by Gage Lee
I whipped my face to the side to save my eyesight from any splashing venom and raised my arm to intercept the twin beams. The jitte had moved too fast for me to avoid, but there was still one defense left to me. I twisted my body, lining the incoming jitte up with the right side of my torso.
The sage’s beams ripped through my robes and slammed into my arm. They would have shredded skin and bone, but they had no effect on the cords of fire and earth woven into my forearm. The flying jitte bounced off the patch of stony fire in my torso, as well. While the sacred energy assaults threw me backward and coated my arm in a slimy residue, neither attack pierced my skin.
I flicked my arm at Tycho, and the green goo splashed across the floor to mingle with the puddle of blood beneath his feet.
“My turn,” I snarled.
The sage was in bad shape, and he knew it. The ragged edges of splintered ribs peeked through the ugly gash in his side. Wet red organs showed through the gap in his skin. Most telling of all, Reyes was no longer floating.
“Wait,” he said, raising one hand. “Stop, before you do something you’ll regret.”
“My only regret is not leaving you dead,” I said. “I won’t make that mistake again. Your time is up, Reyes.”
A shimmering haze appeared around the sage, and the room filled with the scent of old leaves and winter rain. He raised one hand to show me a slim, scrivened copper tile. “You leave me no choice, then. I warned you that my people had Rachel. Let me go, or I’ll activate this talisman, and they will kill her.”
Despite his wounds, Tycho’s defenses were formidable. There was a chance, a slim one, that I could get to him before he activated the talisman. But if I failed, his people would kill a young woman with so much life ahead of her.
That’s how Tycho saw the situation. But I had an ace in the hole. Rafael had already saved his sister. Tycho’s treacherous gambit had failed.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “You don’t have Rachel, and I have all the time in the world to hammer your defenses down and tear you to pieces. It’s over, Reyes. You’ve lost.”
The sage licked his lips. For the first time, he looked like a coward and a weakling. He had no honor, no will to stand and face the fate he’d earned. Few others had the opportunity to forge their own destiny, and he’d squandered his chance on some pathetic supervillain scheme to rule the world.
“Your father is here,” he said. “The man you never knew. What do you think he would say to you, Jace?”
“My father’s dead,” I spat back, black spots of rage dancing in my vision. Doubt crept into my mind on dagger feet, puncturing my self-assurance. Because I didn’t know my father was dead. My mother, the lunatic who’d created the Machina, who’d built a device to bring back the Eclipse Warriors, who’d sacrificed her son to a madman’s dream of revenge and domination, had told me he was dead.
Why should I trust her?
“He’s dead,” I repeated. Not because I was sure that was the truth, but because I needed Tycho to prove he wasn’t lying.
“Let me go,” the sage said. “I’ll give you the keys to release your father from his service to me once I’m free.”
Tycho’s eyes flicked past me, but I didn’t look away from him. He was a treacherous old monster who could strike as swift as a snake despite his injury. I’d sooner turn my back on a ravenous bear than give Reyes the instant of inattention he needed to kill me.
“He’s right in there,” Reyes said. “What’s left of him, that is. The important part. The remnant of his core. He talks to me, Jace. Your father wants to know you. And I can tell you how to free him from the Eclipse Engine.”
“Liar!” I roared. That couldn’t be true. My father, the man who’d given up half his core to let me live, could not be trapped inside the machine my mother had built to make monsters. “I’ll kill you—”
“Stop!” Tycho thrust a hand toward me and his power gave me pause. “Listen to me. Your father is in that box. You don’t have to believe me. But if that isn’t enough to stop you, then maybe this will be. Rachel, Abi, Clem, and Eric are all within my grasp. Trained killers will fire on them the instant I die. Let me go, Jace, and your friends live.”
My sanity teetered on a high wire over the yawning abyss of madness Tycho’s words had stirred to life. I could kill him, right here, right now. But if he had told me the truth, my friends would follow him into their graves seconds later. As much as Tycho deserved to die, I couldn’t make my friends suffer for his sins.
