Day 9, 3rd District — Cobbleworth Row
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The letter arrived that morning, slipped under his door before dawn, sealed with a wax stamp shaped like a rising sun. Bethuel had spent twenty-eight years learning to hate that particular sun on sight.
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Come home, Bethuel. Your father requires your presence at the Estate tonight. Bring the good humor you're so famous for in that gutter you insist on calling a neighborhood. We'll all need it.
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Signed, D.
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Bethuel sat with it a long while at his small kitchen table. Then he put on his good coat, same as he always did. There had never once, in twenty-eight years, been a version of this summons that ended well for anyone who tried to ignore it.
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Duncan mac Findlaech's Estate, Northern 3rd District Highlands — Day 9, Evening
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The Estate sat on the only real hill the 3rd District possessed, ivy-choked gray stone older than the District borders themselves. Bethuel had learned to walk on its cold marble floors as a boy. He'd learned, not long after, exactly what those same floors sounded like when someone was being dragged across them.
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He arrived at the appointed hour, as he always did, and found the great hall already full.
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Six siblings, and their father at the head of a table long enough to seat twenty, though only eight chairs had ever been set at it in all Bethuel's memory. Duncan mac Findlaech sat in the largest of them, broad, silver-bearded, with an easy smile that had fooled every visitor to this Estate right up until the moment they learned better.
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"Bethuel!" Duncan's voice boomed warmly across the hall. "There he is. Our little jester, come home at last. Sit, sit, you're the final piece, and we can't properly begin without you."
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...
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Bethuel took his seat, third from his father's right hand, and let his eyes move down the table.
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Duffuel sat closest, arms crossed, a permanent scowl carved into a face that might have been handsome wearing any other expression. Pursuer of Acrimony, their father called him. Ten years spent cultivating grudges like other men cultivated gardens, patient, watered, grown teeth.
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Beside him, Ruruel. Spine straight as a blade. Pursuer of Tenacity, and she hadn't smiled at Bethuel's entrance, but she'd nodded once, which, from Ruruel, counted as warm.
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Banquel further down, jittery, eyes darting at shadows nobody else had noticed moving. Pursuer of Trepidation. Their father called it a gift. Bethuel thought otherwise.
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Malcuel beside him, hollow-eyed, shrinking a little further into his chair every year. Pursuer of Tribulation.
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Donuel across from Bethuel, wearing no visible mark of her assignment at all, which was itself the mark. Pursuer of Apathy. He'd wondered, sometimes, whether that particular gift was a mercy or the cruelest one their father ever handed out.
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And at the far end, Lenuel, draped across her chair in a way that drew every eye whether it wanted to look or not. Pursuer of Lust. The only one who seemed to genuinely enjoy the part she'd been handed, though Bethuel had learned not to mistake her performance for happiness.
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Seven children. Seven emotions. One father who'd decided, twenty-some years back, that the Ring's various Overseers represented the single greatest untapped seat of power any family could claim, and had built a household around claiming as many of those seats as one bloodline could manage.
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"Now that we're all gathered," Duncan said, rising, spreading his hands over the table like a man blessing a feast, "let's speak plainly about how proud I am of all of you."
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Nobody relaxed. Bethuel had learned a long time ago that his father's pride and his father's punishment arrived wearing the same warm, booming voice. The only way to tell them apart, some nights, was to wait and see whose chair got pulled out from under them before the evening ended.
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"Bethuel." Duncan's smile turned on him. "Sixty-eight points, last I heard, and climbing. My boy, the fool, out there winning at a game built by God himself, armed with nothing but bread and bad poetry." A genuine, delighted laugh. "I always did say your gift would prove itself, given the stage. Didn't I say that, Ruruel? Years ago, when he was still small enough to carry?"
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"You said it often, Father."
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"I did." His gaze swept on, and Bethuel felt the familiar, sick lurch that always came the moment his father's attention left him, because it meant it was about to land somewhere considerably worse.
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It landed on Malcuel.
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"Tribulation." The warmth drained out of Duncan's voice like water from a cracked cup. "Malcuel. When was the last time you generated any tribulation worth the name?"
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Malcuel didn't look up from his plate. "I've been working the 8th District docks, Father. The dockworkers there, the ones who lost their contracts when the Coalition—"
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"That's not a question about your work schedule, boy." Duncan's voice hadn't risen, and somehow that made it worse. "Suffering with teeth in it. Suffering that leaves a mark. Or are you simply standing near people who happen to already be miserable, and taking credit for the weather?"
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The hall went quiet. Bethuel kept his eyes on his own plate, every muscle braced for something he already knew was coming.
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"I've tried, Father." Malcuel's voice had gone thin. "It's harder than it looks. Real tribulation— I've just gotten so used to it—"
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"Then you haven't tried hard enough." Duncan's chair scraped back. He crossed the hall, unhurried, and stopped behind Malcuel's chair. "I built each of you a path. Do you know how rare that is, in a Ring this size, this indifferent? Most children are born into nothing, forced to guess their whole lives at what they're for. I handed each of you an answer before you could walk." He set one broad hand on Malcuel's shoulder, and Bethuel watched his brother go rigid beneath it. "The least any of you owe me is the discipline to actually pursue it."
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"Father, please, I—"
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"Ruruel."
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She rose without hesitation and crossed to stand at their father's side.
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"Show your brother what tenacity actually costs."
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What followed, Bethuel had watched happen to every one of his siblings at least once, had endured himself on three occasions he still couldn't think about too closely, and had never once found the nerve to interrupt. Ruruel didn't strike with any visible anger. No hesitation, no feeling of any kind beyond a grim, professional focus that Bethuel knew was the only mercy this household had ever taught any of them how to offer each other. It was fast. It was thorough. It lasted exactly as long as their father allowed, not a second more.
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"There," Duncan said, resuming his seat as though nothing had interrupted dinner. "Now you understand tribulation from the inside, rather than simply observing it in strangers who owe you nothing."
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Malcuel nodded, wet-eyed, breathing carefully around whatever had just cracked, and Bethuel swallowed the same helpless fury he'd swallowed a hundred times before, because the one time he hadn't, the lesson that followed had taught him, more thoroughly than anything else in his life, exactly what happened to children in this house who objected out loud.
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"Now." Duncan's smile came back easy, complete, a switch flipped somewhere behind his eyes. "Bethuel. My little fool. Sixty-eight points. Tell us how you did it. I want every detail."
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Bethuel made himself smile. That part came naturally, at least; it was the only part of the whole evening that did. It was everything underneath it that took the effort, the careful burying of what he actually felt sitting three seats down from a brother nursing cracked ribs.
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"There was once a loaf of bread," he began, letting the old, theatrical cadence slide back into his voice, "and an old man named Henrik, who hadn't had a fresh crust in longer than he cared to admit..." He told it well. He always told it well. Duncan laughed in all the right places, clapped him on the shoulder, told the whole table again how he'd always known his little fool would prove his worth once given a proper stage. Bethuel smiled through all of it, and hated, quietly, every second of a performance built on top of the one true, uncomplicated joy he'd ever been allowed to keep entirely for himself.
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Duncan mac Findlaech's Estate, East Garden — Day 9, Night
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Duffuel found him alone in the overgrown garden, exactly as Bethuel had known he eventually would.
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"You're getting soft, little fool." Duffuel leaned against a crumbling stone urn, arms crossed. "Sixty-eight points, and you're still handing bread to old men and reciting nursery rhymes. You know what real Euphoria looks like, don't you? Or has Father's pet name for you finally curdled the truth right out of your head?"
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"I know precisely what I'm doing, brother." No theatrical flourish left in Bethuel's voice at all, the way there never was when it was just the two of them.
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"Do you?" Duffuel's scowl deepened, something almost curious underneath it. "You've got a gift the rest of us would kill for. A real gift. Not squeezed out of you with a decade of Ruruel's discipline lessons like the rest of us. You feel that joy of yours as natural as breathing. I've watched you feel it since we were children, while the rest of us had to build our own emotions brick by brick out of whatever Father handed us."
