3. Olivia #5
Four-Arms is back, the burns on his jaw darker and angrier, the skin healed wrong because it was given no time to heal right, and he is hitting the glass in a new rhythm — not frantic, not desperate.
The rhythm of something that has run out of patience and moved on to a strategy called hit it until it breaks.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Chuckles has his damaged arm pressed flat against his pod wall, fingers splayed, those milky eyes tracking me with an attention that would get him a restraining order back in Chicago.
Scratch's marks are spiking — not the regulated pulse I’ve noticed, but arrhythmic bursts of white-hot light blazing at his jaw and branching down his throat in jagged lines, his whole body lit up like he's running too much current and isn't trying to contain it.
They all remember.
They were there. They watched. And whatever the arena did with the reset, it did not take the memory.
Then there’s Jawline. The only one not present at our mating because Kaelor removed him early in the round. He must sense the shift because even he is going berserk now.
My hands find the glass and I look back at Kaelor and the pulse does it again — that warm surge — and I think: you need to stop that.
But the pulse does not stop. I doubt it ever will now.
"Seven."
I look down at my hands.
The molten veins are brighter than they were in the basin.
Orange-amber threading through my palms and up my fingers, pulsing in time with the Crown.
I turn my hands over and stare at them. I have approximately two seconds before everything on this platform tries to kill me, so I let this new sensation wash over me.
What am I now? What am I becoming?
"One. "
Then I look up at him again because apparently I can't help it.
He’s watching my hands. Then he looks at his own, where the same light moves beneath the surface of his skin, and then he looks back at me with an expression that is doing something more complicated than his face usually does.
Like he recognizes what he's looking at.
Like he was waiting to see if I'd feel it too.
I do. I feel it.
"Launch."
The floor drops and I'm already braced — third time, I know this part well enough — and the screen activates and the cold voice runs its antiseptic briefing. I catch the words consent, mating, relic, eruption and don't process them because I'm looking for Kaelor’s pod through the glass.
I find it, screaming through the atmosphere beside mine. The pulse in my chest does something warm and immediate that I am filing under later, much later, possibly never.
The platform rushes up. The ash cloud swallows us. Debris hits the pod and I hold on. I'm not afraid the same way I was the first time.
Impact.
The air is driven from my lungs as the pod bounces and grinds to a stop.
The door hisses open.
The heat hits me and I brace for the wall of it — the immediate assault that has greeted every previous door opening — but instead find there's only warmth. It actually feels… pleasant?
"Oh my God," I say, to the volcano.
The volcano doesn't answer. The pulse in my chest does.
I look at my hands again. The Crown's light and my skin's burning veins run together. This crown… it gives me some kind of heat resistance.
About bloody time!
Kaelor’s already running toward me.
We close the distance across the open ground and his hand finds mine. The heat of him runs up my arm and into my chest and meets the pulse that's already there. It doesn't collide with it, doesn't disrupt it — but joins it. Like a second voice finding its note. Like the sentence finishing itself.
I have half a second to be alarmed by this before Four-Arms arrives.
He comes out of the ashfall at a dead sprint, all rage and zero strategy. Kaelor steps in front of me without breaking stride and deals with it in approximately the time it takes me to process what's happening.
One impact. One redirect. Four-Arms hits fractured rock hard enough to raise ash in a ring around him.
Chuckles comes in from the left and meets Kaelor's elbow. I’ve never seen anyone move so fast. In fact, I didn’t see him move! One moment he was here, then he was there. Reach goes down.
No words. No ceremony.
Just clearance.
He turns back and takes my hand.
His fingers close around mine with the same soft pressure of someone working hard not to accidentally hurt me.
I pull left on instinct. I know this area now. I've died in them. I could walk the route to the Arena in my sleep. But instead, Kaelor pulls me in another direction.
I look at him, confused.
"We completed Arena One," he tells me. “Now it’s Arena Two. We go deeper.”
I look right. The ruins are darker that direction. More collapsed. The lava channels more active, more unpredictable, the structures reduced to their lowest, most destroyed forms. Everything in the visual language of this place is screaming worse this way, extremely worse, please reconsider.
But he is already moving that way, tugging me behind him.
I have a brief internal argument with my survival instincts. They make several excellent points. I override them, because the last time I overrode them and followed him, I got heat resistance and a heartbeat that runs in harmony with his.
His track record is better than my instincts.
I go with him.
Ahead, the platform is changing. The lava rivers spread, the channels destabilizing, new fissures cracking open without warning. The smoke is thick enough that I'm breathing through my sleeve. The ash is heavy on my shoulders and in my hair and I almost certainly look extraordinary right now.
Kaelor slows to a stop.
Ahead of us is a red glow. The threshold identical to the one we saw defining the first arena. Only this time, the numeral “II” is emblazoned across it.
Level Two, I presume?
The bond pulses between us. I have started calling it that, internally, in the privacy of my own chest where no one can hear me — warm and steady, its rhythm unchanged by any of this.
He looks at me. His expression is asking if I’m ready. I’m not, but since when did that matter?
I look at what's ahead, and then I look at him — at the burn still present across his flank that he has not once mentioned, at the hands that have caught me every time I've fallen, at the gold eyes that have never once looked at me the way the others do. Like a thing to be taken. Like a prize.
He looks at me like I'm someone who gets to decide.
And he waits. Patiently.
"Let’s do this," I say.
Something in his face does that thing again — not a smile, but the shape of one, the shadow of one, arriving and departing in the same breath.
His hand tightens around mine and we cross the threshold.
The air seals behind us like it was never open, and somewhere behind that sealed air, four furious males are learning that patience is a virtue they should have practiced earlier.
Ahead of us, the red light pulses.
And the bond in my chest pulses back.