“You’ve already lost,” I challenged Reyes. “You may as well give up. I’ve destroyed your experiments. If you leave, I’ll shatter the Eclipse Engine. You’re through.”
Reyes didn’t even blink at my words. “Oh, Jace,” he said, “do you really think I let your mother stop at building just one machine? You’ve slowed me down, but only a bit. There are other laboratories, other demicores waiting to shift the balance of the world in my favor.”
“Get out of my sight,” I snarled, jabbing my sword at him. The idea of letting Tycho go hurt like a flaming arrow through my heart. But I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to my friends. I’d slowed down Tycho’s plans, at least. That would give me the time I needed to finish my quest.
It had to be enough.
He flinched, but a smirk stole across his face even as he winced from the pain in his chest. He reached inside his robes with his free hand and produced a talisman. “I’ll be seeing you, Jace. And, remember. Your friends are seconds away from death, always. You’ve had your fun, but it’s time to relinquish childish fantasies. You cannot stop me. Not now, not ever. If you try, if you do anything else to damage my plan, your friends die.”
Tycho tipped his head to me and triggered his talisman.
In the next second, he was gone.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and cycled pure jinsei through my core. Time seemed to slow in the void of meditation, giving me precious space to organize my thoughts and lay out the steps that came next.
If I went after any one of my friends, Tycho’s men would see my attempt to save them. I might pull one person to safety, but the others would die before I reached them. Even using talismans, the Gate of the Design took a few seconds to transition from one point to another. That was too long.
If I wanted to save all my friends, I had to be in multiple places at once. Using the dragon lines and the Army of a Thousand Eyes would let me see all over the world simultaneously, but it wouldn’t get my friends to safety.
Rescuing my allies one at a time was impossible. And, as powerful as I was, I couldn’t be in four places at once. If I had more time to create talismans, Dusalia and the rest of my clan could help me pull this off.
But that would mean time to gather more supplies, time to scriven them, time to convince Dusalia to help again. And during each passing second, Tycho got closer to his goals and the dragons came nearer to finding and stopping me.
There had to be some way out of this mess.
But I couldn’t see it.
The Trick
THE ECLIPSE ENGINE emitted a grinding groan that dragged me out of meditation’s calm, soothing embrace. The tortured sound was like nails down a chalkboard, and I shivered as it clawed at my ears.
Reyes claimed my father was trapped inside that thing, and the vision I’d suffered through seemed to back up his assertion. I tried to imagine what that would do to a man and shuddered at what my mind conjured. If the orichalcum did hold the man that had once been my father, I doubted there’d be anything sane left of him.
The groan peaked, and panels unfolded from the Engine’s top. The scrivenings were corroded and damaged, not at all like the pristine, glowing miracles from the memory I’d unearthed. But they were still dreadfully familiar.
I did not want to see what was inside the Engine.
But I had to.
My feet moved, one slow step after another. There was no time for this, I knew that. And yet, I couldn’t deny the urge to see th
e truth for myself. Before I knew it, the box was just in front of me.
I peered over its edge, and my mind recoiled at the horror within.
A skeletal frame lay curled inside the box, the black blade from my vision embedded in what little remained of their flesh. Veins squirmed beneath the hairless scalp, and the eyes twitched and rolled behind paper-thin eyelids. By all rights, the tortured form in the box should have been dead.
But they were very much alive, despite having no core at all.
Someone had attached scrivened spikes of silver to their channels, and the box fed jinsei into them. They could live like this for an eternity, locked in endless torture, unable to free themselves.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “It’s time for you to rest.”
My serpents reached out to shatter the spells woven into the spikes. Without them, the creature in the box would finally die. It was the least I could do.
“Jace.” The tortured figure had turned its head to face me. Its eyes were closed, but its mouth had moved to release the creaking, pained voice. “Wait.”