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Bethuel didn't answer. There wasn't a version of this conversation that ended anywhere good.
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"You should be ahead of every single one of us," Duffuel went on, bitterness bleeding through the acrimony he wore the way Bethuel wore his own performed cheer. "Instead you're playing pretend, hiding the one thing about yourself Father never had to force into you."
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"Perhaps," Bethuel said quietly, "I simply refuse to surrender my happiness to his regime..."
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Something flickered across Duffuel's face, brief, almost like understanding.
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"You think that makes you better than the rest of us. Refusing to give him the satisfaction..." He pushed off from the urn, turning to go. "It doesn't, little fool. He still gets the ascension if you win this game. All you're keeping for yourself is the lie that you're not as caught in this as the rest of us."
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Duffuel looked back at Bethuel.
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"When you become God... What will your first moves be, I wonder?"
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He was gone before Bethuel could think of anything worth saying back.
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Bethuel stood a long while in the cold, beneath a sky he'd once, as a much younger boy, believed might someday belong to him instead of the man currently holding court in the hall behind him. Then he made his way down toward the Sub-Train.
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FLAVOR OF EUPHORIA — HOUSEHOLD LEDGER
Duffuel :: Pursuer of Acrimony — Progress: Adequate
Ruruel :: Pursuer of Tenacity — Progress: Exemplary
Bethuel :: Pursuer of Euphoria — Progress: Exceptional
Banquel :: Pursuer of Trepidation — Progress: Adequate
Malcuel :: Pursuer of Tribulation — Progress: Insufficient
Donuel :: Pursuer of Apathy — Progress: Exemplary
Lenuel :: Pursuer of Lust — Progress: Exemplary
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5th District, The Ashwell Underpass — Day 12, Late Night
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Aristio's crowd had thinned, night by night, in a way he hadn't fully registered until he tried to count it and came up short. Not because the fights had gotten less exciting. If anything, he'd pushed harder the past four days than he had in six years running the circle. Real blades. Real stakes. Two fighters, three nights back, who'd both walked away with scars that would last the rest of their lives, and the crowd's cheer at the end of it louder, rawer, more relieved than anything he'd generated in months.
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His palm had lit up brighter than it ever had. Then, within the hour, it had dimmed lower than it ever had either. He sat alone on his usual crate, a cigarette burning low between two fingers he hadn't managed to lift in several minutes, staring at his own palm.
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Doesn't hold as long as it used to, he'd written, three nights back, in a hand shakier than his usual scrawl. Tonight he hadn't bothered writing anything. Wasn't sure his hand would cooperate long enough to finish the sentence.
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"You look like hell, Newbeck."
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He hadn't heard anyone approach, and that scared him more than anything else that had happened in four days, because Aristio had spent his whole life priding himself on always hearing someone coming.
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"Feel about the same," he managed. Even his voice came out thin. "You come to gloat, Wu? Tell me you told me so?"
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"I came because I hadn't heard from you in three days, and found I minded more than I expected to." Yisheng's usual pleasantness had dropped away, replaced by something that looked strange sitting on a face built for smiling through other people's discomfort. "What's it feel like?"
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"Like the world's turnin' down its own volume. Bit by bit." He looked at his hands, steady enough right now, though he could feel that steadiness wasn't going to last. "Used to be I'd finish a good fight and feel it in my chest for hours after. Now I finish a fight, and it's like watchin' it happen to somebody else, through a window, real far away." He paused. "Scariest part ain't the dimmin', Wu. Scariest part's some mornings, I catch myself not much carin' that it's happenin' at all."
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Yisheng was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, all the polish had gone out of his voice.
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"I looked into it. After our conversation the other night. I have contacts who deal in unusual medical information, given the nature of my own culinary pursuits. Nobody could tell me anything concrete. Only rumors. A disease, tied to the game, though nobody could name it properly."
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"Rot," Aristio said, the word strange and heavy in his own mouth. "That's what I've started callin' it. Seemed to fit."
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"A cruel irony, don't you think?" Yisheng turned the word over as if he were tasting it. "A man who's spent his life chasing the loudest feelings he can find, undone by the one feeling he's spent his whole life running from."
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"Yeah." Aristio managed something close to a smile. "The universe does love its little jokes."
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They sat in silence a while. No fights scheduled tonight, no crowd, just two men and a dying cigarette and a cold that had nothing to do with the 5th District's usual air.
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"You should tell the others," Yisheng said eventually. "Gieffrin. King. Bethuel, especially, given how well he's doing. Someone with real points to spare might help you, if they knew in time."
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"And do what?" Aristio's laugh came out bitter. "Hand me a stack of RP like spare change? Don't work that way, far as I can tell. Every player's number belongs to that player. Ain't no charity clause I ever read."
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"Then generate more." Sharper now, something desperate creeping in. "Push harder. Bigger fights, bigger crowds, whatever it takes to outrun it before—"
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"Wu." Aristio's voice, quiet as it was, stopped him cold. "I've been pushin' harder every night for four days straight. You saw the fight three nights back. My palm dimmed faster after that one than it did after any of the small ones. Maybe the bigger the high, the bigger the crash. Maybe I'm just runnin' out of road." He let the last of the cigarette fall to the concrete. "Either way. Don't much think pushin' harder buys me what you're hopin' it'll buy me."
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Yisheng didn't have an answer for that. Before he left, he did something Aristio hadn't expected: reached out and set one hand on his shoulder, gentle, no theater in it at all.
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"I don't know how to fix this," he said. "I want you to know I looked, regardless. That it isn't nothing, that I looked."
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"No." Aristio watched him go. "Reckon it ain't nothin' at all."
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He sat alone a long while after, watching his own palm flicker, and found himself thinking, with a clarity that frightened him more than the dimming itself, that some small, tired part of him had already stopped minding the idea of it going out entirely.
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5th District, Ashwell Underpass, the Mouth of the Alley — Day 14, Night
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Gieffrin found him three nights later, sitting against the cold brick at the mouth of the alley, not inside the underpass, not near his usual crate, nowhere close to a chalk circle he no longer had the strength to draw.
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"You look like hell, Newbeck," Gieffrin said, stepping out of the shadow.
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Aristio's head turned, slowly, toward the sound. Gray skin, sunken eyes, hands trembling with a fine, constant tremor that had nothing to do with cold.
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"Funny. Wu said the exact same thing, a few nights back."
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"He was right." Gieffrin sat down beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched. "I spoke to someone. An Elegy. He survived something like this, a long time ago. He told me what it was. Apathy Syndrome."
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Aristio curled his lip.
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"It comes from not generating enough RP. Or not fast enough. It hollows a person out until their body can't even function anymore." He made himself say the rest plainly. "There isn't a cure. Only a win, big enough and fast enough to outrun it. Or someone there at the end, so it doesn't happen alone."
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Aristio was quiet, breathing slowly, each inhale costing him more than the last.
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"Reckon I already know which one of those I'm gettin' tonight."
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"Aristio—"
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"Don't." Not sharp. Just tired, and certain. "I've felt this comin' two weeks now, Melisanbeque. Felt it get a little realer every night. Ain't scared of it no more. Just tired. Tired in a way sleep don't touch." He turned his head, slow, something almost gentle in his exhausted eyes. "You're the only one who came lookin'. You know that? Wu sat with me a few nights back, and I appreciated it. But you're the one who went and found out why."
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"It wasn't enough." Gieffrin was surprised by how much that cost to say out loud. "I wasn't fast enough."
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"Wasn't nothin' you coulda done faster, and I mean that." Aristio's hand found Gieffrin's forearm, weak but deliberate. "I chose this life a long time before any letter showed up in a sewer. Can't rightly be angry a game just handed me a clock I didn't know I was already runnin' on."
