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  Had Dragon put him up to it?

  I gritted my teeth. I already knew I was different from my friends. Did the tutors have to remind me, yet again, that half of HQ considered me a freak?

  Stiffly, I grabbed a torpefier from the rack. I cranked its handle to pull back the crossbow string, dropped Zephyr’s nightbead into the slot, and double-checked that it was ready to fire. Back in the corridor, I aimed the torpefier at the metal plate, curled my finger, and pulled the trigger.

  Bang!

  The nightbead smashed into the metal plate. Light exploded, erupting in a violent torrent from the wall. I ducked, with instincts well-honed by protean paint, but there was no need; the light didn’t burn or sting. It felt eerily cold, like a spillage of seawater.

  The screws began to turn.

  I watched, my mouth half-open, as they turned in gentle circles. They unscrewed themselves slowly, twisting free from the metal plate in a bath of shining light. As the screws clattered to the floor, the metal plate slipped. I quickly caught it, bracing for its weight, and leant it against the opposite wall.

  And there it was: an Aleatory Door.

  It looked so innocent. Just a doorway, as harmless as any other. I knew better, of course. When I’d first arrived at HQ, I’d roped Riff into exploring an Aleatory Door with me. It had been fun at first, discovering a room full of sorcerous bubbles and even an indoor beach with a working tidal system. But then we had stepped into a corridor of explosives, and barely escaped with our lives.

  I wasn’t keen to repeat that mistake.

  Carefully, I reached for the doorknob. I opened the door just a crack – and to my relief, nothing dangerous jumped out at me.

  The adjoining room resembled an old-fashioned library, lined with wooden shelves and rolling ladders. However, this was no ordinary library. Crimson vines and ebony roses snaked between the shelves, sprouting from the spines of leather-bound books.

  My skin prickled. Somehow, the vines were … alive. They slowly grew, retracted, and pulsated: a hypnotic dance of thorns and petals. Dust hung in the air, twinkling with the remnants of abandoned sorcery. Above the bookshelves, a black ceiling soared infinitely skyward, flecked with carmine stars.

  Something nasty must have happened here – a toxic magical spill, perhaps, or some other sorcerous danger. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t reckless enough to step inside. Instead, I fished Zephyr’s clue from my pocket and studied the last two lines.

  A strange mouth opens to a different taste

  Truth lies trapped in teeth

  If this doorway was the ‘mouth’, perhaps I didn’t have to step through it. In fact, Zephyr couldn’t have predicted which room the door would lead to when I opened it, so he couldn’t have meant for me to enter.

  That meant the clue was here, in the doorway itself.

  I ran my fingers along the doorframe, and then down the hinges. Nothing. At my feet, I saw only cold black tiles. Then I looked up, and my heart thudded. Inside the top of the doorframe, a row of strange white cubes formed part of the Aleatory mechanism. From this angle, they resembled a set of teeth – with a small gold envelope crammed between them.

  Inside, I found a handwritten note.

  Bring this note to the Sorcery briefing room by 5 pm to complete your mini-mission.

  Regards,

  Agent Zephyr

  PS Lean the protective plate against the wall. I shall attend to it later.

  I had done it. I’d been ready to quit, but I’d stuck it out and completed the mission. Even with an extra twist in my assessment, designed specifically for a Witness cadet. As I thrust the note into my pocket, and hurried back down the corridor, I couldn’t wipe the smile from my face.

  That evening, I worked on my sketch of the cadet lounge. Gradually, the scene was coming to life on the page. There was Archibald the plastic skeleton, the origami birds and even the treadmills. Even so, there was something missing. All of the right pieces were there, and yet the feeling of the lounge was absent.

  And so I kept sketching, and erasing, and fiddling with the details.

  In my bedroom later, I rifled through the jumbled collection of notes, cards and worksheets I’d accumulated during Sorcery briefings. I didn’t know which circuit Zephyr had used on the nightbead, but it might prove useful in the future – and I intended to learn it.

  Eventually I found what I was looking for. There were a few cards in the back of my wallet we hadn’t learnt yet, but which Zephyr had assigned for extra credit. The last two cards were labelled ‘Unlocking’ and ‘Unscrewing’.

