Chapter 4 Four

The academy went into lockdown before noon. Instructors moved through the halls in pairs. Nobody left the grounds, nobody entered, and every disciple Kaien passed had a different theory about what happened to Tobin, each one louder than the last.

Kaien was summoned to the infirmary an hour into the search. An Elder he didn't know was standing over the empty bed with a tracking formation half-drawn in chalk on the floor.

"Your energy's still bonded into his core," the Elder said. "From the seal you used. It hasn't faded. We need it to trace him."

"I don't know how to do that."

"You won't have to."

A girl stepped out from behind the privacy screen. Moon Clan blue. The one from the arena.

"Lyra Vesperis," the Elder said. "She's leading the trace. You're the anchor. Sit."

Kaien sat.

She knelt across from him without saying anything and pressed two fingers against his wrist. Her eyes closed. He felt her energy move into his, and it took effort not to pull away from it.

"Your signature's too strong," she said, eyes still shut. "For a Seven-Tail."

"Is that part of the trace or a question."

"Can't it be both?"

He didn't answer.

"You used a technique that doesn't exist," she said. "Now your signature reads like you've been cultivating for years longer than you have. I want to know why."

"I don't have an answer today that's going to satisfy anyone."

"Try anyway."

"I improvised."

"You said that to the instructor." Her eyes opened. "You said it to the Council. Vaelor too, probably. At what point does an answer stop being an answer and start being a script?"

Kaien held her stare and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wasn't either a lie or the whole truth, and he had no intention of handing her either one right now.

She went back to the trace. Her jaw was tight with concentration, fingers still against his wrist, and Kaien found himself watching her instead of watching the door, which he told himself was just good instinct. Know your suspects, that was all this was.

"There." She let go of his wrist. "Faint, but it's there. Leads east. Past the training grounds, into the old maintenance tunnels under the lower campus."

"That's sealed off."

"It is." She stood and brushed off her robes. "I'm reporting this. You're coming with me."

"Why me?."

"Because someone used spiritual concealment good enough to fool half the instructors in this academy, and your signature is the one thing that cut through it." She held the door. "I want to know why. And I doubt I'll be the only one asking."

They didn't speak again until they reached the tunnels.

The seal on the entrance had been broken, not opened. Scorched at the edges, like something had burned through it in a hurry rather than picked the lock properly. Lyra crouched to look at the damage, fingers hovering an inch from the char mark without touching it.

"This wasn't done by anyone at this academy," she said. "Not with this signature."

"How do you know?."

"Because I know every registered signature at Fox Academy. This isn't one of them."

They went in together, and the tunnel narrowed fast, low enough that Kaien had to duck under support beams that hadn't been maintained in years. Lyra lit a small orb of light between her fingers and held it ahead of them.

The smell hit before anything else did.

"Kaien." Her voice had changed.

He came around the bend and stopped.

Tobin Ashe was on the ground, propped against the tunnel wall like someone had set him down carefully instead of dumping him. No wounds, no blood on the stone around him. His eyes were open.

Kaien crouched beside him and reached for a pulse he already knew wouldn't be there.

"He's gone," Lyra said behind him, and her voice had gone flat, working already, cataloguing instead of grieving. "No injuries, no poison smell. Check his meridians."

Kaien pressed two fingers to Tobin's wrist, then his chest, searching for the thread of spiritual energy that should have still been there, faint, low, but present.

There was nothing.

Not weak. Not damaged. Gone, like it had never existed at all.

"His core's empty," Kaien said.

"That's not possible." Lyra knelt across from him, close enough now that he could see her hands weren't quite steady, even with her voice still level. "A drained core doesn't look like this. There'd be scarring, something."

"There's nothing."

Lyra didn't answer. She was staring at Tobin's face, and something crossed hers that she put away almost as fast as it appeared.

Kaien sat back on his heels.

This hadn't happened the first time. He thought saving Tobin would change history but he still died regardless.

He'd saved a boy's life this morning.

Something had come for that boy anyway.

"We need to report this," Lyra said. She was already standing, already moving, voice sharpening back into the same controlled register she'd used on him in the infirmary.

"Now. Before anyone else comes down here."

Kaien stood too, but he didn't move yet. He was still looking at Tobin's open eyes.

"Kaien."

"I'm coming."

She looked at him a second longer than the moment called for. He felt it more than saw it, the weight of her attention shifting off the body and onto him, and he made himself turn and walk before she could ask him the question he could see forming behind her face.

They reported it within the hour. By nightfall the academy wasn't just in lockdown, it was sealed, gates barred, every Elder in residence summoned to the Council chamber.

It was a hollow Fox ritual.

Cultivation gone, no wound. They had heard of this technique before but no one had ever seen it before.

Nobody in that chamber had an answer for it. Kaien didn't offer one either, though for a different reason than everyone else in the room.

He was the only person there who knew, for certain, that whatever had killed Tobin Ashe shouldn't have had the chance to. There was more to this than Kaien knew