“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
