Official Codex Alert from the Shinar Node Authority in Hebron!

  Per the request of the Obsidian Order of the Kingdom of Bela, an official Codex Alert has been issued to all active Codexers within the Kingdom of Shinar, regardless of guild affiliation or origin kingdom. This is a Code Gold Alert.

  Salome the Shadow Scribe, the infamous Codex terrorist with ties to the Nullifiers from the Kingdom of Bela, has been sighted in Shinar by trustworthy eyewitnesses from the Obsidian Order’s Hebron-based Outpost. Salome the Shadow Scribe is wanted throughout all of the Nine Codex Kingdoms for her many and varied crimes against both the kingdoms and the Codex itself, including unauthorized hacking of Stationary Nodes, theft of forbidden Codex knowledge and entries, and even the attempted destruction of the Grand Codexium of Bela itself. She is also wanted for the murder of over a dozen members of the Obsidian Order and two dozen civilians during her assault on the Grand Codexium of Bela.

  The full extent of Salome’s powers is unknown. The Obsidian Order reports that Salome’s last recorded Codex Chapter and Page were Chapter Six, Page 2, making her an extremely powerful and dangerous Codexer whom the SNA urges weaker Codexers to avoid at all costs. The Obsidian Order has been granted exclusive authority to apprehend and arrest Salome by King Amraphel of Shinar due to her unusually powerful and dangerous nature. A glyphsnap image of Salome has been included with this alert to help all Codexers in Shinar to recognize her.

  The SNA advises that you do not engage Salome if you encounter her and to report her current location to your local Codexium as soon as possible, to be transmitted to the Obsidian Order’s outpost in Hebron. Her Whisperglyph Discipline is both highly unstable and forbidden, making her dangerous to anyone who might encounter her.

  This has been an official Codex Code Gold Alert from the Shinar Node Authority in Hebron. If you have any other questions about this alert, please see your local Codex Keeper at the nearest Codexium for more information or return to the Grand Codexium in Hebron for further details.

  -

  “So you ran into Salome herself in the forest last night?”

  The way Miriam phrased that question, she made it sound more like an accusation than a question. That’s why I answered a bit more defensively than I normally would have. “I did, yeah. At least, she was a woman who called herself Salome, but that’s got to be a common name for women from Bela, right? Because I’d think that the real Salome wouldn’t be so nice to me and Nimbus.”

  Miriam stood in front of me with a very skeptical look on her face, illuminated by the morning sunshine leaking in through the rafters of our old family barn overhead. She lifted her portable, tapped its surface, and then a glyphsnap image of Salome herself materialized above the portable, looking like a miniature version of the Shadow Scribe. “Does this image look like the woman who saved you and that rabbit last night?”

  “Yep.” Nimbus sat on a big bale of hay nearby, nibbling on a banana I’d snuck out from the house for him this morning. “That’s her. Unless she has a secret twin sister or something, but you humans don’t usually have those. You usually only have one baby at a time. Makes me wonder how there are so darn many of you with such an inefficient reproduction system.”

  Miriam raised an eyebrow at Nimbus while I rubbed the back of my neck nervously. “I don’t know if I’d trust everything Nimbus says—”

  “I would,” said Nimbus casually. He took another bite of the banana and gulped. “Good stuff, by the way. But I’m going to want more later. You said some humans sell this stuff in your town, yes? Then, as soon as I am finished with this, we’ll head into town and get more bananas.”

  Miriam frowned. “I think we have bigger things to worry about than bananas. Like the fact that you two apparently came face to face with the most wanted woman in the Nine Kingdoms and somehow survived.” She shook her head. “Salome. Really. Out of all of the people you could have run into, why’d it have to be her?”

  I wiped the sweat off my forehead. Though it was fairly early in the morning, it was already hot inside my family’s barn. It smelled like cow, too, though I was pretty used to that smell at this point. “We didn’t deliberately choose to run into her. She kind of ran into us.”

