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  Thorn chewed on that. It was better than mindless bellowing, and the truth stung him—if only a little.

  “Sir, yes, sir.” Thorn had gained a bit of sense in his time at Code Nebula as to when he should call it quits. He poured a drop of the foul tonic on his finger and rubbed it into a spot on his forearm that was now blooming into a lurid bruise. The skin immediately began to tingle, and he tossed the bottle back to Burnitz.

  “Thank you, sir.” Thorn threw his legs into the air and landed on his feet, then he raised his fists to the ready position. “May I have another, sir?”

  At this, Burnitz grinned. “Why Stellers, I thought you’d never ask.” This time they engaged one another hand-to-hand.

  Thorn attacked with a sequence of quick jabs. Burnitz parried and landed a pointed knee in Thorn’s left quad. The muscle cramped on impact, but Thorn paid it no mind. Burnitz entered a series of varied attacks with blinding speed—jabs to the ribs, one to the temple, and a meaty hand clamped down on Thorn’s shoulder, pulling outward to cause a wild spin toward the ground. Thorn dropped his arm a second too slowly and failed to block the three-punch combination, but he twisted his body hard in the opposite direction as Burnitz attempted to ground him. As Thorn turned, he drove his elbow up and was rewarded with a dull crack as blood sprayed from Burnitz’s shattered nose.

  The dark red blood stood out like a burn on the instructor’s pallid skin, followed quickly by a red flush of anger. Burnitz was losing his temper. He bull rushed Thorn, taking them both in a tumble that splayed arms and legs alike as they lost footing and crashed wildly down the riverbank.

  Burnitz bounced to his feet at the terminus of their fall and stopped Thorn’s descent with a savage snap kick that sent both men falling apart from the inertia.

  Violence had consequences, even among the highly trained.

  Thorn burned to take deep breaths, but with iron will, he masked his exhaustion. Predict the actions…he mused, as Burnitz circled to the right, trying to gain the upper bank. I can predict what I cause to happen. He let down the mask of control only slightly, wincing at the pain, then dropped his right arm just enough to make it seem he was hiding a weakness.

  There. Thorn watched carefully as Instructor Burnitz loosened his defenses so slightly, it was only a fugitive moment in his expression that gave it away. The corner of Burnitz’s mouth twitched upward in victory and he directed his attack to the right side of Thorn’s torso. Thorn caught the bull-necked man’s strike with his arm and pinched his wrist against his body, turned sharply to pull him close, and smashed the palm of his hand into Burnitz’s already bleeding nose.

  Burnitz was done. His pose went soft as he pulled away, shaking his head and snorting. He hawked and spat, eyes streaming tears from the vicious strike.

  Thorn raised his blood spattered hands with palms outward, signaling that he was now disarmed.

  Burnitz mastered his anger, but not before turning a poisoned glance at Thorn. With unsteady steps, the big instructor lumbered to the river’s edge, then he leaned down and washed his bloody face with the delicacy of a man in pain. Waving his arm at the recruits, Burnitz bellowed “Dismissed!” in a nasal twang, then turned to approach the water at the bank and waved his arm back toward the hushed recruits. “I said dismissed!”

  “Sir, are—”

  “Not a word, Stellers,” Burnitz said, and his voice held a note of command. “It’s only personal if you make it that way. Otherwise, it’s just business.”

  Wash. Rinse. Repeat. The days recycled, and Thorn had begun to lose himself in the routine. Narvez, Burnitz, Narvez, Hiroshi, bunk. Narvez, Hiroshi, Burnitz, Narvez, bunk.

  The mess hall had become a distant memory as training now required the Mages to eat on the go. Breakfast was a carefully calculated macro-nutrient bar, devoid of taste, that Narvez tossed at them as they hauled ass from their bunks to the first station of the morning. Lunch would be waiting for them at the third station and was expected to be inhaled before the instructor completed directives. The days regularly surpassed dinner hours, and the remainders, whatever those may be, sat outside the locked steel doors for the recruits to collect on their way to the barracks.

