Endgame (The Amnesty Games Book 3), page 20
High above us, my father stands in his VIP box, his fists planted on his hips, a taut grin splitting his face.
As always, his formal, red and gold attire is unwrinkled and immaculate. His beard is trimmed like it’s been lined with a laser. The spectators are a screaming, rabid mass. Nico and I are battered competitors. Darrion, Zyhra, Anton, and Sylvie have been beaten half to death in one of the Nova Heights Detention Rooms.
But my father? He’s a cartoon peacock, a filtered and digitally-enhanced cardboard cut-out of a human being. He’s power. He’s control. He has the right answers to the wrong questions. He’s what people expect and what they need to see.
I hate, envy, love, fear, and admire him.
Is that part of it? Is that the secret to being the most powerful person in the New States? Is the trick to let everyone spend their time guessing and debating about whether you’re a crazy, joke-telling buffoon or a brilliant political genius while you distract them with monitors, games, and gambling?
If so, what’s his endgame? How much more power could he possibly have? How much better could my family possibly live? At what point does a power-seeker press “pause” and say, “That’s it. I’ve got enough. Maybe it’s time to share my hard-earned success and my good fortune with others”?
What if it’s even worse than I thought? What if there is no “pause” button? I guess I always figured that having power and being in control was like eating or drinking or sleeping: It’s nice, but there’s such a thing as too much of it.
But what if that’s not the case at all? What if my father’s quest for power is boundless?
What if there is no endgame?
Around the arena, the Reflection Break is over. People have paid up or collected on old bets and have already started placing new ones. The monitors flash with row after row of statistics and colorful graphs and charts detailing every second of the time my father has spent so far on his meticulously crafted and torturous version of “justice.”
Everyone has returned to their seats except for a few stragglers meandering their way back from bathroom breaks and from getting refreshments at the arena’s various snack counters.
The noise from the crowd has returned to its deafening levels. I’ve never been at the bottom of an avalanche, but I imagine it must feel and sound something like this. The ground quakes, and my skin shivers from the vibrations.
Even Nico winces against the onslaught of reverberations.
The noise hurts my ears, but I get the sense that Nico’s genuinely annoyed by it. For someone who looks so good being the center of attention, he sure hates being in the spotlight.
Something he and I have in common, and something he and Sylvie definitely don’t.
Our Finest escort encircles us. They don’t have their weapons drawn, but they don’t really need to. There’s nowhere for me and Nico to go.
If we made a run for it, there are dozens of Finest, the towering arena walls, and the dense expanse of the Netherwoods between us and anything remotely close to freedom. Depending on what weapon the Finest chose to use, our muscles would be paralyzed or jellified before we got more than fifty feet.
I’m sure someone’s got a prop bet on that.
I can’t believe I spent the last year training, sweating, studying, and getting “toughened up” by Nico just to be standing exactly where I am.
Amnesty Arena is a theater, a sports complex, and an auditorium. But it’s also a prison.
The Finest guide us toward the huge double doors of one of the arena’s ground-level exits.
“Maybe they’re going to let us go,” I suggest to Nico.
He points to the two Starting Pads emerging from the ground. “No. I don’t think so.”
28
RIVERS
The Finest don’t have to tell us what comes next. We’ve stood on these exact same Starting Pads many times.
For a full week, we took our positions on the elevated, flat-headed, mushroom-shaped platforms at the beginning of each day of the Amnesty Games.
It’s also where we stood right before my father signaled the start of our first trial, the one from a week ago where we managed to slip out of the arena, escape into the Netherwoods, and disappear (with my mother’s help) into the Ward.
And here we are…back again. Caught up in the cycle. The never-fucking-ending cycle.
What I once imagined was the straight line of my life has grown rounder and rounder. Its curve has swept me up and brought me back to where I began.
“Looks familiar, doesn’t it?” I call over to Nico.
“That’s the illusion,” he calls back. He raises his hand and makes the motion of an undulating dolphin. “That’s the trick. Life is supposed to be a nice, wavy line. Ups. Downs. And lots of forward progress.” He points an accusing finger up at my father. “His trick has been to make us think that’s what’s happening, but in reality, everything is designed to keep us going in the same stupid circle.”
“Up the mountain, down the mountain…”
“Into the arena, out of the arena, and right back in again.”
“And off balance the entire time.”
