Chapter 10: Awakening
The heavy steel door to the lab groaned open on protesting hinges. Jack Death stood in the threshold, immaculate in his black suit, a stark silhouette against the corridor’s gloom. His eyes, the color of tarnished silver, swept the scene. The shattered hex-grid, the scored floor, the dented steel benches. Amber leaning heavily on Leo, her face a palette of blooming purple and angry red. Alyce hovering like a nervous ghost near Crow, who cradled Angel’s limp form. The girl’s left shoulder sat wrong, a jarring lump beneath her torn shirt. One side of her face was swollen, a road map of abrasions and deep bruises darkening the skin around her closed eyes. She looked less like a student and more like a prizefighter left for dead in an alley.
His gaze flicked to Silas Blackwood, who stood calmly near a sparking console, wiping lab grease from his long fingers with a cloth.
“A bit beyond the usual extracurricular, Professor,” Jack said, his voice flat. He didn’t enter. The chaotic asymmetry of the ruined room—the benches shoved at odd angles, the singular cracked lens of Stein’s discarded glasses on the floor—made the muscles in his jaw twitch. A faint, warm trickle began in his left nostril. He discreetly pulled a perfectly folded handkerchief from his pocket.
“Merely a final examination, Mr. Death,” Silas replied, his voice a dry rustle. He turned to the gathered, battered students. “One arranged by your Headmaster, I might add. A training tool. A… stress test, to forge unity and reveal latent strengths under genuine duress.”
Leo’s grip on Amber tightened. “Duress? He was going to dissect her!”
“He was wearing a wig and cracked glasses,” Alyce snapped, though her voice lacked its usual fire. She couldn’t tear her eyes from Angel’s twisted arm.
“The persona was necessary,” Silas continued, unperturbed. “The late Dr. Stein’s particular… proclivities are well-documented in the archives. An effective archetype to provoke the required response. And of course, he remains a zombie. There is no reversing a resurrection from the Cursed Graveyard. We simply borrowed his historical reputation for theatricality. The Headmaster felt it would be motivational.”
Jack dabbed at his nosebleed, the white linen spotting red. Motivational. His father’s methods were as oblique and brutal as the geometry of this room. A hot coil of anger tightened in his chest, but he bit it back. Arguing with Silas was like arguing with a glacier. And the visual dissonance was becoming physically painful; a shelf on the far wall hung by one hinge, dangling at a 37-degree angle. It was an offense.
He watched as Crow, ignoring them all, shifted Angel’s weight and walked to a large, tarnished mirror on the wall. It wasn’t reflecting the room. It showed a shifting, smoky darkness.
“Headmaster,” Crow said, his tone stripped of all earlier madness, leaving only exhausted duty. “Mission parameters were met. The students are alive. One critical. Angelina took a full ‘Stein Resonance Spike’ by herself instead of using her weapon to block it. She absorbed it. Details to follow. We need Medusa at the east gate entrance. Now.” He didn’t wait for a response. The mirror’s surface swirled and went dormant.
Jack turned on his heel and left. The conversation was over. His fury at his father’s callous games had nowhere to go, choked out by the overwhelming need to be in a symmetrical, ordered space. The blood on his handkerchief was a bright, distracting red.
The jeep ride back to the academy was silent except for the roar of the engine and Alyce’s muttered, sustained complaint about stair-related tyranny. They’d bundled Angel onto the back seat, her head lolling against Alyce’s shoulder. Amber and Leo sat stiffly, wrapped in foil recovery blankets that crinkled with every bump.
Instead of heading for the monstrous, endless staircase carved into the cliff face—the traditional student path—Crow drove around to a sheer rock wall. He pressed his palm against a seemingly solid section. Stone ground against stone, revealing a smooth, steel-lined elevator.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Alyce breathed, helping maneuver Angel’s stretcher inside. “All this time, there’s a freaking elevator?”
“It is for faculty and critical transport,” Silas stated, as the doors closed and they began a swift, silent ascent.
“So we have to nearly die to avoid a cardio workout that would kill a mountain goat? That’s disciplinarily sadistic.”
“It teaches discipline,” Silas said, his tone implying the conversation was as closed as the elevator doors.
The elevator opened directly into a pristine, white-tiled receiving bay. Nurse Medusa was already there, her expression one of professional concern, a hover-stretcher beside her. Her kind eyes took in the scene, lingering on Angel’s battered form as Crow and Leo transferred her.
“A training mission,” Crow said preemptively, his voice gravelly.
