by Paul Tassi
Carlo shook his head.
“Haven’t seen her.”
Mark poked at his fries, lacking an appetite.
“I saw her!” Shyla suddenly chimed in. She blinked her wide, green eyes.
“You saw Aria? Where?” Mark asked, surprised.
“She was …” Shyla hesitated. “Erm.”
Mark wanted to shake her.
“Where was she, Shyla?” he said calmly.
“After our performance, I saw her outside Mr. Crayton’s box. She and Mr. Crayton were … arguing.”
“Arguing?” Mark said, confused. “About what?”
Shyla shook her head. Her curled red hair danced across her shoulders.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear. Mr. Axton told me to keep moving, so I did. But they were both pretty upset.”
Mark didn’t know that he’d ever seen Crayton actually angry, so that was significant. Were they fighting about his imprisonment?
“I just heard them say one thing before I left,” Shyla said. “Something about … a maid?”
Mark froze. After a long stretch of silence, Shyla spoke again.
“Maybe her room was messy?”
Mark’s anxiety tripled after Carlo and Shyla left. Was Aria seriously confronting Crayton about Easton and the murdered maid again? What was she doing? What possible good could come from that? From her view, maybe now that Easton was dead, Crayton could tell the police what had happened to the missing girl, but that could come with potential blowback on him. He wasn’t going to risk that, or more importantly, risk this getting into headlines when everyone was supposed to be focused on the tournament itself. Not to mention, Easton had supposedly been cleared of the exact kind of crime Aria had witnessed, thanks to his legal team. Maybe there was something to this that Mark could use. It had nothing to do with China, but it was potentially significant.
It’s not the mission. He could already hear Gideon’s voice in his head.
No way in hell was Crayton going to let him see Aria before her match. Her match with the most brutal competitor in the tournament.
He wouldn’t dare, Mark thought. Not that he would put it past Crayton to kill Aria to hush this entire thing up if she was just some random witness, but in this context, she was too high profile, and it would destroy his precious bracket. No, Crayton expected he was marching her to her death in the arena tomorrow. Mark wasn’t sure he was wrong.
Sleep didn’t come. Mark wrestled with the enormity of everything, and didn’t want to see any more mangled animals when he closed his eyes. He ran on the treadmill until his legs burned. He lifted weights until his arms screamed. By the end of it all, one thing was clear. He wasn’t staying in this room another day.
It wasn’t Mark’s best plan, but it would have to do. It felt like China-lite, working within the situation at hand and concocting his own escape.
He managed to get himself into the digital temperature display of the room, which he used to jump over to the camera feed and set up an incredibly rudimentary stutter that Brooke would no doubt be ashamed of. But it could work for his purposes. It would show him lying in bed, motionless, over and over. Not ideal, but better than showing what was about to happen next.
Mark took a few swings at the now-battered practice dummy with the bent blade. He gripped it hard, too hard, squeezing every muscle in his forearm. He squeezed like he was trying to crush the grip into jelly, but naturally, his arm went first. His forearm, still healing after its encounter with Cassidy’s katana, popped at least a dozen stiches, and blood immediately soaked through the bandage. Mark felt a sharp stab of pain, meaning the drexophine was fading, and blood was soon dotting the floor.
“Ah fuck!” he yelled, acting like the injury was an accident. He banged on the door with a bloody hand. “Need some help in here!”
The door opened and a helmeted Glasshammer guard answered. Mark held up his bloodied arm. The other still gripped the practice sword.
“Shit,” the guard said through his helm. Mark backed into the room and the man followed him. “Hey, you got a kit?” he said to the other guard. “We’re gonna need a medic in here. Call it in.”
The other guard pressed his finger to his ear, but Mark was too quick. He lunged forward, grabbing the man by his neck plating and wrenched him into the room.
“What the f—” the other guard began, but Mark spun and planted a kick straight into his visor, which bowled him over. Still holding onto the other guard, Mark smashed the side of his helmet with the pommel of his sword, once, twice, until the man went limp. He flung a kick toward the door, which slammed it shut, and fell onto the first guard who was now trying to rise after Mark’s kick.