The wretched thing struggled to gather its energy. Tycho claimed this thing spoke to him, but how much sense could it really make?
“This is one beginning,” he croaked. “I knew you would come back to it. This isn’t... I was wrong, son.”
That word hit me like a cyclone and blasted my thoughts into disarray. I couldn’t deal with all this right now. I had things to do, people to save. This confusion was deadly.
“Stop,” I begged. “Please, just don’t. I have to go.”
“Your mother and I were wrong,” he continued. “There’s no time to explain everything that happened, Jace. But everything has a purpose, and this was ours. I’ve watched the Grand Design for Tycho for so long. I knew you’d return. That kept me going all this time.”
My father’s skeletal hand reached up from the bottom of his living tomb, fingers trembling. I was afraid touching him would shatter those frail bones. With tears in my eyes, I gently, slowly, took his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice more tortured by those two words than his physical pain. “I know you’ve been through more than any of us could imagine. I can’t erase the pain we caused you. But I’ve waited this long to help you. Listen to me, Jace. Sorcery works both ways.”
His arm went limp, then, his body seeming to deflate. His eyes sunk into their sockets, scaly patches drifted away from his desiccated skin, and the flow of jinsei through his channels became turbulent and tortured.
“I’m sorry, son,” he whispered. “I love you. I wish there was more time...”
The black blade suddenly shattered, the pieces raining down on my father’s body, mingling with the dust and shards of bone that were all that remained of him. The fingers that I’d held onto trailed away to black dust, leaving me with nothing.
Alone, again.
My hands clenched into bone-white fists, storms of jinsei sparking around them. After all this time, after thinking my father was dead for so many years, the handful of seconds I’d spent with him were nowhere near enough. My heart ached, and my core burned with frustration.
“Why?” I pleaded with the empty air.
My sorrow coalesced around the Eclipse Engine. It was the symbol of everything that had gone wrong in my life. If it had never existed...
Sacred energy flowed from my hands and wrapped around the cube of orichalcum like a fist. My Thief’s Shield activated and stripped elemental aspects from the laboratory. Machines crumbled to dust, steel rusted away to nothing. I gathered all the aspects into my aura and poured jinsei into them. As they manifested, I pushed the aspects of steel and electricity into the jinsei surrounding the Engine.
In my mind’s eye, I saw the cube crushed and mangled, the gold and copper aspects stripped away from each other by my shield. It was only fitting that I’d undo my mother’s work, my father’s sacrifice, and leave behind a misshapen ball of woven copper, steel, and gold threads.
A final thought embossed a single phrase into the lump of metal. “Never again.”
As I released my hold on my creation, I felt the surge of pain. Orichalcum was tied, forever, to the person who created it. And, while my mother may have engineered the device, I realized she hadn’t manifested its raw materials.
Tycho Reyes had.
A dark smile crept across my face. I hoped he felt that pain for the rest of his life. However long, or short, that would be.
My father’s words drifted back into my thoughts. Sorcery works both ways. Had he meant that I could hurt Tycho through that orichalcum? No, it had to be something else.
With a start, I realized what he’d meant. My father had held onto his wretched existence to give me the gift of a seer. He’d known exactly what I’d needed to hear at that precise moment in time. Tears filled my eyes as the enormity of his sacrifice settled on me. He’d suffered for years to help me save my friends.
I unfastened the bag from my belt and dug out the scrivened talismans I’d need. Christina, Abi, Clem, Eric, and Rachel. Before I could change my mind, I attached each of those to one of my serpents, along with a sixth talisman.
Finally, I understood how Kalani’s lesson would help me.
I dropped into deepest meditation again, letting my mind slip into that timeless, eternal nothingness overlooking the Grand Design. Then, I activated the talismans and let my mind encompass the unfolding scrivenings.
Master Kalani had showed us how to transfer techniques to our fist, but the more important lesson for me was how to perceive the unfolding beauty and power of a technique. The Gate of the Design was laid bare to me.