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Gieffrin had nothing to say to that. He simply sat, and let the hand stay where it was, and watched the first cold drops of rain begin to fall, sudden, the way rain in the 5th always arrived.
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"Mind if I lean on you a bit," Aristio said, already listing sideways. "Legs ain't holdin' me up too good tonight."
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"Go ahead."
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Aristio's head came to rest against his shoulder. Neither of them said anything for a long moment, the rain picking up, running down the brick in dark streaks.
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"Hey, Gieffrin."
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"Yeah."
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"Thanks for comin'." Barely audible now. "Didn't much fancy doin' this one alone."
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"You're not alone," Gieffrin said, and meant it more than he'd meant almost anything.
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Aristio didn't answer. His breathing slowed, evened, grew shallower, and somewhere between one quiet breath and the one that never quite arrived, the weight against Gieffrin's shoulder went still in a way that had nothing left of trembling in it at all. A single tear slipped free from beneath his closed eyes, tracked down his cheek, and fell to the wet concrete, gone within a second, indistinguishable from the rain already gathering there.
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Gieffrin sat with him a long while. He didn't check for a pulse; he already knew he wouldn't find one. He didn't call for help that wouldn't have come in time. He simply sat, in the cold and the dark and the rain, and let himself feel, for once in a life built around careful distance, the full weight of exactly what he'd just lost. It was the sound that finally made him move. A low, rising hum from the katana at his hip, building into a bright, restless glow that lit the wet alley in flickering light. Gieffrin looked down at it and understood immediately what it wanted.
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He'd felt that hunger before, on the rare occasions his work brought him close to ARCH energy freshly loosed from a dying host, energy with nowhere left to go. Aristio hadn't carried a contract of his own, but a man who'd chased raw, resonant feeling his whole life, who'd outlasted most players against this same disease by two weeks, left behind a considerable amount of loose resonance with nowhere left to settle.
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The blade wanted it. Wanted it badly enough to sing.
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Gieffrin rose, eased Aristio's body down gently against the brick rather than let it slump, and drew the katana halfway from its sheath.
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"No," he told it, quiet, steady. "You don't get to have him."
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The glow pulsed, insistent, and he felt the faint, wordless press of the weapon's want against the edges of his own mind.
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The glow dimmed, slow and reluctant, fading back to its usual dormant quiet, though Gieffrin thought he could still feel faint, sullen resentment radiating up through the sheath. The closest thing to a sulk he'd ever felt out of a weapon.
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He stood a while longer in the rain beside Aristio's body before finally walking toward the nearest Post that would know what came next.
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He did not cry. He'd never learned how, not in any way that felt like it belonged to him rather than a performance for someone else's benefit. But something in his chest had gone very quiet, and very cold, and no amount of careful distance warmed it back up for the rest of that long, wet night.
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Day 14, Midnight
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King "Smoke Shot" McGee — 74 Points
Guy Bertillon — 26 Points
Henrique D'Souza — 15 Points
Bethuel Mac Findlaech — 203 Points
Gieffrin Melisanbeque — 51 Points
Aristio Newbeck — 61 Points
Yisheng Wu — 89 Points
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1st District, Stellaire — Yisheng Wu's Private Kitchen — Day 15, Early Morning
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Yisheng hadn't slept. He stood alone in Stellaire's kitchen two hours before his staff was due, apron tied loose over yesterday's clothes, a single unlit cutting board in front of him with nothing on it at all.
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The news had reached him by runner just past dawn, brief and clinical. He hadn't carved a single rose since. Hadn't tasted a single reduction. He'd simply stood there, turning one thought over and over.
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I told him to push harder. I told him that was the answer.
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He'd meant it kindly, or as kindly as anything Yisheng Wu ever meant anything. Kindness had never once been the thing he was actually built to offer anyone, least of all a dying man in a cold underpass. He'd offered the only currency he'd ever properly learned to trade in: an answer, confidently delivered, entirely wrong.
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He picked up his knife, reached for a single apple, turned it slowly in one hand, and began, with the same slow patience he brought to every carving, to peel it into the shape of a rose. He did not eat it. He carried it, instead, out through Stellaire's darkened dining room and down toward the 5th District on foot, rather than by any of the faster means his wealth would have easily afforded him. The underpass looked smaller in the pale gray light, the chalk circle already smudged, no crowd left to gather. He knelt at the spot where Aristio had usually sat and set the small, carved rose down against the concrete.
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"I don't know if there's anyone left to properly grieve you," he said, quiet, to the empty underpass, to a dead man who couldn't hear him, to himself more than anyone. "I understand that's rather the point of a man like you. Solo. No family anyone bothered to track down. Just a chalk circle, and a crowd who came for the fight rather than for you."
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He was quiet a moment longer.
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"I've spent my whole life believing Euphoria and cruelty were two names for the same appetite. I still believe that, largely. But I find, kneeling here, that I've begun to wonder whether there's a cost to that philosophy I hadn't accounted for. Whether a man can feed on other people's fear his entire life and never once notice the moment his own began, quietly, to run out ahead of him."
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He rose, brushed the dust from his knees, and looked down at the pale rose, already browning at its carved edges in the morning air.
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"I intend to win this game, Aristio. I intend to become the next Overseer of Euphoria, and I do not intend to let sentiment slow that down, not for you, not for anyone else this month still manages to take from us. But I find, standing here, that I intend to remember you regardless. Consider that whatever apology a man like me is capable of offering."
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He left the rose where it sat and walked back to the Sub-Train, and did not look back at the underpass again, though something in his chest felt considerably heavier than it had walking in.
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3rd District, Cobbleworth Row — Day 15, Afternoon
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News of Aristio Newbeck's death barely reached Cobbleworth Row at all. A 5th District name, a solo Fixer with no Coalition banner, the sort of passing that warranted, at most, a line buried in a registry nobody on Bethuel's street had reason to read.
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He heard of it anyway, from Gieffrin himself, who found him at the bakery two days later with a directness that plainly cost him something to bring at all.
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"I thought you should know," Gieffrin said, stiff in the doorway, entirely out of place among flour sacks and cooling loaves. "Given your own points and how close you might be to whatever this syndrome requires to keep it at bay."
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Bethuel sat with it, flour still dusting his hands from the batch he'd been kneading.
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"I never met him," he said. "Not once, this whole month. And yet I find I'm grieving him regardless. Is that foolish?"
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"No," Gieffrin said. "I don't think it is."
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They stood together a moment longer, two men from entirely different corners of the same deadly game, before Gieffrin left the way he'd come. Bethuel went back to his kneading, hands moving through motions his body knew well enough to continue without him.
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The baker's wife found him there a few minutes later, still working the dough with more force than the recipe called for.
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"You've gone quiet on me, Bethuel." She watched him with the easy concern of a woman who'd known him since he was a boy stealing crusts when he thought nobody was looking. "That's not like you. Something happen up at the Estate again?"
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"No." He made himself smile, the old performance sliding back into place, though it sat heavier across his shoulders than usual. "Just tired, is all. Long month."
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"You, tired?" She laughed, warm, entirely unaware how close the words landed to something less funny. "Bethuel Mac Findlaech, tired. Now there's a thing I never thought I'd hear. Happiest soul on this whole street since the day you were born, love. Whatever tiredness looks like on the rest of us, I don't reckon it's ever stuck to you."
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"No," he agreed, kneading with hands that had gone, for just a moment, unsteady. "I don't suppose it has."
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She would never know how much effort it cost him some days to keep that reputation intact, or how strange it felt to be, at once, the happiest man on Cobbleworth Row and one of six people racing an invisible clock that had already claimed its first casualty.
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He thought of Aristio Newbeck, a man he'd never met, dying alone with nobody but a stranger's shoulder to lean on, and found himself grateful, for the first time in a long while, for a street full of neighbors who had no idea what game he was truly playing.