“Wei—” was all the man said before Mark tore off his helmet and locked him in a chokehold. He slipped into unconsciousness, and both guards lay still. It had only been about twelve seconds.
Mark stripped all of their armor off and pieced together an un-bloody, un-smashed uniform from the two of them that he donned himself. He found the one guard’s medkit, and after re-bandaging his cut, injected each of them with a tranquilizer compound he found, which would keep them out for a few hours. Regardless, he smashed their remaining comm unit, and used their own cuffs to bind them together. He gagged them with the torn-off sleeves of a CMI fleece he found in one of the lockers. Messy, but a believable escape for an alleged ex-SEAL. He’d be caught eventually, but it would be a little while yet.
Mark looked over his new black Glasshammer ensemble in the mirror. He was every bit the stormtrooper.
He needed to hurry.
The guards had all their data pumped directly into their visor displays. Mark sifted through a virtual map to quickly locate where Aria, one of the so-called “assets,” was supposed to be before her fight. Naturally, it was another locker room halfway around the giant stadium. Mark walked briskly, cutting through the amassing crowds like they weren’t even there, returning curt nods to other guards when he passed by.
It was nice to walk in a crowd for a change without being recognized, something Mark hadn’t felt in months. But his heart started racing as he approached a cluster of guards who were all in a circle talking outside the entrance leading to Aria’s room.
“I’m supposed to re-dress one of Rosetti’s wounds,” Mark said, holding up the medkit he’d pulled from the guard.
“You’re in the wrong place then,” a guard said, breaking from the conversation. “She ain’t here. Supposedly still at the Estate, but Roston just phoned in and said they can’t find her there either.”
“Bitch musta skipped town,” said another helmeted guard. “Pussied out of the fight with Rusakov.”
“I mean, can you blame her?” another guard said. “$50 million might not seem so nice once you realize you’re gonna be too dead to use it.”
Mark’s mind raced. Aria was missing. Last time this happened, Crayton had her. Had her in that very locker room, in fact.
“Let me get in there,” Mark pressed. “If she shows up late, there’s gonna be a rush to get her patched.”
The lead guard shrugged and waved him through.
Mark realized he was shaking as he walked down the hall to the locker room. He stopped at the door, afraid of what he might find if he went inside.
The electronic lock clicked its approval of his security clearance, and he pushed the door open.
It was empty. Or at least appeared to be. After setting down the medkit, Mark made a quick sweep of the room. She wasn’t hanging from the rafters or lying in the shower with her wrists slit, an Axton-induced suicide, which he wouldn’t put past Crayton. She simply wasn’t there, as the guards had said.
Mark opened up the medkit and laid out some bandages in case someone was watching the monitors. He made another sweep, and started casually opening lockers and wardrobes. Nothing but CMI Crucible merchandise, the same as his own. The bed was gone, the workout equipment remained.
Mark thought about his next moves. Trying to head to the compound was a bridge too far.
She could still show up here, even if she was running late.
I hope you ran, Mark thought. I hope you got the hell out of here, and the next time I see you, you’re on a stage dancing in Italy or France or Austria.
Mark waited for what felt like hours, being the patient medic, waiting for his charge to arrive. But he was woken up by a sharp crackle of static in his headset.
“Wei is gone. Knocked out his detail. Was or is posing as a guard. Check exits. Check all the boxes. Check Rusakov and Rosetti’s rooms.”
That had actually taken longer than Mark expected. He calmly stood up and walked to the shower area, exiting the way he’d come when he snuck into the room when Aria was locked up there last time. They still hadn’t bolted the paneling shut.
He shed the armor in the walls, but not before dumping the entire contents of the helmet comms unit to Brooke’s encrypted remote storage to sift through later. He’d pulled a Crucible-branded tracksuit from his locker room before he’d left for this very occasion, and emerged wearing it along with a baseball cap and wrap-around sunglasses. He left the wall in a utility room and found his way back to the main strip. Walking a quarter of the way around the stadium, away from Rusakov and Aria’s locker rooms, he bumped into a slouchily dressed teen in section G21 and came away with a slim phone that he slipped into his pocket. He held it up to security as he entered the arena area itself, and as he expected, the scanner read the kid’s ticket and he was waved through.
