Step one: find the system that controls the cuffs.

“Alright.” Kalden clapped his hands together as he paced in his basement office. “What do we know so far?”

Maelyn sat up straighter on the sofa. “Akari’s handler is a junior agent named Canin Stormspear. He works at the Martials’ office here in Elegan.”

Kalden wrote the agent’s name on the blackboard.

Stormspear. Why did the old Espirian clans get all the cool names? Trengsen meant ‘blood poem,’ hinting at his ancestors’ strategic battle prowess. But most people wouldn’t know that unless they spoke High Imperial Shokenese.

“He handles her day-to-day movements,” she said. “For example, she had an optometrist’s appointment last week. That’s three miles outside her radius, so her foster parents cleared it in advance. He can increase her range, or disable the cuffs entirely.”

Kalden wrote a list of bullet points under Stormspear’s name, getting all the intel in one place. More than a month had passed since the fight with Emberlyn, and he hadn’t spoken to Akari once during that time. The Martials were watching around every corner, and so was Kalden’s mother. This put any direct communication off the table, including meetings or phone calls.

Instead, Darren and Maelyn handled everything through proxies. Kalden also hid these movements through a web of obscurity, sending letters and phone calls to dozens of others, asking for irrelevant favors or items along the way.

He’d been careless before, and Akari had paid the price several times. That might still happen again, but she knew the risks. This whole plan was her idea, after all.

“And we’re sure these cuffs are controlled from a computer?” Kalden asked. “I thought they ran on mana sigils.”

“They run on the wearer’s mana.” Darren spoke up. “But the sigils only handle the location functions. All the data is sent through radio signals, then processed digitally.”

“Plus,” Maelyn said, “Stormspear can control the cuffs from his home if he needs to. That implies remote internet access.”

“Does anyone else have control over her cuffs?” Kalden asked. “Other agents?”

“Probably their HQ in Shoken Port,” Darren said. “But that place will be locked up like a fortress. Stormspear’s the weakest link.”

Kalden tossed his chalk between his open hands. “So there’s a website out there somewhere. Something Akari can hack into.”

“In theory,” Darren said. “But we’d need a starting point. Their Elegan branch doesn’t even have a public-facing site.”

“What about their main site? Do they have a page for Elegan?”

“They list the address and phone number,” Maelyn said. “That’s it.

“No staff directory?” Kalden asked. “No department numbers?”

She gave a helpless shrug. “Akari says we might need to social engineer this step—fish for info the old-fashioned way.”

Great. Impersonating the IT staff might work on the gullible old ladies at school, but that wouldn’t work on the Martials. Then again . . .

“Do you still have that burner phone?” he asked Maelyn.

“Sure.” She retrieved the black device from her purse and set it on the coffee table. “You really think you can fool a Martial agent? Even the junior ones are no pushover.”

“We don’t have to fool the agents. You said Stormspear is the weakest link, but that’s not true. They’ll need more office workers to keep the wheels spinning.”

Maelyn wrinkled her nose. “They won’t know anything useful.”

“This is only step one,” Kalden replied, underlining that part of the blackboard for emphasis. “We’ll worry about access later. But the Martials aren’t web experts. They probably contract with a third party. If we can get a name—”

Darren snapped his fingers. “Pretend to be an account auditor—someone who already has access to these records. We can say there’s a discrepancy with the billing. That should be enough to finagle some basics.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Maelyn slid the phone toward Darren.

“What?” Darren said. “Not me!”

“You’re the accounting major.”

“I also sound like a thirteen-year-old,” he said without a hint of shame. “Your voice is so mature and refined.”

She snorted. “If it’s mature you want, then Kalden should do it.”

Kalden shook his head. “I might sound mature for my age, but I won’t pass for a scary auditor.”

“I’m not scary!” Maelyn protested.

“Unless you’re mad,” Darren said. “Then you look like a pissed-off librarian.”

“Librarians are scary?” Kalden asked.

Darren nodded. “Have you seen Mrs. Kamoto?”

“You’re an idiot,” Maelyn deadpanned.

“There!” Darren slapped the table. “Do that voice for the Martial accountants. They’ll give you whatever you want.”

They spent the next few minutes hammering out the details of their script. Then, after bouncing between a few departments, Maelyn got the name of the Martials’ web firm.

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The battle was all downhill from there. She called the firm later that afternoon, posing as a prospective client. The salesman was all too happy to discuss their government contract, and how they’d built the interface on a system called Crosshair. After some more prodding, he even sent them a non-indexed URL for the control panel.

Everything was password-protected, of course, but that wouldn’t matter for long.

~~~

Step two: find a weakness in the system.

“The system is called Crosshair,” Kalden messaged Relia in the chat room. He’d been worried about finding her again after the battle in White Vale. Fortunately, she’d retrieved her computer from the Contested Area.

“Coming right up.” A few seconds passed, then she sent him a compressed archive file with dozens of exploits and scripts.

Kalden had already researched this software before messaging her. Apparently, it had been developed in Espiria a few decades back. No one used it in the outside world these days, so those exploits were all strictly academic. But software engineers were rare on Arkala, and hackers were even rarer. Even if they’d fixed most of these exploits, they only needed one to work.

“Can you test these yourselves?” Maelyn asked as they pored over the list.

“This is all gibberish to me,” Kalden said. “We’ll need Akari . . .” He trailed off, turning away from the monitor to face his friends. “Things only get riskier from here. If Akari and I escape, we’ll be free. But you two . . .”

“I’m staying,” Darren said. “You can’t pull this off by yourself.”

“Same,” Maelyn said. “We’ll see this through to the end.”

And that was the extent of their explanations. They still didn’t believe him about the outside world, and he couldn’t share any specifics without implicating them in his crimes. Still, they risked everything to help him get there.

Maelyn cleared her throat. “Not to be Captain Obvious, but what can Akari do without internet access?”

A fair question. Her foster parents didn’t own a computer, and she was still banned from the lab at Elegan High. Security guards trailed her all day, and there were no internet cafes within her radius.

To make matters worse, the Martials knew her exact schedule, and they would investigate any discrepancies. Sneaking back into school was out of the question.

But school was the only place they could pull this off without drawing attention. They just had to find a time when no one would miss her.

