Hollow Core

by Gage Lee

  They were not, however, strong enough to lift that bar. No matter how I strained against the iron slab, it wouldn’t budge more than half an inch.

  The effort left me drenched in sweat and exhausted the beast aspects I’d used to summon the shadow serpents. My servants faded away with faint whispers.

  “Let’s try this again.” I forged bonds with more rats, and the serpents sprang to life and slithered through the cracks again. This time, I sent them both off through the side to my left. “You can do this.”

  Both serpents worked on one side of the bar and managed to lift it a couple of inches before they’d exhausted themselves. My best effort was at least an inch short of the top of the bracket. I groaned and leaned back with my hands on the floor behind me. The exhausted beast aspects evaporated from my aura with tiny squeals, and sweat dripped from every inch of my body. I’d gotten tired while organizing books in the stacks, but never like this. My core ached and even my aura felt bruised and tender.

  No matter how terrible I felt, though, I couldn’t quit. If the final challenge was underway, I was hours, at most, from falling into the bottom ten percent and getting expelled. I didn’t think even Tycho could save me from that. I’d spend the rest of my days in his lab, slaving away like Hahen to produce more and more jinsei.

  Hahen...

  What was it he had said? Something about a long enough lever.

  I surged to my feet on a burst of adrenaline. The rats squeaked with surprise as I lashed connections between our cores and braced themselves for the onslaught of cycled jinsei that swept through them like a hurricane. Their beast aspects swelled my aching core like water into a balloon.

  The shadow serpents exploded from the palms of my hands and shot through the gap in the right side of the door. I clenched my fists and wrapped the serpents around the iron bar. I felt the metal in my hands and pulled it hard to the side. The explosive jerk earned me an inch of movement. Another yank got me another inch and exhausted the beast aspects.

  I grinned, breath whistling through my teeth in ragged gasps. That effort had blown through beast aspects faster than I’d imagined possible. It had also earned me progress I could build on. Those two inches would become four, then eight, then two feet. That might be enough to tilt the balance in my favor.

  I’d need a lot more rats to help me before this was over.

  It was a very good thing there were hundreds ready to do just that.

  The progress was slow and tedious. Latch onto rats, summon the serpents, pull the bar twice, repeat. It took me longer to recover between each repetition, and I had to burn up precious seconds to purge exhaustion aspects before I could continue. Seconds I didn’t have to spare.

  Every moment that passed brought me closer to missing the final challenge and losing my place at the School.

  “No,” I groaned and dove back into the effort. “I won’t let that happen. I can’t.”

  The world blurred around me. I pushed everything away except for my breathing technique and the effort of moving the bar. The endless rush of air and jinsei through me blurred one second into the next and focused my thoughts on the only task that mattered: escaping the stacks.

  And then, when I thought I couldn’t move that iron bar another inch, its left side dipped down. Not much, but enough to let me know it was time.

  With a triumphant shout, I pulled down on the end of the bar with my weary serpents. The barrier became my lever, and it overbalanced and slid free of its bracket. The bar crashed to the floor with a thunderous clang.

  My core and aura were raw and ragged, and my body felt like I’d just run a marathon. Before I could do anything else, I needed to cleanse my aura of all the exhaustion and anxiety aspects that weighed it down. If I tried to do anything else, I’d end up falling onto my face.

  The cycling trance left me feeling refreshed and less sore than I had been, but even it couldn’t fully restore my energy. I needed sleep, and lots of it, to do that.

  “Later,” I promised myself.

  Then I stepped forward and pushed the door wide open.

  I was free.

  And, judging by the rosy sunlight that poured through the windows of the passage I stood in, I was very, very late for the final challenge.

  I raced to the other end of the hall and shoved the metal bar that held that door closed out of its bracket. The hallway beyond ended in a T-intersection, and I raced down it, holding the image of the School’s main entryway firmly in my mind. With every step I reached out to the rats in the building and bound two-strand connections to them. I didn’t need their jinsei, I needed their noses to sniff out my target.