  The first depicted a keyhole shape: the circuit for unlocking. I remembered the night that Inductors had come to my house in Hollingvale. One of the men had pressed a small, round object to the lock and it had begun to sizzle. The object must have been preloaded with this very circuit. I stared at the unlocking diagram for a long moment, memorising the shape, and then flicked to the next card.

  The next card’s diagram was a circle of curling loops, like the twists of a screw. This must be it: the unscrewing circuit that Zephyr had loaded into the nightbead. Again, I stared at the image for a long moment, determined to commit it to memory.

  Strange that it was so easy to unlock a lock, yet so hard to unlock a secret. As I rolled into bed, I couldn’t help but think again of Nephrite. What was the secret of the vials – the secret her grandfather had died for? What was she plotting with Dragon?

  The question itched at me, hot and prickly. I rolled over and pressed my face into the pillow. Not my problem. I was only a cadet, not a proper agent, and it was their job to deal with the Inductors.

  Yet still my mind brimmed with hidden tactics and dangerous missions, of shadowed corridors and library domes and dangers in the dark …

  Unfortunately, I didn’t sleep for long.

  At 6 am, I found myself hyperventilating like a drunken hippo on the edge of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. I swigged a gulp of water, massaged a stitch in my side and ploughed onwards, struggling to keep up with my friends.

  Ever since Phoenix had hyped up the benefits of treadmills, I’d been making an effort to improve my fitness. My cardio had plummeted since I’d left Hollingvale, swapping soccer training for Sorcery briefings. As a HELIX cadet, I’d already discovered that the phrase ‘run for my life’ might prove all too literal.

  As a result, we had decided to set our alarms early and join the cohort of fitness fanatics who ran around the Tan: a popular jogging track encircling the Botanic Gardens. At this time, the track was littered with corporate workers, dog walkers and gym junkies who liked to squeeze in an early jog before work. As the crowd thickened, I couldn’t help but notice my friends’ moods shifting. Their strides grew stiffer, and their eyes grew narrower, as they scanned the crowd for dangers.

  Inductors. They were worried about Inductors. When I’d first suggested jogging outside, I’d planned to do it alone. But the others had insisted on coming with me, just in case I ran into trouble.

  ‘It’s a jogging track,’ I’d said. ‘What dangers am I’m gonna face – a rabid poodle?’

  Phoenix had given me a serious look. ‘The Inductors know you’re a Witness, Nomad. Until you’re dead, they won’t stop hunting you.’

  ‘Geez, way to put a dampener on things,’ Riff said.

  Phoenix glared at him. ‘You were thinking it too, and you know it. She can’t just go wandering around the Tan on her own.’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s a difference between thinking it and saying it,’ Riff said. ‘I mean, I reckon it’d be hilarious to shave off Zephyr’s moustache, strap it to a protean rocket and shoot it at the moon, but I’m not gonna say that to his face, am I?’

  Phoenix rolled her eyes. ‘Anyway, it’ll be good for all of us. I’ve always liked the idea of a morning run.’

  And so I found myself with a group of companions, instead of running alone. I had to admit it was nice to have company, and it meant a lot that they’d given up their sleep-ins for me.

&nb
sp; Riff was the fastest sprinter in the Fifteens, and he outpaced us easily at first. His lack of endurance proved his downfall, however, and soon enough he was struggling along with the rest of the group. Phoenix, who trained in the Fitness Centre each night, jogged steadily beside me as if this were merely a casual stroll.

  Orbit suffered from asthma, and kept stopping to take a gasp of his inhaler. Feeling guilty, I suggested he return to HQ, but Orbit shook his head stoically and stumbled on. He was so determined to keep up that he had even built a pair of mechanical spring-contraptions into his shoes.

  ‘This is a crime against common decency,’ Riff complained, when we stopped for a rest and a swig of water.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Getting up at this hour!’ He checked his watch. ‘I mean, this isn’t even a real time of the day. Far as I’m concerned, there’s only one six o’clock, and it’s the one with the word “dinner” stamped all over it.’

