Subterfuge: A Cultivation Academy Series (Bastion Academy Book 3)

by J D Astra

  “What happened?” I was able to croak through my raw throat.

  Yin pulled me up onto his back once more. “You defeated a beast-god, the shapeshifting shūspekta, perhaps the only one left of its kind.”

  “You’re a legend,” Kago said with excitement.

  “I would rather be alive,” I mumbled, and the others chuckled.

  “You’re going to make it,” Ko-nah said, resting a hand on my shoulder.

  “We must go,” Yin said, then took off again.

  The jostling and the heat made me weary, and soon, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My mind drifted with the dance of black and red munje. My father appeared in my mind, red sparks flying from his fists as he struck Bo. What kind of blasphemy of magic had he created?

  Chapter 15

  I WAS STANDING ON A desk, staring up dozens of meters to the person looming over a long-necked machina. She brought her eye to the end of the device and then pulled away to write something on a digital tablet.

  I turned from side to side, observing more oversized people and things moving about the room. In a cage next to me was a creature that closely resembled a badgermouse that was about twice my size. Why was I so tiny?

  “Pardon me?” I asked the woman looking through the machina, but she didn’t look my way.

  Suddenly, the ground shook and trembled like we were in a rockslide. The people stumbled and fell against the cluttered laboratory countertops. Water sprayed from the ceiling, and a red light flashed overhead.

  Speakers blared around the room. “Containment breach in B7. I repeat, containment breach in B7. All staff evacuate to the shelters in B9 immediately.”

  The woman next to me opened the cage and pulled the frightened furry creature into her grasp. She reached down and grabbed me—not me, but a disc I stood on. No, that I projected out of. What was this?

  “Jiyong, wake up,” a kind, frightened voice whispered.

  The woman ran toward the door, but when it opened, it was only black on the other side. My skull throbbed from the front to the back like a rippling wave. I cracked my eyes to see faint candlelight on the wall beside me. I was propped up a few feet from the ground in a weightless gurney suspending my nearly naked body in pearly light.

  ‘Did we almost die again?’ I asked my digital friend.

  “I chose the wrong boy to get trapped inside, that’s for certain,” Mae said with a relieved chuckle, but then her tone turned serious. “That was a close one. You almost burned me out, too. I had to shut down the majority of my functions to take over heat conversion when you blacked out.”

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mae. I don’t know what happened,’ I thought, closing my eyes in shame. I could’ve killed her—killed myself.

  “But you didn’t, though. And, for an added bonus, look at your core,” she said with an excited squeak.

  I turned inward and envisioned my munje center. It had doubled in size at the completion of the third, hexahedronic ring that circled the other two. What in Mun-de-Jayu?

  “You recycled all that bear’s munje and built out your third core ring. Congratulations!” She squealed again, higher, and I winced in pain.

  “Oh, sorry,” she whispered, reducing her excitement.

  It had taken me all summer to get what little I had done for the third band, and I had expected it would take another year to finish... but I had built that overnight?

  “Not overnight. You built it in a few hours. By the time the Grandmaster was done healing you, you’d finished the band. It’s incredible, but enough about that. There’s things we need to discuss.”

  I contained my sigh and pulled the warm blanket higher up my chest. ‘A lecture, now?’

  “Not a lecture, information. I had time to evaluate the bear and the reason its nanites behaved the way they did.”

  My eyes snapped open, and I became alert.

  “That’s more like it. The bear was not a bear. You were right. It was not a living creature as we know it, but a cluster of nanites imitating a bear. It was munje, which was why your ma dispel killed it. Well, didn’t kill it, you absorbed it, which brings me to point two.

  “The nanites behaved the way they did because they were all programmed differently. I’ve been piecing together little bits of my story with everything we see, but this creature was clear evidence of something that has been on my mind—the very thing you just saw in your dream, my memory.”

  I scowled. ‘You’ve remembered something from the secondary disc?’