  “Find Grayson,” I commanded. If anyone would be at the challenge, it would be the headmaster. He wouldn’t miss the chance to gloat over my failure.

  I took a left at the intersection and found myself in a small corridor that I recognized from my many trips to the alchemy laboratory. No wonder Tycho hadn’t had any trouble reaching the stacks—they were right next door to his territory.

  While my rats searched for Grayson, I zipped through the hall of artifacts and burst through the secret door that led to the main entryway. I waited impatiently for the rats to hunt down my target, trying not to freak out. It was close to dusk. The final challenge had to be nearly over. Even if I found Grayson, there was no guarantee I’d have enough time to complete the test.

  The rats squeaked with excitement. They’d found him.

  I followed the trail of jinsei between my core and the rat who’d discovered the headmaster. It seemed that the sun sank lower and its light faded more with every step I took. The path led me down a flight of stairs, around a wide hall, then up a staircase that seemed to last forever. An excited chittering from up ahead urged me on.

  I was in the home stretch.

  A rat met me at the top of the staircase. It jumped with excitement, spun in the air, then raced off. I followed the rodent, who skidded around a corner, claws scrabbling for purchase on the wood floor. It led me through a shadowed passage that ended, not at a door, but a wide window.

  “No,” I groaned. “No, no, no!”

  I hadn’t been clear enough. The rats had found Grayson.

  They hadn’t found me a way to get to Grayson.

  I saw him through the window, standing several stories below me in a courtyard I’d never seen before. He sat on an enormous throne carved from a piece of obsidian. The other professors flanked him in smaller chairs of their own. All of them stared raptly at crystalline slates that floated in the air in front of them.

  An enormous arch of pearlescent light hung in the air to the right of the professors. I caught flickers of movement and flashes of light through the opening. Whatever lay on the other end of that arch certainly looked exciting.

  Dozens of students sat on white wooden chairs in front of the professors, their eyes fixed on whatever was happening on the other side of that arch. I scanned the crowd for familiar faces, but didn’t see Clem, Abi, or Eric. Deacon wasn’t down there, either.

  None of the initiates were.

  There was, however, one face I did recognize. Adjudicator Hark sat off to one side in a plush leather chair. Her seat was in the front row of another section of the courtyard, and she was surrounded by older, dignified Empyreals.

  That had to be the parents’ section. I scanned it, searching for my mother. When I didn’t find her, I let out a sigh of relief. If she wasn’t here, I could hope they hadn’t found her.

  The sun had dropped below the top of the building. Daylight was fading, and small wisps of light sprang to life to illuminate the courtyard. I was out of time.

  I wrenched the window up and cycled my breathing. I pulled on all the rats I could manage and crammed the channels of my legs with so much jinsei that they throbbed with pain.

  “It’s now or never.” I steeled myself for the pain I knew was coming.

  Then, before I could wisen up and change my mind, I did something that was probably going to kill m
e.

  I jumped.

  The Final

  THE FALL TOOK MUCH longer than I’d expected. I hung in the air for what felt like an hour before the ground reached up and smashed my legs out from under me. That sent me sprawling across the grass as shards of the window rained down around me. The jinsei in the lower half of my body burst out of its channels in a spray of light, leaving me out of breath and flat on my back in front of the entire student body and most of the parents.

  Fortunately for me, there was only room in my mind for two thoughts: I hurt all over, and I was alive. There wasn’t any space left in there for embarrassment.

  “Wardens,” Grayson said, his voice booming through the air like a clap of thunder, “please apprehend Mr. Warin before he can do something we’ll all regret.”

  Nope, no way. I wasn’t going back to the stacks until I’d had my shot at the challenge. And I certainly wasn’t going back in there until someone explained why I hadn’t been fed today.

  I jumped to my feet and summoned my serpents and fusion blade in the same instant. If they wanted me, they were going to have to fight. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the wardens wanted to do. Every one of them, from every clan, summoned their weapons and headed in my direction.

