The Black Stars

by Dan Krokos

  He tried to kick out again, and someone caught his foot. Two more fists crashed into his stomach. His gloves almost slipped down over his hands, but he caught himself at the last second, refusing to use them against the students. Mason had a job to do.

  But he was scared now. If he were at home, at Academy II, the fight would end safely. Maybe a bone would get broken, but it would be healed that same day. The combatants would be forced to shake hands and make up. There would be punishment. Here, Mason didn’t know what was going to happen. It was an unknown, and that terrified Mason more than anything. He could die, right here, right now.

  He decided to make sure that didn’t happen.

  Mason recalled the feeling he’d had in the forest with Tom, when the vines had been trying to strangle them both. Now, the gloves shot down over his hands without thought, and suddenly there was a wall of light in front of him; the rhadjen were on their backs in the hallway, stunned, their robes smoking lightly.

  Juneful blinked rapidly, looking around, eyes unfocused.

  “You just made a serious mistake,” Juneful said, his wits, what little there were, returning. “The energy discharge was recorded. You’re done.” The anger on his face dissolved into a smile. A victorious smile. If Marcus Jones were here, he would definitely be friends with Juneful.

  Mason made his voice very low. If he was going home, he wanted to get in a parting shot. “You attack me, then report me when I defend myself. If that’s what this school is about, then I can’t get home soon enough.”

  The goons all traded looks, as if they were unable to process this information without seeing Juneful’s reaction first. Juneful couldn’t deny Mason’s logic, so he didn’t even try. He just made a disgusted sound in his throat and stalked away. His goons followed, giving Mason looks that ranged from anger to what might’ve been some form of respect.

  Mason watched them go, as his breathing returned to normal. The places they’d struck him still throbbed and probably would for some time. His skin would be bruised, but that was okay. If what Juneful said was true (and Mason had no reason to expect it was, other than Juneful seeming so confident), then Mason was going home, and nothing else really mattered. Hopefully he could see Merrin on the way back.

  But his mission would be incomplete.

  Mason stood alone in the empty hallway. It was quiet. And that’s why he heard the footsteps coming from several corridors away. They were loud because they were heavy—the footsteps of men, not children, walking swiftly. They were traveling away from him, getting quieter. Mason set off down the hallway, moving with care, keeping his feet light. Where are they going? He had to know—they were marching with too much purpose. This wasn’t a stroll to the next class.

  Mason stopped at each intersection, where the hallway material changed and became something else: wood, glass, metal, and even what appeared to be ice. He was gaining on the footsteps. There were four of them, he thought, eight feet total. He caught his first and only glimpse of them turning a corner. Mason recognized the bluish hair of Master Rayasu. The other lead Rhadgast appeared to be Master Shem, head of the Bloods. This is big, Mason thought. He almost forgot about his throbbing nose and sore ribs.

  They disappeared for a second, after reaching a set of stairs covered in springy, tough grass. Mason followed them down twenty seconds later.

  The stairs led to more stairs and more doors. The doors were loud and clicked when they shut, but Mason made sure to give his targets enough of a lead. They had to be far underneath the sphere now.

  Mason wished Tom was with him, not for the first or second or third time. He passed a sign:

  NO RHADJEN BEYOND THIS POINT. STUDENTS WHO DISOBEY WILL BE STRIPPED OF THEIR GLOVES AND SENT HOME.

  Oh well: Mason was going home anyway. Juneful hadn’t been bluffing—he had seemed too confident, too pleased.

  Mason’s heart began to pound. Full Rhadgast, in the school, going to a secret, banned area? Maybe he was going to get a bit of intel after all. It was almost too much to hope for.

  But his hopes were dashed a moment later, when he descended another flight of stairs—this one made of craggy rocks fused together—and came to a door that had what appeared to be a retinal scanner built right into the middle of it.