  “No, and that’s the stranger part. There was an incident long ago, as you’ve seen, and this I remember from my home disc. There was an explosion of some kind, and I think nanites were released from the lab. But those nanites were nothing like they are now, and—” She broke off, mumbling. “There’s a reason Dokun was able to program his drugs to affect people the way it did, and it’s the same reason that bear’s nanites surrendered themselves to your mental signature.”

  She paused, and I sat upright from the suspense, which was a mistake. I sucked in a sharp breath at the pain in my shoulder and leg.

  Mae collected herself and went on. “Dokun’s malware tricked the nanites in your body to obey a new dominant signature, which was why ingesting just a small amount of the poison last year was relatively safe when it was cycled out of the body. There’s ancient programming in all these nanites, and I didn’t understand it until we encountered that bear.

  “The shūspekta was made of nanites that had replicated with code that had been deactivated in your people generations ago. This creature could’ve been a fluke. We haven’t seen much beyond Busa-nan, but since there’s legends about it, I think not.

  “That creature had weaponized this code that changed the dominant signature. When it breathed in your munje, it was transforming and feasting on it. The shūspekta was fueling itself with your munje. Moreover, I think that red munje flowing through you now is exactly how it did that. It’s incredibly potent... A single nanite from the red munje can convert thousands of the others to a new mental identifier.”

  ‘Dominant signature? Deactivated code?’ I asked, rubbing the fresh scars on my right shoulder from the creature’s bite.

  “There’s power in this world I still don’t understand. I thought I’d learned everything about nanites, but it seems Busa-nan might have developed differently from other regions. I think when you damaged the shūspekta, and it damaged you in return, the dormant code inside you activated. That code had been suppressed by some event in Busa-nan hundreds of years ago, but interacting with the creature turned it back on. That change allowed your nanites to adopt the mental signature of the shūspekta when it hurt you, and vice versa.

  “That’s also why Cho, who’d had several cups of the laced tea, was affected so much more. He had a high saturation of the malware munje—those red nanites—in his system that activated the dormant code in his nanites to switch dominant mental signatures. Half his body quite literally turned against itself.

  “However, the malware is not complete. Whatever Dokun is trying to create, I still don’t know, but he’s trying to switch the mental signature of the recipient’s nanites, that much is for certain, and he’s been moderately successful. What are we calling this red munje, anyway?”

  ‘Eh, I can’t think...’ I rubbed my eyes and blinked a few times. ‘Uw, like uwol.’

  “The Busaneo word for control, very clever, Jiyong.”

  ‘I try.’

  Someone shifted against the wall of the dim room and my heart pounded in fright. Was my jang-ryzo up? I blocked the glare from the candle and focused on the figure.

  “Jiyong?” Hana’s voice soothed my nerves.

  She rushed forward, reaching for my hand. My throat tightened as I saw her haggard face. Her eyes were red and lashes still slick with tears. She pulled my hands to her cheeks and squeezed them.

  “Thank Jigu,” she whispered. Her warm breath tickled my fingertips.

  Additional dark figures around the room shifted in th
eir bedrolls and sat up. With a flick of my wrist, I launched a ry glimmer to the center of the low ceiling, illuminating the room. Cho, Shin-soo, Sung-ki, and Yuri were clustered around me in a loose semicircle. Long River was packed into the corner, but only Ko-nah roused. The other three boys were covered in a shimmering purple blanket of ry, a silence spell from Ko-nah, no doubt.

  “What are they doing here?” I asked, my voice raw.

  “We’re your family away from home, remember? Ena demanded it.” Ko-nah held his hands up defensively. I knew it was a placating gesture. He thought I was weak right now and couldn’t dream of winning a fight against him. He may have been right.

  “How are you feeling?” Hana asked, looking up from my hands with a hopeful smile. The dark bags under her eyes said she hadn’t slept a single second. I didn’t wish this for her. How could she be effective on this mission if she was always so worried for me that she couldn’t sleep?

  “I’m good, better than good—aside from a few new scars,” I whispered. “I forged my third band,” I said, glowering at Ko-nah. I wasn’t as feeble as he thought.