  It looked very much like Grayson was about to get his wish. The wardens would slaughter me, or I’d end up stuffed back in my prison to rot. Either way, he won.

  “Halt.” Adjudicator Hark rose from her chair, her golden eyes flashing brighter than the light of the setting sun. “Mr. Warin, why are you out of your cell?”

  The wardens froze, though they didn’t put their weapons away.

  “I didn’t get breakfast this morning. Or lunch.” Realizing the hour, I added, “Or dinner.”

  “A simple oversight,” Grayson said. “We’ll feed him and then return him to his prison.”

  “Where is Tycho Reyes?” The adjudicator didn’t seem to care what Grayson had to say.

  I liked her more every time I saw her.

  “I’m not aware of Sage Reyes’ location.” Grayson’s tone cooled a few hundred degrees when he spoke to the adjudicator. Having her countermand his orders in front of everyone must have really upset him. “In his absence, I will see to the disposition of the prisoner.”

  If he hadn’t liked it when Clem’s mom shut him down the first time, he really hated it the second time.

  “I don’t think that will be acceptable, Sage Bishop.” It was the adjudicator’s turn to add some frost to her words. “Come here, Mr. Warin.”

  I banished my sword and serpents and skirted around the edge of the wardens. I didn’t want one of them to get antsy and accidentally skewer me.

  “A thousand pardons, honored Adjudicator.” I bowed before Clem’s mom, then did the same to Grayson. “And to you, honored Headmaster. I was afraid I’d been forgotten, and I didn’t want to miss the final challenge.”

  Grayson’s brow furrowed, and he did his best to scowl a hole through my core.

  “You are very late for the challenge, Mr. Warin. I’m afraid there’s no point in your joining the others at this point.” The headmaster clucked his tongue and shook his head in mock sorrow. “If only Tycho had cared for you properly, you’d have arrived an hour ago when the challenge started. Perhaps you wouldn’t be so hopelessly behind at this point.”

  “Hopelessly?” The Adjudicator snapped her fingers and a small slate appeared in the palm of her hand. She reviewed something on its surface, then showed it to the headmaster. “He’s in last place by ten points, but that’s hardly hopeless. Is there some rule that would prevent him from taking the final challenge?”

  “He’s a criminal,” Grayson said drily. “He should be in his cell, not in class.”

  “You demanded I take part in the Grand Melee,” I challenged the headmaster. My nerves were wound tight, and I’d lost all ability to be polite. I needed to start the final to have any chance of staying here. There wasn’t time to be anything but direct.

  “If that’s true, then there’s no reason to exclude him from this test.” Adjudicator Hark leaned closer to Grayson. “It would also be the right thing to do after you lost track of a student under your care and failed to feed him for an entire day. Some might think that wasn’t an accident.”

  Grayson’s eyes narrowed, and he shot me a venomous glare that slammed into my aura with such force it rocked me back on my heels. When this was over, he’d make me pay for what had just happened.

  That was all right. Future me could figure out how to survive that mess if present me figured out how to survive the challenge.

  “Mr. Warin,” Grayson barked. “Through that portal lies your final challenge. You must enter the arena, collect as many jinsei tokens as you can, and return them to me. When the last student has exited the arena, we will tally the tokens to determine the winners. And the losers.”

  “Are there any other rules?” I wanted to charge straight into the portal and begin the treasure hunt. The only thing that held me back was the worry that Grayson would forget to tell me something, and I’d be disqualified.

  “No, Mr. Warin.” A troubling smile widened over Grayson’s features. “This is a very simple and straightforward challenge.”

  The instant the word “No” left Grayson’s lips, I limped toward the portal. My legs ached from my leap, and my body still hadn’t fully recovered from the wound to my gut. I forged new connections to nearby rodents and pulled jinsei from them into my channels to heal the damage I’d caused myself. That helped, though it didn’t do anything for the aches and pains that made me grimace with every step.