Medusa’s warm demeanor chilled several degrees. She placed a gentle hand on Angel’s forehead, then glanced at the brutal angle of her shoulder. “Professor, there is training, and then there is brutality. These are students, not front-line legionnaires.”
Crow met her gaze, his silver eyes hollow. “Keshin don’t play easy, Nurse. They don’t grade on a curve.” He stepped back, relinquishing responsibility. “She consumed a Class-4 soul attack. Monitor for wavelength corruption. The shoulder is dislocated and possibly fractured.”
Medusa’s lips pressed into a thin line, but she nodded, orchestrating the stretcher’s movement with efficient grace. “I will see to her. See to your others.”
The infirmary was a landscape of quiet pain. Angel lay in an observation chamber, her arm now immobilized in a sophisticated hard-light cast that pulsed softly with regenerative energy. An IV line ran into her other arm, and a bank of monitors beside her bed traced jagged, anxious lines of her vital signs. The smell was sharp: ozone from soul-damage scanners, the astringent bite of antiseptic, and underneath it, the copper hint of blood.
Once Angel was stabilized, Medusa moved to Amber and Leo. She handed Amber a small vial of iridescent liquid. “For the pain and the soul-fatigue. Two drops under the tongue. Bed rest for three days. No resonance, no training. Your soul needs to knit.”
Amber took the vial, her fingers trembling slightly. Leo looped an arm around her. “I’ll get her home.”
They left, leaving Alyce hovering awkwardly by Angel’s chamber glass. Crow leaned against a wall near the door, arms crossed, watching the slow, steady drip of the IV. Silas had vanished.
“Her blood pressure is still high,” Alyce said, pointing at a number blinking on the monitor. “Look. It’s not coming down.”
Medusa approached, studying the readings. The rhythmic line of Angel’s heartbeat was fast, thready. “She is in a great deal of pain. Her body is fighting the foreign energy. Let me give her something stronger for the systemic shock.”
“Do it,” Crow said, pushing off the wall. He walked to the bed, looking down at Angel’s swollen face. His own expression was unreadable, a mask carved from obsidian. “The shoulder first.”
Medusa manipulated a control. The hard-light cast dissolved. Angel whimpered in her unconscious state, a raw, animal sound that made Alyce flinch.
Crow’s hands, those same hands that had pinned and threatened her hours before, were suddenly precise, steady. He placed one on Angel’s collarbone, the other around her upper arm. There was no ceremony. A sharp, calculated push and twist.
A wet pop echoed in the quiet room. Angel’s body jerked, a full-body spasm, and then went still. On the monitor, the spiking heart rate began a slow, reluctant descent.
“There,” Medusa murmured, administering a sedative through the IV line. The tense lines on Angel’s face softened minutely. The frantic beeping of the machines eased into a slower, more regular rhythm.
“She’s stable,” Crow announced, the word final. He didn’t look at Alyce. He just stared at Angel a moment longer, his eyes shadowed with something that might have been calculation, or guilt, or the first faint crack in his own contained madness.
He just stared at Angel a moment longer, his eyes shadowed with something that might have been calculation, or guilt, or the first faint crack in his own contained madness.
The silence was broken by the soft click of an electric kettle. Medusa turned towards her office with the little kitchenette on the side and started preparing hot tea for Crow and Alyce. The domestic sound was profoundly wrong here, amid the hum of medical scanners and the smell of violated flesh. Steam whispered from the spout, carrying the gentle, grassy scent of chamomile.
Crow leaned up against the wall as he stared at Angel, staring, staring, trying to read her soul. He’d seen her soul before, of course he had. Every meister’s soul had a texture, a color, a temperature. Hers had always registered as a curious, calm silver-gray, like still water under a moonless sky. One thing he hadn’t done, though, was tried to read further than the surface.
His specialty, one he had spent years perfecting, is the ability to analyze a soul and find all the person's attributes within. It was a dissection, a mapping of traumas and triumphs, fears and follies that composed a person’s wavelength. He had never needed to look further than the outside of Angel’s soul, until today. Until she consumed a weapon-shattering attack and stood back up.
He pushed his perception inward, past the silver-gray calm. He met a barrier. A resistance that felt less like a wall and more like a depth, a plunging silence that absorbed his probing. The most he was able to see through was a soul larger than his own. Vast. A soul with mysteries inside, and his scientific itch was driving him crazy to find out. It was an architecture he didn’t understand, and the not-knowing scraped against the ordered part of his mind that was already fraying.
Medusa finished preparing the hot tea and handed one to Crow and Alyce. The porcelain was almost painfully warm. Holding her own tea, she looked at the time on a wall chronometer and gave a start. “Oh, I must go see a student about her insulin, she’s late coming in.” She set her tea down on a sterile metal tray and rushed out the door, her white coat flapping.
