Just as suddenly as Max’s body had become frozen, it was abruptly unfrozen.

He shot up like a jack-in-the-box. His chair clattered to the floor, the sound echoing through the classroom, which was startled into a hush. He was so cold he shivered, his breaths coming out as hard gasps, visible as water vapor despite the climate-controlled environment.

His finger pointed unsteadily at the holographic display.

“What was that?” It was more of a demand than a question. Now that he was on his feet, the hologram had winked back to normal, innocently rotating and displaying their jumpsuits’ schematics instead of the terrifying inhuman face that had been there an eyeblink ago.

Waldo seemed caught off-guard. His magnified eyes blinked behind his thick lenses, scanning Max and then his holographic display with increasingly annoyed confusion.

“Max, what in the world are you going on about? First Finn’s spiders, now this. Blast it, does everyone in this class itch to be the center of attention? I know Greene’s sixth Law of Power is to ‘court attention at all costs,’ but you lot carry the admonition too far. There’s a time to be the cynosure, and a time to sit still with your yaps shut until you’re called on.”

Ollie’s hand shot into the air. His eyes twinkling with devilry, he spoke before being called on. “What’s a cynosure? Another part of our suits?”

“No, genius,” Carlos said, his face twitching with the effort to keep it straight. “A cynosure is a no-show job. Like the ones the mafia arranges for their soldiers.”

“That’s a sinecure, Einstein,” Malik interjected. “Cynosure is a play. Everyone knows that. It’s short for Cynosure de Bergerac.”

The three Anarchy Division students’ guffaws were cut short when they suddenly straightened in their seats, convulsing as small arcs of electricity danced on the surface of their suits, like the jumpsuits had transformed into Tesla coils.

Waldo’s robotic arm released a button it was pressing on his hoverchair, and the electrical arcs ceased. The Anarchy Division students’ bodies relaxed. They sagged in their seats, their breath hissing out of them like deflating tires.

“Sorry about that, gentlemen.” Despite the mildness of his tone, the predatory look Max had seen in the fleshy man’s eyes earlier was back again. “Your ham-handed humor must’ve short-circuited your suits. See me after class, and we’ll see what we can do to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Waldo’s enlarged eyes whipped to Max like a shotgun’s barrel. “As for you, Max, are you going to sit down and shut up of your own accord? Or will your recalcitrance cause your suit to short-circuit too?”

Max hesitated, his gaze flickering between the menacing figure of Waldo and the seemingly innocuous hologram. The tension in the room was palpable, with a thick cloud of unease hanging in the air. He could feel every pair of eyes in the class on him, some with curiosity, others with excitement at the prospect of more violence, and a few with undisguised disdain.

With a deep breath, Max righted his chair and slowly sat, the metal legs scraping against the floor in a grating echo. His heart pounded against his chest, a rapid drumbeat in the silence of the classroom. The image he had seen in the hologram refused to leave his mind, its haunting presence lingering like a ghost.

Waldo’s eyes were narrow as he watched Max, an unreadable expression on his doughy face.

“Well then, let’s continue, shall we?” he said. “As I was saying, here are the additional features of your suits you will need to know about . . . .”

The class slowly returned to a semblance of normalcy, but the air still crackled with an undercurrent of tension. Max barely heard Waldo’s lecture. His thoughts were elsewhere, racing to make sense of what he had just experienced.

He was certain that if he consulted with Asclepius, the doctor would tell him that what he saw was no more than a hallucination, likely a side effect of the head trauma he had suffered in Power Channeling class.

But Max dismissed that hypothetical diagnosis out of hand. He had seen this same symbol, felt the same presence, heard the same voice when he was involuntarily yanked into the shadow realm from Mirrorkin’s chamber. He hadn’t been recovering from a head injury then.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

No. His foggy breath—now back to normal—hadn’t been a figment of his imagination. Nor had the cold that chilled him to the marrow. The symbol, the voice, the chilling command to free me . . . they all felt too real to be a mere hallucination.

What he experienced in the shadow realm hadn’t been a hallucination. And it wasn’t one now.

It was real, Max decided firmly. And, unless the entire class was playing a prank on him, he had been the only one to see . . . whatever it was.

What in the world was it? And why had he been the only one to see it?

As the Gadgetry class dragged on for seemingly forever, Max’s resolve hardened. He needed answers, and he wasn’t going to find them sitting in this classroom.