Mark entered the sun-drenched stands and a gust of hot Vegas air hit him. He was already pretty high up, but turned and trudged even higher toward a section in the nosebleeds. He’d never seen the crowd like this before, from among them. The boxes he sat in didn’t do the experience justice. Here he was part of the endless ocean of humans. They were laughing, eating, drinking (quite heavily in the cheap seats), and waiting for the festivities to kick off. Mark looked across the bowl of the Colosseum and saw infinite faces stretched out around him. Lining the rim of the stadium were tiny figures Mark knew were snipers, watching over everything with eagle vision and rifles that could punch a hole through a concrete wall.
Mark found an empty seat and sat down. It would take them a while yet to find him, even if they had a derm tracker on him, like he suspected they might. Those were imprecise enough to only tell them he was still in the stadium.
Mark wanted to watch Crayton announce that Aria was gone. That she’d forfeited. That she’d fled. That she’d escaped his horrible game.
The sun started to set. Music blared, and tiny figures bounced out onto the sand. The enormous viewscreen zoomed in on Shyla and her Muse sisters. They began to dance, and Mark found himself tapping his foot along with the beat.
She ran, he told himself. He didn’t kill her. She ran.
By the end of the national anthem, he’d almost convinced himself.
Rusakov entered like a massive stormcloud moving through the desert, clad in nightmare black, executioner’s axe already in hand. There were more cheers than boos, reflecting his legend status from the Prison Wars era, but the man had the power to make your blood run cold just by looking at him. The spiral horns on his helmet were polished to a mirror shine. If Soren wanted to be Helen of Troy, this man was Attila the Hun, destroyer of worlds. His intro video now included a clip of his recent TV interview.
“Ballerina will dance and dance. She will be pretty. Like flower.”
A quick cut to Aria’s beautiful destruction of Easton.
“I know death. I am full of souls. Full to bursting.”
A cut to Rusakov decapitating Naman Wilkinson.
“This will be ugly thing.”
As the crowd settled down, Aria’s video played next. It was a classical score set to a collage of her taped fights, juxtaposed next to recordings of her dancing on stage from before the Crucible. The editing was fantastic, and so was she, in both sets of clips. The video ended with a line from an interview Mark had never seen.
“Well, you only get one life,” Aria said, smiling at the interviewer off camera. “And you haven’t really lived until you try to do something impossible. I guess that’s why I’m here.”
The crowd cheered the sentiment, but when their approval died down, Aria still hadn’t emerged from the tunnel. After a minute, a hundred thousand whispers were heard rippling through the audience.
Mark stared hard at Crayton’s box.
Say it, you bastard. Call the match. Call it.
The camera zoomed in on Crayton himself, who sat stonefaced with his hand on his chin, blue eyes narrow. The shot panned to the blackness of the entry tunnel. Nothing. Back to Crayton. The tiniest hint of a smile.
No.
Aria strode out onto the sand, wind pulling at her long brown curls, her helmet in her hand, and her mirror swords on her back. She smiled and waved, the setting sun making her polished silver armor glow. The crowd loved her.
You love her, Mark finally admitted to himself. And you should have taken her far, far away from this place.
37
IT WAS HARD TO describe how Aria fought, because it was more of a feeling than anything else. Mark knew that the best fighters let go of themselves when in combat. You didn’t think, you just did. The closest anyone ever came to putting it into words was Bruce Lee, with his famous “Empty your mind, be formless, be shapeless, be water, my friend” quote that had been on a poster in every dorm room in America for the last four decades. But it was true.
And Aria was water.
