The Great Destroyers

by Caroline Tung Richmond

  “Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, because it looks like this match will be a quick one!” the announcer says.

  I jerk my Goliath around to face Lidiya head-on. She comes at me like a hurricane, first with a swing of the elbow that I dodge and then with a kick that I spin away from. Jeez, she’s quick—faster than Giselle, faster than anyone I’ve ever faced—but I’m no slouch. I plant my palms onto the ground and sweep my leg out, aiming my foot at her Vostok’s knee, and it’s a perfect shot. I’ve timed it just right and Lidiya stumbles backward, but I must not have hit her hard enough because she recovers fast. But when she comes at me again, she lets out a pained grunt as soon as she puts weight on her left leg.

  I’ve drawn first blood.

  Adrenaline zips through me as we grapple at the center of the pit. It’s a battle of strength, both of us trying to overpower the other, and I try to kick at her left knee again, but I miss this time around and Lidiya swoops in. She lands a blow on my cockpit, making the whole frame shudder, but I lurch out of harm’s way.

  “So far, Linden and Federova looked pretty evenly matched!” the announcer says. “Hold on though. Federova may have gained the upper hand!”

  Lidiya pounces onto my back. I don’t even know where she came from because she was in my sight line not even two seconds ago, but that’s all the time she needed to latch on to me like a parasite. I try to throw her off, but we both take a tumble in the process. Repositioning herself, she locks me in an expert hold, pinning my chest down while hoisting my mecha’s left leg upward so that I can’t get any leverage to buck her off. I wriggle against her, but it’s useless.

  The crowd gasps. The announcer’s voice turns frantic. “We’re not even five minutes in, but could this be the end of the line for Team USA?”

  The ref holds up one hand, ticking the seconds, and he’s already on three. The title is almost Lidiya’s.

  Running on nothing but willpower, I let out a scream and jerk my leg out of her grasp before I roll over. She cries out because she had the win within her fingertips, but I’m not going to hand her the trophy that easily. Besides, I’ve already imagined how my name will look engraved on it.

  I somersault out of her grasp and aim for her left knee one more time, and my strike hits true—my heel colliding into the Vostok’s joint.

  Lidiya’s face screws up in pain. I think I must have the advantage now, but she only gets more furious and she uses that anger to fuel her next onslaught. But she does seem to be limping.

  “Federova looks to have injured her leg, but let’s not forget that she has feigned this before. Could she be trying that tactic again?” the announcer says. “Linden isn’t in tip-top shape either from the looks of it. She appears very fatigued.”

  I wish that I were faking it. The sweat now drips into my eyes and down my face. I manage to wrench away from Lidiya, and that buys me a couple seconds to launch my Goliath into the air. My plan is to give myself a moment to think, but my arms feel like deadweights and I can’t even grasp on to the nearest bar. I fall back onto the ground and barely roll away from Lidiya’s snatches, but it’s harder to get up this time.

  My stomach cramps, and I think I might vomit, which has never happened to me before in the pit. Lidiya grabs a hold of my arm just as my last meal comes up, coating the inside of my face shield. Out of instinct and pure disgust, she stumbles backward, and I have enough wherewithal to get out of Dodge.

  I use my draining energy to jump up again and my hands manage to clamp on to the bars. I gather the last tatters of my strength, but already my grip is slipping and I have no idea what’s wrong with me. The match can’t have lasted over fifteen minutes, but I feel like I’ve been at this for hours.

  I don’t feel well.

  I don’t feel right.

  But if I don’t get myself together, I’m going to lose because here comes Lidiya again.

  She joins me at the top of the cage and attempts to knock me down. I tangle my ankle around her Vostok’s left leg and give it a sharp jerk to aggravate it—and it works. She starts to fall, but on the way down, she catches my foot and I don’t have the strength to hold on any longer.

  Both of us crash toward the ground and upon impact I retch again, but Lidiya comes out worse. Every time she moves that left knee, her face scrunches up in agony, and I’m screaming at my body to take her out now. But I’m dizzy and can only crawl on all fours. Soon even that’s too much, and I keel over.