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He did not think, kneading bread that afternoon, that his own danger was about to arrive from a considerably more deliberate direction than any disease.
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2nd District, Qianren Coalition Estate — Day 16, Evening
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Henrique D'Souza arrived an hour early, and spent that hour watched, politely and thoroughly, by no fewer than six household staff before finally being shown into a receiving room where Heng Jing sat waiting at the head of a low lacquered table.
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"Mr. D'Souza." Heng Jing's voice carried the same unbothered warmth as everything else about him, from his immaculate robes to the two Flame Blade attendants stationed silently at either side of the room. "Vitalität doesn't often send its officers to us directly. Usually a courier suffices, for a Coalition of your particular size."
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"This isn't Coalition business." Henrique seated himself without waiting to be invited. "Personal business, conducted with personal funds. I've come to your Coalition because I understand the Xi lineage's specialty is exactly the discretion this matter requires."
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"The Blood Blades." Heng Jing folded his hands. "You want a Death Contract."
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"I want a man removed from a game he's currently winning." Henrique's voice stayed level, professional. "Bethuel Mac Findlaech. A citizen, not a Fixer, accumulating Resonance at a rate that makes him, by my own calculation, the single greatest threat to my own standing."
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"A citizen." Heng Jing's eyebrows rose. "You want a Death Contract issued against an unarmed civilian."
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"I want him removed from the board. How that's accomplished, I'm content to leave to the Xi lineage's professional discretion."
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Heng Jing considered him for a long moment, then reached for a small bell and rang it once.
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A side door slid open. A woman entered, moving with unhurried grace, dressed in deep crimson formalwear that marked her Xi lineage. Three more figures followed, blades sheathed at their hips, pulsing with a faint, dark red glow.
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"Xi Wanrou," Heng Jing said. "She leads our Blood detachment personally, on matters the family considers sensitive enough to warrant her direct attention." He turned back. "A contract of this nature comes at considerable cost, both in Nanum and in the Qianren Coalition's expectation of future favor."
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"I understand entirely." Henrique produced a thick folder from his coat, everything Vitalität's resources had allowed him to gather on Bethuel's daily movements, his residence, his known associates.
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Xi Wanrou flipped through it quickly and efficiently, giving nothing away.
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"No combat training," she said finally. "No ARCH contract. No affiliation with any Post capable of retaliation." A faint, pitying smile. "This will not be difficult, Mr. D'Souza."
⠀
"I never expected it to be. I simply expect it to be thorough, and soon."
⠀
"Three days," Xi Wanrou said. "We'll have confirmation within three days."
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
Duncan mac Findlaech's Estate, Northern 3rd District Highlands — Day 18, Midnight
⠀
Xi Wanrou had led enough Death Contracts to know, within thirty seconds of approaching a residence, whether the job was going to be simple. The mac Findlaech Estate, dark windows, gates conspicuously unlocked, gave every surface indication of simplicity.
⠀
She'd learned, over a long career, to distrust exactly that kind of indication most of all.
⠀
"Spread out," she told the eleven Blood Blades behind her, each crimson blade pulsing faintly in the moonlight. "Two teams. Front entrance, servants' passage. Target's a citizen, unarmed, untrained. Minutes, not hours. Do not get comfortable regardless."
⠀
They crossed the overgrown grounds in silent formation, and it was only when the great hall's doors swung open on their own, well before any Blade reached them, that Xi Wanrou finally let herself feel the caution she should have felt from the start.
⠀
Duncan mac Findlaech filled the doorway, backlit by candlelight, beaming like he was welcoming old friends rather than eleven armed assassins come to kill his youngest son.
⠀
"Xi lineage." Warm, delighted. "Been a while since anyone's sent the Qianren Coalition up my little hill. Forgive the state of the grounds. We don't get many visitors who bother announcing themselves properly."
⠀
Behind him, six more figures filled the hall's entrance in an unhurried line, and Xi Wanrou felt her certainty begin, very slightly, to waver.
⠀
"Duffuel," Duncan said, easy as ever, not once taking his eyes off the assembled Blades, "why don't you and your siblings show our guests what kind of household they've stumbled into?"
⠀
Duffuel stepped forward first, his hands curling into fists already blackening at the knuckles with a slow, creeping rot.
⠀
"Pursuer of Acrimony," he said, low. "Every grudge I've ever nursed. Every slight I've ever decided doesn't get to be forgiven. All of it, waiting for exactly this."
⠀
He closed the distance in three strides and drove a blackened fist into the nearest Blade's chest, and the impact didn't just bruise. It spread, a slow corruption creeping outward like a wound that had already decided never to heal.
⠀
"Get it OFF, get it OFF—" the Blade screamed, clawing at his own chest.
⠀
"That's the thing about acrimony," Duffuel said, watching him thrash. "Once it's rooted, it doesn't much care how hard you try to dig it back out."
⠀
Ruruel moved next, catching a crimson strike on a bare forearm that should have opened to the bone and instead simply held. She drove her own fist forward, mechanical, relentless.
⠀
"Pursuer of Tenacity. I don't tire or yield." A second blow connected. The Blade facing her staggered, arm hanging wrong at the shoulder. "You'll find that considerably more inconvenient than you're prepared for."
⠀
Banquel hung back near the doorway, eyes darting, and the two Blades converging on him stopped mid-stride, their advance faltering into sudden dread with no source and no end.
⠀
"Pursuer of Trepidation," he said, trembling. "Doesn't feel good, does it? Not knowin' exactly what you're afraid of...?"
⠀
One Blade broke and ran blind into the garden and didn't come back.
⠀
Malcuel moved slower, hollow-eyed, and when a crimson sword finally caught him across the ribs, drawing real blood, he didn't cry out. He simply swayed, and the Blade who'd struck him staggered back instead, clutching his own chest, gasping, as the exact same wound opened on his own body.
⠀
"Pursuer of Tribulation," Malcuel said, tired, blood soaking slowly into his shirt. "Every hurt anybody's ever tried to hand off to somebody weaker. I collect it. Sometimes I give a little of it back."
⠀
Donuel didn't announce herself at all. She walked, unbothered, straight into the thickest press of fighting, and a Blade's strike that should have taken her head clean off simply lost its strength halfway through the swing, arriving soft and harmless.
⠀
"Pursuer of Apathy." She caught his wrist and squeezed until something gave way, a sound Xi Wanrou heard from twenty feet away. "Remarkably difficult to fight someone properly, once you've stopped believing the fight matters."
⠀
Lenuel hadn't moved from the doorway. A Blade turned toward her and found himself, within seconds, stumbling forward with a dazed, helpless longing that had nothing to do with combat.
⠀
"Pursuer of Lust." She let him come all the way in before turning his own momentum into a throw that sent him sprawling. "Don't take it personally, dear. You were never going to win that fight. Nobody ever does, once I've decided I'd rather they lose it quickly!"
⠀
A third Blade kept his eyes carefully averted. "Clever," Lenuel said, approving. "Won't save you." She hummed, low, and his knees buckled before he'd covered half the distance.
⠀
Bethuel watched from the edge of the hall, unarmed, and felt, more than anything, a familiar, exhausted grief.
⠀
Xi Wanrou, six of her eleven already fallen or fled, finally turned her attention on the man she'd actually been contracted to remove.
⠀
"You!" she said, closing in, blade rising. "The target!"
⠀
"I am," Bethuel agreed, and made no move to run.
⠀
He caught her wrist bare-handed an instant before the strike landed, and Xi Wanrou felt her own considerable strength meet something in his grip that shouldn't have been there in an untrained citizen's hand at all. Warm. Bright. Immovable.
⠀
"Pursuer of Euphoria," Bethuel said, and for the first time all night, no flourish in it. Just plain, and somehow worse for being plain. "Forgive me if I don't recite you a verse for this. Some things just aren't funny enough to earn one..."
⠀
He twisted her wrist. The blade clattered to the marble, and in the half-second she stood disarmed, he drove his palm flat against her chest.
