Either Hagar had special permission to come and go from the School whenever she pleased, or her teachers and friends knew better than to question her absences. It was frustrating, and I vowed to get the truth out of her.
If I ever found her again.
And then, a month after I’d last seen her, the warden showed up at my doorstep.
“Stop asking so many questions about me,” she said sharply. “It takes a lot of work to hide a missing student, and you’re not making it any easier.”
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“Not important, and also not for you to know,” she sighed. “The only thing you need to know right now is that we’ve got a new assignment.”
“Hold on,” I said. “We go on a mission, then you go missing for a month? I thought you were hurt. Maybe dead. You can’t just drop off the face of the world.”
“I don’t want to have this conversation in the hall,” Hagar said, glancing up and down the empty corridor. “Inside.”
She didn’t say another word until we’d reached the cottage. Then she took a seat on the edge of a chair in my sitting room and crossed her hands on one knee.
“First off, I didn’t go on a mission, you did,” she said. “I stayed right here, in this chair, and watched. It was very intriguing. The analysts who looked over the footage noted that you did something very unusual to the spirit—”
“You said something about a new mission?” I interrupted. The last thing I wanted was to go into what I’d done with my Eclipse core.
“Yes, in about fifteen minutes,” she said. “This one is going to be a little more intense, okay? We have a line on some vital material we need to recover. If we can get our hands on this, we’ll leapfrog past the heretics. It will accelerate the elders’ timetable by months, Jace. Unfortunately, it’s in a secured facility behind a wall of core sensors.”
“And you want me to sneak in and steal the stuff?”
“Not exactly.” Hagar leaned forward. “You’ll clear a path for the recovery team. Neutralize the guards, disable the core sensors, and get out.”
“What kind of guards?” I asked.
“You worry too much. They’re not heretics, just hired goons.” Hagar’s eyes burned into mine. “I’ve seen you fight, Jace. You’re the champ. This will be a piece of cake.”
Maybe she was right. Three months of fighting day in and day out had left me wired for combat even now, almost three months after the Challenge had ended. I’d beaten the best contenders each city could offer. None of them had been able to take me down, and few of them had even landed a single blow. I doubted any rented security team would fare any better.
“What else do I have to worry about?”
“Cameras in the halls,” Hagar said. “But we have a jintech helmet to hide your face from them. We’ve got a source on the inside who has patched us in to the security net. I’ll be able to control the cameras and watch the guard patrols, though. Shouldn’t be a problem. We can talk about all this on the way. Let’s get you on the transport ahead of schedule.”
“Transport?” I asked. “What are you—”
An angry hum rumbled through the air over the cabin. It grew louder by the second until the walls began to shake, and the lake’s surface jittered and jumped outside the window. It felt like my teeth were about to shake out of my head.
Hagar grinned at me and rushed outside. I followed her and was immediately pummeled by the downdraft from some sort of bizarre helicopter. The vehicle descended to the shore on the far side of the lake. A set of stairs flopped out of a hatch on its side and landed at the end of the bridge.
The vehicle was thirty feet from nose to tail. Its body was long and slender, pointed at the nose, and flared out into a wide tail that supported a pair of vertically mounted rotors. Four mobile struts that extended from the top of the craft held the horizontal rotors, which still spun with furious force. Clearly, they were in a hurry to get moving.
The strangest thing about the vehicle, though, was its color. The entire craft was coated in a dark material that was difficult to look at for more than a few seconds. It was as if my vision slid off it without absorbing any details.
Weird.
“There’s your ride,” Hagar shouted. She rushed across the bridge ahead of me, and I hurried to catch up.
By the time I’d boarded the vehicle, Hagar had already thrown herself into a seat and grabbed hold of the armrests. There was a thump from behind me as the stairs retracted and the hatch closed.
“Grab a chair,” Hagar warned.
And not a moment too soon. The instant I dropped into a flight seat, the angry buzzing became a roar and the transport lifted into the air. It took off with a sudden burst of speed that made my stomach lurch sickeningly. There was a bone-rattling bout of turbulence, and the deafening roar of the engines vanished.
“Where’s the rest of the team?” I asked with a glance at the empty seats.
“They’re coming in on a different transport,” Hagar responded. “Stop worrying about
