Akari kept waiting for a knock on her door, but the days stretched into a week with no word from Trask or the KCPD. The Artegium also kept quiet about the break-in, along with their missing quantum computer. Not that she’d expected a big announcement or anything. Koreldon University ranked among the world’s top schools, and their reputation was worth more than anything stored in their vaults.

  Student enrollment had also plummeted after Storm’s Eye’s attack, and the school had responded with a bold statement. The streets might be chaos, but their campus was the safest place on the East Coast. The teachers had things under control, and no mana beast had ever set foot in that part of town.

  They couldn’t risk a black eye after all that work.

  “Why not brag about their shiny new Artisans?” Akari asked one night in the loft. She leaned against the kitchen counter, using small bursts of mana to make an apple float over her outstretched palm. Kalden stood by the stove to her left, and the scent of garlic and ginger wafted up from his pan. He’d gotten surprisingly good at cooking these past few months.

  “You and Kalden are outliers.” Arturo spun in his desk chair to face them. “The school can’t recreate your success.”

  “So?” Akari’s stomach growled again, and she finally bit into her apple. “We’re still good for business, right?”

  “She has a point.” Kalden flipped the contents of his wok, filling the air with steam and flames. “Even Relia didn’t advance this early.” He turned to face Arturo. “And aren’t you the poster boy for the Sigilcraft program?”

  “That’s different, shoko. I did a double major and got some patents to my name. The school can take credit for all that.” He gestured toward them with his screwdriver. “You guys reached Artisan at seventeen, and no one but Elend knows how you did it. That just screams soulshine.”

  “Your Aeon connections don’t help.” Zukan spoke through gritted teeth as he pressed a barbell over his head. Sweat glistened on his green skin, catching the evening light that streamed through the tall glass windows. It was always strange to see a dragonborn sweat, but they weren’t actually reptiles despite their appearance.

  Arturo nodded. “Plus you guys like to piss off the teachers.”

  “Hey.” Kalden glanced over his shoulder. “I get along with the teachers just fine.”

  “To their faces, sure. But you bad-mouthed the whole school on TV last year.”

  Akari opened a portal to the nearest trashcan and threw away her apple core. Reaching the Artisan realm at seventeen shouldn’t be that suspicious, should it? Plenty of the current Mystics had done the same thing. Her own mother had also advanced to Master her twenties, and she hadn’t taken a drop of soulshine.

  Then again, North Shoken had its own advancement secrets. They really should visit that place someday and learn those secrets for themselves. But there’d be plenty of time for that after the saved Relia.

  In the meantime, Akari kept attending her classes and squeezing the Artegium for all she could. More than once, she’d thought about dropping out of school to work on her advancement full-time—especially now that she had some solid footholds. But the others had all convinced her to stay for now. The police were still searching for the missing quantum computer, despite the radio silence. Dropping out now would just make her look more suspicious.

