“No,” I said. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Liar,” Clem growled.
As concerned as my friends were, they were also smart enough to know I wouldn’t budge on my decision. They helped me limp through the School’s shifting halls, and we made it back to the dorm without running into any other students or teachers. I offered silent thanks for that small miracle, then shrugged out of my backpack and took a seat on my bed. My robes reeked of smoke, and I knew my room would stink like a campfire for days.
“Give me a hand, Eric.” I held up my arm on the wounded side, and he helped me shrug out of the sleeve.
We peeled back the robes to expose the wound I’d picked up on our field trip. The small hole beneath my ribs oozed blood onto the robes gathered around my waist. I gritted my teeth and probed the hole’s edges with my fingertips. Not that I had any idea what I was doing. I shifted my focus to the jinsei sight and was relieved to find the missile hadn’t blasted through any of my channels, and none of my organs was leaking sacred energy. The longer I concentrated, the more I felt the foreign body lodged inside me.
“Not as bad as I thought,” I said with a sigh of relief. “It’s not deep.”
The bullet had punched through my skin, but layers of jinsei-laced muscle had stopped the projectile before it hit anything vital. I pinched around the hole with my thumb and forefinger and found the misshapen chunk of lead inside me.
“Jace,” Clem cautioned me. “Don’t make it worse.”
I took a deep breath and squeezed the bullet wound like a blackhead.
“That was disgusting,” Eric said, turning his head away as the projectile popped free of my body.
“Ew. That looked nasty,” Clem said with a gulp. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’ll need a bandage and a good night’s rest,” I said. “But I’m fine.”
Those words sucked the tension out of the room. Clem hopped up on my desk and crossed her legs. Abi dropped into the corner near the closet and held his head in his hands. Eric pulled my chair out and flopped down in it.
“We did it.” Eric raked bloodstained fingers through his golden hair. “We have all four pieces of the Heart of Eternity and the rubbing from the coffin. That should be all we need to figure out the final parts of this quest, right?”
Clem fished the carefully folded rubbing out of a pocket inside her robes.
“This isn’t much to go on,” she said. “There’s also the name Wallovik kept saying. Meriwa, right?”
I grabbed a notepad off my desk and made a note of the name, spelling it phonetically. I could probably get Librarian Tanoki to help me find more information on it. At this point, speed seemed more important than secrecy.
A much more immediate worry burrowed up to the front of my mind, though. I asked Abi the question that had been bothering me since the heretics attacked.
“How did they find us?” I asked my friend. “I’m assuming the people you picked to run the portal are trustworthy, so the leak didn’t come from our end.”
Abi scratched the side of his chin and looked off into the distance. He opened his mouth to speak, shook his head, and furrowed his brow.
“If they have someone inside the PDF, maybe they’d be able to track your movements,” Abi suggested. “They couldn’t do it from just any terminal, though. They’d need access to the central network. Even then, they would have to be tipped off when you planned to use the network and which terminal you’d depart from to figure out where you went.”
Abi’s words didn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling. They also weren’t the doom and gloom I’d feared. I dropped my laptop on the bed next to me and leaned back against the wall.
“The where isn’t hard to figure out,” I said. “The heretics know I’m at school. That narrows down the number of terminals to those on campus. The when, though, worries me a lot. The only way they could pinpoint the time when we left is if we had a traitor in our group.”
My friends recoiled from me like I’d just transformed into a spitting cobra. Clem raised her hands, and Eric and Abi both shook their heads.
“No!” they all exclaimed.
“I know,” I said. “It isn’t one of you. Are you sure we can trust those interns, Abi?”
“As much as anyone,” my friend said. “I don’t see any way a spy could operate inside the PDF right now, anyway. Security at the central network is so tight only a handful of engineers are allowed anywhere near those computers. Other than guards and executives, that facility is on complete lockdown.”
After the problems the heretics had caused so far this year, that made sense. The PDF wouldn’t want any unauthorized access to their systems. Everyone was so paranoid, even the sneakiest heretic couldn’t have slipped in there without being detected. The leak came from somewhere else.
If there’d been one at all.
“If they knew where I’d end up, could they use those coordinates to open a portal?” I asked Abi.
“It would take some time, but yes,” Abi said. “But how would they know where you were?”
Clem snapped her fingers and pointed at me.
“Scrying,” she said. “You think the heretics used a seer?”
“They couldn’t use the Design to see the future, but a seer could still scry my location, I think.” I winced at a sudden jolt of pain from the wound in my side. “Did anyone bring a bandage?”
Eric leaned over and unzipped the main compartment of his backpack. He rummaged around for a moment, then came up
