Chapter 61 The Traitor

• The assassination attempt came during the third week of expanded network training, when our defenses should have been strongest. I was in the courtyard with a group of fifty volunteers, teaching them the mental disciplines required for safe consciousness merger, when the crossbow bolt punched through the air where my head had been moments before.
• Only the skull relics' sudden warning had saved me, their whispered alarm causing me to duck just as the quarrel whistled past. But as I rolled to my feet, drawing the obsidian blade that never left my side, I realized this wasn't a random attack by enemy agents.
• The bolt had been fired from inside our defensive perimeter, from a position that only someone with intimate knowledge of our security arrangements could have reached.