The Black Stars (13 page)

Mason didn't say a word, either. He knew it would drive the Stones insane. He just kept his eyes open and free of fear.

“What are you doing out in the halls alone, human?” Juneful said.

Mason kept his lips sealed. It was hard, but he was ESC, and they were not.

“He asked you a question,” Goon One said to Mason's left. He appeared to be second in command. All of them had black hair, long and loose.

Mason did not open his mouth.

“He must be brain dead,” Juneful said after a moment. “Come on, let's leave the little human alone before he tells on us.”

Mason remained still as they walked past him on either side, banging their shoulders into his, jostling him. He heard their footsteps pause briefly after passing him, and that's when he knew the attack was coming after all. Mason bent at the waist violently, feeling air swish over his neck as one of the Tremist failed to strike the back of his head. In the same movement, Mason mule-kicked straight back and caught something soft—a stomach, he thought—and was rewarded with the sound of breath exploding from lungs—
“oof!”
—followed by a thump as one of them hit the floor.

That left three. Which was still a lot. Mason felt the adrenaline dump, as his blood became hot and his ears burned and his eyes became hyperfocused, the pupils jacking wide to take in more light.

But the other three weren't your regular bullies; they were Rhadgast trainees. As Mason spun, they caught him by the arms and walked him back against the wall. An elbow smacked him in the nose and his vision blurred with tears. He tasted blood on his lips.
Tom, I need you!

He tried to kick out again, and someone caught his foot. Two more fists crashed into his stomach. His gloves almost slipped down over his hands, but he caught himself at the last second, refusing to use them against the students. Mason had a job to do.

But he was scared now. If he were at home, at Academy II, the fight would end safely. Maybe a bone would get broken, but it would be healed that same day. The combatants would be forced to shake hands and make up. There would be punishment. Here, Mason didn't know what was going to happen. It was an unknown, and that terrified Mason more than anything. He could die, right here, right now.

He decided to make sure that didn't happen.

Mason recalled the feeling he'd had in the forest with Tom, when the vines had been trying to strangle them both. Now, the gloves shot down over his hands without thought, and suddenly there was a wall of light in front of him; the rhadjen were on their backs in the hallway, stunned, their robes smoking lightly.

Juneful blinked rapidly, looking around, eyes unfocused.

“You just made a serious mistake,” Juneful said, his wits, what little there were, returning. “The energy discharge was recorded. You're done.” The anger on his face dissolved into a smile. A victorious smile. If Marcus Jones were here, he would definitely be friends with Juneful.

Mason made his voice very low. If he was going home, he wanted to get in a parting shot. “You attack me, then report me when I defend myself. If that's what this school is about, then I can't get home soon enough.”

The goons all traded looks, as if they were unable to process this information without seeing Juneful's reaction first. Juneful couldn't deny Mason's logic, so he didn't even try. He just made a disgusted sound in his throat and stalked away. His goons followed, giving Mason looks that ranged from anger to what might've been some form of respect.

Mason watched them go, as his breathing returned to normal. The places they'd struck him still throbbed and probably would for some time. His skin would be bruised, but that was okay. If what Juneful said was true (and Mason had no reason to expect it was, other than Juneful seeming so confident), then Mason was going home, and nothing else really mattered. Hopefully he could see Merrin on the way back.

But his mission would be incomplete.

Mason stood alone in the empty hallway. It was quiet. And that's why he heard the footsteps coming from several corridors away. They were loud because they were heavy—the footsteps of men, not children, walking swiftly. They were traveling away from him, getting quieter. Mason set off down the hallway, moving with care, keeping his feet light.
Where are they going?
He had to know—they were marching with too much purpose. This wasn't a stroll to the next class.

Mason stopped at each intersection, where the hallway material changed and became something else: wood, glass, metal, and even what appeared to be ice. He was gaining on the footsteps. There were four of them, he thought, eight feet total. He caught his first and only glimpse of them turning a corner. Mason recognized the bluish hair of Master Rayasu. The other lead Rhadgast appeared to be Master Shem, head of the Bloods.
This is big,
Mason thought. He almost forgot about his throbbing nose and sore ribs.