“Funny how being back in the same place is so…”
“Different,” I finish.
Nico catches my eye from across the space between us. “The place is the same. We’re the ones who are different.”
My mother once told me about an ancient Greek philosopher called Heraclitus. According to her, he said that “a person can never step in the same river twice.”
I asked her what that meant, since I knew it had to be wrong. Teshe River flowed down and then around the base of our mountain, and Callynne and Darrion and I had stepped, swum, and splashed in it a million times.
“It means,” my mother explained, “that the next time, it won’t be the same river, and you won’t be the same person. Experiences change you, but you change those experiences right back. The river doesn’t end. It flows into the ocean. Its water evaporates under the heat and rises as mist into the clouds. When there’s enough of it, it gets heavy. It collects and falls back down onto our mountaintop as rain. That rain flows downhill into Teshe River. The river, the mist, the rain, and the river again—always moving, always there.”
We were in the living room when she said that. My father walked through on his way to the den. My mother and I greeted him. She waited until he was in the den and out of earshot with the sliding barn door closed behind him before adding, “Heraclitus believed in the unity of opposites. He said change is good and that there’s value in conflict. He wasn’t about getting to a single state of being. There’s no perfect, ideal ending. For him, life was about growth, flux, change, and forward progress. Like the river.”
I pretended I understood and then ran off to find Callynne and Darrion down at the river at the bottom of the mountain. I don’t know if the river changed me or if I changed it, but it’s true that I never looked at Teshe River the same way after that day.
The river was right where I’d left it, but it was also in motion. It wasn’t perfect, but once I saw the magic in its cyclical but always forward progress, it didn’t need to be.
I could use a good dose of that kind of forward progress right now, actually. Anything to get me and Nico off these Starting Pads and somewhere, anywhere, far from here.
This place, this spot, this arena…they may be familiar. This may even be home. But it’s sure as hell not a homecoming.
Their small red and black ladybug-bodies glistening in the sun, four camdrones drift above, behind, and on either side of me and Nico.
All around in the stands, eager spectators are still buzzing from their arena seats. A new set of betting odds scrolls along the bottom of the monitors, right under action shots of me and Nico being replayed from the last series of games in the three tanks of Axial glass.
The giant screens show me in embarrassing, larger-than-life detail: my arms windmilling as I leap blindfolded across the white, gliding grav-pads. Me floundering in the rising water of the second tank. And me stripped down to my boots and underwear and later on, me climbing Nico like he’s my own personal stripper pole in the third tank.
As a Hawker, I ran, dodged, chased, attacked, and did all the same crazy physical stuff.
This is different. I’m on the other side of the equation. All those shots of me up on the monitors—they’re the same actions and all the same intense physical movements. Now, though, they lack dignity. There’s no heroism in them. It’s pathetic.
I’m pathetic.
I never said so out loud, but I figured that I always looked kind of badass in my Hawker gear: Silver-trimmed leather vest, cargo pants, tactical combat gear, my ponytail whipping around, and my Ballista strapped with potential lethality to my wrist.
Whatever I looked like then—draped at the moment in my dingy and battered Hopeful jumpsuit—I definitely don’t look anything like that now.
And somehow Nico, through all the shouting, leaping, clambering, and nearly drowning, still looks like a Greek god. His white jumpsuit might as well be a toga.
Standing on my Starting Pad, I feel naked and on display. Over on his Starting Pad, Nico looks like someone should build a Doric temple around him.
I can’t figure out how he and I could possibly have our names on the lips of the arena’s spectators at the same time. He’s a million times stronger, braver, and more confident than I am. He’s my mentor and a veteran of the Amnesty Games. I’m his disappointing protégée. We don’t belong in the same game, on the same monitors, or even in the same world together.
I have to remind myself that despite my best and most eager fantasies, he and I being together isn’t a natural thing. It’s all contrived. My mother worked in secret for a long time behind the scenes to make this happen. To make us happen. She pushed him toward me so I could fulfill her dream. I was never even a person to my mother. I wasn’t a daughter or even a Hawker.
I was a means to an end.
Rivers might not end, but I sure as hell feel like I’m about to.
29
BETHA AND RAND
Filling the stands, the spectators lock in wagers on their Betting Tablets before my father announces the beginning of the next game.
Turning as one, the audience pins their full attention onto me and Nico. As sure as if they had laser beam eyes, their stares sear my skin.
