Hollow Core

by Gage Lee

  Then I collapsed onto the worktable and clung to consciousness just long enough for Hahen to curse me for a fool and go to work on saving my flame-ravaged limb.

  The Serpent

  GOOD NEWS: I DIDN’T lose my arm.

  Bad news: My recovery was so painful I almost wished I had.

  Hahen urged me to hide the injury from the wardens and other staff because he was sure they would poke their noses into Tycho’s business if I turned up with a side of roasted beef where my arm should have been. The rat spirit was able to heal the surface damage to my hand to help me conceal my wound. He slathered the damaged wound with a thick black salve to stave off infection and reduce swelling. Unfortunately, that left me smelling like rotten garlic and the treatments were useless for reducing pain.

  After a week of torture, I could use my left hand without wincing, but it was almost the end of October before I was able to lift anything heavier than a fork with that arm.

  “You should take better care of yourself,” Clem warned me at lunch one day. “The only reason you’re not neck deep in duels is because the rest of the initiates know I’ll kick their butts if they start any trouble with you. But if you’d injured your right arm, you’d be too tempting a target for me to protect you.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. The wardens no longer herded their clanmates together at lunch, and it was a nice break to get to hang out with Clem, Abi, and Eric outside of class. “And thank you, all of you, for watching out for me. I’ve had a target on my back since I got here, but it feels like it’s getting bigger.”

  As if on cue, a group of Disciples of Jade Flame stomped past our table with trays overloaded with food. A skinny girl with a long black braid that dangled down the center of her back thrust her left hip out as she approached Abi and nearly dumped his tray into his lap.

  “What was that all about?” I asked when the Disciples were out of earshot.

  “You’ll probably need a new friend, soon,” Abi said with a rueful grin. “I caught one of the Disciples cheating in a duel, and they lost all their Core Contest rankings when I reported them to Minister Ishigara.”

  “Oh, wow,” Eric said. “That’s why they’re at the bottom of the rankings?”

  “They’ll come for you soon, Abi.” Clem pulled a slender crystal slate out of the bag she wore across her shoulders and pushed it across the table toward me. The current standings of each clan glowed on the tablet’s surface.

  The Resplendent Suns were in the lead with ten ranks, most likely because their members enjoyed dueling and took every opportunity to challenge rival clans. The Titans of Majestic Stone were in second place with six ranks, thanks to back-to-back challenge wins in the scriptorium. Thunder’s Children had climbed to third place, also on the strength of their duelists. With five ranks, that put them two ranks ahead of the Shadow Phoenixes, who hadn’t scored any ranks since I’d earned three from Professor Aurelius for my trick with the fusion sword. The Disciples were at the very bottom of the slate’s display with zero ranks. A stark red asterisk next to the clan’s name noted they’d been penalized eight ranks for cheating.

  “They were in second place before Abi caught them,” Eric pointed out. “They’d been dueling like maniacs for a week or so, and our buddy here finally figured out how they were winning.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. As someone who’d been accused of cheating my way through a duel by none other than our illustrious headmaster, I wanted to know how Abi had caught them.

  “They were boosting,” Abi said. “Nothing too serious. They gobbled up stone aspects before every fight to strengthen their skins and make their punches hit harder.”

  “You can’t use boosters in duels?” I hadn’t heard that rule before. It would put a serious crimp in my plans if I couldn’t use any of the serums I’d stolen from Tycho’s laboratory.

  “You can if both parties agree.” Clem took a bite from her ham sandwich and washed it down with a drink of water. “But the Disciples didn’t disclose their boosts.”

  “Dumb way to cheat,” I said. “If they didn’t want to come clean to their opponents, pure jinsei boosting would have been harder to detect and is almost as strong. You saw the stone aspects stuck in their auras?”

  They all stared at me like I’d sprouted a third eye.

  “Well, look at Mr. Smarty-Pants.” Clem elbowed Abi. “When did you learn so much about auras and aspects?”