  “In one day?” Sung-ki asked incredulously.

  I nodded to him with confidence.

  “Tamashioku,” Ko-nah whispered and all eyes fell on him with a glare. He swallowed hard and went on. “It means something like soul eating. It’s stuff of legends everywhere else, but in Kokyu it’s part of the old religion. Soul eating was the process of a battle victor consuming the magic of another. It was also outlawed a hundred years ago because of the immense power one could gain that way. There are men and women out there with powers beyond our dreams.”

  Mae projected through the speaker. “This could be what Dokun is trying to accomplish.”

  “Mae!” Hana yelled and placed her hands over the device on my chest.

  I smiled and pulled her away gently. “He knows. He was the one who told Kumiho who I was.”

  Hana’s frightened scowl turned to anger, and her eyes went black. She pulled away from me in a blink and flew across the room in a rage. She pushed Ko-nah against the wall, her hands tightening on his throat.

  “Stop,” I called to her, though I took some enjoyment in seeing his feet dangle like that. “He may be useful to us, and killing or hurting him could have—” I stuttered at the pain behind my eye—“unexpected consequences.”

  Hana relaxed her grasp, and Ko-nah slid down the wall, but she didn’t release him. Her muscles thrummed with zo, and her shoulders heaved with heavy breath.

  “You’re implying we should collaborate with a traitor?” Sung-ki asked. He’d skirted the negative effects of the Secret Pact by being vague.

  “Like shipuh we will,” Shin-soo said with an angry snarl.

  “What do you know that we don’t?” Cho asked me, though still with side-eyed glares aimed at Ko-nah.

  I pulled back the sheet and stepped off the magical gurney. It hurt, but I didn’t limp as I walked to Ko-nah. “You’re still working with him, aren’t you?”

  “Who are you talking about?” Ko-nah asked with that cocky, upper-hand tone. He thought he was moving me like a pawn on one of Mae’s chessboards.

  Hana’s grip tightened on his neck. “Play around and find out.”

  “Let’s just kill him and be rid of his interference,” Shin-soo said as he stepped up behind Hana. “If you’re scared to do it, I can. I’ll take him out to the woods, and they’ll never find him.”

  “Doubt that,” Ko-nah managed to say with a gasp.

  Yin tossed in his bedroll beside us, and we all went still.

  “Enough.” I pulled Hana’s arm away from Ko-nah, and he gasped again.

  Ko-nah massaged his neck with a grimace. “You’ll have to be more specific about who you want to know I’m working with. I work with a lot of individuals.”

  “You’re still working for Hiro Kumiho,” I said, not asking.

  He nodded. “I’m also working with Ribatasan.”

  “So where do your loyalties lie?” Yuri joined the conversation.

  “To himself,” I said. “And his mother.”

  Hana’s gaze snapped to me, and she groaned. “Jiyong, no. Please don’t tell me you fell for his sob story.”

  I looked to her, my face stern. “We have an opportunity to get exactly what we need using him. Eyes and ears on the inside,” I said, carefully avoiding the effects of the Secret Pact as well.

  “But he’s a snake,” Shin-soo protested.

  “Snakes protect themselves instinctually,” I reminded him.

  Ko-nah scoffed. “I’m right here.”

  Hana’s hand flew up to his chest and pushed him against the wall. “Do you want to be dead in the woods instead?” She looked to me. “Jiyong, we’ve trusted him before and Bastions died.”

  “I know,” I said, my gut churning. I wasn’t going to trust him, but it was obvious he had some kind of connection with the kids at school who called themselves Ribatasan, our local allies. They were more interested in liberation from the king, but we could use one another to a mutual end. Being unable to reveal the Secret Pact to anyone else, we’d have to figure a way to drop vague hints that would allow us to communicate. I wondered why Min-hwan hadn’t extended the Pact to our allies here...

  I supposed it would be difficult to do from such a great distance under careful surveillance. The Grandmaster of Bastion didn’t just take a trip to Kokyu to visit a random student. It would look incredibly suspicious, especially after what happened last year.