  The shimmering black gateway seethed with jagged webs of jinsei. The portal’s surface showed me glimpses of students scuttling through a fractured landscape and flashes of blurred spirits soaring above them.

  I took a deep breath, then stepped through the portal.

  Into a madhouse.

  Shouts of excitement and dismay echoed off the arena’s walls and floor. Wisps of smoke rose from deep zigzag cracks in the floor and filled the air with a sulfurous stink. Stone walls rose thirty feet to a vaulted obsidian ceiling overhead, and strange engravings crawled across their surfaces. The spirits I’d seen zipped in and out of holes in the black ceiling, translucent bodies wrapped around cores that glowed like tiny stars.

  The arena was at least a hundred feet on a side, which gave my fellow initiates plenty of room to maneuver. They dodged around one another as they frantically searched for the jinsei tokens, occasionally attacking one another with fists or blades. A quick count told me there were fewer than thirty students down there, less than a third of the total number of initiates in my class.

  “Let’s find the rest of them,” I whispered to myself.

  The portal was at the edge of the arena, and no one had noticed me. That gave me a few moments to open my spirit senses to the world around me. While the other initiates had to hunt for their tokens, I had a much more efficient method in mind.

  My senses found small creatures scattered across the arena floor. They also detected other little beasts far outside the arena that I could see. The creatures I found were smaller than rats, and their auras were colder. I had no idea what they were and didn’t care. There was no time to be picky about what critters I bound to me. With a thought, I forged twin-strand connections to as many of the creatures as I could manage.

  My mind reeled at the senses that flowed through the connections. Unlike the rats, who saw the world in a blurry, yet familiar way, these animals perceived their environment in shades of purple. Sharp bursts of white light emitted ripples that flowed over the terrain, creatures, and objects to paint a detailed, if fleeting, picture of their surroundings.

  The tiny beasts’ auras were every bit as strange as their senses. Where rats were simple creatures with only beast aspects, these things held armor, sword, knowledge, and beast auras. And, yet, they were even easier to forge a bond with than rodents.

  It took me a couple of minutes to
sort out the senses of my new buddies. The purple, it turned out, measured intensities of jinsei. The little monsters could sense the sacred energy, though their range was limited to only a few feet. The white flashes were a sort of echolocation. The little guys and gals emitted high-pitched clicks from inside their shells, then mapped their surroundings from the sonic waves that bounced back to them.

  Individually, they weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, but taken altogether they gave me an impressively detailed map of the entire arena and many of the tokens it contained. Most of the students were to the left of the main arena, where dozens of small rooms each held small handfuls of tokens. A few were off to the right, where much richer treasures could be found. In the few seconds I’d searched with the help of my new friends, I’d uncovered several very rich deposits of jinsei that had to be tokens.

  I had no idea what sort of place I found myself in, but I liked it.

  Armed with my newfound knowledge, I opened my eyes and ran for the nearest token. The small coin was hidden beneath a piece of rubble that had fallen from the wall to my left. I scooped it up and stuffed it into the secret pocket of my belt.

  “Congratulations, initiate,” a soft voice chimed in my head. “You are currently in one hundred and third place, out of one hundred and four initiates in the final challenge. You have one more token than last place, and the rank above you has four more tokens. Good luck!”

  Well, wasn’t that special?

  I had a long way to go to get out of the bottom ten percent of this challenge, much less the bottom half of my whole class. There was no way for me to tell how many ranks the other students had gained, or where I stood overall.

  I’d need to find a ton of tokens.

  Fortunately, my new little pals had shown me there were tons that no one had found.

  There was still hope.

  The next few tokens were close together. They’d been hidden in the mouths of strange beasts carved into the walls, where no one had thought to look. Another handful of coins were stowed in sconces behind lit candles on the cracked pillars that lined the room. In less than five minutes, I jumped three spots in the rankings. My heart soared as I raced toward another cache of tokens closer to the center of the room.