School of Swords and Serpents Boxset: Books 1 - 3 (Hollow Core, Eclipse Core, Chaos Core)

by Gage Lee

  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 appendages 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.”

  “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 getting around 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 Rachel.

  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 left. 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 right. 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. Please have one member of your group bring me the completed assignment before the end of class.”

  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 replied, 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 quo, 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. Rachel 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 snatched up the scripted square of metal. She took off for the front of the classroom to turn in the assignment.

  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 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.