Alyce set her tea on the small table beside Angel’s bed and didn’t touch it. She watched the slow, sedated rise and fall of Angel’s chest.
Just as Crow was about to put the cup to his mouth, the monitor on the wall started beeping slightly more, signaling a spike in heart rate. The green line jumped, etching frantic peaks. When he looked down at Angel, her eyes were open and fierce. The swelling had turned one to a slit, but the visible brown iris was sharp, lucid, and blazing with an urgent knowing that shouldn’t have been possible under sedation.
She said, “Don’t drink that.”
The words were slurred but unequivocal. Then, her eyes rolled back and she was unconscious again, her heart rate returning to its slow, medicated rhythm. The monitor’s beeping softened into a steady, reassuring pulse.
Alyce and Crow looked at each other. No words were exchanged. Collectively they poured their tea into the steel sink basin. The liquid swirled, pale yellow, down the drain. Crow checked the cup Medusa had left behind; it was identical, steaming innocently. He poured that out, too.
Crow checked on Angel periodically after that. He stood sentinel in the infirmary chair as shifts of med-techs came and went, as the light from the high, narrow windows cycled from dawn to dusk and back again. She spent a total of 3 days in the infirmary before her body was stable enough to come out of sedation. The swelling in her face had receded to a shadow of yellow and green. The hard-light cast on her arm had shrunk to a compact support around her bicep.
Amber, Alyce, and Leo were there when she woke up. Amber’s bruises had faded to a sickly greenish-yellow, but she was upright, leaning against the foot of the bed. Leo had his arm around her shoulders.
“Hey, sleeping beauty,” Alyce said, her voice uncharacteristically soft. She was perched on the edge of a visitor’s chair. “You gave us a real scare, you know that?”
Angel’s throat was desert-dry. “Water,” she croaked. Leo handed her a cup with a bent straw. The cool liquid was the best thing she’d ever tasted. Every part of her body throbbed with a deep, aching persistence, as if she’d been run over by a truck and then the truck backed up for a second pass. “Feel like hell,” she rasped.
“You look like hell,” Amber said, but she was smiling, a real one that reached her eyes. “But you’re okay. That’s what matters.”
They were happy she was okay. They filled her in on everything she’d missed the last few days. “Headmaster Death’s son is in the E.A.T. class now,” Leo said, rolling his eyes. “Jack Something-or-other. Walks around in a three-piece suit like he’s running a board meeting. Total weirdo. He’s the new celebrity of the school.”
“Along with you,” Alyce added, a grin spreading across her freckled face. “Because I made sure to spread about you kicking Professor Crow in the balls. That’s legendary. People are calling you ‘The Nutcracker’ behind his back.”
Angel managed a weak, pained chuckle that made her ribs protest. The sound felt strange. Good, but strange. She looked past them, to the empty doorway. “Where is he?”
“Lying low, probably,” Amber muttered. “Silas said the ‘exam’ is over. We passed. No more Dr. Stein.”
“For now,” Leo added, his tone grim.
Angel shifted, wincing as the movement sent a fresh spike of pain through her shoulder. The memory of the tea, the serpent like figure hovering over the cups, of the urgent need to warn them, surfaced like a bruise. She looked at Alyce. “The nurse. Medusa. Where is she?”
“Dunno,” Alyce shrugged. “Comes and goes. Why?”
Before Angel could form an answer, a new presence filled the doorway. It was Kilson Delacroix, his muscular frame almost too broad for the opening. He held a massive, cellophane-wrapped bouquet of violent orange lilies. He looked at Amber, his expression painfully hopeful. “Heard there was a party in the sickbay.”
Amber’s face shut down instantly. “No party. No need for flowers. Get out.”
“Amber, come on, I just wanted to—”
“Get. Out.” Her voice was low, final. Leo stepped slightly in front of her, his posture changing.
Kilson’s shoulders slumped. He looked at Angel, gave an awkward, miserable nod, and retreated, leaving the gaudy flowers leaning against the wall outside. The silence he left behind was thick.
Angel closed her eyes, sinking back into the pillow. The aching pains were a symphony. But underneath them, a new, steady heat was building. Not just pain. Purpose. They’d passed a test designed to break them. They’d seen the mask their teacher wore. And a nurse had tried to poison them with tea.
She opened her eyes again, looking at her friends—her partner, her allies. “Tell me everything about Jack Death,” she said, her voice clearer now. “And someone find out what ‘E.A.T.’ stands for.”