  “What?” I feigned surprise that my friends didn’t know as much as I did. “We all learned about them in alchemy class.”

  “No,” Eric said. “We definitely did not learn any of that from Professor Xarla. Abi only figured it out because he’s been reading ahead in the Beginning Aura Mastery textbook. And we’re all going to be late for that class if we don’t get a move on.”

  We still had a few minutes of the lunch hour left, but the classroom for Aura Initiation was notoriously difficult to reach even when you weren’t in a hurry. The aspects that haunted the room made it hard to focus while navigating the School’s tricky passages. If we waited until the bells rang to signal the end of our meal, we’d be several minutes late for Professor Harkness’s class. While she wasn’t the strictest of our teachers, Harkness had a definite cruel streak when it came to punishments for tardiness.

  “Let’s go.” Clem scooped up her empty tray and shooed the rest of us away from the table. I followed along behind her, hastily shoveling the last of my green beans and roast beef down my throat in a frenzied flurry of fork mastery.

  “You must’ve learned all about aspects in your work-study, right?” Clem pouted when I didn’t confirm or deny her suspicions about what I did all night. “You might as well spill the beans. I will figure out what you’re up to sooner or later.”

  “Doubtful.” I didn’t want to spur Clem’s curiosity, but I couldn’t resist the chance to needle her. She was easily the smartest of the four of us, though her mind flitted from subject to subject like a butterfly in search of the tastiest flower in the field of daisies. “It’s one mystery you’ll never get to the bottom of.”

  “We shall see,” Clem said.

  “Get a room, you two,” Eric smirked. He and Abi were sure that Clementine had a secret crush on me, which seemed about as likely as Grayson suddenly becoming my best friend. Clem was from the Kyoto overcity, the heart of the Empyreal government in the Eastern Kingdom, so I knew her family was politically connected and extraordinarily wealthy. She could never be more than my good friend. Her family would throw a very dangerous fit if they caught wind that their daughter was dating a camper.

  Grayson had nowhere near the political clout of a Kyoto family, and he’d already made my life miserable. Clem’s parents would annihilate me.

  My friends and I crashed through the classroom’s doorway with seconds to spare and hustled to our seats under the watchful eyes of Professor Agatha Harkness. We were the last to arrive, and the instant our tailbones hit the wooden bench, she marked her attendance book and slammed the tome’s cover.

  “We have much to cover today, so I thank you all for being on time,” Professor Harkness said. “Though, as I know you’ve all heard me say a hundred times before, on time is also five minutes too late.”

  The rest of the class smirked in our direction, including Deacon, who still avoided me like the plague. I’d tried to speak with him on several occasions, but he turned his nose up and scurried off the second he caught sight of me outside of class. I wasn’t sure what the other Phoenixes said about me behind my back, but it clearly wasn’t good.

  “I’ve seen you all practicing with your fusion swords in the courtyards and hallways, despite being strictly forbidden from brandishing them anywhere but the dueling yards and exercise areas.” Professor Harkness glared at all of us. “Though your disobedience is is frustrating, it is clear that most of you have mastered the basics of harnessing your jinsei into useful weapons. Now it is time to learn to summon your serpents.”

  “Oh, you should be good at this,” C
lem whispered to me. “Especially now that you’re an aspect expert.”

  I had no idea why my friend thought I’d be any good at anything that had to do with harnessing jinsei, but my ears pricked up and I vowed to pay attention no matter how tired I was. Hahen had worked me mercilessly the night before, and the treatment for my arm had consisted mostly of a painful massage followed by the application of a truly foul-smelling lotion, but I wasn’t going to fall asleep in a class where I could actually learn something useful.

  I hoped.

  “Let us begin with breathing. Think back to the foundation of your earliest training.” Professor Harkness demonstrated by drawing in a deep lungful of air, holding it for a count of three, and then releasing it all it in a long, quiet sigh. To my aura sight, her breath was filled with sparks of an aspect I couldn’t identify, and her aura was as clean and clear as a mountain stream.

