right,” Clem grumbled.

  “It is a mess,” Rachel agreed.

  They both eyeballed me with irritation, which was an improvement over the boiling anger they held for each other. I could handle my friends being mad at me over something I’d done a lot more easily than I could handle them arguing with each other. Especially when I didn’t even know why they’d decided to fight.

  My partners put aside their differences and dove into a frenzy of activity to undo the mess I’d made of our scrivened plate. While I felt a teensy bit bad about what I’d done, I mostly felt relief. I didn’t see any way for us to complete the work before the end of the class, especially because I kept asking questions so I’d understand what my partners were up to. That would cost us some points off on the assignment. On the other hand, I’d avoided a fight between two of my friends, who seemed much more interested in talking to one another when they both had something to gain.

  “What if we added an inner border to connect these two pieces?” Rachel said excitedly.

  “It is unorthodox,” Clem said with a frown. Her expression brightened, though, when she saw how Rachel’s unusual tactic could help them overcome one of the gaps in the scrivening. “It’ll work! I’ve never seen anything quite like it, but there’s no reason not to do it.”

  “I had to teach myself scrivening,” Rachel confided. “We don’t get a lot of textbooks in the undercity. Most of what I learned came off the Internet. The rest I sort of made up as I went along.”

  “I can help you,” Clem offered, much to my surprise. “It won’t be easy, but if we put in some extra time, maybe...”

  “Oh, I couldn’t trouble you,” Rachel said. “I know you’re very busy.”

  The two of them chattered on like that, bouncing ideas off each other, working feverishly to finish the assignment. I was shocked to see we’d actually finished with minutes of class time to spare.

  “Nice work,” Clem said as Rachel closed the final loop on the scrivening with a smooth, spiral flourish. “I didn’t think we were going to make it.”

  Rachel grinned at my pink-haired friend and slapped a high-five into her palm.

  “No, thank you,” Rachel insisted. “I found a couple of shortcuts, but we would’ve never finished if it weren’t for your knowledge of the more traditional techniques. There were sigils that I just didn’t know were missing.”

  “There are advantages to traditional training,” Clem admitted. “That’s what helped me fill in the gaps. But without your intuition and shortcuts, it would’ve taken much longer to fix the damage that someone caused.”

  I raised my hands defensively but couldn’t hold back a chuckle.

  “I’m terrible at scrivening,” I said. “They shouldn’t even let me have an inscriber.”

  “We’ll remember that for next time,” Rachel said with a wink for Clem.

  “I’ll turn this in,” she said. “I wouldn’t want it to get messed up on the way down to Professor Shan.”

  “I wouldn’t mess it up,” I complained.

  “No sense taking chances!” Clem said brightly and spirited the scripted square of metal away.

  Rachel watched her go, a faint smile on her lips.

  “I guess I’m the one who rushed to judgment this time,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Clem,” she clarified. “She dresses like a rebel, you know? The hair and those robes, I mean. It’s not very traditional. I thought she was more like me.”

  “Well, she is,” I pointed out. “You’re an Empyreal from the undercity who taught yourself, and you don’t like rules. She’s from the overcity, but helped a kid from the labor camps survive his first year at the School of Swords and Serpents.”

  “Maybe we do have some similarities on the surface.” Rachel gave me a faint grin. “You need to learn to look past that, Jace. Dressing like a rebel doesn’t make you a rebel. And acting out doesn’t always mean you don’t like the rules. The truth is deeper than that. For all of us.”

  Before I could ask her what she meant, Professor Shan dismissed us. Rachel gave my shoulder a quick squeeze, gathered her books, and slipped into the stream of students pouring out of the scriptorium.

  I watched her dark braid sway through the crowd as Clem climbed the stairs to retrieve her books, and I wondered if I’d ever really understand my friends.