  Besides, Nightfang was planning a trip into the Hollows next month. This was their chance to get the lay of the land and hunt some more mana beasts.

  ~~~

  Kalden lay on a small cot in the Solidor’s safe house. A tube fed dream mana into his brain, and the quantum computer loomed above him like a golden spider in its glass cage

  Akari’s fingers flew across the keyboard to his left. Several dark strands of hair had fallen in her face, and she muttered to herself as she worked. It reminded Kalden of their early days together, searching for Elend’s videos on the dark web.

  Glim hovered over her shoulder as a pulsing blue Missile, offering feedback along the way. Akari had spearheaded this project, but she’d also gotten plenty of help. Irina and Arturo had offered their own expertise, along with two scientists from the Cult of Solidor.

  They’d spent two weeks on the hardware setup and even longer on the software. Prism hadn’t been designed with quantum computers in mind, so the team had to start from scratch with a brand new program. Not to mention a new whole language called Q-Jade. Kalden didn’t know much about programming, but Akari had spent hours poring over the documentation.

  Now, they were finally ready for a test, and Kalden got to be their lab rat.

  “Okay.” Akari spun in her chair to face him. “Ready to go?”

  “Ready,” Kalden said with a nod. Akari typed a command, and the dream mana filled his brain an instant later. Phantom sensations raced through his channels, and Kalden followed the map with his aspect, listening for the resonance of a true technique.

  Glim hovered above him in her Missile form, scanning his channels, and sending data back to the quantum computer.

  “It’s working!” Akari said.

  “What?” Kalden opened his eyes. “This feels the same to me.”

  “We just ruled out ten thousand options.”

  “Ten thousand?” They’d started with two hundred million, so ten thousand hardly put a dent in their total. Even so . . .

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Make that twenty,” Akari said. Kalden couldn’t see her face from this angle, but he heard the smile in her voice. “Let’s do another one.” More keys clattered beneath her fingers as she prepared to do just that.

  The phantom cycling stopped, and Kalden propped himself up on his elbows. “How?” It had taken them several minutes to strike a single option from the list with their old setup. He could accept that quantum computers were faster, but this?

  “We only tested one pattern,” Kalden continued. “How could it know?”

  “We tested one patterns in your channels.” Akari stressed the last word as if that made things clearer. “But this can run millions of patterns once.”

  Glim appeared in the computer’s transparent case and took on her human form. The curvature of the case left her face and body looking bloated, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Let’s say you were trapped in a maze with a million different options. Normally, you would have to go through each option one by one until you found the exit. That’s why our first attempt failed. There wasn’t enough time.”

  “And a quantum computer can simulate every path at once,” Kalden finished for her. “I understand that part. But how does it know what the right path looks like?”

  He'd already researched quantum computers and the usual problems they solved. They cracked codes, predicted stock markets, and charted the course of mana storms. But those problems all seemed so simple by comparison. Cloak techniques had countless variables that humans couldn’t comprehend, much less measure. Knowledge mana also had a mental component to contend with. Even a perfectly formed Cloak technique was useless if his brain couldn’t process the results.

  “Two way feedback.” Glim gestured between Kalden and the computer behind her. “I tell the program what a dead-end looks like, and it finds more dead-ends that match it. We don’t need the right answer to make progress.”

  “Yep,” Akari said. “And that’s where the Artegium got stuck. They had the right tools, but they didn’t have a mana spirit.”

  “Well”—Glim flipped her blue hair and held her head higher—“I wasn’t gonna put it that way, but I’m glad someone did.”

  “And here’s the best part.” Akari leaned forward in her chair, looking like a kid on Midwinter morning. “The program keeps improving its model. It’ll get even faster as we go.”

  They spent the rest of the night simulating patterns with Kalden’s aspect, eliminating millions of options along the way.

  Forty-eight hours later, their work finally bore fruit.

  Most of these patterns had felt wrong from the start, like stepping into another person’s shoes. Other times, Kalden felt a brief resonance in his mana, but no effect. The shoes fit him, but they didn’t do anything. No enhanced speed, power, or traction. Just dead weight on his feet.

  But this was different. Crimson battle mana twisted in a complex spiral, branching out from his body and filling his surroundings. His failed techniques had been rigid shells, but this one felt alive, pulsing with every heartbeat like an extension of his own body. It was like seeing the world with a whole new sense, filled with patterns and connections that hadn’t existed before.

  "This . . .” Kalden's voice caught in his throat. "This might be the one” This wasn’t a true technique yet—that would take months of practice and refining to get right. But this was a start. Certainly more than he’d expected in such a short time.

  “Nope.” Akari rubbed her hands together like a mad scientist. “That’s the first one.”

  Things moved even faster once the program knew what to look for. They discovered fifty more viable options that day, and each one seemed more promising than the last. By the end of the week, they narrowed those fifty down to the best candidate.

  Two hundred years’ worth of work, all compressed into seven days.

  During that time, Akari used the same process to simulate her father’s space Cloak. When that was done, she made her own version of her mother’s time Cloak.

  But Akari didn’t stop there. She inputted the data for all her spacetime techniques, including her Missiles, portals, and time bubbles. Then she simulated better versions of those techniques, pushing each one to its limits.