⠀
Something warm and overwhelming flooded through the point of contact. Xi Wanrou staggered back, gasping, her whole body going helplessly weak with an emotion she hadn't felt in years: pure, disarming joy, some childhood summer rising unbidden behind her eyes, tears she couldn't hold back.
⠀
"What—" she managed. "What did you just—"
⠀
"The same thing my father's spent my whole life training me to do to strangers, so I can help him become all-powerful," Bethuel said. "Except this time I did it to save my own life instead of pleasing his. Funny, how much better it feels, done that way round..."
⠀
She dropped to her knees, weeping, undone, and Bethuel simply watched, more sorrow in his face than triumph.
⠀
By the time the last of the Blood Blades had fallen or fled, Duncan stood in the middle of his own hall, arms spread, beaming.
⠀
"Well done! Every one of you! Qianren Coalition, sent up our hill, sent back down it in pieces! I couldn't be prouder if I'd planned the whole evening myself!"
⠀
"You very nearly did," Duffuel muttered, flexing a hand still faintly blackened, not loud enough for their father to hear.
⠀
Duncan crossed to where Xi Wanrou still knelt weeping and crouched to her level, gentle in a way that made it worse.
⠀
"Go home. Tell Heng Jing exactly what happened here. Tell him the mac Findlaech household isn't some soft target he can hire out to the highest bidder." His voice hardened, the warmth never once leaving it. "Tell him whoever hired you tonight has made an enemy of my entire family, and I do not forget the names of people who threaten what's mine."
⠀
Xi Wanrou fled without another word.
⠀
Duncan turned back to his children, the same broad, satisfied smile in place. "One step closer, all of you. To the ascension I've spent your whole lives building toward. Seven Overseers, seven emotions, one family holding every seat of power this Ring has to offer." His eyes swept over all seven of them at once. "And once we hold it, we remake this entire Ring in whatever shape we choose. No more Coalitions squabbling over Districts. No more Posts pretending their rules matter. Just us. Built properly, from the top down, the way it should have been built from the beginning."
⠀
Nobody answered him. Nobody in that household ever really needed to.
⠀
Bethuel stood among his bruised, bloodied siblings, watching his father's terrible smile, and thought that the cruelest thing Duncan mac Findlaech had ever done wasn't the punishments, or the discipline, or the decades of breeding toward a purpose none of them had ever been permitted to refuse.
⠀
It was making sure every time they used the gifts he'd built them into, they used them well enough to prove, all over again, exactly how thoroughly he'd succeeded.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
Duncan mac Findlaech's Estate, the East Garden — Day 19, Early Morning
⠀
Duffuel found him again in the same garden, hours after their father had finally gone to bed, still glowing over the evening's carnage, and this time it was Bethuel who spoke first.
⠀
"You held back tonight." He didn't look over. "That first strike, against the Blade who came at you head-on. You could've ended it faster."
⠀
Duffuel didn't deny it, which told Bethuel more than any answer could have. "Wanted to see how far the rot would spread, given time. Curiosity."
⠀
"Curiosity." Bethuel's mouth twisted, tired. "You've spent your whole life pretending every soft thing you feel is actually something sharper in disguise, brother. I wonder if you've done it so long you've forgotten there's a difference."
⠀
"Careful, little fool." No real heat in it tonight. "You almost sound like you pity me."
⠀
"Perhaps I do." Bethuel turned to face him. "You told me, weeks ago, that keeping my joy for myself instead of handing it over to Father was nothing but a comfortable lie. I've thought about that a great deal since. I wonder whether your own lie runs the same shape. Just wearing angrier clothes."
⠀
Duffuel went quiet, jaw tight, no ready retort waiting for once.
⠀
"Doesn't matter," he said finally, turning to go. "Real or built, it's the only currency this family ever taught any of us how to spend. A man learns to love the coin he's handed, little fool, or he starves waiting for one that was never coming."
⠀
He left without waiting for a response. Bethuel stood alone a while longer, watching his brother's shape disappear into the dark hulk of the Estate, and thought that of all seven children Duncan had built with such deliberate purpose, Duffuel might be paying the steepest price of all of them, precisely because he'd never once been allowed to notice he was paying it.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
3rd District, Cobbleworth Row — Day 19, Morning
⠀
Bethuel returned before dawn, bruised along one forearm where a Blade's strike had grazed him before Ruruel stepped in, and let himself into the back of the bakery rather than his own apartment, unwilling to be alone with his own thoughts just yet.
⠀
The baker's wife found him there an hour later and took one look at the bruise before her face creased with worry.
⠀
"Bethuel! What in the Ring happened to you?"
⠀
"A disagreement." The old lightness came back easier than he expected, given the night. "Nothing worth troubling yourself over. I came out the better end of it."
⠀
"You don't look like the better end of anything, love." She fussed over him anyway, fetching a cool cloth despite his protests, and it was there, in the warm, ordinary comfort of her kitchen, that something in his chest finally began to crack.
⠀
"May I ask you something?"
⠀
"Course you can."
⠀
"Do you think a man can love a thing his whole life, and hate the reason he's doing it, both at once, without either canceling the other out?"
⠀
She paused, cloth in hand. "That's an awfully heavy question for a man who juggles bread for a living."
⠀
"I contain multitudes," Bethuel said, and the old joke came out threadbare.
⠀
She set the cloth down and took his uninjured hand in both of hers. "I think, love, most of the best things people do in this life get done for reasons a lot more tangled than anybody watching from outside ever guesses. Don't matter to me why you started bringing joy to this street. Only what matters is you kept doing it, year after year, even on the days it plainly cost you something." Her eyes searched his. "Whatever's eating at you, whatever you're not telling me tonight, I hope you know this street would love you just the same. Joy or no joy. Family trouble or none of it."
⠀
Bethuel didn't answer right away. He simply sat in her warm little kitchen and let himself cry, quietly, without performance, without a single verse attached to it, while she held his hand and said nothing further, understanding, the way only a woman who'd known him since boyhood could, that some grief just needed a witness rather than a solution.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
2nd District, Qianren Coalition Estate — Day 19, Dawn
⠀
Heng Jing listened, in complete silence, as Xi Wanrou recounted exactly what the mac Findlaech household had done to eleven of his Blood Blades.
⠀
"Eight Blades lost," he repeated, once she'd finished, his usual warmth gone entirely. "One dead outright. Three unlikely to fight again. And you, personally, brought to your knees, weeping, by a man with no ARCH contract and no Fixer training whatsoever."
⠀
"I underestimated the household, Lord Heng." She didn't look up from the floor. "I take full responsibility."
⠀
"You will take responsibility." Quiet, cold. "But responsibility and consequence aren't always the same debt, Xi Wanrou, and I intend to collect the second one considerably higher up the ladder than a Blade captain who simply executed the contract she was handed." He moved to the window, looking out over the skyline. "Duncan mac Findlaech has made an enemy of the Qianren Coalition. I don't believe he understands yet what that enemy is capable of, once properly provoked."
⠀
"Shall I prepare a second contract, Lord Heng?"
⠀
"No. Not the Blood lineage again. Not yet. I'll handle this myself, in my own time, once I understand exactly what kind of household managed to embarrass this family so thoroughly in one evening." He turned back, something patient and terrible behind his eyes. "Send word to Mr. D'Souza that his contract failed, and his deposit won't be returned given the losses incurred on his behalf. And Xi Wanrou. Begin quietly compiling everything we can learn about the mac Findlaech family. Every child. Every emotion. Every weakness a household built entirely around weaponized feeling might actually possess, once someone patient enough finally looks properly."
⠀
His mouth curved, slowly.
⠀
"I am not a man who forgets an insult. I simply prefer to collect on it at a moment of my own choosing."
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
Vitalität Coalition Central Bank, 3rd District — Day 19, Late Morning
⠀
Henrique read the notice of the contract's failure twice before setting it down, hands unsteady for the first time in longer than he could remember.
