They were inspected at a host of successively safe- check gates, each of which was an inch further into another type of Academy. The former was staffed by inexperienced wardens who continued to stare at him with a glint of interest. The latter by less expert guards whose eyes were flat and uninterested. The third and fourth were under the management of wardens quite another type of them who had to work in the libraries and gardens. These were softer, their movements were economical, and without any unnecessary humanity, their eyes masked in full-face helms which revealed the dim light in solitary, interminable glimpses. They were the guardians of the place which was not supposed to be seen, was not supposed to be recognized. They had been custodians of the disgrace of the Academy.At last they stood in front of a door not of wood, or iron, but of one continuous, smooth plane of opaque, brushed steel, cut with the runes of containment and silence and soul-binding. It had no handle, no

Leo listened, his heart aching over the girl called Elara, although the part of him, the one that was also growing into a strategist was putting the information away. His sympathy with the people he was fighting with his raging, desperate desire to know the bigger workings of their destruction. Cipher was the key. He was the code solver and Leo had to know how to crash the whole program.One day, on the despondent rec time, when they sat against the cold, wet wall, they were watching the rest of the crowd moving in their hopeless silent procession, Cipher turned his searching eyes on Leo. You are not like us, Seven-Three-Four. Your signal is… loud. A screaming siren in the statical. It is not only the Fractured signature but that is a part of it. It has something more in the architecture. Let me look. Really look. Prior to my being taken to my final test.Cipher stretched forward a wicked, shaking hand and touched his fingertips to the forehead before Leo could say yes or no. His eyes

There was no transition, no tunnel of light or wrenching pull through dimensions. One moment, Leo was a scream of data being unmade in the collapsing Underdepth, his consciousness a fragmented cloud of panic and raw, uncontrolled code. The next, he “was”. He coalesced, his form reassembling itself not from flesh and bone, but from memory and possibility, from the ghost of a choice he had refused. He stood on solid ground, drawing a breath that felt both familiar and profoundly alien, the air tasting of static and forgotten prayers.You felt awe, and it was staggering and shot through with a profound, pure fear, snarled in his stomach like a serpent.He was in the Ascension Grand Hall. but it was a monstrous imitation, an ideal, evil imitation. It was veined white marble, but it was cold as a tombstone, and appeared to absorb the light instead of reflecting it, which gave the large room a twilight effect. The Throne of the Founders was now, however, a large, solid block of obsidian, an

The recognition was not a surrender. It was a catalyst.As Eryndor’s void-blade touched his soul, Leo did not see a future of darkness. He saw the root of it. He felt the exact, agonizing moment, repeated across a hundred cycles, where the weight of love and loss became too much to bear. He felt the seductive whisper of the System, not as an enemy, but as a grieving friend offering the only solace it knew: the end of feeling. And in that shared, horrific understanding, Leo found his weapon.It was not a blade of light or will. It was a single, defiant memory, polished to a brilliant, unassailable point. The memory of Aria, not as the Academy’s Vessel, but as herself. The feel of her hand in his in the Astral Gardens. The fierce, protective light in her eyes when she stood by him. The promise they had made. A memory untouched by the System’s logic, untainted by the despair of cycles. A variable it could not compute.He did not push the void away. He embraced it, and in that embrace, he

Leo had been scalped open with the realization of his father, the reality a fresh and bleeding cut. The great office, the man on his knees, the power offered all seemed to be the scene in the life of another, some play where he had been thrust on the stage without knowing his part. But the philosophical agonies of that discovery were immediately replaced by a chillier, more animal and more desperate terror: ‘Aria’. His father would be unconditional in his anger after his devastating rejection and she was the most susceptible, the most prized chess piece in this heavenly game. It was she that his father could still use to checkmate him.He was a ghost in the Academy, pursued by his new, ungrounded presence, in some measure deforming the reality behind him. A wall sconce flickering would, becoming, a moment of a heart beat, a bunch of burning mushrooms. A strip of passage suddenly smelled not of polished stone and ozone, but of rain-laden earth and the smell of diesel smoke of the Morta