They disappeared for a second, after reaching a set of stairs covered in springy, tough grass. Mason followed them down twenty seconds later.

The stairs led to more stairs and more doors. The doors were loud and clicked when they shut, but Mason made sure to give his targets enough of a lead. They had to be far underneath the sphere now.

Mason wished Tom was with him, not for the first or second or third time. He passed a sign:

NO RHADJEN BEYOND THIS POINT. STUDENTS WHO DISOBEY WILL BE STRIPPED OF THEIR GLOVES AND SENT HOME.

Oh well: Mason was going home anyway. Juneful hadn't been bluffing—he had seemed too confident, too pleased.

Mason's heart began to pound. Full Rhadgast, in the school, going to a secret, banned area? Maybe he was going to get a bit of intel after all. It was almost too much to hope for.

But his hopes were dashed a moment later, when he descended another flight of stairs—this one made of craggy rocks fused together—and came to a door that had what appeared to be a retinal scanner built right into the middle of it.

The door beeped, sensing his presence.
Oh crap!
Mason began to backpedal. His heels hit the staircase behind him, and he fell onto the steps. A readout above the scanner said:

COMPLETE SCAN OR ALARM WILL SOUND

A timer was counting down from five seconds. In five seconds, it would all be over. The Rhadgast would come back for him, and he would definitely not be leaving the basement alive.

There was really only one thing to do: try. Perhaps a false scan would buy him time and the system would reset. Mason pushed off the staircase and lunged for the scanner, watching as the number 2 flicked to 1. He pressed his face to the scanner and held his eyes open, and the scan initiated. But this wasn't an old-school retinal scan, Mason quickly discovered. That technology had been around for over eight hundred years, and the Tremist may have had it even longer. When the lasers passed over Mason's eyes, he felt them
probing;
they couldn't be lasers at all, not the way he knew them. It felt like tiny ants were walking up and down his optic nerves, plucking packets of information from his brain, intercepting the electrons traveling through synapses, pulling his very identity and reading it like computer code. There was no way to fake it. In an instant, the scanner knew Mason better than Mason knew himself.

The ants began to leave his brain, taking the itchy feeling with them. Mason stepped back, blinking rapidly as his irritated eyes began to water.

He waited for the alarm to sound.

But instead, a purple light in the scanner blinked, the lock clicked, and the door eased open.

 

Chapter Eighteen

 

Beyond the doorway there was darkness and a pinprick of white light.

Mason waited, listening for any sound that said he'd been discovered. But none came.

“Impossible…” he breathed. The machine had scanned him. And yet the door was open.

Like it had been expecting him.

I should get Tom.

But there was no time: the door was already beginning to close. Mason could go back for Tom, but who knew if they could both make it down here undetected again? Mason slipped across the threshold as the edge of the door brushed his chest. The door sealed shut behind him with a sucking sound, and he was left in the darkness with the single point of light ahead of him.

Only one way to go,
he thought.

Mason started toward the light with slow, careful steps, not knowing what was around him in the dark. The walls could've been a few feet or a few hundred feet away. His footsteps did not echo, so there was no way to tell.

After a minute, the light was not a pinprick but a thumbnail. By the time it was the size of a closed fist, Mason could make out details: it was some kind of room with harsh, sterile lights in the ceiling. He could see reflections off a glass wall. Mason heard voices then, low and urgent.

A woman's voice, it sounded like.

She was arguing with the Rhadgast, just around the corner, out of Mason's line of sight. Mason stepped closer, crouching low. He looked down at himself to make sure no part of him was visible.

The woman spoke: “You're not hearing what I'm saying, so let me say it in whatever dialect you understand best—
I won't have another student harmed.
” She said the last part in the dialect of Mhenlo dai Kro, the People of the Mountains.