  Lidiya throws herself on top of me, but I have a little fight left in me yet. I smash a fist against her injured knee, at least I think I do.

  Cameras flash all around us in the stands, like little bursts of fireworks, but they’re dimming fast. Black spots cloud my vision, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t blink them away.

  Those same black spots are growing bigger and bigger, when I hear the announcer say, “We have a winner of the ’63 Pax Games!”

  Before I can hear the rest, the darkness reaches up and drags me down with it.

  My eyes crack open.

  I cough and blink the blurriness away, but I’m not sure where I am. The room is dark and unfamiliar; the thick curtains have blocked out all but a sliver of light. My head is pounding, and my body hurts and my mouth tastes like … well, nothing pleasant. I reach out to grab the glass of water that I usually keep on my nightstand, but a sharp pain makes me groan.

  There’s a needle in the crook of my arm. An IV drip.

  My dad sits up in a chair next to my bed, rubbing his eyes like he has just woken up too. As soon as he notices me, he scrambles out of his seat. “Jo! I ought to tell the nurses—”

  I grab his hand to stop him. “What happened?”

  “You collapsed and—” His features darken. “You don’t remember the match?”

  Of course I remember that part. But not what came after. “Did I win?”

  Dad sighs through his nose. He isn’t looking at me anymore.

  I lurch up. “I lost?”

  “Why don’t you—”

  “Tell me.” I try to swing my legs over the side of the bed, but he takes me by the shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” he says softly.

  His words slam into my chest, knocking the breath right out of me. “I lost?” I choke out.

  He doesn’t need to answer. I see it on his face.

  I lost the title.

  “Oh, Joey.”

  I shrink away from him, pulling my knees against my chest and dropping my head down as the tears come. Dad presses his hand on my back, but his attempt at comforting me only makes me cry harder.

  “Lie back, all right? You’ve got to take it easy. You’ve been unconscious for eighteen hours, and the docs are concerned you could have another seizure.”

  My gaze jerks up. “What do you mean another seizure?”

  “You had one on the way to the hospital last night.” His voice goes shaky. “Scared me half to death.”

  If I had a seizure that could mean … “Was I poisoned?”

  “Just like the others,” he says grimly.

  “It was Lidiya, wasn’t it?” I say, the accusation flying out from my lips. “She has had it out for me as soon as I got to Washington, and you know that she plays dirty. I have to talk to the police.”

  “No need because they already believe you. After you were taken to the hospital, the IC’s security team searched through the stadium, and they found a glass tube in Lidiya’s gym bag. They tested it and guess what? They found trace amounts of a poison in it, the same one that they found in your blood.”

  My head sinks against the pillows. They’d found a glass vial, like the one Malcolm discovered in my room, I bet.

  “I knew it,” I whisper.

  “The doctors told me what the poison is called. Tetra or tetranort something. It comes from the berries of a white cedar tree,” Dad explains. “They said that it isn’t a toxin that their tests usually cover, which is why it didn’t show up in the other fighters.”

  I take this
all in. “How did Lidiya get that tetra stuff into me? Did she inject it?”

  “That we don’t know. Maybe she put it in your food.”

  I rack my mind for what I ate the day before, but my memory feels fuzzy like my head.

  “What happens next? Will Lidiya go to jail? Will they strip her of the title?” I’m sure my blood pressure is rising and the docs won’t like that, but I had the championship match stolen from under me. “I could’ve taken her out. I was this close.”

  “I know, Jo, I know.”

  “What’s the IC going to do about it then?” I ask, but my question gets swallowed up by sirens. I figure they must belong to an ambulance on its way to the emergency room, but the alarms veer off somewhere else in the city.

  “We’ll see. They’re working with the FBI on next steps,” Dad says vaguely.

  “ ‘Next steps’? How about they arrest Lidiya and nix her win? They found the evidence in her bag!”

  Dad rubs his temples. “It’s complicated. The FBI is trying to connect her to the other poisonings, but they need proof. The Soviets are also refusing to turn Lidiya over to the authorities, even for questioning. They say that she has been framed and want to fly her back to Moscow, but her passport has been confiscated.”