  Once a week they were sent to the medwing for a brief physical to ensure proper hydration and appropriate increase in muscle mass. If it was found that muscle had actually been lost, the individual recruit’s breakfast bar nutrients would be recalculated to compensate the following week. Thorn had seen cattle raised for slaughter. This was different. Cattle ate food that had flavor.

  Drigo dropped to the bunk beside Thorn and exhaled. “It’s a bitch, ain’t it?” He turned to his side and propped his head up on his fist.

  “If you’re speaking in generalities—yeah. It’s one hell of a bitch, Drigo.”

  Drigo flopped backward, spreading his arms across the narrow bunk, but not without an exaggerated groan. “Well, yeah, I mean my body ain’t never been so sore in my life. It’s like as soon as you get used to it, they switch it up on you so you can’t ever heal.”

  Tuck passed by and pounded his fist against Drigo’s. “That is exactly what they do. Keep us on our toes. That is how we become the strongest intergalactic force.” He pounded his fist against his chest in Spartan fervor. “My pain is pleasure.”

  Thorn struggled to place Tuck’s accent but was too tired to care. His hard consonants made him believe he hailed from the Velorum system—Naunet maybe. A people bred for survival in the harshest of environments. Hardasses to the last person.

  Drigo scoffed at their tall bunkmate. “Speak for yourself, Goldie. I ain’t into bein’ hurt to prove a point.”

  Tuck ran a hand through his pin-straight blonde hair. “I pity you, small man. You don’t understand the nature of learning. It’s pain. Otherwise, it’s not learning.” He moved to his bunk and crashed into it.

  “Great. A philosopher and a magician. Like we need both in one guy. Thorn, y’think we should—” Drigo began, but his only answer was the soft snore of everyone else in the barracks.

  “I can take a hint.” In seconds, Drigo was snoring too, pain or no, but Thorn’s eyes flickered back open as he let the room grow still, air ripe with exhaustion and the placid noise of people driven to the edge. And beyond.

  Thorn reached his callused hand beneath his pillow and felt for the cover of the tattered book he’d placed there. Satisfied, he closed his eyes, feeling the darkness as a weight that settled down like a welcome friend.

  He didn’t rest long.

  Barrack 2A jolted awake to the noise of heloplane engines, chaos erupting in each bunk while the recruits stumbled as they stepped into their combat boots, fatigues already on.

  Instructor Hiroshi met them as they burst through the metal doorframe and tumbled outside in disarray. His face was a slab of stone, implacable but tinged with disappointment simply by seeing them fight their way to some semblance of order.

  “Today is your Class practicum,” Hiroshi began. “Your mission details await you on your individual holoscreens in the heloplane. There will be no breakfast this morning. The enemy does not wait to make sure you’ve eaten. The alien scum will attack when you are least prepared. And they know exactly when you are least prepared.” At this, Hiroshi shook his head in resignation. “I can do no more than observe in this practicum. You will not see me, nor will you hear me. You will become reacquainted with the Hammer—Instructor Burnitz. Good luck, Private Starcasters. Board your planes.”

  Hiroshi pulled his hood to shroud his face and spoke a few words under his breath that Thorn didn’t understand, the liquid syllables vanishing on the breeze. The tunic flickered, and he was gone.

  “Okay, I need one of those,” Thorn muttered, remaining at attention. He studied the area where his instructor had been seconds earlier. Hiroshi was using an environmental cloak—invisibility, more or less—and it was just one tech item that made the corps seem like it was populated by wizards instead of soldiers who also happened to be actual wizards. “Whic
h we are. Both.”

  He broke off his amazement to board with the other soldiers. Each person strapped into their jump seat and typed a code on corresponding holoscreens. Every recruit was given their own individual task to accomplish in support of the main event; the mission overview was deceptively simple.

  They would take the enemy base.

  Barrack 4D was set to oppose them in this practicum. Thorn had heard they had one hell of a Hammer, but not much else in the way of magic. Still, raw force—a Hammer—was a dangerous enemy ability. Subtlety wasn’t always needed, especially if you were pounded into paste before you could cast your own spells.

  The heloplane had begun to decrease in speed, the engines switching tone as they neared their target. The group had been silent for the flight, each handling the unexpected test in their own way. Some twitched. Some stared. No one slept.

