“Then give me more time with them.” The four hours a week I had with the hollows just wasn’t enough. “Let me dedicate all my non-training hours to helping them find their path.”
“No,” Cruzal said flatly. “I’ve had enough trouble convincing the rest of the Empyreals involved in the program to accept you as their tutor. They’d never allow someone with your background to teach students full time.”
“You’d sell those kids to the Inquisition because I’m a camper?” I’d believe a lot of things about Cruzal, but this was tough to swallow.
“No one is being sold.” Cruzal rolled her eyes and rapped on the classroom door. “The investors don’t care that you were a camper. They care that you’re a disruptive influence. If you spend too much time with the new initiates, you’ll corrupt their worldview. Now, get in there and teach them how to fix their cores. I simply can’t afford to lose these investments to the Church.”
Cruzal’s uncharacteristic honesty left my jaw on the floor. It was still hanging open when the door swung open and the guard gestured for me to come inside. He knew the drill and immediately stepped into the hallway to leave me alone with my students.
“Mr. Warin!” they shouted almost in unison.
“Good morning.” I hobbled over and took a seat on the desk. My leg throbbed with every step I took, and the pain was distracting. Getting weight off the injured limb was a blessed relief. “What have you learned while I was gone?”
The students shifted nervously in their seats. No one raised their hands.
“Come on.” I knew Hahen had been with them every day. “You had to have learned something.”
Christina raised her hand, a defiant gleam in her eye.
“Yes, Christina? What did you learn?” I asked.
“I can distill two types of corruption from polluted jinsei at the same time.” She said that proudly, like it was a true accomplishment.
That was a nice trick, but it wouldn’t save them from the Inquisition. I’d told Hahen to guide them toward their individual paths. He’d reported back that he was pushing them in that direction. Unfortunately, it didn’t appear that his teaching had stuck.
“And what about your paths?” I looked at each student in the front row, and they all looked away. “Surely you’ve made some progress there.”
None of the students would look at me. They fidgeted in their seats or toyed with the empty vessels on their desks. A couple of them even put their heads down, like they were so embarrassed they just wanted to go to sleep until I left them alone.
Too bad for them I had no interest in leaving anyone alone. These hollows had to heal themselves. I wouldn’t let them become slaves to the Church.
“All right, then.” I crossed my arms over my chest and put on my stern teacher face. “I guess we have a lot of work to do.”
Christina scowled at me, and Ricky looked at the ceiling as if expecting rescue from that direction. The other students either stared past me at the blackboard in the hopes they’d misheard me or stared at the scarred surfaces of their desks with their shoulders hunched up around their ears.
“What’s going on here?” My irritation at the students’ lack of ambition had turned to concern. “I’m trying to help you reach your full potential. If you find your path, that’s one step closer to healing your core.”
“We don’t want to get hurt,” Christina said in a low, sullen voice.
“Like what happened to you in the challenge,” Ricky added.
“And where did you hear about the challenge?” As far as I knew, only the challenge results had been announced. No one knew the details, and none of these kids had been around to see me get taken out of the arena on a stretcher. If someone was out there spreading rumors about me, I wanted that nipped right in the bud.
“The other initiates said you hurt your core,” Furendo, a little guy with dirty fingernails and a cowlick with a mind of its own, answered in a voice so low I almost missed it. “They said anyone who follows your path will die.”
I had no idea who would tell impressionable young initiates that load of bull, but I was determined to find out. My whole plan was to teach these kids how to find their way through the meat-grinder maze of Empyreal society. They’d come here to claim their power so they could defend themselves against the monsters who wanted to use and abuse them. And now someone had filled their heads with nonsense.
“Do I look dead?” I asked Furendo.
“You don’t look great,” Christina said.
“Thanks.” I chuckled. “I got set on fire during the challenge. But that has nothing to do with the path I follow. In fact, if it hadn’t been for my path, I would definitely be dead, and most of my friends wouldn’t have survived, either. My special core saved us all.”
That drew a few nervous smiles from the students. They’d always thought their cores made them weak. When they heard how their wounds were special, even powerful, that gave them the courage to push through the challenges ahead of them. I had to keep feeding that fire.
“And all of you have a special path to find, too.” I picked up a piece of chalk from my desk and tossed it to the back of the room, where it bounced off Christina’s desk. “Even you.”
“The other teams didn’t have anyone like you.” Ricky spread his hands out on his desk in front of him, then curled them into fists as if to gather his courage for the question he wanted to ask. “How did they get through the challenge without an Eclipse core?”
I’d thought about that question a lot while staring at the ceiling in the infirmary. It would have been nice to talk to Trulissinangoth about what her team had faced, but that hadn’t been possible with the nurses watching over me