  “They ought to do a lot more than take away a few pieces of paper.” I’ve got some suggestions in mind. Here I am in the hospital after what she has done to me while she hasn’t even got a slap on the wrist. And she has that trophy. “They need to break into wherever she’s hiding and handcuff her.”

  “Let’s wait and see. President Kennedy is supposed to meet with Khrushchev tonight to talk this through.”

  A chill snakes down my spine, and I don’t think it’s from the IV. I can’t see Khrushchev abandoning Lidiya in the States, but neither can I see Kennedy letting her leave American soil. It’s going to be a real showdown, and all that hangs in the balance is the fate of the world.

  Outside, the sirens are blaring again, jumbling my concentration. “What’s going on out there?” I ask, irritated. “Did the Soviets invade?”

  Dad doesn’t answer. He focuses instead on the cafeteria menu lying on the side table. “You hungry?”

  There’s something in his tone that makes me swallow. It’s the same one he uses whenever he’s trying to cover up the fact that our electric bill is in default again.

  “Dad. What is it?”

  “They’ve got tapioca pudding. You used to love that,” he says, sounding nothing like himself.

  I snatch the menu from him. “What’s going on?”

  “Can’t you listen to me and rest for once?” he says, tossing up his hands.

  “If you don’t tell me what’s happening out there, then I’m going to climb out of this bed and start looking for someone who will. In a hospital gown.”

  “You can be an awful pain sometimes, you know that?” He grips the armrests defeated. “Fine, fine. When the FBI tried to take Lidiya into custody and the Soviets refused, they hid her away in the Manger Hay-Adams and posted their Vostoks outside the hotel entrance.”

  “You mean the sports-grade Vostoks that the Federovas fought in?” I ask, trying to picture that in my head. Those models would be almost useless against a militarized mecha.

  “No, it turns out the Soviet delegation brought a few weaponized ones over from Moscow. They were real clever about it too and kept them packed away in their plane and didn’t declare them at customs. There are six of them, and they’re standing guard at the hotel in case anyone tries to arrest Lidiya.”

  I swear loudly, and Dad lets it slide, which tells me that this situation really must be bad.

  Before I can ask anything else, we hear shouts coming from down the hallway, followed by rapid footfalls.

  “Young man!” a nurse yells. “Young man, visiting hours won’t start for another hour!”

  Dad rises to check out the ruckus just as a shadow appears in the doorway.

  I jolt up. “Sam?” His hair is tousled, and his dress shirt is wrinkled, looking like it has been slept in. He has his backpack over one shoulder too.

  Sam stares at me, confused, before saying to my dad, “She’s awake?”

  “Awake and alert,” Dad says, motioning at me. “I just broke the news.”

  There’s a familiarity between them that I hadn’t expected. I didn’t get a chance to introduce them back at the stadium, but apparently they handled things on their own while I was unconscious.

  Dad turns to me. “Sam has been good enough to spend time with Peter whenever I’ve had to talk to the doctors, but he had to run a couple errands and get changed.”

  “I ended up skipping that last part. I got a little sidetracked,” Sam says, which explains the crumpled button-down shirt and slacks. He unzips his backpack to reveal the camera bot he loaned me a couple days ago. “I stopped by your room first to grab this.”

  “How did you get inside?” I ask.

  “I sweet-talked the dorm matron into letting me up,” Sam says with a sheepish shrug. Of course he did. “I knew it was a long shot, but I wondered if we had caught anything on tape.”

  “Did you find anything?” I’d forgotten all about Sam’s camera until now, but the look on his face tells me that we need to see this footage.

  “Can’t this wait?” Dad interjects. “Jo hasn’t had time to get checked over by the doctors yet.”

  “No, I don’t think this can wait, Dad.” I’m ready to wrestle that camera out of Sam’s hands. “What’s on that tape? Lidiya?”