  ‘You used to say Phoenix was the grumpy one in the mornings,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m getting grumpier in my old age.’

  Phoenix snorted. ‘If you think fifteen is old, what’ll you be like when you’re Dragon’s age?’

  ‘A priceless antique, obviously,’ Riff said. ‘They’ll stick me in the window of a fancy vintage shop and I’ll be worth a squillion bucks or something.’

  He gulped a mouthful of water, and then his face brightened. ‘Actually, screw that. I’ll be one of those super grouchy old men who wave their walking sticks in your face and ramble on about “the good old days”. That’d be fun, I reckon.’

  ‘I hate to break it to you,’ Phoenix said, ‘but the “good old days” are right now.’

  ‘God, you’re right.’ Riff looked mortified. ‘Imagine being old and reminiscing about this. If the best days of my life involve staggering around a running track, kill me now and be done with it.’

  ‘Come on,’ Phoenix said, rolling her eyes. ‘We’d better keep moving.’

  As she turned to face the crowd, her lips thinned, her eyes narrowed, and she was once again on alert. Phoenix had learnt to distrust the world at a young age. To her, every stranger was another potential threat.

  To be fair, I had been attacked in public before, and the Inductors weren’t idiots. They had followed Dragon’s false trail to hunt me in Europe – but sooner or later, they would realise they had been fooled. Perhaps this track full of joggers really was a danger. A crowd of unknown faces, where Inductors might be lurking …

  Perhaps Phoenix was right to distrust the world.

  In a way, that thought disturbed me more than anything.

  After a drowsy morning of Maths and Geography, we gathered at 1 pm for our Combat and Weaponry briefing.

  Fox warmed us up with timed laps of the room, testing whether his treadmills in the cadet lounge were having a positive effect. Since their net result so far had been a hodgepodge of aches, scrapes and bruised backsides, he was sorely disappointed.

  ‘Even worse than last time!’ Fox shook his head. ‘I don’t know where they recruited you lot from, I really don’t …’

  With a sigh, he turned his attention to the topic of the day. ‘Well, it’s a basic sparring session today. You won’t always have a torpefier on hand when you’re facing an Inductor, so it’s important to practise hand-to-hand combat techniques. Could save your life one day.’

  I fought down a groan at the familiar warning. Lately, it always seemed to be ‘running laps’ or ‘punching people’ that might save my life. Why couldn’t it ever be eating chocolate bars?

  In the changing rooms, we donned our sparring gear: black spandex suits that we wore beneath our training shorts and t-shirts. The suits wouldn’t stop any sorcerous weapons, but they were fairly effective against kicks and punches.

  Fox divided us into pairs. Phoenix and Steel were put together, since they were by far the strongest in the class, while Riff was placed against Frost. I found myself facing Apricity, a timid little twig of a girl who generally hid up the back of the class. Although she was Solitaire’s daughter, Apricity had inherited none of her mother’s confidence. She was brilliant at building quintessic circuits, yet dissolved into a sack of trembling nerves whenever a tutor asked her a question.

  ‘Coloured powder today,’ Fox announced. ‘First to ten wins the bout. No hits to the face, no unauthorised weapons, and no sorcery. Above all, no interfering with a fight that isn’t your own. Got it?’

  Nodding, we each dunked our hands and feet into barrels of colourful powder. It would leave a glowing mark on whatever we touched, providing proof of any hits to our opponent. I chose a cheerful orange powder, while Apricity chose pale blue: the colour of a quiet sky.

  ‘Okay to start?’ I asked.

  Apricity quivered a little, but raised her fists. The sight made my insides twist with premature guilt. Looking at her now, I might as well try to fight a butterfly.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not gonna hurt you,’ I said. ‘I mean, I don’t even know what I’m doing half the time, let alone –’

  Before I could finish, Apricity darted forward. With a brutal jab, she delivered a blow to my guts. I doubled over, gasping, and then swivelled up to face her in shock. ‘I didn’t know you could do that!’

  Apricity smiled.

