“Nice!” I congratulated Clem. “I think you’ve almost got it.”
“Maybe,” she said, her brow furrowed. “It takes so much of my jinsei to harness the wind aspects that I could only do it once, maybe twice in a fight.”
“If you do it at the right time, you’d only have to do it once,” I said. “Catch your foe in the middle of a roundhouse kick or a leaping kick, and you’ll knock them flat. Then it’s ground and pound time.”
She grinned. “Unless I’m too slow and they knock me down first.”
“That’s what practice is for,” I responded. “Do it again.”
We spent the entire class working through Clem’s new technique. By the time Professor Song dismissed us, Clem was sweaty and almost wiped out.
“Nice workout, Professor Warin.” Without warning, she threw a hug around my neck. “I’m going to grab a shower before breakfast. Thank you so much for helping me with that technique.”
“You’re welcome,” I said through the shock. For a moment, I’d thought Clem had something else in mind when she’d moved in to hug me.
“Clem and Jace, sitting in a tree,” Eric said in a singsong voice, “K-I-S—”
“Better watch out,” Abi said with a belly laugh that warmed my heart even though it was at my expense. “You keep that up, Jace will knock you out.”
“He’ll try,” Eric said, his grin spreading so wide across his face I thought the top of his head might flop off.
“You’re just jealous,” I said. “Because no one likes you.”
We roughhoused out of the dojo, and for the first time since I’d returned to school I felt really good about myself and my core. I’d held the Eclipse Warrior in check through the whole class, even when it had urged me to eat Clem’s wind aspects and send them back to her with a roundhouse punch that would have knocked her flat.
The rest of the day went just as well. At the end of our last class for the day, Abi took off for Portal Defense Force duty while Clem, Eric, and I all agreed to grab dinner after we dumped our books in our rooms.
It was a great dinner. We laughed and teased each other, ate too much, and then headed back to my cottage to drink coffee and watch the sun set.
By some amazing stroke of luck, I managed to string almost a whole month of those magical days and nights together without my Eclipse nature trying to kill anyone. The urge was still there when I meditated, but I was learning to mitigate surprises and anxiety during the school day.
The extra time I started spending with Rachel also went a long way toward pushing back the tension that could trigger the urge. She was amazing and had so much to teach me about what life was like for Empyreals who weren’t rich or connected. It was an eye-opening experience, and I loved every second of it. I wanted to introduce her to my friends, but Rachel always had some excuse about why she couldn’t eat with us or hang out after school. She was very, very busy.
I started to believe that the year would be perfect.
And then it all began to unravel.
The Spy
HAGAR AMBUSHED ME IN the hall outside my room on the first Friday in October.
“Get the door open,” she said, her voice tight and urgent. “I don’t want us to be seen together.”
“Thanks,” I said sarcastically and opened the door for her. “And here I thought I was the popular one. You worried about your reputation?”
Hagar rolled her eyes and slipped through the door. When I joined her on the forest path, she threw a half-hearted punch into my left shoulder.
“It’s not about my reputation, it’s about our clan’s enemies,” she said.
“That sounds melodramatic,” I said. “Come with me, I need to drop my stuff off.”
“It’s best we leave from inside the cottage, anyway,” Hagar agreed. “I don’t want to leave the port stone outside where someone could stumble across it.”
“No one’s going to stumble across anything in here,” I said. “These are my private quarters. The door’s locked.”
“Because the Locust Court or heretics care about locks,” Hagar said, rolling her eyes.
I didn’t have an answer for that, so I just shrugged and led her down the path, across the bridge, and into the cottage. I dropped my books on the coffee table, rolled my head on my neck, and crossed my arms over my chest.
“What’s going on?”
Hagar held up her index finger, fished out a thin crystal rod from her belt, and raised it over her head. A thin trickle of jinsei leaked from her core, ran up her spine, then went through her arm and into the crystal. The rod lit up with the pale green radiance, shifting slightly to blue, before it faded to white.
“Good, we can talk without anyone hearing us,” Hagar said. “Today is your first mission.”
Well, if I’d wanted any further confirmation from the elders that they’d accepted me, I guess this was it. There’d been a month of silence and Hagar hiding from me, and I’d been sure the elders had decided they didn’t need me.
Guess I was wrong.
“This is happening really fast,” I said. “I was supposed to meet Clem and those guys for dinner—”
“Sorry to disrupt your plans, but this can’t wait. You’ll be back before morning, but I’m afraid dinner is off the books,” Hagar said. “Control can have something sent over when you get back.”
“Back from where?” I asked.
With a flick of her wrist, Hagar made the crystal rod disappear, and a thin piece of pale white stone appeared in her palm. She crouched down and placed the disk on top of my books, twisting it this way and that until she was satisfied with its position. Then she stood up, snapped her fingers, and pointed at the stone.
A beam of light speared from the stone into