Half of them are betting we succeed. Half are betting we fail.
Desire doesn’t even matter anymore. Neither does justice. Even the spectacle my father is putting on at our expense has taken a back seat. For now, at this moment, it’s about the bets. The fans are weighing their options. They’re talking back and forth about optimal gambling strategies for whatever game is about to happen and in light of the games that have already been played.
According to the scroll on the bottom of the arena’s monitors, a small minority is betting that Nico and I are going to get killed trying to escape.
There’s no real care or connectedness in it. There’s no empathy. They’re not betting on what they want to happen or on what they hope might happen, only on what they predict will happen.
Nico doesn’t look worried.
Until he does.
The sudden roar that goes up from the crowd startles us.
Only about fifty feet from us, the arena’s massive twin wooden doors heave open. The thick, silver door hinges screech with the straining cry of strips of sheet metal being fed into a wood-chipper.
Accompanying the sound, a storm cloud of dust gets kicked up from the bottom of the doors as they groan their way open over the dirt-packed arena floor. It’s as if someone came along and set off a bomb.
The camdrones spin toward the noise and the cloud and proceed to broadcast the scene to all of Nova Heights on the monitors.
Nico and I and the entire audience in Amnesty Arena watch as four Hawkers—geared up in supple, shiny, silver-trimmed leather armor—stride through the towering doors and through the whirling dust-cloud. In a single-file line, they march between our two elevated Starting Pads and take their positions inside of a white chalk circle painted on the arena’s dirt floor, about thirty or forty feet in front of us.
It’s a slow, deliberate, and calculated entrance. Out of context, it would be the height of boredom. Four expressionless teenagers marching in lockstep between two other teenagers on pedestals and into a packed, open-air arena should barely register.
Especially after the chaos of the three tanks and the general commotion the crowd has already been treated to.
If “the height of boredom” has an opposite, this is it.
The crowd goes crazy as the four Hawkers pivot in a slow circle, waving to their adoring fans.
Dressed like Nico and I were a short time ago, the Hawkers are decked out in their brown leather vests, protective wrist straps, black boots, multi-pocketed field vests, and combat cargo pants with light-padding in the hips and knees—all standard Hawker issue.
At least they don’t have weapons.
Two of the Hawkers I don’t know that well. Two of them I do.
From inside the chalk circle, my brother Viktor—the young, evil genius—catches my eye and sneers at me. There’s nothing unusual about that. Despite being my younger brother, he’s always looked down on me. Growing up, he teased and tormented me. He liked to annoy me, and he enjoyed outsmarting me, but he loved to hurt me.
Back then, his scorn was practically a solid.
My understanding was that siblings like us often split the attention and affections of our parents.
According to an old stereotype my mother once told me about, there are so-called “Momma’s Boys” and “Daddy’s Girls.”
By that logic, I should get along best with our dad, and Viktor should get along best with our mom. Instead, Viktor basically helped our dad kill our mom, and my dad seems dead set on killing me.
As she pivots and accepts the crowd’s cheers, Kaia ignores me in favor of locking her electric eyes on Nico. Her wavy, wheat-blond hair whips in the light wind. Those high cheekbones of hers look ready to cut through waves like the bow of a ship in a tempest.
Kaia and Nico spent a lot of time together during this past year’s training season. They’ve known each other for a long time and have an equally long history of being seen together around Nova Heights. I don’t know if there was ever anything official between them, but even something unofficial is more than enough to overload my jealous brain.
Kaia may not be a techno-genius like Sylvie, but she’s gorgeous as an Egyptian goddess, competitive as a pro athlete, strong as a bear, and mean as a snake.
During Hawker training, while Nico and Kaia were flirting and feeding off of each other’s perfection, I was left alone to be eaten by my own insecurities.
First Kaia. Now Sylvie. There’s that circle again.
My brain rolls its eyes. Nice to know some things never change.
The other two Hawkers are Betha and Rand. Although we were in the same class at the Academy, I only know a little bit about them.
Betha was in my Extreme Games class. She was one of the best in our class at ice climbing, but she got hurt early in the semester and wound up missing a few weeks with a badly broken forearm. She’s about my height, but she seems taller. She carries herself with a chin-up, shoulders-back, I-don’t-give-a-fuck majesty. Her blond hair is cut short and dyed a dusty, powdery blue on one side. Her blue eyes are flat, dead, and unreadable.