She flowed in and out of Rusakov with a delicacy that seemed improper for the situation, but it was entirely effective all the same. Rusakov didn’t flow. Rusakov was not water. He was an iceberg, waiting for one solid smash to destroy whatever was in his path. But Aria wove all around him and his terrifying axe like it was some sort of elaborately choreographed routine where she was paired with a partner who had two left feet.
Her swords tested his armor, massive interlocking plates that Naman Wilkinson certainly hadn’t been able to breach in his ill-fated, minute-long attempt. She finally found a gap, and drove her blade into the meat of his leg, before whirling away from the butt of his axe. Rusakov and the crowd both roared, but for very different reasons.
The foot that Easton had gored in her previous fight was still hurting her, Mark could see that in her micro-movements that favored the other leg. But she was still fast enough. Fast as she needed to be, it seemed.
Aria stabbed Rusakov once, twice. Five times. Careful slices that sometimes took minutes to set up. The fight was already one of the longest on record, and Mark expected she was trying to wear the big man out. How many times could a human swing an axe the size of a street light before getting fatigued? But that was assuming that Rusakov was human, not an infernal machine powered by hate and pain and death.
If he was hurting from Aria’s stabs through the cracks of his armor, he didn’t show it. Nor was he slowing down. Not a bit. In fact it was Aria that seemed to begin to tire first, her foot becoming more of an issue as time pressed on. Her balance wobbled, her form slipped. But still, even Aria fighting at less than full capacity was a sight to behold. No, she wasn’t doing backflips like Soren Vanderhaven, but there was a grace in her movements that the gymnast lacked. It was like—
Ah shit.
Mark saw a group of guards talking about thirty rows down near the entryway. They weren’t looking at him, but they were scanning in a complete circle around them. Despite his makeshift disguise, he might have triggered facial recognition on one of the thousands of security cameras in the arena. Mark shifted in his seat, but acted natural. And that meant cheering when Aria’s blade sunk into Rusakov’s arm, along with the rest of the crowd.
Before she could retract the sword, Rusakov brought the butt of the axe around and smacked it into her shoulder. Aria spun like a top, landing on her injured foot and hitting the sand, unable to keep her balance. She scrambled to pick up one of her dropped blades, but Rusakov stomped on her hand and sword with an iron boot
, which caused her cry out. After trapping her, he thrust the axe down toward her back, but she managed to bring the other blade around and sink it into his knee. He didn’t scream, but he staggered, and the axe bit into the ground to her right. He lifted his foot enough for her to pull her arm out, the armor now crumpled around her gauntlet. A fracture or break seemed likely, and as she gingerly tried to grip her reclaimed sword, she saw the blade was bent awkwardly from being crushed under his heel.
Mark had to watch all of this from the drone cams that were projecting the fight on the massive screen overhead. To try to follow them in the actual sand was impossible. They were just tiny shapes skittering around like insects from this height. The drones were looping lower and lower to get prime shots for the audience, and a zoom on Aria’s helmeted face showed that she was grimacing from fresh pain, her teeth locked together in agony. Her heart rate on the monitor was spiking.
She tossed her bent sword away and charged in with her remaining good blade held in her remaining good arm.
It’s just a broken hand, Mark told himself. An easy fix. She was fine. Rusakov may not have been showing signs of fatigue, but he was now making red prints in the sand and blood was trickling down his armor in a half dozen places.
He yelled something in Russian Mark couldn’t make out and deflected Aria’s flashing blade with the back of his gauntlet. He turned and immediately flung the axe up in a high, overhead arc, nearly sheering a rotor off one of the passing drones, which were circling dangerously low to get tighter tracking shots.
Aria deftly dodged the earth-shattering blow, which lodged the axe firmly in the rocky ground. Then, to the entire arena’s amazement, she leapt over the head of the enormous axe and sprinted up the grip toward Rusakov’s head.
Yes. Goddamnit, yes.
Her blade dove forward, but Rusakov shifted slightly so that it sank into his collar, not a gap in this throat plating. Aria flipped off his shoulders, missing his helmet’s sharp bull horns. She took the red blade with her, and landed behind him.
It was like he hadn’t even felt it.