Time finally ran out, and Waldo dismissed the class. Max returned the man’s gun magazine, hoping to rush out with the rest of the class, but Waldo stayed him with a robotic gesture. He didn’t speak again until they were almost alone.

“Care to explain your outburst?” Waldo asked him.

Max was acutely aware of the presence of Ollie, Carlos, and Malik, who lingered behind sullenly as Waldo had ordered. Even if Max were inclined to discuss with Waldo what he had seen—and he wasn’t, not when he didn’t know whom to trust—he certainly wouldn’t do it with these galoots eavesdropping.

“It was nothing, professor. It was just a trick of the light,” Max lied. “I got hit on the head during a training exercise, and Doctor Asclepius said I might see light artifacts for the next few days. Sorry to disrupt your class.”

Waldo’s chair floated closer to Max, close enough for Max to get a whiff of the man’s rancid sweat. “For the sake of the smooth conduct of my class,” Waldo murmured quietly, his eyes flicking to the three Anarchy students, “as well as your own sake, you’d be well advised to not spotlight any additional vulnerabilities you might have. This institution respects strength more than it does candor.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Max promised.

He fled the classroom, feeling Waldo’s thoughtful eyes on him. He hustled to catch up to Gene, who was threading her way through the castle toward the Dining Hall with the rest of the class. He pulled her aside, telling Damian they would catch up with him.

“I’m going to ask you something, Gene, and I want you to be honest with me. Did you see anything unusual in Gadgetry class?”

“Did I see anything unusual?” she asked in disbelief, her guileless amber eyes goggling. “Brother, did I ever! Where do I even start? First, I got shot in the chest. The girls are my best feature, and one of them nearly got shot clean off. I almost peed my pants! It’s a good thing I’ve got this foil on for added protection. To protect my boobs, I mean, not catch the pee. Then, those spiders! Until I realized they weren’t real, I swear, I was this close,” she held her fingers a millimeter apart, “to unleashing a scream that would’ve shattered Waldo’s glasses. And don’t get me started on how you behaved. First you disarmed that awful boob-shooting Jabba the Hutt of a man, and then you popped up out of your chair like a startled meerkat on caffeine, acting like you’d seen the Ghost of Christmas Past. What was that all about?”

Max had been struggling to get a word in edgewise, and was grateful Gene had asked a question so he could finally talk. “No, no, not all that stuff. I mean about the hologram. Did you see anything unusual about the hologram?”

Her brow furrowed in thought. “The hologram? Nope, nothing weird there. It was all suit schematics and boring tech stuff. Though that info about the spider silk wasn’t as boring. Why? What did you see?”

He nodded, more to himself than to her. He believed her. Gene was eccentric, with a tendency to say whatever popped into her head, but she wasn’t one to play tricks or lie.

“You said you realized the spiders weren’t real,” he said, avoiding her question. “You mentioned that in class, too. Something about not sensing their mass. What did you mean by that?”

“You know how you can sense shadows?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I can sense living things. It’s a side effect of my body modification power.”

Max nodded. “That’s what I thought you meant. I know this is going to seem like a strange question, but I’ll ask anyway: At any point while Waldo’s hologram was active, did you sense any kind of life form within it?”

Gene looked at him the way he had looked at her when he discovered she had lined her underwear with tinfoil.

“Of course not,” she said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “Holograms aren’t alive, Max. They’re a product of technology. Technology is artificial. Definitely not alive.”

Max nodded again. “Thanks. Thanks a lot. And do me a favor—don’t mention this conversation to anyone else. Not even Damian.”

Gene frowned. “Why not?”

Because I can’t trust anyone, he thought. “Just don’t, okay?”

He turned away.

“Hey!” Gene exclaimed, pointing the opposite direction from where Max was headed. “Are you lost? The Dining Hall’s this way.”

“I’m not hungry. Besides, I need to run an errand.”

He ignored her further questions, disappearing around the corner.

Seeing that symbol, hearing that voice, feeling that powerful presence had re-ordered Max’s priorities.

He still needed to find out why Molly had slugged him. He still needed to avoid Malik and his vendetta. And most importantly, he still needed to escape Villains Island.

But right now, for reasons he didn’t completely understand, his immediate priority had become to figure out what he had seen in Gadgetry class.

He strode purposefully through the castle, knowing exactly where the answer might lie.