Chapter 8 - 7 — The Eighth Awakener
POV: Jace
The car stopped outside Chiron Academy, and my father had not asked me a single question since the corridor.
He had decided my staring was nerves, which suited me, because I had no answer that would not have sounded insane.
The driver opened my door, and I stepped out into a uniform I had not worn in six years.
The courtyard was already full. Teachers walked the lines with tablets, checking names and registration numbers, while the school buses idled along the road with their doors standing open.
Banners for the Regional Awakening Ceremony hung across the entrance arch, the same deep blue as I remembered, with the PSB seal stamped into the corner.
I remembered all of it.
Not vaguely, and not the way anybody remembers school. I remembered exactly where I had stood, and who laughed too loudly to cover being afraid, and which teacher kept checking the time because our bus had arrived late.
He was checking it now, from the same spot, with the same crease sitting between his eyebrows.
The car window came down behind me.
"I will see you inside. Families and invited guests use a separate entrance."
I turned back and looked at him a second longer than I should have, because he was sitting there with both hands resting on his knees and not one burn anywhere on him.
He noticed, since he always noticed, but this time he only frowned and let it go.
"Do not embarrass yourself by missing your school’s departure."
Then the window went up, and the car pulled away.
I joined the lines, and nobody insulted me.
That was the part people got wrong whenever they retold it afterwards. On that morning I was still Christopher Nolan’s son, and the whole courtyard assumed the only real question was how high I would score.
"That’s him."
"His father cleared a Red Gate last month."
"Someone out of a top ten bloodline can’t fail. It isn’t possible."
I had heard every one of those the first time, and they were exactly why the silence afterwards had been so complete.
The buses pulled out toward Concordia Stadium, and I took a window seat and watched the region go by, because thinking about history was easier than thinking about the hall waiting at the end of the road.
The Towers had erased the old borders long before I was born, and the governments that survived spent years trying to rebuild the world exactly as it had been.
That attempt died during the Second Gigantomachy, when Players who believed their power placed them above human law turned on the governments that had sheltered them.
Not all of them did. Plenty stayed with their countries and their neighborhoods and their families, and they fought other Players so ordinary people could get out alive.
By the end, too many countries were left without working governments or defensible borders, so under the Concordia Accords the survivors were consolidated into ten Regional Unions.
I lived in the North Atlantic Region, and this morning every eligible student in it was traveling toward the same building.
More than seventy thousand of us, eighteen and nineteen years old, pulled from every school the region had.
Most of them had never stood near a Player in their lives. The stands filled with public school students and private school students, with clan children and the sons and daughters of guild members, with corporate sponsored candidates and orphans raised in the post-Gate settlements.
People outside the system mixed those last two words up constantly, though they were nothing alike.
A clan runs on blood, passing its Abilities and its retainers down a family line, while a guild hires whoever can fight and sells that work as Gate clearing, Tower expeditions, and security contracts.
The PSB regulates both and owns neither.
Inside, the floor had been divided into hundreds of testing platforms meant to run at the same time, with more of them waiting in the connected halls.
Guild scouts filled the observation boxes, while clan families and invited guests had their own seating well away from the schools, and PSB officers held the barriers, the medical stations, and the registration desks.
I found my father from three tiers up, and so did the cameras.
Six years before the Red Gate, he was already the man every lens turned toward the moment he sat down.
The stadium lights dimmed, and a man in the dark uniform of the Player Security Bureau walked out onto the central stage.
The PSB controlled registration, Gate access, Tower expeditions, and every legal Awakening Ceremony held across the ten regions, so this morning belonged to them.
"There was a time when Players and ordinary people could not stand inside the same building without seeing an enemy."
His voice carried across seventy thousand seats without rising.
"Some Players decided their Abilities placed them above human law, and our governments answered with armies, with anti-Player weapons, with arrests and executions. Cities that survived the monsters were taken apart by the people who were supposed to rebuild them."
"Other Players chose us. They put themselves in front of civilians and fought their own kind to keep the evacuation routes open."
He looked up across the stands before he finished.
"This morning, seventy thousand of you are sitting peacefully under the protection of human officers and awakened Players at the same time, and that is your proof the war did not decide your future."
"You are not gathered here to learn who stands above humanity. You are here to discover who has been given the power to serve beside it."