  “It’s probably better if you saw it for yourselves,” Sam says, getting to work. He flips on the bot and makes a few adjustments to switch it into projection mode. Propping it up on the foot of my bed, he points the lens against a blank wall and gets the tape queued up.

  “Hold on a minute. Care to fill me in on what’s going on?” says Dad.

  Sam gives him a swift rundown about his camera bot and how I had set it up in my room in case someone tried to sneak in ahead of the final match. “Most of the video is pretty boring until I got to this part.”

  The three of us turn our attention to the footage. The film shows a shot of my dorm room, with the lens pointed at my door and with a set of drawers next to it. Soon, my past self appears in the frame to let Rushi inside. The two of us talk before she starts to make the tea, placing the mugs on the dresser along with the steaming kettle. While she puts the ingredients together, I step out to grab the sugar from the commons area.

  “This is it,” Sam says urgently. “Watch her hands.”

  There on the screen, I watch Rushi digging her fingers into her skirt pocket where she takes out a clear tube that’s small enough to fit snugly in her palm. She unscrews it and tips the powdery contents into one of the mugs, giving it a rapid stir with a spoon. The whole time she keeps glancing over her shoulder, her eyes nervous like a rabbit’s.

  My stomach feels queasy when I see my prior self come back into the frame and take the cup—the cup with the mysterious powder in it.

  “You caught that, right?” Sam says, pausing the film.

  I stare at the wall until it really sinks in.

  Rushi was the one who poisoned me.

  I feel punched in the stomach all over again.

  “You’re pale as a sheet,” Dad says, urging me to take a drink of water, but I push his hand away.

  “Why would Rushi do that?” I ask, my throat tight.

  None of this makes sense. A minute ago, I would’ve sworn that Lidiya was to blame for everything, but I can’t deny the proof in front of me. But … why? Rushi wasn’t even in the competition anymore, so what did she have to gain? It wasn’t like she and Lidiya were allies either.

  My confusion mixes with a throbbing ache, right in the center of my chest. Weren’t Rushi and I friends? Maybe that’s too strong a word to describe the two of us—we didn’t have the time to build that sort of connection—but I thought we were on the path to something like that.

  She made me trust
her.

  She drew me in.

  And she could’ve killed me.

  “Who knows why she did it, but this means that Lidiya is innocent,” Sam points out.

  “What about the tube that the IC found in her gym bag though? At the stadium?” I ask.

  “Rushi must’ve planted it to frame Lidiya. Or someone else on the Chinese team,” Sam replies.

  Like someone did to me with the vial that Malcolm found in my dorm. Could it have been Rushi too?

  My dad walks over to the wall and gets a closer look at the footage that’s still paused. He points at my mug. “Good thing you didn’t drink all that tea she poured for you.”

  I hadn’t thought of that, but he has a point. I’d only gotten about halfway through my cup before I got interrupted by my dad’s and brother’s visit. I shudder, thinking what might’ve happened if I had finished the entire thing.

  “Could the Chinese have poisoned the other fighters too?” Dad says, hands on hips.

  My head hurts to consider that. It sounds absolutely nuts—shy little Rushi poisoning Lukas and Zoya? But as I sort through my memories, I see snippets of possible evidence. Before Purgatory, I was standing right there when Rushi handed Lukas his water bottle—could she have slipped the poison into it before that? And during the dinner at the White House, I remember seeing Rushi and Zoya standing beside a service bot that was offering drinks. What if Rushi had added a little something to Zoya’s champagne then?

  Yet there’s one thing I can’t wrap my head around.

  “Why would she drink her own poison?” I ask. More questions crowd my mind, one after the other, but no answers come.

  Sam suddenly starts moving toward the TV. “Are you two seeing this?” He hustles over to the Philco black-and-white that occupies one corner of the room, working the knob to turn up the volume. The channel has switched from a game show to a live news broadcast.

  “That’s the Manger Hay-Adams!” I exclaim. There on the screen, I see the hotel Sam and I had visited only a week ago during the Games’ welcome luncheon. Now it looks like something out of a Hollywood movie. A half dozen Vostoks block the entrance, standing tall and glinting in the hot sun.