  The door beeped, sensing his presence. Oh crap! Mason began to backpedal. His heels hit the staircase behind him, and he fell onto the steps. A readout above the scanner said:

  COMPLETE SCAN OR ALARM WILL SOUND

  A timer was counting down from five seconds. In five seconds, it would all be over. The Rhadgast would come back for him, and he would definitely not be leaving the basement alive.

  There was really only one thing to do: try. Perhaps a false scan would buy him time and the system would reset. Mason pushed off the staircase and lunged for the scanner, watching as the number 2 flicked to 1. He pressed his face to the scanner and held his eyes open, and the scan initiated. But this wasn’t an old-school retinal scan, Mason quickly discovered. That technology had been around for over eight hundred years, and the Tremist may have had it even longer. When the lasers passed over Mason’s eyes, he felt them probing; they couldn’t be lasers at all, not the way he knew them. It felt like tiny ants were walking up and down his optic nerves, plucking packets of information from his brain, intercepting the electrons traveling through synapses, pulling his very identity and reading it like computer code. There was no way to fake it. In an instant, the scanner knew Mason better than Mason knew himself.

  The ants began to leave his brain, taking the itchy feeling with them. Mason stepped back, blinking rapidly as his irritated eyes began to water.

  He waited for the alarm to sound.

  But instead, a purple light in the scanner blinked, the lock clicked, and the door eased open.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Beyond the doorway there was darkness and a pinprick of white light.

  Mason waited, listening for any sound that said he’d been discovered. But none came.

  “Impossible…” he breathed. The machine had scanned him. And yet the door was open.

  Like it had been expecting him.

  I should get Tom.

  But there was no time: the door was already beginning to close. Mason could go back for Tom, but who knew if they could both make it down here undetected again? Mason slipped across the threshold as the edge of the door brushed his chest. The door sealed shut behind him with a sucking sound, and he was left in the darkness with the single point of light ahead of him.

  Only one way to go, he thought.

  Mason started toward the light with slow, careful steps, not knowing what was around him in the dark. The walls could’ve been a few feet or a few hundred feet away. His footsteps did not echo, so there was no way to tell.

  After a minute, the light was not a pinprick but a thumbnail. By the time it was the size of a closed fist, Mason could make out details: it was some kind of room with harsh, sterile lights in the ceiling. He could see reflections off a glass wall. Mason heard voices then, low and urgent.

  A woman’s voice, it sounded like.

  She was arguing with the Rhadgast, just around the corner, out of Mason’s line of sight. Mason stepped closer, crouching low. He looked down at himself to make sure no part of him was visible.

  The woman spoke: “You’re not hearing what I’m saying, so let me say it in whatever dialect you understand best—I won’t have another student harmed.” She said the last part in the dialect of Mhenlo dai Kro, the People of the Mountains.

  Mason inched closer, edging toward the line where darkness blurred to gray, until he could see most of the room. It was a laboratory, no different than a human one, with bare metal tables and various arrays of testing equipment, beakers, and containers of strange liquids. It smelled sweet. The back half of the room was separated by the floor-to-ceiling glass Mason had seen on his approach. Beyond the glass was darkness, with no way to tell how large the room really was.

  In the corner a
woman was talking to the four Rhadgast who had come down before him, once again two Bloods and two Stones. Their postures were tense, like they were in a standoff. The woman was facing away from Mason. She had black hair and wore a white lab coat tied with a crimson belt.

  Mason saw Master Rayasu clearly. “Tell me again what you will and won’t have, human,” he said. “I’d love to hear it.”

  Human? Mason and Tom were supposed to be the first visitors to Skars. What was a human doing down here?

  “She forgets her place,” said another. “And her surroundings.”

  “And you forget your manners,” Shem said to Rayasu—the other two Rhadgast Mason didn’t recognize. He felt a bit of blood leak from his nose but dared not sniff it back.

  “And everyone here forgets who I answer to,” the woman said. “Now if you’re done with idle threats, I will ask you to leave my laboratory.”