She was one of the top candidates for Hawker, but she didn’t make the final cut. She probably deserved to, but she hardly ever talked during training and rarely raised her hand in class. When she did talk, she was always curt and grumpy.
Because Hawkers are going to have their faces and actions projected onto monitors all over Mercy Province, they have to have a certain amount of charisma. Betha didn’t really have it.
Honestly, I didn’t, either, which is why I was an alternate.
Like Betha, I probably shouldn’t have made Hawker. I was good, but I had slightly lower scores than she did. I lacked her aloof confidence, but my mom pulled some strings to make sure I got selected as one of the final six.
I wish she would have pulled those strings for Betha. Then maybe Betha would be the one on trial, and I’d be the one getting ready to hunt her down in yet another series of savage games.
As for Rand, he’s a short guy with disproportionately bulky calves and forearms, but he’s super fit. In training, he used to show us how he could hold flat stones pinched in the creases of his six-pack abs.
“Three-percent body fat,” he always bragged, rapping his knuckles on his marble-hard stomach.
He once told me he admired my skills with the Ballista. I didn’t know if he was serious, if he was teasing me, or if he was playing some kind of mind game to lull me into complacency. His words were as unreadable as Betha’s eyes.
He wasn’t eligible for High Hawker because he got too many demerits the year before, most of them for cutting class, cheating on a final, and getting into constant fights with other students—usually ones at least a few years younger than him.
Betha and Rand have three things in common: They’re both religiously brainwashed into the party line of us being superior to the Warders and the Hopefuls. They’re both aggressively violent. And they both get great joy out of exercising their violent streak on whatever beaten down and weakened target happens to be in front of them.
Which right now is me and Nico.
They’re unconditional, uncompromising predators. A combination that doesn’t bode well for me and Nico at the moment.
A metallic buzz of feedback startles me. From up in his VIP box, my father laughs and clears his throat. “Sorry about that. Let’s try that again.”
After a wink into the red eye of the camdrone, he announces the rules for the next game. After a very brief compliment to me and Nico for surviving the Trial of the Tanks, he describes the two new obstacles laid out in the middle of the arena.
As he talks, a camdrone beams a light, first onto the towering Rock Wall and then onto the Cage.
As always, his formal, red and gold attire is unwrinkled and immaculate. His beard is trimmed like it’s been lined with a laser. The spectators are a screaming, rabid mass. Nico and I are battered competitors. Darrion, Zyhra, Anton, and Sylvie have been beaten half to death in one of the Nova Heights Detention Rooms.
But my father? He’s a cartoon peacock, a filtered and digitally-enhanced cardboard cut-out of a human being. He’s power. He’s control. He has the right answers to the wrong questions. He’s what people expect and what they need to see.
I hate, envy, love, fear, and admire him.
Is that part of it? Is that the secret to being the most powerful person in the New States? Is the trick to let everyone spend their time guessing and debating about whether you’re a crazy, joke-telling buffoon or a brilliant political genius while you distract them with monitors, games, and gambling?
If so, what’s his endgame? How much more power could he possibly have? How much better could my family possibly live? At what point does a power-seeker press “pause” and say, “That’s it. I’ve got enough. Maybe it’s time to share my hard-earned success and my good fortune with others”?
What if it’s even worse than I thought? What if there is no “pause” button? I guess I always figured that having power and being in control was like eating or drinking or sleeping: It’s nice, but there’s such a thing as too much of it.
But what if that’s not the case at all? What if my father’s quest for power is boundless?
What if there is no endgame?
Around the arena, the Reflection Break is over. People have paid up or collected on old bets and have already started placing new ones. The monitors flash with row after row of statistics and colorful graphs and charts detailing every second of the time my father has spent so far on his meticulously crafted and torturous version of “justice.”
Everyone has returned to their seats except for a few stragglers meandering their way back from bathroom breaks and from getting refreshments at the arena’s various snack counters.
The noise from the crowd has returned to its deafening levels. I’ve never been at the bottom of an avalanche, but I imagine it must feel and sound something like this. The ground quakes, and my skin shivers from the vibrations.
Even Nico winces against the onslaught of reverberations.
The noise hurts my ears, but I get the sense that Nico’s genuinely annoyed by it. For someone who looks so good being the center of attention, he sure hates being in the spotlight.
