***
Ceril opened the door to the room he and Swarley had been assigned. The first thing he noticed was the gigantic, curved window that filled an entire wall from floor to ceiling. They were being housed in one of the higher towers on campus, which gave them a pretty spectacular—and unobstructed—view of the night sky. The moon shone brightly into the room and cast a surreal light across the unfamiliar space.
“We must have been wandering around for quite a while,” Ceril said, peeking out the window.
“Must’ve been,” Swarley agreed. He fell backwards on the nearest bed and sighed. “This’ll do. I think I can handle this.”
Ceril did likewise and found that the bed was much softer than the one he had slept on for five years of Phase I. “Yeah, I like it, too.” He rolled over and something jabbed into his side. In the moonlight, he could just make out the corner of the suitcase that was jabbing into him. “Lights,” he said and rubbed his ribs. “I think this is yours.”
He tossed the suitcase onto Swarley’s side of the room, and his friend responded with an “oof” and a “thanks for that” before throwing Ceril’s bag over to him. Until this year, Ennd’s staff had transferred students’ luggage to their rooms and unpacked it. This time, however, they were not unpacked, which meant the boys could finally choose which bed was theirs. It was a small luxury, but until that very moment, the boys had never been given a choice about anything regarding their time at Ennd’s Academy—no say regarding class schedule, roommate, or even when they wanted to bathe. Their two hours of daily recreation were even determined by the staff.
Phase II was supposed to be different, and so far it was. Not only did they get to choose who they lived with, they got to choose their own beds, and at Presentation tomorrow morning, they would choose their primary area of study.
Now that the lights were on, Ceril could see that the room was sparsely furnished with maroon linens on both beds. The beds sat on opposite sides of the room, and there was a large, two-sided desk dividing the room in half. The walls, floor, and ceiling shared the motif of the rest of the Phase II campus: tan stone and brushed-steel.
“I’m not sure I like this room,” Swarley said. “It still feels just as sterile in here as it did out there.”
“Get used to it,” Ceril said. “This is home for four more years. At least. Maybe longer, depending on your Rites.”
After a few minutes of lying still, Ceril couldn’t take it anymore. He popped upright and braced himself against the mattress. “Oh, Swarley!” he almost shouted. “I forgot to tell you what I found last week!”
“A sense of humor? A lick of common sense? What? I’m dyin here, Ceril.”
“A Charon’s sword.”
“Shut up.”
“No, really. I did. I found a technomage sword in the garden—”
“Shut up,” Swarley repeated.
“No!” Ceril said excitedly. He stood up and leaned against the desk so he could see Swarley better. “After that, Gramps spent the rest of the week telling me about Vennar and the other Charons. That’s what they called themselves. Charons. Cool, huh?”
“Not even a little,” Swarley said, sitting up and frowning.
“What’s the matter with you?” Ceril asked. “I thought you’d be excited for me. I mean, I found a Flameblade! An artifact!”
“Are you an idiot, Ceril?”
“I think we both know the answer to that,” Ceril said, trying to joke around with his friend. Swarley wasn’t having any of it. What was his deal?
“My gods, Ceril, you should know better than to just blurt something out like that right now.”
“I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about, Swarley.”
Swarley sighed. “What happened, Ceril?”
“I was working in the garden when I hit something hard in the dirt. I thought it was a rock, you know, so I reached in to dig around it so I could pull it out of the ground, and I cut myself.” Ceril’s voice was getting higher and higher as he spoke faster and faster. “Gramps came over, and he saw that it wasn’t a rock. He told me it was a Flameblade. After that, he told me a lot about the Charons.”
“You mean to tell me that you found a Flameblade in Ternia? In your garden?”
“Uh-huh!” Ceril nodded vigorously. “Gramps said a technomage could make it catch on fire, but that the fire wouldn’t burn anyone the technomage didn’t want it to. And that the color of the fire—”
Swarley interrupted him again. “Did it ever catch on fire with you?”
“No,” Ceril said. “But I’m not a technomage.”
“What about Gramps?”
“He’s not either, Swarley.”
“Then how do you know it’s a Charon’s sword? Did you look it up on the ‘Nets?”
“Well, no,” Ceril said. “Gramps doesn’t have anything but basic CommNet, but he said that he only knew of a couple of these swords ever being found across all of Erlon, you know? He told me that all the rest of them might have been lost. He said that ours might be the only one left. How cool is that?”