Mason inched closer, edging toward the line where darkness blurred to gray, until he could see most of the room. It was a laboratory, no different than a human one, with bare metal tables and various arrays of testing equipment, beakers, and containers of strange liquids. It smelled sweet. The back half of the room was separated by the floor-to-ceiling glass Mason had seen on his approach. Beyond the glass was darkness, with no way to tell how large the room really was.

In the corner a woman was talking to the four Rhadgast who had come down before him, once again two Bloods and two Stones. Their postures were tense, like they were in a standoff. The woman was facing away from Mason. She had black hair and wore a white lab coat tied with a crimson belt.

Mason saw Master Rayasu clearly. “Tell me again what you will and won't have, human,” he said. “I'd love to hear it.”

Human?
Mason and Tom were supposed to be the first visitors to Skars. What was a human doing down
here
?

“She forgets her place,” said another. “And her surroundings.”

“And you forget your manners,” Shem said to Rayasu—the other two Rhadgast Mason didn't recognize. He felt a bit of blood leak from his nose but dared not sniff it back.

“And everyone here forgets who I answer to,” the woman said. “Now if you're done with idle threats, I will ask you to leave my laboratory.”

The Rhadgast seemed like they were about to do just that, but suddenly a dark shape stirred behind the glass, in the area where it was too dark to see. It was a man shape, hulking, and it crept toward the group.

The four Rhadgast and the woman turned to look, as out of the darkness emerged a Fangborn.

Mason clapped his hand over his mouth, but the sound didn't give him away. All eyes were on the creature. And a creature it was. Mason had only seen them in glimpses before, or through the thermal imaging system on the king's Hawk. He wished it had stayed that way. Now the beast was under crisp light, stepping out of the darkness completely. His arms and legs were impossibly thick and veiny, bulging with visibly striated muscle. His skin was bluish gray, like a stone, and it looked just as hard. His ears were pointed. The eyes were eerily human, but bigger. He had no nose, just two little holes beneath the eyes. Holes that flared with each breath.

But that wasn't what held Mason's gaze, what froze his blood and locked his muscles.

His eyes lingered on the Fangborn's enormous set of jaws, which easily took up more than half the entire head. The lips peeled back from rows of sharp yellowed fangs. He was drooling.

Mason knew nothing would ever be the same after that. The image would always haunt his sleep. This was what they were up against. An army of monsters in control of ships too powerful and huge to destroy.

Master Rayasu stalked toward the glass, then slammed his glove against it. “Are you going to stay put this time? Or must we kill you?” Electricity leaked from his glove, spreading over the glass.

Did this Fangborn kill Jiric?
Mason wondered.
How?

The Fangborn seemed to smile, though with teeth that big anything might look like a smile, and it made a low rhythmic chuffing sound. It was
laughing.
It was laughing at Master Rayasu.

Slowly, it melded back into the darkness, slipping out of sight.

The four Rhadgast shared a look, then stalked away as one—right toward Mason, who quickly retreated into deeper shadow. He kept walking, stumbling almost, but didn't hit a wall. With every step he expected to fall into an abyss that went all the way to Skars's core. Finally he stopped, and the Rhadgast walked past him, heading for the door, though it, too, was in darkness.

Mason waited, holding his breath. Master Rayasu paused and sniffed the air. He made a half turn in Mason's direction, paused again, then spun away with a swish of his robe. Mason didn't move until they reached the door and opened it, and he could see their silhouettes passing in front of the light. The door shut behind them.

Mason let out the breath he was holding. He was still shaking. A Fangborn
here,
under the school. How did it get here?
Why were they holding it?

Mason knew where he could get his answers: the woman. There was just one of her and one of him, and he doubted she had the same gloves and training if she was working in a laboratory. Mason steeled himself, clasping his hands together hard until they stopped shaking. He wasn't overreacting—it was a
Fangborn.
But his curiosity won out in the end. He walked toward the opening again and right into the laboratory.