  ~~~

  Elend stood with Irina outside the Solidor’s safe house, watching his students practice their new techniques in the lawn. Autumn had arrived in earnest now, and the trees reflected the evening sun in shades of orange and red.

  Space warped around Akari as she dodged every technique Kalden threw at her. Well, almost every technique. Kalden’s own Cloak let him see several moves ahead, and that extended to the smallest details of the battle. He even predicted the subtle warping of Akari’s mana and adjusted his own techniques accordingly.

  “What do you think?” Elend asked his wife.

  She stayed silent for several heartbeats, cycling knowledge mana between her body and her Second Brain. “Are you asking for my assessment or my emotional reaction?” Irina hadn’t asked that question in decades; that showed just how flustered she truly was.

  “The latter.” A faint smile tugged at the corners of Elend’s lips. “We both know perfection when we see it.”

  Irina gave a slow nod. “I’m glad those kids are on our side.” She rounded on him, almost meeting his eye. “I spent decades on my Cloak of a Thousand Eyes. Kalden’s technique isn’t just better than mine. It’s more than ten times better. That machine carved the perfect path through millions of possible futures.”

  Elend raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t question her. Irina had never been one to exaggerate when it came to math or numbers.

  The same probably held true for Akari’s new techniques. Not only had she made two perfect Cloaks this semester, but she had the potential to merge them both into a single technique. This new Cloak would combine both of her parent's abilities, letting her warp space and see the future all at once. If she succeeded, then it would be the strongest Cloak Elend had ever heard of.

  Laughter echoed up toward the house as Akari blended her space Cloak with a portal, dodging Kalden’s punch and appearing behind him. She hadn’t looked this happy all summer, and it reminded Elend of his own days as an Artisan. A time of pure discovery, momentum, and change.

  He’d also been dating Irina back then, and that made the memories even fonder.

  “You’re thinking of the past,” Irina said.

  Elend gave her a sidelong look. “What gave it away?”

  Golden knowledge mana swirled around her head like a tiny storm. “You blinked five times in under three seconds, and your left hand twitched toward your father’s old ring before you remembered it wasn’t there.”

  Oddly specific as usual. But Elend just flashed her a smile. “I was thinking about us. When we were young.”

  Irina glanced back at the kids. “When we were their age?”

  “Maybe not quite that young.” Akari and Kalden had their moments of immaturity, but he and Irina were undoubtedly worse at that age. She’d tried to kill him during their time at Koreldon Prep, and Elend had absolutely deserved it.

  On the other hand, he never would have met Irina if not for her blatant attempts to get close to him. Those attempts shouldn’t have worked, but they did. Elend had struggled with the truth, but Irina didn’t have a dishonest bone in her body. When his younger self looked at her, he saw a glimpse of the man he wanted to become.

  His dream mana never worked on Irina the way it did with other people. Her brain ran on a different wavelength, and his aspect couldn’t sway her, no matter how hard he pushed. Despite that, Elend’s mana helped him understand her when no one else did. Their classmates had all looked at Irina and seen cold indifference, but he’d had looked deeper and seen the truth of things. She felt the same emotions as everyone else, but she didn’t know how to express or label them. She also refused to play a game she couldn’t win.

  Mana flashed at the edge of Elend’s vision, and he glanced back into the clearing.

  Irina followed his gaze. “Those kids are going to change the world.”

  “So are we,” Elend said. “Even if the Mystic realm seems a lot less impressive than it did before.”

  He’d always believed in his students and their potential. He’d even expected them to merge mana arts with technology in some novel way. But in that moment, watching them train with their new techniques, he saw his first real glimpse of the mana artists they would become.

  Web of Secrets Book 1 is now available for ebook, paperback, and Kindle Unlimited:

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