  The Raid

  HAGAR PULLED ANOTHER vanishing act after our first mission. I rapped on her door every night, hoping the analysts had given her some information about my mother, but my handler never answered. None of the other Shadow Phoenixes had seen her around, either. Half of my fellow clanmates claimed to have no idea who Hagar was, and the other half didn’t seem concerned about her vanishing act. I even asked some professors if they’d seen her in class, and they all reprimanded me for asking them to violate student privacy rules. Even Professor Song, who seemed particularly open and honest, claimed he hadn’t noticed her missing from his upperclassman courses. I sent the rats to find her, and they came back just as empty-handed as those who’d gone looking for Hahen.

  Either Hagar had special permission to come and go from the School whenever she pleased, or her teachers and friends knew better than to question her absences. It was frustrating, and I vowed to get the truth out of her.

  If I ever found her again.

  And then, a month after I’d last seen her, the warden showed up at my doorstep.

  “Stop asking so many questions about me,” she said sharply. “It takes a lot of work to hide a missing student, and you’re not making it any easier.”

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “Not important, and also not for you to know,” she sighed. “The only thing you need to know right now is that we’ve got a new assignment.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “We go on a mission, then you go missing for a month? I thought you were hurt. Maybe dead. You can’t just drop off the face of the world.”

  “I don’t want to have this conversation in the hall,” Hagar said, glancing up and down the empty corridor. “Inside.”

  She didn’t say another word until we’d reached the cottage. Then she took a seat on the edge of a chair in my sitting room and crossed her hands on one knee.

  “First off, I didn’t go on a mission, you did,” she said. “I stayed right here, in this chair, and watched. It was very intriguing. The analysts who looked over the footage noted that you did something very unusual to the spirit—”

  “You said something about a new mission?” I interrupted. The last thing I wanted was to go into what I’d done with my Eclipse core.

  “Yes, in about fifteen minutes,” she said. “This one is going to be a little more intense, okay? We have a line on some vital material we need to recover. If we can get our hands on this, we’ll leapfrog past the heretics. It will accelerate the elders’ timetable by months, Jace. Unfortunately, it’s in a secured facility behind a wall of core sensors.”

  “And you want me to sneak in and steal the stuff?”

  “Not exactly.” Hagar leaned forward. “You’ll clear a path for the recovery team. Neutralize the guards, disable the core sensors, and get out.”

  “What kind of guards?” I asked.

 
“You worry too much. They’re not heretics, just hired goons.” Hagar’s eyes burned into mine. “I’ve seen you fight, Jace. You’re the champ. This will be a piece of cake.”

  Maybe she was right. Three months of fighting day in and day out had left me wired for combat even now, almost three months after the Challenge had ended. I’d beaten the best contenders each city could offer. None of them had been able to take me down, and few of them had even landed a single blow. I doubted any rented security team would fare any better.

  “What else do I have to worry about?”

  “Cameras in the halls,” Hagar said. “But we have a jintech helmet to hide your face from them. We’ve got a source on the inside who has patched us in to the security net. I’ll be able to control the cameras and watch the guard patrols, though. Shouldn’t be a problem. We can talk about all this on the way. Let’s get you on the transport ahead of schedule.”

  “Transport?” I asked. “What are you—”

  An angry hum rumbled through the air over the cabin. It grew louder by the second until the walls began to shake, and the lake’s surface jittered and jumped outside the window. It felt like my teeth were about to shake out of my head.

  Hagar grinned at me and rushed outside. I followed her and was immediately pummeled by the downdraft from some sort of bizarre helicopter. The vehicle descended to the shore on the far side of the lake. A set of stairs flopped out of a hatch on its side and landed at the end of the bridge.

  The vehicle was thirty feet from nose to tail. Its body was long and slender, pointed at the nose, and flared out into a wide tail that supported a pair of vertically mounted rotors. Four mobile struts that extended from the top of the craft held the horizontal rotors, which still spun with furious force. Clearly, they were in a hurry to get moving.

  The strangest thing about the vehicle, though, was its color. The entire craft was coated in a dark material that was difficult to look at for more than a few seconds. It was as if my vision slid off it without absorbing any details.