  Miriam shook her head. “Either way, both of you are lucky you survived. Especially you, Aaron. Salome is known for preying on young Codexers like you.”

  I grimaced. “Preying? You make it sound like she’s a predator.”

  Miriam nodded. “You’re right. She’s worse than a predator. She’s a crazy woman who wants to bring down the entire Node Network out of some misguided sense of justice. And she’s willing to step over as many bodies as is necessary to achieve her goal.”

  I pursed my lips. “Have you met her before?”

  Miriam shook her head, frowning deeply. She glared at the glyphsnap image of Salome on her portable. “No, but I was in Bela last year when she attacked the Grand Codexium and killed all of those innocent people. In fact, my master and I had left the Grand Codexium less than an hour before her attack. We came back to help when we heard the explosions, but the deaths … the chaos …” She closed her eyes. “So much death …”

  I nervously tugged at the collar of my shirt. I hadn’t realized it was such a difficult subject for her. It made me feel like a terrible brother. “Um, I’m sorry.”

  Miriam’s eyes snapped open, and she glared at me. “Don’t be. It was Salome’s fault. Not yours. I’m just grateful she didn’t decide to make you her next victim. Because if she had …”

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  Miriam let her sentence trail off, but the way her fingers twitched around her portable, which glowed softly with mana, told me everything that I needed to know about how she would have reacted to Salome hurting or killing me.

  Miriam had always been protective of me and Joshua, my younger brother. It used to annoy me a lot when I was younger, but nowadays, I’d started to appreciate it more and more, even though I wasn’t sure how effective she would be against Salome. Surely Salome was much stronger than she was.

  Nimbus chuckled. “She seemed more interested in playing with those bandits than with us. You should have seen what she did to that Jezebel lady. One minute, she had a perfectly functioning, if unsightly, human head; the next, boom, it was gone when Salome blew up her portable.”

  Miriam nodded. “That sounds exactly like Salome. She hacks into portables and overwhelms them with mana feedback, making them explode. It’s not always fatal, depending on where you are wearing your portable, but it always cripples or harms the Codexer who she does it to. And, of course, severing their connection to the Codex entirely.”

  I suddenly found myself questioning the wisdom of wearing my portable so close to my heart. If Salome blew up my portable, who was to say I wouldn’t end up like Jezebel?

  But I shook my head to calm myself. It was just a hypothetical, especially since Salome wasn’t around us at the moment. “I didn’t know. She seemed so nice, especially after she killed off most of the bandits.”

  Miriam huffed and folded her arms across her chest. “That’s probably because she thinks she can use you, Aaron. And probably Nimbus, too.”

  Nimbus finished eating his banana and gazed down at Miriam with an offended look. “You make that sound like it’s a bad thing. So what if she’s a ‘terrorist’ and ‘murderer’ according to your human definitions? She saved me from evil humans twice now. That’s good enough for me. And if those Obsidian Order guys hate her, that makes me like her even more.”

  Miriam scowled at Nimbus. “If you weren’t a Codex Beast, I’d be sorely tempted to slaughter you myself right now for attempting to justify the actions of the most murderous woman in all of the Nine Kingdoms.”

  I stepped between Miriam and Nimbus, holding up my hands defensively. “Hey, everyone, let’s calm down now. No need to fight each other. We’re all friends here.”

  Nimbus huffed and twitched his ears. He looked at his empty banana peel. “People who save my life and give me a banana are my friends. Your sister here hasn’t done either of those things. She’s a stranger, at best.”

  “And the only people who are my friends are the people who don’t make apologies for murderers and terrorists like Salome,” Miriam snapped. “Makes me glad you’re not synced with me. I’d probably quit being a Codexer if we were partnered.”

  I bit my lower lip, feeling helpless to stop Miriam and Nimbus’ bickering. This was not at all how I’d imagined the two of them would get along when I brought Nimbus to the farm last night.