“Really? The only one?”
Ceril nodded.
“Ceril, do you know how ridiculous this all sounds?”
Ceril hesitated. It hadn’t sounded ridiculous at all when Gramps had said it. Of course, nothing sounded ridiculous if Gramps said it. “It’s true, Swarley.”
“I don’t doubt you found a sword, Ceril, but it’s not a Flameblade.”
“How do you know?”
“Did it ever caught on fire for you?” Swarley asked. “Once?”
“Well, no,” Ceril admitted.
“I don’t want to be the one to say it, bud, but I think your Gramps is pulling your leg.”
“Why would he do that?”
“To have some fun with his gullible grandson? It doesn’t matter why, anyway.” Swarley said with a small grin. He leaned up on his mattress and looked Ceril dead in the eyes. “And, um, make sure that you don’t mention it around school, all right? Especially to the teachers.”
“Why not?”
“Ceril, really?”
“What?” Ceril demanded. “I mean, Gramps told me not to tell you, but I did. And it’s fine. The world didn’t end or anything. So why are you telling me not to tell anyone else? Why are you acting like this?”
Swarley’s shoulders dropped. “You don’t have the ‘Nets when you’re at your Gramps’ house.”
Ceril furrowed his brow. “You’re being a jerk because I don’t have the ‘Nets over the summer? Swarley—”
“No,” Swarley said. “I don’t mean…” He sighed. “You haven’t heard, then.”
“Heard what? What are you talking about?”
Swarley got off his bed and sat down at his side of the desk. “Hold on,” he said, “let me find it.” He manipulated the terminal for a few minutes, and when he was satisfied with whatever it was he had found, he leaned back and let Ceril watch the first newsreel he had seen since before the summer began.
Above the desk, a hologram of a woman began to discuss what she called “the first in what is sure to be a series of unprovoked attacks from a terrorist organization led by someone called the Untouchable.” Ceril sat down on Swarley’s bed and leaned forward as the image of the woman faded away. It was replaced by a video of a playground scene. “Please be advised,” the woman’s voice continued, “the images you are about to see are incredibly graphic. Viewer discretion is advised.”
Kids were screaming and running around, probably toward their parents. Parents were yelling for their children, but only a few actually found them. The camerawork was bad; it was obviously a quick video someone had taken with their tablet or PDA.
But that didn’t matter. The quality of the video wasn’t important. What it captured was.
The video zoomed in, and Ceril covered his mouth with his hands as he watched. A group of men and women were wearing long, purple robes and holding golden swords. Swords that looked an awful lot like th
e one he found in Gramps’ garden.
Ceril swallowed audibly.
There were maybe half a dozen of the robed figures, and they were all bald, even the women. The men had identical, chest-length beards that were dyed a garish blue.
And they were all using their swords to kill the running children. If there had been only one weapon, he would have assumed someone had stolen the sword from Gramps. After all, Gramps had said theirs was probably the only one. Ceril watched as the cameraman whipped the camera around the scene, catching parents and children being gutted, stabbed, dismembered, and eviscerated.
“Swarley, what the hell?”
“Just watch, Ceril.”
Ceril did. The swords that the robed killers held were glowing now. One of the women cut through a man’s arm, and her blade flared yellow. She turned around and immediately sliced a running mother down the length of her back, while the glow around the sword pulsed blue. As the mother fell, she covered her son with her body in an attempt to protect him.
Her body shook as she lay there, and Ceril realized she was weeping. The video tried to zoom in further, but it just distorted the image. Ceril thought he could see the woman with the yellow-blue sword rush toward her and plunge the sword downward.
Even in the low-quality video, it was easy to see the sword penetrate through her body and into her son. The sword’s aura erupted in a flare of color as the bald killer shrieked. She laughed girlishly as she pulled the blade from the corpses she created.
The cameraman, who had been silent until this point, let out a whimper, which caught the attention of the largest of the men. His head whipped toward the camera. He wiped his sword against his leg, but the red-purple fire around its blade didn’t seem to singe his robe at all.
That was exactly the way Gramps described the sword he had found. Ceril swallowed again, but didn’t dare to blink.