My grandfather used to tell me about that war before he died.
I would sit near him as a child while he described holding a road open, fighting other Players for it, so that people carrying nothing could walk out of a city that was already burning.
He had been strong enough to take whatever he wanted and keep it, and he put himself between civilians and the men who thought exactly that instead.
That belief is what took Aurelian’s name away from him in the end, because my uncle called serving humans an insult to the power we were given, while my grandfather thought protecting them was the only reason the power had ever arrived.
The director moved on to the rules, and out on the floor the platforms opened.
Large transparent spheres rose out of them in every direction, catching the light as they came.
Resonance Spheres.
The first one was recovered from an early Tower floor, and researchers found that it changed color whenever an awakened Player touched it.
They matched those colors against the grades showing inside Players’ private System windows, and after years of repeated testing the same grade produced the same color every time.
Everything standing on the floor today was manufactured from materials modeled on that original relic.
A sphere cannot give you an Ability’s name, or its full effect, or its activation conditions, or its weaknesses, and it cannot open anybody’s private window.
It only confirms that an awakening has happened, and it shows the grade of the strongest resonance it can find.
Gray for F, white for E, green for D, and blue for C. Violet for B, red for A, silver for S, and black for SS.
Gold for SSS.
A sphere that stays transparent means nothing woke up at all.
The public scale stops there, since the PSB has never confirmed an EX Ability through a ceremony, so the word does not appear anywhere on their charts.
I thought about the three cards in my bedroom, and the gold one I had reached for.
Everybody in this stadium knew what gold meant coming out of a Resonance Sphere, because that scale had been public for decades.
Mimesis had never told me its cards used the same one.
"Understand what today is," the director said. "Passing this examination makes you a Player, and it does not make you a Hunter."
Anyone who awakened could apply to register with the PSB afterwards, and registration meant being measured on mana capacity, physical ability, Ability output, combat control, psychological stability, and practical performance.
Only at the end of all that does an applicant receive an official Hunter rank, along with permission to enter regulated Gates.
Plenty of Players never bother. They take ordinary jobs, or they join the PSB, or they go into research, or they live quietly and never register at all.
Then the examination began, and the schools started moving.
Hundreds of platforms ran at once while the central board filled with names and results faster than anybody could read them.
Sphere after sphere stayed transparent.
When the first one took color, the noise reached me before the board did, since the section above that platform came up out of their seats all together.
I watched it happen exactly the way I remembered, and then the second one, and then the third.
By late morning all seven of them had reached the board in the same order, and I knew every name before it appeared.
One of them would sign with a major guild inside two years, while one would turn down every offer and stay independent, and another would join the PSB.
One would die during his first year inside a Gate.
And one of them, years from now, would be standing close enough to Aurelian’s supporters that I would have to find out how she got there.
[Successful Awakenings: 7]
The same number as before, and history had not moved an inch.
Then Chiron Academy’s final group was called, and I walked down from our section toward the assigned platform.
People knew the name before I reached it. Cameras came around, and the whispering spread outward from the nearest schools.
My father watched from the guest seating with nothing at all showing on his face.
The examiner checked my identity against his list.
"Jace Nolan. Chiron Academy."
I stepped onto the platform.
The sphere sat there in front of me, clear as water.
The first time, I put my hand against it while thousands of people watched, and nothing happened. The examiner told me to try again, so I did, and it stayed transparent.
I remembered the silence far better than I remembered any laughter, because laughter would have meant they still thought it was a joke.
And I remembered looking up toward my father, and watching his face close before he turned away.
That one moment walked behind me for six years.
I put my palm against the sphere.
For one full second nothing happened, and the old fear came straight back up my spine as though none of the last six years had ever been undone.
My fingers pressed harder into the surface.
The examiner glanced down at his timer, and somewhere above me a whisper started.
Then warmth moved up through my palm.
A single point of light appeared in the middle of the sphere, and it did not spread so much as detonate.
The entire surface went gold at once, bright enough to throw my shadow across the platform and wash out the first rows of seats behind it.
The examiner stumbled backward off the step.
Every conversation in the stadium stopped inside the same breath.
[Successful Awakenings: 7 → 8]
The gold burned under my palm, and the examiner stared at it with all the color gone out of his face.
"Gold resonance," he whispered. "An SSS-class Ability."