Something he and I have in common, and something he and Sylvie definitely don’t.
Our Finest escort encircles us. They don’t have their weapons drawn, but they don’t really need to. There’s nowhere for me and Nico to go.
If we made a run for it, there are dozens of Finest, the towering arena walls, and the dense expanse of the Netherwoods between us and anything remotely close to freedom. Depending on what weapon the Finest chose to use, our muscles would be paralyzed or jellified before we got more than fifty feet.
I’m sure someone’s got a prop bet on that.
I can’t believe I spent the last year training, sweating, studying, and getting “toughened up” by Nico just to be standing exactly where I am.
Amnesty Arena is a theater, a sports complex, and an auditorium. But it’s also a prison.
The Finest guide us toward the huge double doors of one of the arena’s ground-level exits.
“Maybe they’re going to let us go,” I suggest to Nico.
He points to the two Starting Pads emerging from the ground. “No. I don’t think so.”
28
RIVERS
The Finest don’t have to tell us what comes next. We’ve stood on these exact same Starting Pads many times.
For a full week, we took our positions on the elevated, flat-headed, mushroom-shaped platforms at the beginning of each day of the Amnesty Games.
It’s also where we stood right before my father signaled the start of our first trial, the one from a week ago where we managed to slip out of the arena, escape into the Netherwoods, and disappear (with my mother’s help) into the Ward.
And here we are…back again. Caught up in the cycle. The never-fucking-ending cycle.
What I once imagined was the straight line of my life has grown rounder and rounder. Its curve has swept me up and brought me back to where I began.
“Looks familiar, doesn’t it?” I call over to Nico.
“That’s the illusion,” he calls back. He raises his hand and makes the motion of an undulating dolphin. “That’s the trick. Life is supposed to be a nice, wavy line. Ups. Downs. And lots of forward progress.” He points an accusing finger up at my father. “His trick has been to make us think that’s what’s happening, but in reality, everything is designed to keep us going in the same stupid circle.”
“Up the mountain, down the mountain…”
“Into the arena, out of the arena, and right back in again.”
“And off balance the entire time.”
“Funny how being back in the same place is so…”
“Different,” I finish.
Nico catches my eye from across the space between us. “The place is the same. We’re the ones who are different.”
My mother once told me about an ancient Greek philosopher called Heraclitus. According to her, he said that “a person can never step in the same river twice.”
I asked her what that meant, since I knew it had to be wrong. Teshe River flowed down and then around the base of our mountain, and Callynne and Darrion and I had stepped, swum, and splashed in it a million times.
“It means,” my mother explained, “that the next time, it won’t be the same river, and you won’t be the same person. Experiences change you, but you change those experiences right back. The river doesn’t end. It flows into the ocean. Its water evaporates under the heat and rises as mist into the clouds. When there’s enough of it, it gets heavy. It collects and falls back down onto our mountaintop as rain. That rain flows downhill into Teshe River. The river, the mist, the rain, and the river again—always moving, always there.”
We were in the living room when she said that. My father walked through on his way to the den. My mother and I greeted him. She waited until he was in the den and out of earshot with the sliding barn door closed behind him before adding, “Heraclitus believed in the unity of opposites. He said change is good and that there’s value in conflict. He wasn’t about getting to a single state of being. There’s no perfect, ideal ending. For him, life was about growth, flux, change, and forward progress. Like the river.”
I pretended I understood and then ran off to find Callynne and Darrion down at the river at the bottom of the mountain. I don’t know if the river changed me or if I changed it, but it’s true that I never looked at Teshe River the same way after that day.
The river was right where I’d left it, but it was also in motion. It wasn’t perfect, but once I saw the magic in its cyclical but always forward progress, it didn’t need to be.
I could use a good dose of that kind of forward progress right now, actually. Anything to get me and Nico off these Starting Pads and somewhere, anywhere, far from here.
This place, this spot, this arena…they may be familiar. This may even be home. But it’s sure as hell not a homecoming.
Their small red and black ladybug-bodies glistening in the sun, four camdrones drift above, behind, and on either side of me and Nico.
All around in the stands, eager spectators are still buzzing from their arena seats. A new set of betting odds scrolls along the bottom of the monitors, right under action shots of me and Nico being replayed from the last series of games in the three tanks of Axial glass.