  Thorn made a silent decision.

  He cleared his throat in that obvious way meaning a speech comes next. “I don’t have an expensive glass to tap with my fork, so listen up,” Thorn said in a bold voice. He was surprised to see that they did, in fact, listen up. All eyes were on him.

  “We’ve got one chance to complete this mission and pass our Class practicum. We pass, that puts us at First Class Starcaster. We each have our individual assignments, but we’re going to have to overtake 4D’s stronghold as a team. We hit our marks, and we move forward.” Thorn tapped his fingers against his holoscreen in a rhythmic pattern and projected it between their seats. “The battlegrounds. Mark your assignments here.”

  Streya was the first to ping her red dot to the screen. “Stellers, what’s our plan? We don’t have a lot of time to alter it.” She tugged nervously at her hair, looking around.

  The remaining six dots had appeared on the screen, and Thorn circled pairs. “This. This is our tactic. The assignment is meant to divide us, but we will move in teams. Streya, you’ll be with Unger. Val, you’ve got Rodie. I’d apologize but we don’t have time for that. Drigo and Tuck, watch each other’s backs—you’ve got a high visibility zone.”

  Streya’s hands fell to her lap, fingers braided with nervous energy. “You mean I’ve got the Joiner? He doesn’t even know his true strength yet, and I’m not sure that telepathy or even psionics of any kind will help.” She measured Unger’s impressive stature with a hint of disapproval. As a Joiner, he could meld with other minds, but it might not be useful during their test.

  “Then you watch him and make sure he gets off that field unscathed, okay?” Thorn’s voice crackled with authority. As a Purecaster, he was born with magic, but many Joiners developed slowly—or even learned as their lives went on, initially unaware of their potential. The idea that a Joiner’s magic was somehow less or even weak was beyond his comprehension. In Thorn’s eyes, there was magic—or no magic. The source was irrelevant, as long as the spells were under control and things that were supposed to go boom went boom. “Unger is good. He’ll do his job.”

  The heloplane hovered and began its descent. “No, no, no. This is not right.” Tuck released his straps and grabbed the cargo netting above his head. “You have no team. You’re all alone.” His eyes bored into Thorn’s, a mixture of worried envy creasing his features.

  Thorn got to his feet, grinning. “It’s lonely at the top. I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. We can build the team later by blending, but for now we go take this stronghold, and we don’t keep anything in reserve. I want us tapped out and victorious or we don’t deserve to be here. Agreed? They exited the heloplane at the drop zone and headed into the dense forest in admirable formation, a bounce in their collective step. Thorn’s growing command presence was a bulwark against the long days and exhausted nights. They’d earned this through long days of sweat and exhaustion, and now they had a chance to prove their worth.

  As self-appointed leader, Thorn made his way silently to the crest of the hill. His assignment was to draw the Hammer away from the stronghold and neutralize him. His eyes scanned the canopy of trees surrounding the crumbling cement stronghold. The structure had definitely seen better days, as mortar speckled the ground in an array of broken chunks. The walls themselves were pitted, hemmed in moss, and crawling with vines thicker than Thorn’s wrist.

  He caught sight of a strong breeze tearing through the trees to the East, nodding to himself as the pieces fell into place. He’s there. Burnitz. He’s coming.

  “Now, to draw attention without appearing to want the attention,” Thorn said. “Burnitz knows me. That means he’ll try to predict what we’re going to do.”

  “Which is?” Drigo asked, his feral gaze never leaving the walls.

  “We make our final move, not the one Burnitz is looking for. Old tactic I picked up from a man who played games with me.”

  “Think it’ll work?” Streya asked.

  “I’m counting on it.”

  Thorn drew on the air surrounding him, feeling his energy grow as each particle struck his senses. Heat began to build, then pressure, and then he channeled all of it into his open palms, turned up to the sky like a supplicant before an ancient temple.

  The energy pulsed, glowing in a dark, shimmering void. He waited until he saw the breeze shake the leaves once more, fighting to constrain the power that begged to be released. Like a beast at the ready, he let it run free, throwing two explosive bursts into the trees fifty yards ahead of the Hammer’s trajectory. The light sizzled away, searing the air around it as it passed to impact like a pair of orbital bombs. When the thunderous sound of his attacks faded, the breeze did too, and all the leaves before them came to a stillness that seemed unnatural given the violence of a moment earlier.