⠀
"Eight Blades," he said to the empty office. "Lost to an untrained citizen and his household."
⠀
His entire career had been built on the assumption that sufficient resources, properly applied, resolved nearly any obstacle. The notion that Bethuel Mac Findlaech had walked away from a professional Death Contract, protected by some household force that Qianren's own intelligence had failed to anticipate, sat uneasily against every instrument Henrique had ever trusted.
⠀
He thought, briefly, of the crowd outside Old Henrik's building weeks earlier. Thirty strong. Immovable. An equation his ledgers hadn't accounted for either.
⠀
"Interesting," he said again, and found the word considerably less satisfying to say this time.
⠀
He filed the paperwork in a drawer he rarely opened and sat a long while, staring out at Vitalität's marble spread below him, turning over, for the first time since that sewer room, the uncomfortable possibility that he might not be the most dangerous person currently playing this particular game.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
9th District, Wharfside — Day 19, Night
⠀
Guy Bertillon had found four more names since Doruk Aslanov. A landlord who'd bricked up a tenement's fire exits to save on maintenance, killing eleven. A Coalition-contracted overseer running an unlicensed labor camp behind enough paperwork to keep any audit out. A smuggler who moved children when cargo didn't pay well enough. A fourth man half the 9th District already knew by name, and flinched at the sound of it.
⠀
He sat now over the fourth of these, breathing hard, palm glowing steady, and found himself, for the first time since Doruk, sitting down afterward rather than simply walking away.
⠀
Twenty-six points, before tonight. More, now.
⠀
It should have felt like enough. That first night it had felt like an answer to a question he'd been asking his whole adult life, proof that his own dark appetite belonged in this game every bit as legitimately as King's balloons or Bethuel's bread. Hunting men the Ring itself had already failed to punish, he'd expected something closer to triumph than what he actually felt: a fourth body cooling a few feet away, and a small, unwelcome question that wouldn't leave him alone.
⠀
How many more names are there, on a list like this, in a Ring this size? And what happens to me, once I run out of the kind even I can still tell myself deserved it?
⠀
He didn't have an answer. He rose, eventually, and made his way back toward the Sub-Train, palm still glowing in the dark, thinking more than once of the balloons still occasionally spotted drifting over the 4th District's rooftops weeks after King had released them, refusing to come down.
⠀
He wondered whether King's version of Euphoria wore out the same way his own seemed to be starting to. He suspected it probably didn't.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
Rotary Eleven Epicenter — Day 20, Morning
⠀
King "Smoke Shot" McGee hadn't planned on visiting New Jerusalem that week. He'd planned, if he was honest with himself, to avoid it as long as he possibly could, the way he'd been avoiding it two years running, ever since the last time he'd walked out and promised himself, with real if ultimately empty conviction, that he wouldn't be back.
⠀
The letter that changed his mind came by ordinary courier. No maroon parchment, no comedy mask. Just a plain envelope with a Heart Division seal, informing him an inmate under his sponsorship had requested a visit, and that policy required such requests be honored within thirty days or formally denied.
⠀
King read the name twice before he let himself believe it.
⠀
Montserrat T. Archivo.
⠀
He told nobody where he was going. He climbed into Cloud Nine alone and drove the whole way in a silence considerably heavier than the engine usually allowed him to sit inside for long.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
New Jerusalem, the Ring's Highest-Containment Facility, Heart Division Jurisdiction — Day 20, Afternoon
⠀
New Jerusalem didn't look like a prison, which was the point. It rose out of the barren stretch between the 5th and 6th like a cathedral built by someone with no love left for God: black spires and narrow, unlit windows, walls lined floor to roof with a dull gray alloy engineers had spent decades perfecting for exactly one purpose: dense enough with dead, inert resonance that no living ARCH bond could push a signal through it.
⠀
Threnite.
⠀
Two Heart Footmen walked him through six checkpoints and left him in a narrow visitation corridor, iron bars on one side, behind which sat a man King hadn't laid eyes on in over two years.
⠀
Montserrat T. Archivo had aged badly. Thinner. Grayer at the temples. A stillness King recognized, with an uncomfortable ache, as the kind men adopted once they'd stopped expecting anything good to happen to them again.
⠀
"Smoke Shot." His voice hadn't changed. "Didn't think you'd actually come."
⠀
"Said I would, didn't I?" King settled onto the stool, forcing his grin into place. "Man of my word, even when it's inconvenient."
⠀
"Especially when it's inconvenient. Always your particular flavor of stubborn." Montserrat's mouth curved. "You look good."
⠀
"You don't look so bad yourself."
⠀
"I look like a man who's run out of years he expected to have," Montserrat said, plain, no self-pity in it at all. He leaned in, lowering his voice, though the corridor was empty save the two Footmen well out of earshot. "There's a riot comin'. Been building for weeks, cell to cell, quiet enough the guards haven't caught it yet. I expect that won't last. When it happens, they're gonna come for me first."
⠀
"Why you?"
⠀
"Same reason anybody in here comes for anybody else." His smile didn't waver, though something behind it had gone older. "Made enemies in this place, same as I made 'em out there before they locked me up for makin' 'em. In here there's nowhere left to run from 'em. Just a hallway, and a locked door, and however many of 'em decide, one night, that tonight's the night."
⠀
"I'll get you out." King's voice went hard. "I don't care what it costs, Montserrat—!"
⠀
"Smoke Shot." Gentle, firm. "You know as well as I do there ain't no version of that promise you can keep. Not with what you're carryin' in right now, anyway. Heart Division doesn't pardon men like me, and even if you could bust every lock between here and the front gate with your own two hands, what exactly are you plannin' on fightin' a riot's worth of desperate men off with? That mouth of yours?"
⠀
King didn't have an answer for that, and hated that he didn't.
⠀
Montserrat watched him sit with it a moment, then glanced down at his own palm, turning it over slowly in the dim light. Nothing happened. Nothing had happened, not once, in the two years he'd sat behind Threnite.
⠀
"Been thinkin' about her a lot, lately," he said quietly. "Circle of Fire. She's been with me since before you and I ever crossed paths, Smoke Shot. Longest relationship I ever kept, if you wanna call it that." He huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "Two years now she's been sittin' right here behind my ribs, wide awake, and I haven't been able to so much as light a match with her. That's its own kinda cruelty, you know. Bein' able to feel somethin' that alive, right up against these walls, and not bein' allowed to touch it."
⠀
"...Is that what this riot's really about? Somebody findin' out you're runnin' cold?"
⠀
"Partly." Montserrat's eyes came back up, sharp despite everything else about him that had dulled. "But that ain't why I'm bringin' her up."
⠀
"Then why?"
⠀
"'Cause I already know how this ends for me, Smoke Shot, riot or no riot, and I'll be damned if the last thing that ever happens to Circle of Fire is watchin' both of us go down doin' nothin' about it." He reached one hand through the bars, slow, deliberate. "Give me your hand."
⠀
"Monty—"
⠀
"Give me your hand, and don't argue with a dyin' man about how he wants to spend what's left of himself."
⠀
King reached through and took it.
⠀
The warmth hit him first, small and orange and curling, the same wisp of flame he remembered from the one or two times Montserrat had let her show herself off over the years. But it didn't stop where it usually stopped. It kept climbing, past his wrist, past his elbow, spreading warm and wide through his whole chest like something looking for a place to land that was bigger than the one it was leaving.
⠀
"Montserrat, what are you—?!"
⠀
"You always did run hotter than most," Montserrat said, teeth gritted now, sweat beading along his hairline. "Even before any of this. I used to tell her that. Told her you had more room in you for somethin' like her than anybody I ever met, and never once did anything about it, 'cause I was too damn selfish to hand her off while I still had use for her myself." His grip tightened, knuckles white. "Not selfish enough to let her die in here with me, though. Not that selfish."