The giant screens show me in embarrassing, larger-than-life detail: my arms windmilling as I leap blindfolded across the white, gliding grav-pads. Me floundering in the rising water of the second tank. And me stripped down to my boots and underwear and later on, me climbing Nico like he’s my own personal stripper pole in the third tank.
As a Hawker, I ran, dodged, chased, attacked, and did all the same crazy physical stuff.
This is different. I’m on the other side of the equation. All those shots of me up on the monitors—they’re the same actions and all the same intense physical movements. Now, though, they lack dignity. There’s no heroism in them. It’s pathetic.
I’m pathetic.
I never said so out loud, but I figured that I always looked kind of badass in my Hawker gear: Silver-trimmed leather vest, cargo pants, tactical combat gear, my ponytail whipping around, and my Ballista strapped with potential lethality to my wrist.
Whatever I looked like then—draped at the moment in my dingy and battered Hopeful jumpsuit—I definitely don’t look anything like that now.
And somehow Nico, through all the shouting, leaping, clambering, and nearly drowning, still looks like a Greek god. His white jumpsuit might as well be a toga.
Standing on my Starting Pad, I feel naked and on display. Over on his Starting Pad, Nico looks like someone should build a Doric temple around him.
I can’t figure out how he and I could possibly have our names on the lips of the arena’s spectators at the same time. He’s a million times stronger, braver, and more confident than I am. He’s my mentor and a veteran of the Amnesty Games. I’m his disappointing protégée. We don’t belong in the same game, on the same monitors, or even in the same world together.
I have to remind myself that despite my best and most eager fantasies, he and I being together isn’t a natural thing. It’s all contrived. My mother worked in secret for a long time behind the scenes to make this happen. To make us happen. She pushed him toward me so I could fulfill her dream. I was never even a person to my mother. I wasn’t a daughter or even a Hawker.
I was a means to an end.
Rivers might not end, but I sure as hell feel like I’m about to.
29
BETHA AND RAND
Filling the stands, the spectators lock in wagers on their Betting Tablets before my father announces the beginning of the next game.
Turning as one, the audience pins their full attention onto me and Nico. As sure as if they had laser beam eyes, their stares sear my skin.
Half of them are betting we succeed. Half are betting we fail.
Desire doesn’t even matter anymore. Neither does justice. Even the spectacle my father is putting on at our expense has taken a back seat. For now, at this moment, it’s about the bets. The fans are weighing their options. They’re talking back and forth about optimal gambling strategies for whatever game is about to happen and in light of the games that have already been played.
According to the scroll on the bottom of the arena’s monitors, a small minority is betting that Nico and I are going to get killed trying to escape.
There’s no real care or connectedness in it. There’s no empathy. They’re not betting on what they want to happen or on what they hope might happen, only on what they predict will happen.
Nico doesn’t look worried.
Until he does.
The sudden roar that goes up from the crowd startles us.
Only about fifty feet from us, the arena’s massive twin wooden doors heave open. The thick, silver door hinges screech with the straining cry of strips of sheet metal being fed into a wood-chipper.
Accompanying the sound, a storm cloud of dust gets kicked up from the bottom of the doors as they groan their way open over the dirt-packed arena floor. It’s as if someone came along and set off a bomb.
The camdrones spin toward the noise and the cloud and proceed to broadcast the scene to all of Nova Heights on the monitors.
Nico and I and the entire audience in Amnesty Arena watch as four Hawkers—geared up in supple, shiny, silver-trimmed leather armor—stride through the towering doors and through the whirling dust-cloud. In a single-file line, they march between our two elevated Starting Pads and take their positions inside of a white chalk circle painted on the arena’s dirt floor, about thirty or forty feet in front of us.
It’s a slow, deliberate, and calculated entrance. Out of context, it would be the height of boredom. Four expressionless teenagers marching in lockstep between two other teenagers on pedestals and into a packed, open-air arena should barely register.
Especially after the chaos of the three tanks and the general commotion the crowd has already been treated to.
If “the height of boredom” has an opposite, this is it.
The crowd goes crazy as the four Hawkers pivot in a slow circle, waving to their adoring fans.
Dressed like Nico and I were a short time ago, the Hawkers are decked out in their brown leather vests, protective wrist straps, black boots, multi-pocketed field vests, and combat cargo pants with light-padding in the hips and knees—all standard Hawker issue.
At least they don’t have weapons.
