by Laura Legend
“Zach,” Cass prompted, “what happened at the bank?”
“I don’t know what to say, Cass,” Zach began. “I don’t know how to describe it. I’m not sure what happened.”
Cass kept quiet and gave him room to try.
“Once the vault was open, the sarira—they did something to me. For a moment, they changed me. And trapped me. And I didn’t know if I’d ever get loose again.”
Cass felt an involuntary tremble pass through Zach’s body, from head to toe, and settle in his still-shaking hands.
“I’ve never felt so powerful. Or been more scared.”
Cass squeezed his trembling hand, willing it to be still in her own.
“There are stories, legends—I thought they were just your typical kinds of exaggerations, built up layer by layer over the years. But now I wonder if there isn’t something to them.”
Agitated, Zach stood up, almost losing his towel again. He pulled it tight around his waist and began to pace back and forth. Cass sat up, following him with her eyes.
“One legend is about a famous Shield magician in the Middle Ages who experimented with these kinds of relics, augmenting his strength and changing his form until he had effectively encased himself inside another body and mind. Once he was in, though, he couldn’t control the power he’d gathered and he couldn’t get free of the body either. He crippled the Lost for hundreds of years, and Judas himself barely escaped, but he also almost destroyed the Shield in the process. In the end, the Shield itself was forced to put him down.”
Cass was riveted by the story, though she wasn’t sure what to make of it. The scholar and scientist in her was skeptical, but in the end this story wasn’t much stranger than everything else she’d seen and experienced in the past few years.
In particular, though, she wasn’t sure what the story meant for Zach, or what it revealed about the events at the bank today. She was hesitant to pressure him for more details. He seemed fragile enough at the moment that, probably, the only way he could talk about it was to come at it sideways.
Explanations could wait.
Cass stood up, fixed Zach’s loose towel for him, and pulled him close.
Zach returned her embrace with one hand while, with the other, he absently rubbed the place on his forehead where a short pair of horns had budded just hours ago.
25
The following day, Cass found herself back in the ring. She hadn’t thought they could pack any more people into the arena than they already had.
She was wrong.
If there were fire codes in the Underside, they were definitely being broken. Cass could barely hear herself think amid the pre-fight rumble of the crowd.
The price you pay, Jones, for your own excellence.
Kumiko snapped her fingers in front of Cass’s face.
“Over here,” Kumiko said. “Focus.”
Cass turned her full attention to Kumiko, happy for any last-minute advice.
“You’ve never seen anything like this man,” Kumiko began sourly. “You aren’t ready for this.”
Cass glanced over at her semi-final opponent, the last person standing between her and the championship fight. He was a tall Middle Eastern man with a thick, white beard, dressed in desert garb. He was warming up with some type of “whirling dervish” moves. Also, he happened to have four arms and four eyes.
Kumiko was probably right. Cass wasn’t ready for this.
Kumiko continued. “He is a practitioner of magic who, in violation of sacred oaths, has used his knowledge of magic to modify and amplify his own body.”
“I already picked up on that last part,” Cass said.
“But that’s not the most important thing. The crucial thing is to always keep in mind that he’s adept with spells that can temporarily modify the terrain of the ring. Casting holes where there weren’t holes, raising ridges where the floor has been smooth. He will attack with two hands and cast spells with the others.”
“Right,” Cass agreed, “that is a problem.”
The referee was calling for their attention. He positioned Cass and Four-Eyes at the center of the mat’s blood-red eye and had them bow to each other. This close, Cass got a good look at the man’s eyes. But they didn’t tell her anything. They were gray and unreadable and only showed a reflection of her own wandering, milky eye. The man himself, though, did radiate a kind of balance and dignity that Cass instantly admired. When she bowed to him, she bowed in earnest. He seemed to return the favor.
In the moment before the fight began, Cass looked up again at Richard’s box to confirm that he and Zach were there. They were. Richard was in his customary seat. Zach, on the other hand, was already pacing nervously in the back of the box. Cass knew it was torture for him to watch.
She took a step back from the center of the mat and dropped into a fighting stance. She couldn’t decide which pair of this guy’s arms (or eyes) were the original set and which were the add-ons. She felt like she was suffering from some kind of double vision whenever she looked at him, so she tried crossing her eyes to cancel out the doubling.
It didn’t help. He just ended up looking like he had eight arms and eight eyes.
The bell rang and the crowd thundered, already on its feet. The fight was on.
Cass and Four-Eyes circled each other, both a little wary. Cass felt good, though. The spark of heat behind her weak eye was already beginning to burn and she could feel the power flowing more cleanly through her as her eye settled into focus, like a gap in a circuit had closed.
Four-Eyes made the first move. He jabbed with one arm, repositioning Cass as she danced away, but simultaneously cast a spell that created an unexpected ridge in the floor, just behind her, that sent her stumbling.
Cass rolled into her fall and was right back on her feet. This was going to be difficult. Both the fighter and the ring were her opponents. She couldn’t even count on the ground to be a neutral observer. Instead, she’d have to anticipate that it would be actively working against her.
