“I just did.” I reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “Hagar, we don’t know who’s who in this mess. If you’d told the elders, they’d have fed this to their agents. What if there was a leak?”
Hagar wanted to argue with me, I knew that. But her eyes softened, and she let out a disgusted sigh.
“I don’t want to admit it, but you’re right. I’ve been doing the spy thing long enough to know you can’t trust anyone for long.” She nodded slowly and stiffened her spine. “All right. It’s the five of us against the world, then. What are we waiting for?”
“You heard the lady,” Eric said. “Let’s kick some dragon tail.”
We all looked at Abi, and he shuffled his feet uncomfortably. He clenched his fists, then relaxed his hands until his fingers dangled loose at his sides. His dark eyes burned with an inner light, and he focused them on me.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m with you.”
I led my team through the archway and into the red mist. My senses went haywire when my foot crossed the threshold, and I threw my hands out in front of me to brace myself for a fall. The time between one step and the next stretched out into a chaotic swirl of sound and color that dragged my stomach up into my throat. If I hadn’t skipped dinner, that meal would have ended up all over the floor.
Abi brought up the tail end of our team, and I’d already given the small room we’d arrived in a once-over by the time his boots touched the stone floor. Our prison was a silo, twenty feet across and many times that high. A blazing golden fire rained light down on the smooth and featureless walls. There were no exits that I could see, and no way to climb those walls.
“Now what?” Eric paced a circle around the silo. “Looks like a dead end.”
“There has to be some way out of this room.” Abi pushed his fingers against the wall.
“The challenges are tied to swords, auras, and serpents,” Hagar said. “We’ve done swords and auras, so this has to be solved with our serpents.”
“You’re right.” Clem shook out her arms and drew in a deep breath. “And since there’s only one thing in this silo, we should touch it with our serpents.”
Clem’s serpents burst from her aura and soared into the flames overhead.
Nothing happened.
“You’re not dead, so that’s good,” Hagar said. “Maybe we all need to touch it.”
“Then let’s do it.” I started slow, cycling breaths to fill my aura with aspects. There wasn’t much to draw on in the cold, sterile environment. I considered activating the Beggar’s Core vessel to speed things along, then rejected that idea. If there weren’t any rats or other creatures in the area, the technique would be wasted. Better to take my time and absorb the light and stone aspects slowly.
A jagged ripple of pain radiated from the center of my core. That was all right. This was the final challenge. I could survive the pain long enough to finish. Then the Flame would heal my core and this whole ordeal would be over.
By the time I’d gathered enough aspects to fuel my serpents, beads of sweat dripped from my forehead, and my friends looked at me with real concern in their eyes.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “Let’s get through this, okay?”
I sent my serpents to join the rest of the team’s in the flames. The fire sent a pulse of warmth back to me, and the pain in my center eased. Faint smiles touched the lips of the rest of my team, as if they’d been touched by something pleasant, too.
The fire broke apart into five sets of seven small circles that drifted down to us. One set hovered in front of each of us. The smaller circles were marked with distinct icons: a black feather, a shimmering sphere surrounded by a red circle, a trident, an enormous double-headed ax, a wolf’s head, a coiled serpent, and a fiery scale.
“Well, that’s pretty obvious,” Clem said. “Heron Blade Academy, Dojo of Opal Radiance, Battle Hall of Atlantis, the Jinsei Institute of the Jade Kingdom, the Bright Lodge of Frostmir, the School of Swords and Serpents, and the Indomitable Dragons of Light. What are we supposed to do with them?”
I thought back to what the voice had said in the courtyard. Choose your allies. Choose your enemy. Unlock the heart.
“We have to pick a team to serve as our allies,” I said. “Though we already know it doesn’t matter. They’re all against us.”
“That does make things more difficult,” Clem grumbled. “What’s that red circle around the Dojo’s symbol?”
“They were the odd team out,” Hagar said. “If the teams have to pair up, then we can only have six teams in this challenge, total.”
“Then they could have just excluded us from the challenge and we’d never have had a chance,” I said. “I wonder what went wrong with their plan.”
“The Dojo finished last in the second challenge.” Eric shrugged. “That must have been enough to eliminate them from the running. If our team had gotten bounced, everyone would know this was rigged, and the dragons can’t afford that. They need this competition to look legit to the rest of the world. Who do we pick for our ally?”
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d missed something. The only other team leader that had been remotely friendly was Tochi. If he’d held the Jinsei Institute of the Jade Kingdom out of the challenge, that would have made some sort of sense. It would have let him defy the others, retain his honor, and give me a shot at winning this thing.
But the Dojo of Opal Radiance? They weren’t friends of mine.
A chilling memory flashed through my thoughts. The heretics had threatened the Empyrean Gauntlet. Maybe something had happened to the Dojo.
“Jace?” Clem put her hand on my shoulder. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, shaking