  My circular breathing, which I’d practiced for upwards of twelve hours a day, every day, since I’d arrived at the academy, kicked in at Professor Harkness’s words like one of Pavlov’s dogs slobbering at the ding of a dinner bell. Jinsei flooded my core, then passed through my aura, taking the filthy weariness aspects away from me with it.

  “Good!” Professor Harkness cheered us on. “Now, imagine the jinsei passing through your aura and picking up not the corrupted aspects we all carry, but an aspect that is uniquely yours.”

  It was a struggle for me to make sense of what the professor said. Elements were represented by iconic aspects, every animal had one as well, and even abstract concepts like hope and fear could taint jinsei with their unique energy. But no one had ever told me that people had their own distinct aspects.

  No matter how much jinsei I cycled through my core, I couldn’t detect even a hint of an aspect that was unique to me. My aura was healthy and clear, much cleaner than most of my classmates’. It wasn’t hollow like my core. It was blank as a white sheet of paper waiting to have words inscribed upon it. Great. Now I had some new jinsei deformity to worry about.

  Even stranger, when I focused my aura sight on the other initiates in class, I didn’t see anything unique in their auras. It was easy enough to spot worry and fear aspects, and a few of the students had anger and violence aspects tangled in their auras, but those weren’t unique. Everyone at the School had something to worry about thanks to the Core Contest, and the duels had infected more students than not with the taint of violence.

  While I struggled to find the essence of me in my aura, several other students had already expressed ribbons of rainbow color that flickered and faded into the air around them. These figments of jinsei were far from the solid serpents I’d seen around more proficient practitioners’ bodies, but they were much more advanced than anything I’d managed to produce.

  “All right, then,” Professor Harkness said. “Some of you are getting the hang of it. It’s time for the next Core Contest challenge. The first of you to express two serpents, one around each of your arms, will win five ranks for you and three ranks for your clan. Begin!”

  I cursed under my breath.

  Clem had most of one serpent around her left arm within five minutes, though she had a hard time maintaining its head as the tail formed. She grumbled when the jinsei construct unraveled into limp threads of light and faded away.

  Eric had fashioned the middle of a snake around each of his arms, but when he tried to complete the manifestations both serpents winked out of existence as if they’d never existed. His breathing technique was perfect for channeling jinsei in short, sharp bursts, but was less suited to the prolonged effort required to form one serpent, much less two.

  Abi didn’t have anything to show for his efforts yet, though a serpentine shadow curved from his left shoulder down to his left wrist. His technique was slow and steady, but he could spring ahead of the rest of us at any moment.

  There were a dozen other students in the room with us, though none of them, including Deacon, had gotten as far as Eric or Clem after a solid fifteen minutes of exertion.

  I had three serums hidden in my belt and considered taking one of them to help boost my efforts. Unfortunately, Abi was seated on my left, and I didn’t think I could sneak a booster without him noticing. I wasn’t sure outside jinsei was cheating for this challenge, but I was definitely sure that Abi would tell Professor Harkness what I was up to, and that would lead to all kinds of attention I didn’t want.

  Plus, I didn’t think this was a problem that could be solved with more jinsei. From watching Clem and Eric I saw that the serpents didn’t consume a lot of energy. The problem was that my aura was so bland it lacked any identifying aspects I could use to form a serpent. There was nothing for the jinsei to cling to and take shape around.

  Eric exclaimed in surprise. He had a full-blown serpent around his right arm and a third of another around his left. Both of the snakes glowed with the orange-white light of a flame’s heart, perfect for a Resplendent Sun.

  Eric was close to winning this challenge. I needed to figure out what was wrong with me, and how to fix it, fast. Even if no one else in the Shadow Phoenix clan wanted to earn ranks, I had to if I didn’t want to fall into the bottom ten percent and face expulsion.

  Winning was my only option.