  After a quiet beat, Thorn worried that the Burnitz had hidden depths to his strategy, but then he saw the funnel cloud descending from the sky.

  “Here we go,” Thorn growled, his bluff working to perfection. He could hear the forest creaking as trees were torn from their root systems, rising into the air in a dangerous vacuum of tortured debris.

  One click in his comms device notified him that Streya had disarmed the security systems by magic or—well, it had to be magic. Thorn felt his energy gathering, but as an afterthought, because he hadn’t noticed the black cloud growing above his head. He focused on the globe of light he held in each hand as he raced toward the Hammer, flickering, hard-edged shadows dancing around him from the magical brightness.

  Two clicks signified that Drigo had neutralized the Western guards. The team was moving faster than Thorn had anticipated.

  Good. We’re early, he thought.

  In a disjointed swirl, the cyclone reversed, releasing a maelstrom of debris, then picking it back up to whine through the air like a collection of lethal missiles.

  Something had tipped him off.

  Thorn had to draw his team back before they joined the vortex. He could not fail. Failure meant a one-way trip back to the pipe fields and, even worse, shitty coffee. A rage filled his chest unlike any he had felt before. The black cloud above his head sparked with blue light and began to draw on the cyclone, pulling at its edges, absorbing its power and diffusing it into the lacuna sky.

  Control. Not revenge. Thorn’s thoughts were short and cast of iron.

  He turned his eyes slowly toward the chasm of energy above his head. Before he had the opportunity to process what he’d just created, the ground trembled beneath him and he lost his footing, the earth slipping sideways in a moving slab. Rodie. His feet continued to slip as Rodie’s magic ran wild and free—and unchecked.

  Too much. The cloud disbanded and his energy dwindled. Thorn knew there were limits to how much force they could apply, and the limit was answered seconds later.

  A phosphorous globe of light shot into the sky and fizzled into red streamers. The med flare. Thorn dropped his weapon to swing it on its strap behind his back and sprinted toward the cement building in the center of the valley.

  Practice could wait.

  By firing a defensive globe of magic toward the ru
bble, Val managed to save herself.

  Or at least she tried. She took in a breath, but carefully. Every part of her body rang with pain, the bruising so complete she looked like her skin was changing colors.

  The mass of concrete from Rodie’s idiotic loss of control had fallen on her, but in a sliding motion, its path turned by the raw power of her intervention. Luckily, she hadn’t been killed on impact. Rodie had given in to his ego and harvested too much energy before casting. He couldn’t tend what he’d produced—the quake had brought the building down when it was only supposed to crack the seal to the control room.

  Again, Val groaned, then turned her head as she sensed a presence.

  Commander Schrader stood over her bedside in the medwing. A cold aura emanated from his very being, and he turned to address the squad.

  “Lieutenant Narvez, Instructor Hirsoshi.” His icy blue eyes pierced the officers. “It is your duty to determine proper timing of the Class practical. These dogs haven’t been housebroken yet, to sum up.”

  Instructor Hiroshi came to attention. “Commander, sir, I accept full responsibility for this incident.”

  “As well you should, Instructor. Your pets are gonna get us killed.” Schrader was unnaturally still, only his lips moving as he spoke. “Ernest Rodie, step forward.”

  Rodie’s eyes bulged with worry behind his glasses. “Sir, yes, sir, Commander, sir.” The skinny man stuttered through his response; any bluster he’d possessed had been little more than a show and was now only a memory.

  “For the crime of casting in excess of what you are capable of controlling, and nearly killing your fellow recruit, you will be given two full days of isolation in the Electromagnetic Variance chamber. She would likely have been crushed in that rubble if it weren’t for her immense capabilities as a Castle. While in EV, you will attempt to harness and control your magic while the energy variations work to pull that control away from you. You will not eat. You will remain under high frequency light waves, and you will not sleep. Is this punishment clear?” Schrader spoke with a calm that undermined the severity of the sentence.