by B.J. Keeton
Chapter Nineteen
Damien was hungry. The one piece of fruit he had eaten a few hours ago was long gone. Once the elevator dropped him off at the third-floor dining hall, the smells of so many different foods wafting over him made his stomach rumble. Aside from the fruit, he had scavenged here and there but had not eaten a full meal since the night his home had been invaded.
“Visitor, please enjoy your time at the Ennd's Academy dining hall. May I recommend…” The voice trailed off as Damien walked quickly out of earshot. He had no intention of getting food recommendations from something that could not eat.
He stalked directly toward one of the self-service stations and made himself a sandwich. The dining hall was big and round; students and faculty mingled here, but he thought the size would allow him to blend in well enough that he wouldn’t seem out of place. He chose a seat by the only window in the hall, one that made up a good quarter of the circular room’s wall. It overlooked an interior courtyard, which was perfect for Damien's needs. He sat and ate his sandwich as he surveyed the school’s basic architecture. He had to see what else had changed since he left.
Two small spires shot up from the ground of the courtyard, though he could not see how tall they were from his table. Across the courtyard, he could see Ennd’s central tower, and that's where Damien focused most of his attention. That one structure dwarfed everything else about Ennd's. That's where the Library had been once upon a time and should still remain. Instance physics were unlikely to have changed too much in recent years. Or, well, ever. No amount of renovation would be able to change the laws of the universe.
However, the renovation that the technomages had instituted would make it impossible to know which floor the entrance would be on, but he was still confident that he could find a way in. Space and location were imperative to Instancing, sure, but it was all relative. As long as the portal was in the general vicinity of the energy pocket, it would open. The portal being shifted a few stories in one way or another would not prevent access.
He finished his food, glad to have some protein in his system, and looked at the central tower a moment longer before moving away from the window and toward a corridor that hopefully led to the Library, and in turn, to Headmaster Gilbert Squalt. He casually worked his way through the crowd, nodding at people when they made eye contact—he had to be careful not to call attention to himself by seeming too anxious. He even tossed his trash in a receptacle as he passed it.
As he approached the hallway, his left hand tingled. It was not exactly painful, but it was more than just an itch. It was probably an alert, a warning. Damien assumed the sensation was caused by being too close to a restricted area access point.
So he kept walking.
As he entered the hallway, the tingling became more insistent, verging on painful, but he pushed through. If he had known a little tingling in his hand was going to be the school’s best attempt at confining him, he would have marched his way through the halls hours ago.
And then he stopped. Or more accurately, his left hand—the one containing the nanite stamp—stopped while the rest of his body kept going. He was thrown off balance and just barely managed to avoid falling completely. His body was free to move, but his left hand hung suspended in midair. He could not, with any amount of force, pull his hand any further down the hall. It was as though his wrist were a gigantic square peg trying to fit through a very tiny round hole.
Damien felt around with his right hand, and there was nothing in the air holding him. No invisible walls had clamped down on him.
He could walk backward, though. He was perfectly free to move back into the dining area. So this, he thought, is how they keep visitors in line; by putting us in invisible cages. He realized that he had spent probably the last two minutes struggling with his own left hand, and he wondered how that might have looked to anyone who was watching. He looked back toward the dining area and was pleased to see that the corridor had just begun to curve when he hit this invisible boundary. He could only see a small section of the dining hall around the curve, and there were only two tables with line of sight to him. No one was sitting at either of them. Yet.
Damien figured that with the size of the crowd in the dining hall, they would not stay unoccupied for long. He had to make a decision, and he had to make it fast. He could go back the way he came and search for another route to the central tower, or he could figure out a way to free his hand and make those tingling nanites stop restricting his access.
When he thought about his options, he realized how much being away from the Charons for so long had affected him. Ennd's was tracking his whereabouts and restricting his access with nanites and the unique signature they emitted. If there was one thing Damien Vennar understood, it was how to manipulate nanotechnology. Until his home was invaded, he had not Conjured in centuries. Most Charons would never be able to Conjure invisibility as rapidly or as effectively as he had, but like almost anything else, once you knew how to do something, the skill was rarely completely lost. Proficiency may deteriorate, yes, but with a little practice, you could easily regain whatever atrophied through inactivity.
Damien's control of nanotech was no different, and he focused his attention on the visitor's pass stamped into his hand.
The old man edged as far along the curved wall as the nanites allowed, and he dropped to his knees. His trapped hand supported much of his weight. That way, when he was finished with his purge, he would know immediately by having his hand come free.
Damien Vennar was very aware of the nanites that made up his bloodstream. At one point in his life, he could have controlled them on an almost one-by-one basis. He expected that ability to have atrophied, but he still had a very keen grasp of what was going on inside his flesh. He closed his eyes and directed his attention to finding the foreign nanites within him. He took on himself the role his immune system played on a day-to-day basis: hunting down anything foreign and destroying it. Only this time, he was searching for any nanotechnology inside him that was not a part of the self-replicating, self-repairing system coursing through his veins already.
He entered a state of meditation, as he focused almost all of his attention on eliminating the microscopic machines that were restraining him. One by one, he found the foreign bodies and destroyed them. When the very last one went offline and its signal interrupted, the old man stumbled backward. He fell onto his back and smiled. He had missed the rush that came with Conjuring.
He flexed his now-free wrist. Without the molecular stamp in his skin, he would be able to move through the halls unhindered. He made one last look toward the dining hall to make sure no one had seen him, then stood up and continued down the hallway unnoticed.