Two of the Hawkers I don’t know that well. Two of them I do.
From inside the chalk circle, my brother Viktor—the young, evil genius—catches my eye and sneers at me. There’s nothing unusual about that. Despite being my younger brother, he’s always looked down on me. Growing up, he teased and tormented me. He liked to annoy me, and he enjoyed outsmarting me, but he loved to hurt me.
Back then, his scorn was practically a solid.
My understanding was that siblings like us often split the attention and affections of our parents.
According to an old stereotype my mother once told me about, there are so-called “Momma’s Boys” and “Daddy’s Girls.”
By that logic, I should get along best with our dad, and Viktor should get along best with our mom. Instead, Viktor basically helped our dad kill our mom, and my dad seems dead set on killing me.
As she pivots and accepts the crowd’s cheers, Kaia ignores me in favor of locking her electric eyes on Nico. Her wavy, wheat-blond hair whips in the light wind. Those high cheekbones of hers look ready to cut through waves like the bow of a ship in a tempest.
Kaia and Nico spent a lot of time together during this past year’s training season. They’ve known each other for a long time and have an equally long history of being seen together around Nova Heights. I don’t know if there was ever anything official between them, but even something unofficial is more than enough to overload my jealous brain.
Kaia may not be a techno-genius like Sylvie, but she’s gorgeous as an Egyptian goddess, competitive as a pro athlete, strong as a bear, and mean as a snake.
During Hawker training, while Nico and Kaia were flirting and feeding off of each other’s perfection, I was left alone to be eaten by my own insecurities.
First Kaia. Now Sylvie. There’s that circle again.
My brain rolls its eyes. Nice to know some things never change.
The other two Hawkers are Betha and Rand. Although we were in the same class at the Academy, I only know a little bit about them.
Betha was in my Extreme Games class. She was one of the best in our class at ice climbing, but she got hurt early in the semester and wound up missing a few weeks with a badly broken forearm. She’s about my height, but she seems taller. She carries herself with a chin-up, shoulders-back, I-don’t-give-a-fuck majesty. Her blond hair is cut short and dyed a dusty, powdery blue on one side. Her blue eyes are flat, dead, and unreadable.
She was one of the top candidates for Hawker, but she didn’t make the final cut. She probably deserved to, but she hardly ever talked during training and rarely raised her hand in class. When she did talk, she was always curt and grumpy.
Because Hawkers are going to have their faces and actions projected onto monitors all over Mercy Province, they have to have a certain amount of charisma. Betha didn’t really have it.
Honestly, I didn’t, either, which is why I was an alternate.
Like Betha, I probably shouldn’t have made Hawker. I was good, but I had slightly lower scores than she did. I lacked her aloof confidence, but my mom pulled some strings to make sure I got selected as one of the final six.
I wish she would have pulled those strings for Betha. Then maybe Betha would be the one on trial, and I’d be the one getting ready to hunt her down in yet another series of savage games.
As for Rand, he’s a short guy with disproportionately bulky calves and forearms, but he’s super fit. In training, he used to show us how he could hold flat stones pinched in the creases of his six-pack abs.
“Three-percent body fat,” he always bragged, rapping his knuckles on his marble-hard stomach.
He once told me he admired my skills with the Ballista. I didn’t know if he was serious, if he was teasing me, or if he was playing some kind of mind game to lull me into complacency. His words were as unreadable as Betha’s eyes.
He wasn’t eligible for High Hawker because he got too many demerits the year before, most of them for cutting class, cheating on a final, and getting into constant fights with other students—usually ones at least a few years younger than him.
Betha and Rand have three things in common: They’re both religiously brainwashed into the party line of us being superior to the Warders and the Hopefuls. They’re both aggressively violent. And they both get great joy out of exercising their violent streak on whatever beaten down and weakened target happens to be in front of them.
Which right now is me and Nico.
They’re unconditional, uncompromising predators. A combination that doesn’t bode well for me and Nico at the moment.
A metallic buzz of feedback startles me. From up in his VIP box, my father laughs and clears his throat. “Sorry about that. Let’s try that again.”
After a wink into the red eye of the camdrone, he announces the rules for the next game. After a very brief compliment to me and Nico for surviving the Trial of the Tanks, he describes the two new obstacles laid out in the middle of the arena.
As he talks, a camdrone beams a light, first onto the towering Rock Wall and then onto the Cage.