  “You still think it’s a good idea to leave him alive? We can’t trust him not to betray us the second he leaves this room!” Shin-soo said, his face screwed up in anger.

  “I haven’t betrayed you yet and have had plenty of time,” Ko-nah objected.

  I silenced him with a glare. “I’m always your trump card—like you said before. You’ll wait for the best opportunity to present itself before betraying us.

  “And even so, I never said I was going to trust him. I said we we’re going to use him.” I paused and pulled Hana’s menacing arm away from Ko-nah once more. “You’re despicable, but useful. I’m certain as soon as you wear out your use, the Ribatasan won’t need you either, and you’ll need a way out, again.”

  Ko-nah didn’t move but watched me carefully. He didn’t want to let anything slip, but he already had. The brief encounter at dinner was more than enough for me to piece it together.

  “We can’t offer him clemency. We don’t have the authority,” Sung-ki said plainly.

  I nodded to my instructor. “But we can help him escape when it’s time.”

  The room was quiet.

  “I can’t believe we’re considering this,” Shin-soo said with a scoff and returned to his bedroll. “May as well just tell everyone why we’re here. Might get our suffering over with a little faster.”

  “I need something from port customs, the long-term storage facility nearby,” I said to Ko-nah, ignoring the obstinate Shin-soo.

  “Name it,” Ko-nah replied.

  “They took a picture of my family, and I want it back.”

  Ko-nah’s eyebrow came to an inquisitive point. “Just a picture?”

  “And the frame,” Yuri said.

  A smug smile crept onto Ko-nah’s face.

  “Can you do it?” I asked, not letting the frustration show on my face.

  “Sure, we can get your family portrait. It’s going to take a week, maybe two.”

  I took a deep breath. I was making a deal with a snake. “Fine.”

  I turned away, and Ko-nah grabbed my arm. Hana was on him just as fast, pushing him back from me.

  “What assurance do I have that you’ll help me when I need it?” Ko-nah dared to ask, even though I was certain he felt he had information we didn’t want him to have.

  Even if he thought the picture frame was somehow related to some kind of plot, no one would be able to figure out what it truly was. Only I knew how to unlock the device, and the munje pathways had never been used, leav
ing no trace for detectives to follow. He didn’t have anything on us, no matter what he thought.

  “None. Nor will I give you any.” I looked over my shoulder. “You’re going to have to trust us.”

  Chapter 16

  THE SONMA PHYSICIANS departed Moon Shadow the next morning when it was clear I was not in real danger. They wanted time to study the effects the shūspekta had on me, but Woong-ji had declined. We would run our own tests and provide them with the details, she’d told them—though I doubted there was much honesty to that.

  Building the third core band in a single day was a legendary feat, one Kokyu was familiar with from history. Their records were so old it was difficult to tell truth from fable, but I had proved the possibility to be a reality. How had I—a teen with only two bands—survived that much energy, they wondered? I had no doubt my connection with Mae was the reason and had a feeling Woong-ji knew the same.

  Breakfast came with excited pats on the shoulder and looks of awe. The news of our battle with the shūspekta had spread like wildfire through the school. It was comforting to know that Bastion had at least one thing in common with Moon Shadow: the gossip mill turned no matter where I was.

  We had finished the final week of integration, which meant we were free to sit with our classmates. Most Bastions did, and so it wasn’t out of the ordinary for the five of us to crowd around a table as soon as I escaped the pats on the back. Hana cast a ry shield around the table, obscuring our words and faces in a clever deception.

  “You’re wrong, and he’s going to get us killed,” Shin-soo blurted angrily before we were even seated comfortably.

  “Good morning,” Cho said, not willing to forego the kindnesses of morning greetings despite Shin-soo jumping to the point.

  I sighed. “All I’ve asked for is a picture. He has no evidence of our plan, nor does he know one exists. We have yet to take any action, and therefore there’s nothing to incriminate us.”

  “How did you sleep?” Cho asked Yuri across the table, trying to cut through our conversation.