pain as the fiery weapon burned into the tendrils of jinsei connected to my core. My instinct was to pull the serpents away from the pain, but I rejected that and maintained my steely grip on the Sun’s blade.

The Resplendent Sun reacted with shocking speed despite his surprise. He yanked back hard on his fusion blade to tear it free of my serpents’ grip. It was a smart move on his part, because he’d rightly guessed most of the pressure for my serpents would be pushing up against the weapon to keep it from slicing my head off.

What he hadn’t anticipated was that I didn’t need to pry the blade out of his grip to make it useless.

My serpents stripped the fire aspects from the weapon and reduced it to a pale shadow of itself in the space between heartbeats. They took its jinsei next, and the blade vanished entirely.

With the threat of immediate extermination out of the way, I rolled hard to the left and bounced up to my feet. The guards were trained Empyreals, but they were only initiates. To them, this fight had been nothing more than a blur of motion. Their weak cores weren’t strong enough to keep up with what was happening.

I used that to my advantage and lashed out at the two men who’d tried to manacle me. My serpents whipped through their auras and instantly drained most of their aspects and jinsei. I stepped past the stunned Resplendent Sun and drained the two guards behind him on the stairs in the same motion.

With their auras empty, the guards slumped to the floor. I’d held the dark urge at bay just enough to spare their lives. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could fight it. My willpower was running low.

“Stop or they’ll shoot!” the Resplendent Sun shouted from behind me.

Naturally, I didn’t stop. I pushed jinsei out of my core and into my channels to climb the stairs at top speed. I wove a serpentine pattern to the second floor, and the guards’ shots missed me and chipped stone from the steps.

The humming had grown to an almost deafening droning by the time I’d climbed the stairs. Dust devils tore through the building’s hallways, and spirals of tortured air pulled at my robes and hair. Whatever the Lost were up to was extraordinarily powerful.

I ignored the elevators because I knew the guards would kill them as soon as they recovered. Instead, I charged through the nearest exit door and into the stairwell. I raced up the narrow concrete steps, around and around the square silo at the heart of the courthouse. I passed each floor in the space of a heartbeat and made it to the sixth level before a door above me burst open.

Guards spilled into the stairwell with their weapons raised. They wore plated body armor and carried much bigger, much scarier sidearms than the lobby crew. They completely blocked my path with a barrier of bodies and guns. Their eyes were hard and cold under the brims of their riot helmets.

The guys downstairs had been grunts. These were the elites, ready and willing to kill me.

There was no way to pass them on the stairs without catching enough lead to sink a ship, even with my enhanced speed. Instead, I leaped into the open space at the heart of the stairwell. Guns roared behind me, sending a storm of bullets after me.

My jinsei-enhanced leap carried me to the next landing, and I kicked off the railing there to propel myself up and onto the floor above.

Bullets slammed into the concrete steps instead of me. The guards shouted in surprise and alarm when they realize I’d escaped without so much as a scrape.

I didn’t stop to gloat. These guys were pros, and I doubted my trick would work a second time. If I wanted to live, I needed to stay ahead of them.

I made it to the tenth floor without another attack, the guards chasing after me. They might close the gap by the time I reached my target, but by then they’d have other things to worry about.

The droning had become an endless groan that raked icy fingers across my nerves. There was something terribly wrong about that sound. Madness echoed in its eerie harmonies. Death lurked in the melodies that wound higher and higher.

My stomach churned as the noise built. More frighteningly, my Eclipse nature seemed to like the cacophony.

I wondered if that meant the Lost were close.

I crashed through a door and burst onto the eleventh floor. The power was there, nearby. It pulled at my core like a lodestone to iron filings. I followed it, activating the Borrowed Core technique as I ran. I lashed connections to any living creature I could find. Rats, cockroaches, tiny snakes coiled around warm pipes.

Other cores flickered at the edges of my awareness, and my Borrowed Core flinched away from them before they could make a connection. I recognized those hideous targets and my mouth went dry.

The Locust Court was here.

The Lost hadn’t just attacked the leaders of Imperial society. They’d betrayed them in the most devastating way possible. They’d allied themselves with humanity’s deadliest enemies and unleashed the Hungry Spirits on the world.

I crashed through a pair of double doors and into the courtroom where Bishop was on trial. The chamber was in utter disarray. Hot, red blood stained the walls in streaks that glistened in the reflected light from burning orange circles in the ceiling. Darkness oozed through those portals and filled the room with shadows that made it difficult to understand what was happening.

The dead, dying, and wounded were scattered around the courtroom like broken dolls. Most of those who’d come as officials or witnesses to the trial were down and motionless. I spotted guard uniforms among the fallen and caught a glimpse of Grayson Bishop’s ashen face in the witness stand. He was slumped in a chair behind a wooden rail, and I couldn’t tell if he

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