The large man with the Flameblade screamed something unintelligible at the man behind the camera, who then turned and ran. The next few seconds of video were hectic and unfocused. Then there was a crash, and the camera fell to the ground, focusing sideways on a tree. A booted foot stepped into frame, and the bald man’s face appeared soon after as he crouched to peer into the lens.
He said, “Your generation has tried to hide the past for too long, and the time has come to make things right. The Untouchable will no longer allow you to feed the world the scraps of your technology.” He held up the glowing sword. “You technomages will either remove yourselves from the shadows and put Erlon back on the path toward its destiny, or we will pull you out and put it there ourselves.”
The face moved out of frame, followed by the boot. There were a few seconds of silence and then a whuffing sound off screen that ended with a pop. The video ended, and the hologram returned to the woman who had introduced the horrifying clip. Swarley paused the holovid before the woman could begin her commentary.
“Hey!” Ceril said. “What was she saying?”
“About how horrible it all was, and that no one knows what’s going on. It doesn’t matter,” said Swarley.
“Then what does?” Ceril yelled. “Why did you show me that?”
“Because it’s all that anyone has talked about for the last month, Ceril. I knew it was going to be tough at Ennd’s this year because of the technomage rumors these terrorists stirred up—did you know my parents almost wouldn’t let me come back?”
“No,” said Ceril. “How could I? I’m glad they let you.”
“Me, too. I just never expected you to come in claiming to be a technomage after this!” He waved his hand at the area of the room where the hologram of the woman still floated.
“I never claimed to be a technomage!”
“But you said you had one of their swords, which might as well be the same thing. It sounds a little too close to the weapons those people used to kill all those kids, man.”
Ceril was silent. He leaned against the wall and banged his head lightly against it over and over. “Yeah,” he finally said. “It sure does.”
“Did yours glow like that?”
“No,” said Ceril, perhaps too quickly.
“What about the rest of it? The color of the metal, the sword itself, you know?”
Ceril thought back to the garden. He could see the gold blade glinting in the sunlight as though it were in front of him. “It looked just like the ones in the vid,” he said.
“So. This sword, this Flameblade of yours. Where is it?” Swarley asked. His voice was even, without inflection. Ceril thought Swarley sounded a little more menacing than he had ever heard him.
“Gramps kept it. Said he might contact a museum about displaying it,” Ceril said.
“Right,” Swarley said. “And you said he didn’t know about this attack at all?”
Ceril shook his head. “How could he? You know how he feels about the ‘Nets.”
“Okay. Well, at least you didn’t bring it here. The sword, I mean.”
“He wouldn’t let me.”
“Smart man,” Swarley said. He just stared at Ceril with his lips pursed.
“What?”
“I dunno. I’m just saying all of this kind of weirds me out.”
“Yeah. It does me, too,” Ceril said and closed his eyes. “I’m not a terrorist, though. I’m not a killer.”
After a small pause that Ceril might have imagined, Swarley said, “I know.”
“Neither is Gramps.”
“I know that, too, Ceril. Of course, I know that. But no one else here does. And after that—” he gestured again to the hologram floating above the desk, “you really shouldn’t mention the Charons, the technomages, or that sword to anyone. I wouldn’t even make a reference to the technomages or their Artifacts that kids think are all around the school. It’s just…just a bad idea, you know?”
“Yeah,” Ceril said. That’s all he could say. “Yeah.”
“Now I have to get some sleep,” Swarley said. “Presentation is tomorrow morning. Get off my bed.”
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” Ceril said. He had barely even thought about Presentation since he had been back at Ennd’s. Ceril went to his side of the desk and set the alarm so that he wouldn’t oversleep and miss Presentation. Or worse: be late.
Once he was satisfied that his alarm was reliable, Ceril settled into bed. Every time he closed his eyes, though, he kept seeing the mother and her child being impaled by the Flameblade.
“Oh, and Swarley?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I appreciate the heads up. I really had no idea.”
“Sure thing, bud. It’s what I do,” Swarley said.
The two boys lay there in silence for a while. Ceril tossed from one side to the other, unable to sleep. He said, “And thanks for not thinking I’m crazy.”
“Oh, I think you’re crazy, Ceril. I just don’t think you’re a terrorist.”
“Still, thanks.”
“Mmm hmm,” Swarley said. The next sound Ceril heard was his roommate snoring. He hoped that he would be soon, too. He lay his head on his pillow and lulled himself to sleep by replaying the events of the previous week in his mind.