Six gates unfurled in my mind, one for each of my friends and one for a destination I prayed would be safe enough for what I had in mind. Because if I was wrong, Dusalia and the rest of my clanmates were already doomed.
I wove new sorceries to the opening gates, binding all five of the portals aimed at my friends to the sixth. Finally, I attached my core to the sixth gate with carefully woven strands, just as the techniques reached their full potential.
Reality bent around me, and I struggled to hold the spell together. Creating a single gate was no problem at my level, but I’d never even attempted to create two, much less six. My thoughts shook in my head like dice in a cup, and I hoped they wouldn’t come up snake eyes.
And then the world put itself back together, and my friends and I landed in a tangled heap on the floor of a place I’d never expected to see again.
Surprised shouts rang out all around us, and the sizzling crack of igniting fusion blades filled the room.
“Wait,” I croaked from the bottom of the pile of sacred artists. My whole body shook from the effort of maintaining those gates, but if I didn’t say something my clanmates were liable to hack us all to pieces.
“Jace?” Dusalia asked in amazement.
Helping hands dragged my friends to their feet, giving me room to sit up. Concerned faces swam into view, only to part a moment later as Abi wheeled through the circle around me.
“You couldn't have just called?” he asked with a chuckle.
“I wish,” I said and took his offered hand to pull myself back onto my feet. I was weak as a kitten, but every breath I cycled restored more of my strength. “I’m sorry to have dragged you all here without warning—”
“Jace,” Rachel interrupted me. “You have to send me back. Tycho will murder you for taking me out of his project.”
“He, uh, already wants to murder me pretty bad, and he’d have done the same to you. I tried to send Rafael to get you, but I’m guessing he didn’t.” I sighed. “Look, I want to explain everything, but there’s no time. When this is all over, I promise, you’ll get a full explanation.”
Lying to my friends didn’t feel good, but telling them the truth—that none of them stood a chance in the fight to come—would only make them feel worse.
“Is this the Champion’s cottage?” Clem asked me. “Why are there bullet holes in
the walls?”
“An assassin tried to kill me here,” I said. “And, yes, this is where the Champions used to live. The School cut it loose after I was nearly killed, saying it was a security risk. It’s sort of... drifting... through the mortal world. I figured it would be the easiest place to pull my big trick.”
“How did you find it again?” Eric asked.
“That’s the last question I’ll answer,” I said, chuckling. “I found it because I almost died here. That gives me a stronger connection to it than almost anything else. Christina, I need a favor.”
My former student and current clanmate looked at me, her eyes sharp, her gaunt cheeks sunk into a frown. “Tell me what you need, and I’ll do it.”
The conviction in her voice was as comforting as a warm fire on a winter’s day. I basked in its glow, just for a moment, happy that someone had faith in me. “I have to bond our cores. Just for a few minutes. I need some special aspects.”
“What are you talking about?” Clem asked. She didn’t sound angry or annoyed, just worried. Somehow that was worse.
“I...” Christina shrugged. “I can separate time aspects from jinsei.”
Eric and Abi’s jaws fell open, and Rachel’s eyebrows shot up to the middle of her forehead.
“That’s impossible," she said. “Time aspects don’t exist. It’s just a theory—”
“It is not,” I said. “Ready, Christina?”
She nodded and crossed her arms over her chest. “Do it.”
It took only a second to extend the Borrowed Core technique to include my friend. She shivered and closed her eyes as we bonded, meditating to keep her mind clear and calm.
Then I cycled, using Christina’s unique ability to fill my aura with time aspects. They flooded in with every breath, clouding the air around me with an ephemeral blue glow. I still wasn’t entirely positive my plan would work, but it seemed like the surest bet to get my friends out of the reach of Tycho and the dragons.
As if summoned by my thought, the weight of a seer’s attention fell on one of the rats still connected to my core. It felt like a tickle at the back of my throat, a passing sensation that would be gone before I could do anything about it.