⠀
"You don't have to do this—!"
⠀
"I know I don't have to." Montserrat's voice had gone ragged, strained around the edges. "I'm choosin' to. There's a difference, and I need you to let me have it."
⠀
The flame climbed higher, and Montserrat's face went gray with the cost of it, his whole body sagging forward against the bars like something holding him up had just been cut loose. King wanted to pull back, wanted to stop this, and found he couldn't, because whatever was moving between them now had a will of its own, pouring itself out of one man and into the other with the patient, unstoppable certainty of water finding the lowest ground.
⠀
ARCH: Circle of Fire
Threat Level: NA (나)
Associated Individual: Montserrat T. Archivo → King McGee
Ability: Grants its bonded holder immunity to harm from fire and electrical current, along with the ability to generate and direct flame at will from the fists. The bond is not fixed; given sufficient resonance already present in a willing recipient, and sufficient sacrifice from the current holder, the contract can be passed from one person to another while the original holder still lives, though the toll of the transfer falls heaviest on whoever is giving it away.
⠀
~ Hello, McGee. ~
⠀
The voice arrived warm and rich, blooming behind his ribs like it had always lived there and simply hadn't gotten around to introducing itself yet.
⠀
~ He's told me about you for years. More than you'd probably like, if I'm honest. I feel like I already know you better than most people I've actually met... ~
⠀
"Circle of Fire," King breathed, and felt something settle into his chest that had never once, in thirty-some years, had a proper place to settle before.
⠀
Montserrat slumped back against the far wall of his cell, breathing hard, drained in a way that went past exhaustion into something closer to hollowed-out. He managed a smile anyway, thin and real.
⠀
"There," he said. "Now go do somethin' useful with her."
⠀
"Montserrat—" King's own voice had gone thick. "You look like you're about to keel over!"
⠀
"Feel like it too. Gave away somethin' I've been carryin' longer than I've known you, Smoke. Figured it'd cost more than pocket change." He waved off the concern before King could voice it properly. "I'll manage a few more days on empty... Ain't like I had big plans for the resonance anyhow, sittin' in here. You're the one who's gotta go do somethin' with it before that riot lands..."
⠀
King rose, jaw set, every trace of his easy humor gone. "I'm gettin' you outta here. I swear it."
⠀
"Didn't say I'd argue with you about that part," Montserrat said, and for the first time all visit, something like real hope moved behind his tired eyes. "Go on, then. Don't waste what I just handed you sittin' here talkin' to me about it."
⠀
King left without trusting his own voice to speak again until he'd cleared the outer gate, Circle of Fire warm and unfamiliar and entirely his own, settling into her new home the moment New Jerusalem's walls fell behind him.
⠀
He stood alone in the barren field a long moment before reaching for a cigar he'd been saving for a happier occasion, and snapped his fingers on pure instinct. A small flame caught instantly, no lighter, no match.
⠀
He lit the cigar, nested it in his jaw, and let the smoke curl up gray into the afternoon sky.
⠀
"Alright," he said, quiet, to the warmth behind his ribs, still strange, still settling. "Guess you're stuck with me now."
⠀
~ Could be worse, ~ she said. ~ He picked you for a reason, McGee. I intend to find out what it was. ~
⠀
"Then let's start with gettin' him out of that hole before it caves in on him." King's jaw tightened, all the smoke and easy charm burning off into something considerably harder underneath. "Whatever that takes. Whoever I gotta go through. You with me?"
⠀
~ I was his, once, and he never once asked me for anything for himself. ~ Something fierce curled under the warmth now, an old patience finally given somewhere to point itself. ~ You're the first thing he's ever asked me to do that was actually for him. I don't intend on letting my old master down. ~
⠀
King nodded, alone in the empty field, and finished the cigar in silence, watching the smoke rise into a sky that offered him, for the first time all day, something that almost felt like a plan.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
Day 20, Midnight
⠀
King "Smoke Shot" McGee — 74 Points
Guy Bertillon — 41 Points
Henrique D'Souza — 15 Points
Bethuel Mac Findlaech — 231 Points
Gieffrin Melisanbeque — 58 Points
Aristio Newbeck — 61 Points
Yisheng Wu — 104 Points
⠀
END OF PART TWO
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
. . .
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
Adjunct-13, Floor Fifty Landing
⠀
"So what do we do now?" Saoirse asked quietly, and as usual, since they'd been trapped in this purgatory, neither Stuffy nor Arnold had a single word to offer in answer.
⠀
Nobody did, not right away. They stood in front of the sealed door a while longer, the two long-dead bodies still slumped against the far wall, badges still useless in Pallas's hand, before Yuhuan finally broke the silence, looking down at the small, coiled shape resting quietly around his forearm.
⠀
"Can you phase us through it?" he asked. "Same as you phased us through the floors, on the way down."
⠀
The serpent's small head tilted, considering, and when she answered, none of her usual easy amusement was in it at all.
⠀
"I could. In theory. Not tonight, and likely not for some while yet. That jump cost me more than I let on at the time, human. I gave you the last of what I had banked, and I haven't had the chance, or the strength, to recover it since." A pause, weighing something. "I could manage it sooner, if you were willing to pay for the privilege yourself... Another finger, perhaps. A larger piece, if you wanted it—"
⠀
Yuhuan raised a finger to the snake's mouth.
⠀
"No." Yuhuan didn't hesitate, didn't even glance at his own hand. "Absolutely not."
⠀
"A wise answer," the serpent said, something almost approving in it. "Though I half expected you to say yes regardless. Most of the humans I've known would have."
⠀
"Most of the humans you've known probably didn't have eight other people countin' on 'em not to fall apart halfway down," Roby said, arms crossed.
⠀
"Fair. Then we wait. A few days, perhaps less if I'm not pushed to do anything foolish in the meantime. I'd recommend making camp here, on this landing, rather than wasting what little strength any of you have left searching the deeper floors. Besides, who knows what secrets lie behind that door?~"
⠀
Nobody argued. They'd been moving, one way or another, since the elevator doors first opened on the hundredth floor, and the idea of simply stopping, even for a night, even on a cold, dust-caked landing beside two skeletons that had waited three years for company, held an appeal none of them were in any position to refuse.
⠀
"Alright," Pallas said, finally settling against the wall. "We camp. Watch rotation, same as before. Leopold, you've got first."
⠀
"Wouldn't dream of arguing," Leopold said, already settling into a position that gave him a clear line down both the stairwell and the sealed door.
⠀
They ate in near silence, rationing what little remained of the supplies they'd carried down from the world above, and one by one, exhaustion won out over whatever nervous energy the last several floors had left humming under their skins. Jianhuan fell asleep first, curled close enough to his brother that Yuhuan had to gently shift him off his shoulder twice before giving up and letting him stay there. Mori slept fitfully, scarf twitching even in sleep, its low wind stirring faint eddies of dust across the landing floor. Saoirse slept curled small against the wall, Stuffy and Arnold's usual bickering reduced to a low, sleepy murmur.
⠀
Roby slept last, and worst.
⠀
He didn't remember falling asleep. He remembered, instead, only the bell.
⠀
It started distant, a low, resonant toll that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, the way sound sometimes traveled through Adjunct-13's stranger floors. He sat up on the cold landing and found himself unsettled by two things at once: the sound itself, out of place in a way he couldn't articulate, and the fact that every single one of his companions lay perfectly, undisturbed, asleep around him, entirely unbothered by a noise loud enough that Roby felt it in his own back teeth.
⠀
"...The hell is that," he muttered, rising, careful not to step on Jianhuan's outstretched arm.
⠀
The bell tolled again, closer, or perhaps just louder, and Roby found himself moving toward it before he'd fully decided to, feet carrying him down a stretch of hallway he didn't remember existing on this landing a few hours earlier, dust and shadow pooling thick in every direction he looked.
⠀
"Prospero." He tried the name out loud, uncertain. "You there? What is that sound?"