  After getting that Codex Alert from the SNA about Salome, we made our way back to my family’s farm. I was in a bit of a daze on the way there, however, thinking about Salome and the alert that made her sound like the worst person ever, though I did clean the blood off my portable before going to bed. As I promised Nimbus, I let him stay in the family barn without telling anyone about him other than Miriam. While I normally didn’t like keeping secrets from my parents, so much had happened last night that I didn’t want to also have to explain who Nimbus was and why he was hanging around me. Plus, Nimbus was not exactly the most social rabbit around, especially when it came to meeting large groups of human strangers. I was under the impression that Nimbus had had some bad experiences with large groups of strange humans in the past, and I wasn’t talking about the Wolfbrand bandits, either.

  But I did tell my family about my encounter with the Wolfbrand Bandits. I had even mentioned Salome, though I didn’t use her name, simply describing her as a traveling Codexer who was really strong and nice. While I didn’t think that my parents or brothers would recognize Salome’s name—they didn’t have portables, so they probably didn’t get the Codex Alert from the SNA that Miriam and I did—I had been trying to keep the story short to avoid making my parents worry about me.

  Not that it helped. Mom had been beside herself with the knowledge of how I had almost gotten killed by those bandits. Even Dad, who was as stoic as a brick wall, had expressed concern about my encounter with the bandits. He had heard from our neighbor that the bandit activity had grown worse and worse over the last several months along the main roads to and from Hebron. No one commented on the fact that the bandits had been so close to the Codexium, nor did they seem very interested in the Codex Beast that I saved. I didn’t mention Nimbus by name or that he had followed me home afterward, but I felt like I needed to mention him because he was the main reason I even bothered to intervene.

  Moses, my older brother, just shook his head and muttered something about why he was glad he wasn’t a Codexer, while Joshua, my younger brother, had actually been the most excited out of all of us. He had asked me a million questions about my fight with the bandits because he thought I had done some cool magic tricks to take them out. I tried to explain to Josh that I needed help from Salome, but Joshua didn’t seem to care. I was under the impression that Joshua just wanted to vicariously live my adventures through me, which was fine, I guess.

  Miriam, however, had also received the warning about Salome at the same time that I did last night. She had asked me about it after dinner, and I just told her that I would fill her in the morning. I didn’t intend for Miriam to meet Nimbus, but Miriam had made it clear that she could tell I wasn’t sharing all of the details of my story with the rest of the family, and she wanted to know what really happened.

  So after breakfast, Miriam and I made an excuse to the rest of my family that we needed to practice spellcasting in the barn so we could have some privacy. Then I filled Miriam in on the entire story, including the identity of Salome and Nimbus. We also linked our portables via NodeLink so we could stay in contact with each other even over a distance.

  Though after seeing how badly Miriam and Nimbus got along together, I felt pretty bad about introducing them to each other. I suppose I wasn’t expecting them to be friends necessarily, but I also hadn’t been expecting to play mediator between my older sister and a talking rabbit.

  I decided to change the subject to help everyone cool down a little. “I can't believe that Salome is a Chapter Six Codexer. That means that she’s one of the strongest Codexers in the kingdom.”

  Miriam sighed deeply. “You aren’t wrong. Salome was considered one of the stars of the Obsidian Order before she went rogue. I never knew her before she went crazy, but my master did, and he was severely heartbroken when she attacked the Grand Codexium in Bela. Everyone was.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck nervously. “Though that does explain how she manhandled those bandits so easily last night. She was doing things with her portable that I didn’t even know were possible.”

  Miriam turned to face me, still frowning. “Yeah, people can do some pretty incredible things in the later chapters. My master… well, I’ll tell you about him later. I’m just surprised that the Obsidian Order got the SNA to send this alert at all. Surely know that there aren’t any Codexers in Shinar who could even pose half a threat to Salome. Honestly, she’s probably stronger than every Codexer in this kingdom put together.”

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