Akari sat alone in the headteacher’s office, crossing her arms as the air vent blasted her from above.

A hoodie would be nice right about now. Or two. Seriously, who ran the air conditioning in Hexember? It was like Grandhall wanted her to freeze.

Dark wooden shelves lined the wall to her left, filled with all sorts of pretentious-looking books. A pair of abstract paintings hung on one side of the curtained window, and his university degrees hung on the other side.

Footsteps echoed from the other room, and Akari jumped as the door swung open behind her.

“We tried calling your foster parents.” Grandhall spoke in a deep voice as he stepped behind his oaken desk. “Unfortunately, the calls went straight to the answering machine.”

No surprise there. Mazren worked out in the field as a mana Construct technician, and Noella spent all day mending patients with her healing arts. Then again, Akari would bet a mana core to a marble that they’d still pick up the phone for their real daughter.

Grandhall sat down in his brown leather chair and began sifting through papers. As usual, the headteacher wore a navy suit with a polished Silver badge over his white dress shirt. His complexion was dark for an Espirian, and he kept his black hair cropped short.

“Mr. Carvell has examined your computer, and he found software and scripts that could be used for hacking.”

Akari pressed her lips into a line. Grandhall was fishing for a reaction, but every good hacker knew to cover her trail. She’d even encoded her notebooks in case they went snooping.

Still, that sucked that he’d sent Carvell after her. She liked the Computer Science teacher, and not just because he was a Bronze.

“Miss Frostblade says you were trying to change the security camera footage.” Grandhall didn’t look up from his papers. “She says you threatened her, claiming you could ‘hack’ the footage and get her expelled.”

Bitch.

And of course, he’d already talked with Emberlyn and her ninety-nine minions, leaving Akari to twiddle her thumbs in the waiting room. Whatever they’d said would be the Angel’s truth, while Akari’s words would be labeled as the lies of a Bronze.

Grandhall continued with the charges, and his papers sounded like birds’ wings as he leafed through them. They’d discovered her fake independent study, but that wasn’t hard, since it didn’t have a teacher assigned to it. That was a flaw in their own system, and no one could prove she’d done it on purpose.

They also knew about the crawl space between the bathrooms and the computer lab. Harder to deny that one when they’d found her sitting behind a locked door.

Strangely enough, Emberlyn had left out the part where Akari punched her. Why? She probably had a nice purple bruise to prove it.

“So?” Grandhall’s chair groaned as he leaned back. “Anything to say in your defense?”

“There’s no point,” Akari muttered. “But if you look at the camera footage—”

“We have reviewed the footage,” he replied. “We saw you and Miss Frostblade talking. Nothing else.”

She figured this would happen. Elegan High was safer than most schools, but that only made it worse when students attacked each other. Everyone looked at the victims like they were crazy.

“Emberlyn changed it,” Akari said. “But North Elegan Security keeps an off-site backup. I’ll bet she didn’t know about that.”

He leaned forward. “Is that what you were doing today? Trying to access that footage?”

Akari snapped her mouth shut, curling her fingers into fists on her lap. The evidence was there, but they chose to ignore it. Grandhall outranked the Golds as long as they were his students, but those rules only existed on paper. Real life was far messier.

Golds weren’t technically allowed to bribe or threaten school staff, just like Emberlyn wasn’t technically allowed to use mana arts on her peers. People had gone to great lengths to make the world look fair and just.

“This doesn’t look good for you.” Grandhall spoke into the sudden silence. “You claim Miss Frostblade changed the footage. But unlike you, she has no record of rule-breaking. Also, we hold our students in the Mana Wing to a high standard. We haven’t had an incident in over three years.”

Typical. Not only did Emberlyn’s father donate to the school’s mana arts program, but an incident like this would make Grandhall look bad. If he saw an easy way out, he would take it.

And if a Bronze paid the price, then so what?

Akari stopped paying attention after that. It was all more accusations she couldn’t defend against. If she tried, they would only use her own words against her.

Finally, after what seemed like ten more hours, Grandhall got to her sentence. “As I said, Miss Zeller, we can’t prove you were hacking, and it’s clear you refuse to cooperate with us. We do, however, know you’ve been sneaking into the computer lab every day. This proves you can’t be trusted.”

Damnit, this can’t be good.