Cass shot Kumiko a look, silently pleading for any additional advice. But as she glanced away, Four-Eyes seized the moment to nail her with a sharp punch to the ribs.
Cass retreated again. She was going to feel that tomorrow.
The crowd loved it.
Cass couldn’t be distracted by relying on Kumiko. She was on her own.
She and her opponent circled each other again and again, Four-Eyes made the first move. He spun into a roundhouse kick while casting a sinkhole in the floor behind her. Cass, though, was expecting something like this and nimbly avoided both the kick and the hole.
There you go, Jones, she thought, you’re getting the hang of this. Now you just have to manage to hit the guy back.
Cass could feel her focus improving, wisps of smoky white light trailing her movements around the ring as time began to loosen and expand. She worked her opponent around the ring, trying several combinations of jabs and kicks, but he was cagey and she couldn’t connect.
Still, she felt strong and glanced up at Richard’s box. Zach had already chewed through his fingernails and stepped outside. Richard, though, was on the edge of his seat. She momentarily locked eyes with him and a bolt of electric energy—even at that distance—passed between them. Cass felt time shift down a gear, and then she felt it swing sideways into an adjacent space. This time, however, it didn’t fork.
Instead, it looped.
While Cass glanced up at Richard, Four-Eyes lashed out with a vicious kick, caught Cass in the side of the head, and buckled a crack in the ground. Reeling, she stepped right into the crack and felt the bone in her ankle snap cleanly in half. White hot pain shot up her leg and she stumbled to the ground.
As she fell, though, she instinctively reached out for something to grab hold of and break her fall. She didn’t find anything solid, but she did, somehow, grab hold of the tail end of time.
Before she knew what had happened, she’d looped back around to the prior, electric moment when
she’d met Richard’s eyes.
But this time she knew what was coming next.
When Four-Eyes lashed out with his kick, Cass caught his foot, used his own momentum to swing him to the ground, and wrenched his leg in the process—causing his knee to buckle and pop in a way that made even Cass cringe. Now, though, was no time to be squeamish. Ignoring the visibly protruding bone, Cass dropped a knee to his head and ended the fight. Mr. Four-Eyes (now Mr. One-Leg) was done.
Cass was filled with a surge of white-hot power and red adrenaline, and she felt instinctively that she could still loop back through the same moment again if she wanted. She could feel the electricity of that connection with Richard again. She could feel the immediate thrill of victory one more time. But she could also sense that this kind of looping path could easily degenerate into a kind of addiction as she tried to perfect her victorious takedown and suck everything desirable out of the moment before moving on. She could already tell that looping time even this once was going to tinge her victory with a bitter aftertaste, laced with guilt.
She couldn’t help feeling like she had—in a way—cheated.
Cass made a conscious effort to let go of the moment and found herself jerked back into the normal flow of time.
As she tried to get her bearings, the crowd went wild. They, of course, had only seen the final result, but they loved the decisive brutality of her win. Chants of “Seer, Seer,” grew stronger and stronger as they swept through the audience.
Kumiko looked both pleased and worried.
Cass’s stomach was tied into a knot. A sharp movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. Cass squinted, trying to see clearly—something she was not at all used to. A dark figure fuzzed and blurred in the overlapping shadows of the tunnel leading to the locker room.
Suddenly, the lurking shape snapped into focus. And Cass couldn’t help it—she sucked in a quick breath. Light glinted off the corner of a kabuki mask. The woman in the mask held still: she was waiting.
26
Maya Krishnamurti was embarrassed.
She didn’t like feeling embarrassed. In particular, she didn’t like feeling the twinge of bright anger at the heart of every embarrassment, the twinge that said “you failed”. That emotion ran against the grain of her default disposition to be cool, unruffled, clinical, and calculating.
She didn’t like feeling that . . . feeling.
She’d accounted for Richard. She’d known that he was on her trail and that, out of some misplaced devotion to Cass, he would try to stop her from stealing the prize so that Cass could win it fairly, dramatically, trailing clouds of glory and whatnot. She’d prepared for him and was ready to set him gently aside with a tactical team and a few pairs of stun sticks. It was just a temporary expediency. Richard would soon enough—surely—put Cass away and start thinking straight again. And when he did, he would thank her.
But what she hadn’t accounted for was Zach. Or, at least, she hadn’t accounted for that thing he’d transformed into.
Now all Maya could do was hope that Cass actually won the tournament—Cass had seemed more lucky than good thus far, so, fingers crossed—and do what she could to clean up her own mess. Richard surely had his suspicions about Maya’s involvement in the heist, but it would definitely be best for their long-term relationship if those suspicions weren’t confirmed by hard evidence.
So, for now, while everyone was occupied with Cass’s semi-final fight, Maya had just one job: recover the bag of gear that the monster had stolen from her.
Getting back into the apartment was no trouble. She was the one who’d arranged for them to stay there in the first place. It made things simpler for her to house them someplace where, from the start, she could easily keep track of them. The cameras around the apartment, however, had captured disappointingly little drama, between the sheets or out. Why would ridiculously beautiful people like the three of them choose to live monkish, voluntarily celibate lives? What, especially, were Cass and Zach waiting for?
It simply wasn’t rational.