  And with that, we were on. I jabbed and she ducked; she kicked and I whirled. I’d picked up a few combat techniques over the past two months, but I was still a relative amateur. Soon, it became clear I was outclassed. Apricity was a tiny whirlwind: darting and thrusting, twisting and leaping.

  Soon I was covered in nine blue marks: imprints of punching knuckles and kicking feet, like a ghostly record of our fight. There were only six orange marks on Apricity, and at least two of them had been accidental luck when I was attempting to flail out of her range.

  I managed to sneak in one more jab, echoed by a kick, bringing my total score to eight. But I tripped at the end of the kick, losing my centre of gravity, and Apricity took her chance to whack my shoulder. I hit the ground with an ‘oomph!’ and then staggered back to my feet.

  ‘You won!’ I said, grinning at Apricity. ‘That … that was amazing!’

  Apricity just smiled, as timid as ever. It was as if the fight had delivered her a moment of verve, but now it was over, and she was back to being the quiet little butterfly at the back of the room. Being? I asked myself silently. Or acting?

  ‘Thank you, Nomad,’ Apricity said, so quietly that I had to strain to hear her over the nearby thuds, stomps and groans. ‘You fought well too.’

  I smiled my thanks, although it wasn’t true, and headed across to report our final scores to Fox. He didn’t look surprised as he noted down Apricity’s win.

  Half the bouts were over now, and everyone’s attention was fixed on the real fight of the day: Phoenix versus Steel. As I watched them fight – ducking, kicking, dashing and twisting – I realised they weren’t just the best fighters in the Fifteens.

  They were truly in a league of their own.

  Neither of them held back. Neither showed any concern for potential injuries, or the limitations of their protective suits. They fought as if their lives depended on it, sweat on their faces and snarls on their lips.

  Phoenix was winning. I felt a surge of pride as I counted the marks: eight marks on Steel, and only seven on Phoenix. I knew it was immature, but I couldn’t suppress my pleasure. If anyone needed their ego deflated, it was Steel.

  Phoenix lunged forward, ducking beneath Steel’s punch. She swept her legs around to the side, smashing the backs of his calves so that he toppled to the ground. A few of the spectators winced, or moaned, as Steel lay stunned on the floor. But then he was up, his face red with fury.

  His eyes narrowed – and with a growl, he slid aside, dodged around Phoenix and punched her squarely in the ribs. The suit saved her from any real damage, but I could see the blow had winded her. She rasped in surprise, catching her breath, and managed to keep her feet.

 
Nine to eight.

  ‘One more blow,’ Riff murmured, just behind me. I hadn’t even realised his bout had finished, and I was about to ask how he’d scored, but something sparked in the corner of my eye.

  I whirled back to Phoenix and Steel. Almost instinctively, my vision plunged into the dark of the tenebrous shroud. Nothing but the two fighters, prowling around each other in quiet circles, like a pair of panthers preparing to attack. The world was dark, washed in hues of black and grey.

  And red.

  A furious, sparking burst of red, clutched like a weapon in Steel’s fist. A quintessic circuit. I couldn’t see what shape it was, concealed by Steel’s fingers, but he was about to rush towards Phoenix and strike.

  My breath stopped.

  Steel was going to cheat. He was going to augment his punch with the circuit in his fist. Except for me, and Steel himself, no one could see his quintessence. But if Phoenix’s suit couldn’t stand up to the blow, she could be seriously injured, or even …

  ‘Stop!’ I cried.

  I rushed forward, just as Steel leapt. He twisted in midair, startled at the sight of me – and suddenly, pain exploded through my chest. I buckled, gasping, as a bright red shine punctured my vision. My eyes throbbed, my chest burned, and I collapsed to my knees.

  And with that, all was darkness.

  I was vaguely aware of shouts around me, shock and confusion and outrage, but all I could do was suck down lungfuls of air. Slowly, colour and light seeped back into the world. My pulse thrummed in my throat, so fast and violent I could feel its rhythm under my skin.

  Fox grabbed my shoulders. ‘Cadet, look at me!’

  He shone a torch in my eyes, muttering curses. When he’d ensured I was all right, he ordered Frost to fetch me some water and a cold cloth from the bathroom. Then he turned on Steel with a snarl.