  The Rhadgast seemed like they were about to do just that, but suddenly a dark shape stirred behind the glass, in the area where it was too dark to see. It was a man shape, hulking, and it crept toward the group.

  The four Rhadgast and the woman turned to look, as out of the darkness emerged a Fangborn.

  Mason clapped his hand over his mouth, but the sound didn’t give him away. All eyes were on the creature. And a creature it was. Mason had only seen them in glimpses before, or through the thermal imaging system on the king’s Hawk. He wished it had stayed that way. Now the beast was under crisp light, stepping out of the darkness completely. His arms and legs were impossibly thick and veiny, bulging with visibly striated muscle. His skin was bluish gray, like a stone, and it looked just as hard. His ears were pointed. The eyes were eerily human, but bigger. He had no nose, just two little holes beneath the eyes. Holes that flared with each breath.

  But that wasn’t what held Mason’s gaze, what froze his blood and locked his muscles.

  His eyes lingered on the Fangborn’s enormous set of jaws, which easily took up more than half the entire head. The lips peeled back from rows of sharp yellowed fangs. He was drooling.

  Mason knew nothing would ever be the same after that. The image would always haunt his sleep. This was what they were up against. An army of monsters in control of ships too powerful and huge to destroy.

  Master Rayasu stalked toward the glass, then slammed his glove against it. “Are you going to stay put this time? Or must we kill you?” Electricity leaked from his glove, spreading over the glass.

  Did this Fangborn kill Jiric? Mason wondered. How?

  The Fangborn seemed to smile, though with teeth that big anything might look like a smile, and it made a low rhythmic chuffing sound. It was laughing. It was laughing at Master Rayasu.

  Slowly, it melded back into the darkness, slipping out of sight.

  The four Rhadgast shared a look, then stalked away as one—right toward Mason, who quickly retreated into deeper shadow. He kept walking, stumbling almost, but didn’t hit a wall. With every step he expected to fall into an abyss that went all the way to Skars’s core. Finally he stopped, and the Rhadgast walked past him, heading for the door, though it, too, was in darkness.

  Mason waited, holding his breath. Master Rayasu paused and sniffed the air. He made a half turn in Mason’s direction, paused again, then spun away with a swish of his robe. Mason didn’t move until they reached the door and opened it, and he could see their silhouettes passing in front of the light. The door shut behind them.

  Mason let out the breath he was holding. He was still shaking. A Fangborn here, under the school. How did it get here? Why were they holding it?

  Mason knew where he could get his answers: the woman. There was just one of her and one of him, and he doubted she had the same gloves and training if she was working in a laboratory. Mason steeled himself, clasping his hands together hard until they stopped shaking. He wasn’t overreacting—it was a Fangborn. But his curiosity won out in the end. He walked toward the opening again and right into the laboratory.

  The woman was working with a huge machine made of clear plastic. Inside were hundreds of tubes filled with liquids of various colors—rose, pink, green, lavender—all of them draining into a central chamber filled with a golden solution. Her back was still turned, as she entered different values on the front of the machine. The Fangborn lurked somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the glass.

  Mason stood there, content to wait until the woman turned around. She was probably expecting him. How else would the scanner have approved him?

  When she continued with her work for too long, Mason decided to clear his throat. The woman jumped and spun around, her hand jostling a beaker, which fell off the table and shattered on the floor.

  Mason felt like a sledgehammer had struck him in the chest. The air went right out of him, and he almost fell to his knees. The woman had midnight hair and eyes. She looked like an older version of his sister, Susan Stark.

  “Mason?” the woman said.

  The woman was his mother.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Mom…?”

  It couldn’t be real. It was another Tremist illusion. That was the only explanation. His parents were dead, and even if his mother had escaped the First Attack, she wouldn’t be here in a laboratory under the Rhadgast school, in the company of a Fangborn.

