For the sake of her country, Freckle had to infiltrate the New Learning. Her father spent her childhood teaching her how.

  After so many years, she still had to dig her feet into the warm, coarse beach sand not to run to her disguised celebrity friend, Uncle Dalice, and the noontime shortness of the blue-spirited extra shadow he’d been casting lately. She pressed her teeth into her tongue to avoid calling out either and looked around the beach. On her white shorts, she traced an O for herself and her friends, a line for obstacles and advantages, and an X for two guards securing the door to an old, beach side gala lounge and the hazing ritual that her father’s not-so-benevolent rivals.

  Like a pawn hiding behind a bishop, she rounded the red-blue-violet crowds to rendezvous pre-infiltration with the others. She arrived, and Uncle Dalice was holding a rusted old nail in front of his tinted eyeglasses. Leaning in, she asked, “Did you recruit anyone else?”

  “Yes.” He turned the nail over in his fingers. “I see no indication that this is any newer than we’d guessed. We’re clear to sneak in after you.”

  Uncle Dalice tossed the nail through his shadows and into the spraying sea.

  His extra shadow rippled toward Freckle. “Get going! We’ll race you to the trapdoor, beat you there, and conquer this trial!”

  Freckle blinked. “Are we ready for that?”

  The shadow snorted. “Oh please, here comes our latest recruit already! She needs you inside to let us all in.”

  “Our latest recruit?” Freckle surveyed the beach, and Uncle Dalice pointed out to her a winged woman with dragon horns.

  Freckle noted the blue-violet aura she wore and the bright red spot on her shoulder. Though she stared at the spotted aura (she’d never seen such a thing before!), she bit her tongue and updated the positioning on her shorts with her own movement and one extra ally.

  She went to sacrifice herself, kicking up sand and dusting her shorts in a beach yellow. One guard wore a true violet aura (clearly, he was a fear type), and the other wore a reddish-purple one more difficult to interpret, except that he had some element of anger.

  Freckle looked more carefully at his aura as he glared at her from in front of the gala lounge door. In the eye area, it held the blackness she’d long associated with hopelessness, but she gleaned nothing else about him.

  He glared at her, and she, a volunteer to be her father’s pawn, would be taken any moment. In chess, it was the endgame that mattered, and the logic made it easier to bear the strategic vulnerability.

  “Freckle Grand,” she said. “I’m registered for twelve thirty.”

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

  The guards straightened and gawked. One angled himself as though trying to look down her shirt.

  “She’s wearing all white. Think we could push her into the water?”

  “From here?”

  Sometimes, going for weak moves at the start could convince your opponent to make mistakes that cost them the game and altered your life forever. Freckle reached into her pocket and pulled out a clay tablet baked with the word shame. "Or maybe you could catch me after the Trial. I'd hate for you to get in trouble over leaving your posts for me. When do your shifts end?"

  “Cover-”

  One guard put his hand over the other’s and whispered something in his ear. As he pulled away, he frowned at Freckle. “What are you giving up to undertake this trial?”

  "Check your records," she said. "My family has already sacrificed a good deal of money for me to be here."

  The guards softened their sneers as they checked the records to confirm that she was rich enough to gain respect from those who claimed to hate material wealth.

  After she entered alone into the grimy maze that the old building had been converted into, the door clicked shut behind her. It left the only sounds within the maze her pounding heart, some buzzing insects somewhere nearby, and a dripping sound that could have been connected to the foul stench in the air.

  Freckle used her fists to muffle her screams. No, she hadn’t been taken by the enemy (and what a relief!), but why did her own morals put her into a position where she could have been? Why did they put her here, in what she understood to be a sometimes-deadly hazing ritual inside a dilapidated building?

  Yet, the same inner voice she'd listened to since she was a child begged her to stop throwing a tantrum and go be a hero. She hadn't been taken, so she could adjust her strategy to move toward a square behind the enemy's lines.

  Though Freckle looked up and around at the maze, tracing obstacle lines on her leg only got her so far as the hasty wood walls obscured most of the room. The floor wasn't any better, as the grime and coloration made it difficult to discern where one tile ended and the next began, and it made her wonder how difficult it would be to find the emergency exit that Uncle Dalice told her about from antiquity.

  She turned her ear to guess the path from which the buzzing came, and though she and the insects remained the only life she could account for her on leg-map, a strangely angelic singing filtered through the door as though from the guards.

  Opting for a systemic approach to searching the maze, she hurried to search for the trapdoor to sneak her ineligible teammates inside.

  The grit on the floor crunched with every step, and as she peeked around her first corner, she saw an aura-less half-armor display turn its helmet toward her. "Fraud! Traitor-born! Defect! There is something seriously, incurably wrong with you. Show some respect for once in your life!"

  "Lies," she said, knowing that there was no living person to hear what she said to the armor. "My father is merely a rival to the gods in power. Just because the religion switches every few centuries does not make him a traitor or me a defect!"

  But she was a fraud, wasn't she? Pretending to be fully human to qualify for the Trials. Pretending to be interested in converting to the New Learning to place herself as a spy.

  As the armor continued its tirade, Freckle clenched her fists and examined the floor. If there was one upside to finding a dead end, the floor was cleaner here, as though few bothered to track grime onto it after realizing they'd gone the wrong way. She could see with relative certain that this wasn't where the trapdoor hid.

  Huffing, she returned to the first passage, wondering from how far away she could hear the others knocking if they reached the door before she did. It probably wouldn't be as easy to hear over any further insults from the maze's armor.