⠀
No answer came. Not even the AI's usual dry, immediate response, that constant low hum of presence Roby had, without quite realizing it, come to rely on ever since the hundredth floor. Just the bell again, closer still, and beneath it now a second sound: voices, distant and murmuring, coming from somewhere just past the edge of what his eyes could resolve in the dark.
⠀
"Anybody?" he called out, louder, and heard his own voice swallowed whole, no echo at all, like the space itself had decided it wasn't interested in giving anything back.
⠀
The bell rang again. Faster. And again, faster still, the gaps between each toll collapsing, until Roby stood frozen with both hands pressed hard over his ears, the sound no longer a bell at all but a single, unbroken, piercing whine coming from directly inside his own skull.
⠀
He woke gasping, drenched in a cold sweat, and it took him a long, disoriented moment to understand he was, in fact, awake, that the landing around him held the same sleeping shapes it had held before, that Leopold sat exactly where he'd left him on watch, eyes alert, glancing over at Roby's sudden movement with immediate concern.
⠀
"You alright?" Leopold asked, low, careful not to wake the others.
⠀
"Yeah. Bad dream, is all."
⠀
He settled back down, breathing slowly, willing his own racing heart to quiet, and it was in that stillness, in the thin, cold silence of the landing, that he heard it.
⠀
A bell. Distant, muffled, coming from somewhere far below them in the sealed, silent depths of the building.
⠀
"...You hear that?" Roby whispered.
⠀
"Hear what?" Leopold's hand had already drifted to his weapon. "Prospero, you catchin' this?"
⠀
Nothing answered. Prospero's usual, immediate presence stayed conspicuously absent, the same silence that had swallowed its voice the moment they'd first stepped onto this floor's landing.
⠀
The bell didn't ring again. Roby sat with his back against the cold wall a long while after that, listening to Jianhuan's soft, even breathing a few feet away, to Mori's scarf occasionally rustling in its own private wind, and felt his mind drift, unbidden, toward a memory he hadn't let himself properly visit in years.
⠀
Red-Light Totteoku, he thought. Nine years old. The balloon.
⠀
The 9th District had swallowed Red-Light Totteoku whole, as it did with most things that grew up too fast and too illegally along its outer edges, a sprawling, makeshift settlement built entirely from scavenged materials and a stubborn refusal to disappear quietly, not unlike the Scrapyard Heap that would rise years later in almost exactly the same shape. Roby had grown up there, in a patchwork shack built by his own father's hands, and had spent most of his ninth year of life absolutely certain that Rupert "R." Reichelt was the single strongest, cleverest man in the entire Ring.
⠀
He remembered the balloon clearest of all. A great, ungainly patchwork thing, stitched together over months from half the settlement's spare fabric, filled with hot air from a jury-rigged burner that had taken his father three failed attempts and one singed eyebrow to get working properly. Rupert had taken him up in it on a clear night, the whole community cheering them off from the ground like they were launching into the stars rather than sixty feet above a settlement built out of other people's garbage.
⠀
"Look at that, boy," his father had said, thick with a pride Roby had never once, in his whole childhood, doubted was genuine. "Look at all of it, spread out like that. Ain't nothin' in this whole Ring as beautiful as home, seen from up high enough to appreciate it."
⠀
Roby had looked. Red-Light Totteoku sprawled beneath them, neon signage and cook-fire smoke, buildings stacked three and four stories out of whatever had been available the week they were built, strings of colored lights strung between rooftops by people with no engineering training and every bit of the stubborn ingenuity that had built the balloon they were floating in. Beautiful, in its own chaotic way, exactly like his father said.
⠀
And past it, past the settlement's ragged edges: the clean, glittering spires of the Districts proper, glass towers catching moonlight in ways nothing in Red-Light Totteoku ever could. A whole different Ring, a few miles away, close enough to see and impossibly far all the same.
⠀
"That's where the real money lives, boy," Rupert had said, something harder creeping into his voice. "Coalitions. Posts. All of it, lookin' down on folks like us like we're somethin' to scrape off a boot heel." He'd knelt, gripping Roby's shoulders. "That's why I'm gettin' you taken in proper, once you're old enough. Viscera. Not some Coalition lapdog Post. The Viscera don't answer to nobody but their own organs, boy, and once you're in, ain't nobody in this Ring gets to look down on a Reichelt again."
⠀
Roby remembered, even at nine, some small, stubborn part of himself recoiling from the promise, though he couldn't, twenty years later, properly remember why. He simply knew, the wordless way children sometimes know things before they have the language for them, that his father's dream and his own didn't fit together as neatly as Rupert believed.
⠀
He never got the chance to find out where that recoil might have led, because that was the exact moment the bell first rang.
⠀
Distant, sudden, and every light in Red-Light Totteoku's tangled skyline went dark within seconds, an entire settlement's hard-won survival instinct answering a sound Roby hadn't yet learned to fear.
⠀
"Get us down," his father had said, voice gone tight, already wrestling the balloon's rigging. "Get us down NOW, boy, help me with this line—"
⠀
They hadn't made it down in time. Roby remembered the descent, chaotic, too slow, his father's hands shaking on the ropes in a way he'd never seen before, and what waited once the basket finally scraped the ground.
⠀
Fixers, moving through Red-Light Totteoku's narrow streets with the cold, professional efficiency of people executing a contract rather than fighting a war, cutting down anyone unfortunate enough to be caught outdoors when the bell sounded, an illegal settlement treated, in one long, bloody night, as an inconvenient stain some Coalition had finally decided to scrub off a ledger.
⠀
He remembered blood in the gutters, dark under the neon signage, the same signs that had looked so beautiful from sixty feet up now casting garish light across a massacre nobody had warned them was coming.
⠀
And amid all of it, a flash of pink.
⠀
A woman moving through the carnage with a stillness that instantly marked her as something other than the Fixers killing around her, dressed in soft rose fabric that stayed impossibly clean amid all the blood pooling at her feet. An Elegy. He'd known it the moment he saw her, the same bone-deep certainty every citizen of the Ring carried about things far above the ordinary scale of the world. She had turned, at some point in that long night, and looked directly at him. Small, frozen, standing beside a father who'd gone very still at the sight of her.
⠀
He remembered her eyes finding his. He remembered a strange, cold clarity settling into his chest, an awareness of his own mortality more complete than anything a nine-year-old boy should ever have been asked to carry. He did not remember what happened after that. The memory simply ended there, at the edge of her gaze, a blank wall his own mind had apparently decided, somewhere in the last twenty years, that he was never meant to climb back over.
⠀
The bell rang again, distant, somewhere far below the sealed door on floor fifty, and Roby, sitting alone against the cold landing wall with Leopold's watchful shape a few feet away, felt the same nine-year-old fear settle back over him, entirely undiminished by two decades of growing considerably harder to frighten.
⠀
His hand drifted, without his full permission, to the inside pocket of his jacket, where a small, worn photograph had lived, folded soft with age, as long as he could remember carrying it: himself, small and grinning, perched on his father's shoulders outside their patchwork shack, Red-Light Totteoku's chaotic sprawl stretching out behind them both.
⠀
"Roby." Leopold's voice, low, careful, cut through it. "You've gone real pale. You sure you're alright?"
⠀
"Yeah." He slid the photograph back into his pocket, the bell finally, mercifully fading. "Just old ghosts. Ain't nothin' worth wakin' the others over."
⠀
Leopold didn't look entirely convinced, but he let it go, turning his attention back to the dark stairwell descending past the sealed door. Roby sat beside him a long while longer, waiting, with a dread he couldn't name and didn't dare examine too closely, for the bell to ring again.
⠀
It didn't. Not that night. But somewhere deep beneath his own ribs, in a place no amount of daylight ever fully reached, Roby understood, with the same bone-deep certainty he'd carried since he was nine years old, that it would.
⠀
It always did.