~~~

Step three: get access to a computer.

Akari stood under the hot spring sun, roasting with a hundred of her peers. They’d all gathered in the quad for graduation day, and the end couldn’t come fast enough.

Unfortunately, when your clan name was ‘Zeller,’ you were the last one to walk.

Her sixteenth birthday had come and gone, and she’d stayed with the Cliftons that entire time. Akari had endured it for more than a hundred days, biding her time for this moment. If she and Kalden failed, the Martials would put her in prison until she was old and gray.

If they succeeded, they would never be safe again. But she would have her mana arts back. More importantly, she and Kalden would leave this island together. Then they’d have a chance at real advancement.

The hours rolled by, and Akari shifted in her seat, sweating beneath her blouse and blazer. Waiting was the worst part of any fight. Nothing to do but imagine all the ways she might fail.

“Darren Warder,” the announcer said into the microphone.

Darren rose a few seats to her left and stepped toward the stage.

“Rina Watase.”

A Shokenese girl stood up next, and the wind caught her long black braids.

“Folan Yacksbane.”

A red-haired Espirian boy followed.

Seriously? His clan name was Yacksbane? How had she gone to this school for three years and never heard that? And what in Talek’s name had his ancestors done to that poor yack?

“Akari Zeller.” The announcer pulled her from her thoughts.

She stood and followed the others. Darren had accepted his diploma by now, but he didn’t return to his seat. Instead, he vanished into the shadows behind the stage.

With so many eyes on her, Akari’s restraints felt twice as heavy as usual, rubbing against her ankles and wrists with every step. She’d spent the last few months wearing long-sleeve blouses to school, and these did a good job of hiding her cuffs.

PE class was harder—Elegan High’s uniform was just a simple blue T-shirt and a pair of matching shorts. Mazren had gotten her some athletic tights and a compression shirt, but the other girls had still seen her change in the locker room. After that, it hadn’t taken long for the rumors to start.

They said she was a Bronze tramp who’d tried to seduce Kalden Trengsen. Why? That depended on who you asked. Some people claimed she wanted to get pregnant so she would have a Silver child. Others said she just wanted his money.

No one knew the exact story from Phoenix Park, but they knew Emberlyn and Akari had dueled there. Apparently, Emberlyn had nobly fought for Kalden, declaring her love for him.

Akari was the violent one in every version of the story. People said she punched and kicked at Emberlyn, using dirty street-fighting tricks rather than real mana arts. Others said she got her hands on Kalden’s Missile rods and used those.

The more ‘outlandish’ rumors claimed Akari had learned a secret Bronze version of mana arts. However, these powers came at a cost. They eroded away her sanity and self-control, making her attack people in fits of primal rage. The cuffs stopped that from happening.

At least they knew the cuffs blocked mana. Somehow, most people ignored that fact.

She wondered if she could have drawn less attention by wearing the restraints as a fashion statement rather than a shameful secret. Kalden could have pulled that off. Then again, Kalden didn’t even take PE classes. He spent most of the day at Elegan Community College, and she only caught glimpses of him in the morning.

As usual, it was easy to act cool and composed when the rules didn’t apply to you.

Akari took ten more steps toward the front of the stage, trying to hold her head high rather than shrinking back from their gazes.

Even the other Bronze had turned against her—probably so they didn’t end up in the crosshairs themselves. They’d given up a long time ago. And if Akari had been more like them, she wouldn’t have these restraints weighing her down.

But careful people didn’t change the world. She’d have to change it for them.

Akari accepted her useless piece of paper, then she followed in Darren’s footsteps behind the stage. Her path took her through the quad and toward the school itself. A pair of guards waited outside the main entrance, so she followed the sidewalk around the corner.

“Look for Alec,” Kalden had said in his last message. “He’s the guard who escorted you to our first meeting.”

She spotted the lanky man near a side entrance and tried to walk past him. He held out a hand before she could.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Akari told him.

He shook his head. “Can’t let you in there without an escort, Miss Zeller.”

“Seriously?” She crossed her arms. “School’s over. I graduated.”

“It’s still the rule.”

“Well, I’ve been holding it for two hours. Any longer, and—”

“I can escort Miss Zeller,” a girl’s voice said. Akari turned to see Maelyn standing right behind her on the sidewalk. She smiled at the guard as she stepped toward the door. “Won’t let her out of my sight. I promise.”

Akari grinned as she followed Maelyn into the school. At first, she’d assumed Kalden had paid off Alec to escort her and look the other way. In hindsight, that would only get him in trouble, and that wasn’t Kalden’s style.

After stopping at the bathroom (she hadn’t been lying about that part) they made their way to the computer lab. Maelyn looked both ways, then knocked in a rhythmic pattern.

Darren opened the door a second later, gesturing them inside. Kalden was already sitting at a computer, and he spun around in his chair to face her. After months of sneaking around and exchanging notes, seeing them all together felt strangely surreal.

“Hurry.” Kalden gestured toward the other computers. “My guess is we have thirty minutes before someone misses us.”

Thirty minutes. Akari had dealt with worse constraints when she’d snuck in here between classes. In many ways, she’d spent an entire semester preparing for this exact moment.