Once she was in, Maya took a quick look around. The apartment seemed mildly lived in. She poked her head into each of the rooms. Everything in Richard’s room was folded, hung, and put away. He’d even made his own bed this morning. Kumiko’s room showed no sign that she’d even stepped through the door. Cass’s room was a mess and smelled a bit like the workout space that Maya had arranged for it to be.
She quickly finished her brief tour of Zach’s room. This was the most likely place to find her missing bag. The room was a little disheveled, but in a way that cried out against its own disorder, as if the state of the room reflected some deeper disorder in Zach’s own mind that he couldn’t entirely hide.
Maya looked in the closet first and found only Zach’s torn and tattered clothes. Then she checked the dresser drawers and bathroom.
Nothing.
There was really only one place left to look. Smoothing the front of her tight, sleeveless dress, Maya knelt on the floor and looked under the bed.
Unprepared for what she saw, she almost fell over backwards. She spotted the bag straight off, but then a pair of green, glowing eyes blinked back at her from the darkness. At first, she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing, but when she looked again and the thing hissed at her, she realized the eyes belonged to a cat.
Who the hell would bring some dirty cat off the street and into a luxury apartment like this?
Maya sat back on her haunches, balanced on the toes of her high heels, and considered her possible courses of action. She could drag the cat out from the under bed, wring its neck, toss it into the garbage, and, in the process, risk getting her arms and dress shredded by cat claws, or. . . .
Maya stood up decisively, went to the kitchen, and filled a bowl with milk. She brought it back to the bedroom, wafted the scent under the bed, and placed the bowl of milk near the bathroom door. Almost immediately, the orange tabby popped out from under the bed, abandoned its post, and began lapping up the milk.
Maya pulled the bag out from under the bed and lay it flat on the mattress. She unzipped it and checked the contents to see if everything was accounted for. It was.
She was ready to zip the bag back up and put some distance between herself and that cat when she heard the front door open. The heavy footsteps said it was Zach.
Fuck.
He’d probably chickened out and come back early, too worried about Cass to bear watching the fight.
He was headed straight for the room. Maya was forced to leave the bag on the bed and hide behind the bedroom door.
When Zach entered the room and saw the bag open on the bed, he froze. That was definitely not where he’d left it. He glanced around the room, his senses on high alert, and spotted Atlantis right away.
“Atlantis!” Zach said, his initial joy at the sight of the cat overriding the underlying suspicion he ought to have felt.
He bent down and scooped up the cat, rubbing behind his ears. Atlantis purred and batted playfully at his face, trying to get Zach to turn his head and look behind the bedroom door, but Maya took advantage of the momentary distraction and stole silently out of the bedroom. By the time Zach turned around and looked, the latch on the front door was softly clicking back into place and Maya was gone.
“Damn that cat,” Maya whispered to herself as she took the stairs down to the back entrance. She would just have to be prepared for whatever fallout with Richard resulted.
As she pushed her way into the alley behind the building, she pulled out her phone and made a call.
“Be ready,” she said curtly. “Things may get bumpy with Richard in the near future. Make sure the votes are in place if we need them.”
27
The first shot to the ribs that Cass took from Four-Eyes didn’t really slow her down, but it did knock the wind out of Zach. He’d been pacing the aisle at the back of Richard’s box with one reluctant eye on the fight and, even before that blow, part of him already had o
ne foot out the door. He wanted to be supportive, but he was too close to this. His heart was too raw and his nerves felt too exposed after what had happened yesterday.
Suddenly, everything he cared about felt fragile, endangered, and precarious.
He leaned forward, gripping the back of a chair and tried to catch his breath, his free hand cradling the spot on his own ribs where Cass had been hit. A wave of nausea crashed over him. He was not himself. When he still couldn’t catch his breath, he stepped into the hall looking for more space and more air. And when, through the thin walls, he heard the crowd thunder again, he visibly flinched and decided to head for the exit. He couldn’t do any good here, but maybe he could start to sort out the truth about what had happened in the bank yesterday.
The truth was waiting for him in that bag.
There was hardly room to move on the concourse outside Richard’s box. The arena was packed tight and the concourse was overflowing with people who’d tried to sneak in but couldn’t find seats. Everyone in the Underside wanted to be in this building. Zach had to fight his way through the crowd, past the concession stands selling popcorn, nachos, and twenty ounce bottles of pig’s blood, and around a biker gang of Vampires with matching leather jackets—Hell’s Undead Angels—and doo rags. The air in the concourse was laced with the unmistakable scent of the not-quite-living. There must surely be a market, Zach speculated, for a special deodorant pitched to the undead: “Centuries-Old Spice: Smell Like You’re Alive Again!”
Zach coughed and pushed through the door and out onto the street. In the light breeze, the air was clearer and the temperature cooler. He took a deep breath, cleared his head a little, and tried to ignore the roar following him out from the arena. Cass could handle this.
It didn’t take him long to get back to the apartment. The door, though, was already unlocked. Suspicious, Zach stepped into the front room and saw that his bedroom light was on. He hadn’t left it on. And Cass, Richard, and Kumiko were all at the tournament.