  I closed my eyes and let my consciousness drift away from my body. There were rats everywhere in the building, and I found a trio of them above the classroom’s ceiling. The rodents were hunched around a scrap of roast they’d stolen from the garbage outside the dining room. They’d tussled over the meat and had torn it into three chunks, one for each of them. Before they were even aware their meal had been interrupted, I’d forged a connection between all our cores.

  Unlike with the rats I’d nearly fricasseed with fire aspect in the lab with Hahen, I breathed pure, unadulterated jinsei into these little guys. As the sacred energy flowed through their primitive cores and auras, it picked up beast aspects and carried them back to me. The primal corruption snared in my aura in a scattering of black sparks that I hoped would give me something to work with.

  Clem and Eric were both excited with their progress and their emotions bubbled out through their auras to fill the air with cracks and sparkles of anticipation. One of them was about to win the challenge.

  Unless I beat them.

  My cycling breaths came faster and faster, the circular technique a blur of jinsei that flowed into me, through the rats, and back into my aura loaded down with beast aspect corruption. The taint felt like a swarm of rodents crawling over my skin, curious and feral, unsure what to make of me. For that matter, I wasn’t sure what to make of me, either. I’d twisted the whole point of breath cycling away from its purpose, to cleanse the aura of impurities, to its exact opposite.

  Satisfied I had enough beast aspect, I thanked the rats for their help and broke the connection between us. The purified stream of jinsei I exhaled passed into my aura. The sacred energy wanted to escape me and carry the beast aspects off with it, but I had other plans for it. I held as much of the power as I possibly could in my aura. It struggled and fought for its freedom, and only my months of experience handling aspects in the alchemy laboratory gave me the skill to hang on.

  The feral energy snagged the circulating jinsei with the spiritual echoes of quick claws and sharp teeth. Trapped within my aura, the sacred power was soon overloaded with the primal energy and formed a coil of polluted force above each of my shoulders.

  The longer I trapped the jinsei, the more of the beast aspects it soaked up. The sacred energy writhed and twisted where I held it like a rat in a cage. I was delighted to discover the coils of raw spiritual energy had changed. They were no longer simply power. They’d become an animalistic force with a will of its own.

  It was time to find out if I’d made a new discovery or made a terrible mistake.

  Before my makeshift serpents could burst free from my aura, I released them.

  The serpents surged down my arms and coiled around my fists in a torrent of power
that took my breath away. They chattered and screeched as they took shape, and their weight dragged my arms down to my sides.

  Eric and Clem both gasped, and Abi scrambled out of his seat next to me with his eyes wide and mouth agape.

  Professor Harkness rose above the class on currents of raw jinsei, her thick glasses flashing with reflected light from the other students’ serpents as she floated above our seats. She paused before me and stared at me over the half-moon glasses perched on the tip of her nose.

  “Well, now, Mr. Warin,” she said with a raised eyebrow, “this is something I didn’t expect from you.”

  Where other serpents blazed with brilliant radiance, mine were dark as shadows. They undulated with strange movements, as if their bodies were formed from dozens of smaller creatures, and their heads coiled above my hands with flashing red eyes. I held onto the serpents for as long as I could, and then they spiraled up my arms and vanished in puffs of shadow above my shoulders.

  “Wow,” Eric said. “I mean, wow.”

  “Almost got you.” Clem punched my arm. “But you pulled it out at the end.”

  “Five ranks for Mr. Warin.” Professor Harkness recorded the results on her slate as she said the words. “And three for the Shadow Phoenixes.”

  I felt Deacon’s attention press against my aura, and I turned around to see what his problem was. I’d earned points for the Phoenixes, not just myself. He had no reason to be upset.

  But he clearly was.

  “You have to stop,” he mouthed.

  As quickly as he’d made eye contact with me, Deacon returned his complete attention to Professor Harkness and her lecture about the relative benefits of single versus multiple serpents on defense and offense. It was an interesting talk, but I couldn’t concentrate on the lesson.

  All I could think about was the look in Deacon’s eyes.

  Fear.

  The Fight