“From now on,” he said, “a security guard will escort you between all your classes. You’ll also be banned from the computer lab for the rest of the year.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

~~~

School was over by the time they released her, and crowds of students filled the quad as they waited to board their trains back home.

Talek, but she hated this time of year. The dusty air always made her eyes water. They’d been doing that ever since she left the headteacher’s office today. Better to walk home alone rather than have people on the train get the wrong idea.

Her route took her below a raised train platform and past dozens of brick buildings, all crammed together between the river and Main Street. Most were small shops and cafes with smaller apartments on the upper levels. Red maples and cherry blossoms lined the streets, and clusters of college students sat on benches with coffee and open textbooks.

The chapel loomed over the rest of the buildings, with a massive statue of the Archangel Talek standing over the thick wooden doors. People worshipped all six Angels historically, but Talek seemed to be the favorite these days.

Once again, Akari opted for a longer, less crowded route, cutting through Phoenix Park rather than facing the crowds. Here, she walked down a stone staircase and followed the winding path along the river.

A group of younger kids practiced mana arts stances in an open grass area while a gray-haired Silver critiqued their moves. These stances wouldn’t actually turn them into mana artists, of course. If they did, the state wouldn’t let them practice in public. But this was apparently one of many prerequisite skills you needed to learn.

Akari only had a vague idea about the others. Every human soul produced mana, but only artists knew how to sense that mana and move it through their bodies. That was step one. From there, you needed to form the mana into specific shapes for Missiles and Constructs.

Aspecting your mana was even more complicated. Emberlyn had ice mana because she was training to be a Martial, but there were a hundred other options she could have chosen. Healing artists like her foster mother used restoration mana to mend wounds. Soldiers used metal and fire in battle. Sailors used water and air to move their boats, and the list went on.

But where did the aspects come from? Emberlyn’s mana was cold, sure, but it only took on the properties of ice. You wouldn’t actually find frozen water molecules if you put it under a microscope.

Was it possible to learn the basics of mana arts without choosing an aspect? Akari could never get a direct answer, and now she was farther from the truth than ever.

Grandhall’s sentence echoed in her mind like an annoying song she’d rather forget. This was so much worse than suspension. Without the computer lab, she couldn’t research anything. Not only was the dark web out of reach, but she couldn’t earn money by changing kids’ grades.

She would need that money if she wanted to survive the next year on her own.

Cobblestones gave way to concrete when she reached her neighborhood. Moss sprouted from cracks in the sidewalks, and piles of dead leaves spilled out from front yards. It seemed like the amount had doubled overnight, and they covered her ankles in some spots. Although, they did make a satisfying sound as they crunched under her Traverse shoes. So maybe autumn wasn’t so bad, after all. At least the air smelled nice, and the weather wasn’t too cold.

The Cliftons’ house looked just like the others in her neighborhood, with brown bricks and white trim across the front, and piles of leaves littering the lawn. Mazren’s dark blue Quest sat parked in the road outside, and a layer of dust covered the bottom half as if he’d just driven down a dirt road.

The TV was the first thing she heard when she stepped inside—probably her foster father watching the news. Maybe, if she avoided the creaking floorboards, he wouldn’t—

“Akari?” a voice asked from the living room.

She slumped her shoulders and stepped forward into the archway. “Yeah?”

Mazren sat on the leather sofa with the day’s mail sprawled on the cushion beside him. He looked like a typical Northern Espirian—light brown hair, clear blue eyes, and high cheekbones. He still wore his work clothes, Silver badge and all.

“You’re home early,” she said.

He nodded, not taking his eyes off the TV. “I had to leave work for an appointment.” When he finally turned to face her, his eyes widened and he lowered the volume on the TV. “What happened to your forehead?”

She glanced away with a quick shrug. “Slipped and fell on a dumpster.”

He hummed in consideration. “Maybe Noella can look at it when she gets home.”

Now there was a good joke. Mazren pretended to care sometimes, but his wife made no effort at all. Even if Akari asked for healing—which she’d never do—Noella would claim her mana was drained from work.

It made Akari wonder how she got here in the first place, or why this particular family kept her around. It wasn’t like they needed the money.

“We got a message from your headteacher on the answering machine,” Mazren continued. “Multiple messages, actually.”

“Oh.” Akari fidgeted with the straps on her backpack. “What’d they say?”

“I don’t know. I’d rather hear it from you first.”

Again with pretending to care. Still, it couldn’t hurt to talk to someone. Talek knew she’d just make herself more miserable if she kept it bottled up.

So Akari told him about Emberlyn, and how the headteacher had caught her sneaking into the computer lab. She even told him about the ceiling crawl space, and how she’d allegedly been hacking into a server to get the camera footage.

To her surprise, Mazren actually chuckled at her story. “A ceiling crawl space, huh? How’d you even find out about that?”

A warmth spread through her chest at the implied compliment. “I saw it in the school’s blueprints. They’ve made some layout changes since then.”

“Ah, right.” He brought an amber glass bottle to his lips. “That whole section was an auditorium back in my day.” A short pause. “Was it Frostblade’s daughter who attacked you?”

Akari nodded.

“Never liked that family,” he muttered into the bottle.

She felt her lips curl into a small smile. At least someone believed her, even if it didn’t make a difference.

“You know, things would go easier for you if—”

“I don’t want easy,” she broke in. “I want to win next time.”

“Yeah, well, there’s no winning against Golds.”

And that’s only true if you believe it. Emberlyn had won this round, but only because Akari took the bait. If she’d been patient and waited to get the footage . . . well, Emberlyn probably would have had a backup plan, but still. Golds weren’t invincible.

Mazren turned back to the TV, and Akari followed his gaze. A reporter stood with a microphone outside a broken section of a chain-link fence. One of the holes looked big enough for a person to walk through, and several smaller holes surrounded it.

Her eyes widened at the sight. “Did mana Missiles do that?”

“Looks like it,” Mazren said as he turned up the volume. “It happened up in Keylas. Whoever this guy is, he put two Gold Martials in the hospital.”

Akari frowned. “Where’s Keylas?”

“Other side of the island,” he replied. “North of the Contested Area.”

She glanced back at the TV. “I didn’t know anyone lived over there.”

“They don’t, but there’s an opening in the mana wall. People think this guy came from the outside.”

“The outside . . . you mean another island? Like Zoron or Teras?”

He shook his head. “No, I mean outside the Archipelago. The conspiracy theorists are going crazy right now. They say this proves the outside world still exists.”

The outside world was supposed to be some uninhabitable wasteland. Espiria, Shoken, Cadria . . . all the major continents had been destroyed decades ago, and these islands were humanity’s last haven.

At least, that was the official story.

Akari shrugged off her backpack and sat down on the sofa to watch. She was, after all, one of those crazy conspiracy theorists.