  Mason didn’t run to her, and she didn’t run to him. They just stared at each other. Mason tried to recall images in his mind, memories of her when she was still alive. He remembered her saying goodbye, giving him a kiss on the cheek, then leaving. Only to pop back in a moment later, say “I love you,” and smile. That was the last time he saw her. April Stark had died that day. And yet here she was.

  “Mom,” Mason said.

  His mother was crying. She kneeled next to the broken beaker and began to scoop the pieces into her hand. Mason’s knees felt like they’d been replaced with water balloons, ready to burst at any moment and stop holding him up.

  It could be a Tremist trick. How else did you get in this room?

  “I know you’re not real,” Mason said.

  The illusion of his mother stood up and put the broken pieces on the table. “I’m so sorry, Mason.”

  “You’re not real.” Mason didn’t even care that a Fangborn lurked in the shadows near him; he was no longer afraid.

  “Yes, I am.” She held out her hands. “Come here.”

  Mason didn’t want to, but he also wanted proof. He’d touched the illusion of Merrin, hadn’t he? So how could he know for sure?

  Mason crossed the room slowly, watching as his mother cried more tears. He stopped halfway. “If you’re real, tell me how the scanner let me into the room. Then tell me how you’re alive.”

  His mother seemed taken aback for a moment. But then she smiled. “Of course you asked that. You’re just like your father.”

  Mason knew he looked like his father, that they had the same sandy hair and blue eyes. “Mom … if it’s you, please. Tell me.”

  April Stark took a deep breath and paused, looking around the room, as if searching for the words in the air. “I … I’ve been allowed to follow your progress. You’re famous here on Skars, too. When I heard you were visiting the school, I reprogrammed the scanner to let in anyone who is a direct descendent of mine. I … was hoping you would find your way down here. They won’t let me go to the higher levels. If a student saw me … I tried to come find you, but they caught me before I could leave.”

  “But how is this possible?” Mason said. “How are you here? You’re a prisoner?”

  She wiped at her eyes. “I guess the shortest answer is that the Fangborn threat has been known for a lot longer than you’re aware. When the Fangborn were first discovered you were just a baby. We didn’t know how dangerous they were at first. But when we realized, a small group of open-minded humans and Tremist decided to meet in secret, apart from both governments. Just those that understood what’s truly at stake.”

  “What’s truly at stake?”

&nb
sp; “Your father and I were asked to be a part of this team, and we said no, of course. But they knew our specialties and they knew we were the best candidates to join the Tremist team—even though we were still at war then. They asked us again, and we agreed to six months. They agreed to six months, too. But then … the Tremist in control of the project didn’t want us to leave. Our reappearance in the ESC would’ve brought too many questions. There was still so much work. We … we knew it was going to be important one day, that the future of both races were counting on us.”

  Mason let that sink in. She hadn’t meant to leave him for that long. She had good intentions. He should be able to forgive that. But then she willingly stayed.

  “Would they have let you leave?” Mason said. “If you tried hard?”

  She turned her face away, briefly, and Mason wondered if whatever came out next would be a lie. “Things weren’t easy in the beginning. The group didn’t mesh. Someone tried to leave, quite violently, and I was too scared.… I didn’t try, Mason. I thought I would’ve been able to finish and come home. But then more time went by, and I didn’t know how to come back to you, how to explain, and there was so much work left. I … I’m sorry, Mason. There is no excuse. But I believe the Fangborn threat is paramount to everything, even my own feelings. I did what I did to protect you and your sister. To protect all of us.”

  Mason said nothing and felt nothing besides cold.

  “I didn’t know they faked our deaths at first,” she said. “The First Attack was not staged, of course, they just … said we were there. When we were really on a shuttle to Nori-Blue. I was promised I could tell you I was leaving for six months aboard the ship—you and Susan were used to us taking long trips—but they lied. They said it was too big of a secret, too important.”

  “What’s truly at stake, Mom?” He instantly regretted calling her that, wished he could pull the word back into his mouth, swallow it down. But what am I supposed to call her?