5. Olivia #3
I make it four steps before his hand closes around my arm, he pulls me back and, grinning through teeth red with blood, he says:
“And then there were two.”
My heart and my soul sink.
The relic is extraordinary.
Even now — shoulder aching, heart hammering, every nerve I have screaming run — even now, being dragged toward it, I look at it directly for the first time and it really is incredible.
It sits in its niche on a column of dark volcanic stone, a basin carved from material that isn't stone and has no name I know.
The color of cooling magma, deep black threaded through with veins of orange-red that glow from within — not reflecting the light, but actually generating it, pulsing in a slow steady rhythm that is, I am shocked to notice, the precise rhythm of my own heartbeat.
The basin itself is half a yard across and shallow, filled with a liquid shimmers when I look at it straight on and seems to solidify when I catch it from the side. Symbols ring the rim in characters I can't read.
The blood sacrifice basin.
The second relic.
Varketh stops us at the edge of it and releases my arm.
He positions himself between me and the only exit.
The lava has risen on all sides of the platform now.
Any higher and it will submerge the entryway.
What was a broad platform is now a shelf, maybe twenty yards wide, contracting around this single point of light.
The ground shudders, a rolling tremor that never fully stops. Ash is falling in earnest, settling on the basin's rim and is absorbed within the liquid without trace.
"Put your hands in," Varketh says.
I say nothing.
"It ends this," he says. "The round. The platform. All of it."
"No," I say.
The word comes out very clean. Very clear. One syllable that I mean completely.
He moves before I can track it. That's the problem with fighting things that are so much faster than you — there's no time for anticipation, there's only the result. A backhand that connects with my cheek and sends me to the stone with a sound I feel more than hear.
The blow was not full force. I understand this because I am still alive and conscious and haven't left the platform sideways. Ten percent of his power. Maybe fifteen.
The world rings, sharp and clean. I lie there waiting for it to stop ringing.
"On your feet," he says.
The ground shudders. The volcano answers. Another chunk of something enormous hits the magma beyond the platform's edge and the impact travels through the stone and up through my ribcage.
I stay where I am.
He crouches beside me.
This is worse than the blow. The proximity. The scale of him at close range — the deliberate, unhurried way he lowers himself, the way the air changes when he's in it.
He reaches out. The same hand that struck me. He touches my cheek with something trying very hard to be gentleness. I hold very still.
"I'm sorry." His voice has changed — lower, softer, doing real work to sound sincere. "That was not what I wanted. That was not—" A pause. "I don't enjoy hurting you. That isn't why I'm here."
No — you’re here to fuck me.
I look at the stone in front of my face. I breathe.
"You're more than I expected," he says. "I knew humans were resilient but you—" He rubs his thumb gently across the cheek he just hit.
"I came here because I had no other option.
Someone in my family is dying. Someone who matters to me more than I can put into words in a language you'd understand.
Winning the Games brings great rewards to the victors.
That would save them. That's the only reason I'm here. "
I say nothing.
He might be telling the truth. He might not.
In the ER I got good at reading the people who came in with stories.
Some of them true, some weren't. I could usually tell the difference, except for the very good liars. He is one of the best I’ve seen.
The grief in his expression reads convincingly. The exhaustion beneath it reads real.
It doesn't matter.
Even if every word is true, the outcome he's working toward is the same. The thing he needs from me is the same.
He guides me upright. His hand at my back, steady and warm and deeply, profoundly unwelcome. He walks me toward the relic and his voice continues — low, reasonable, patient, the voice of someone who has decided to try being kind before trying the alternative.
I shudder at the thought.
"You've bonded with Kaelor," he says. Careful. Neutral. "I don't pretend not to understand why. He's formidable. What you feel toward him is real to you. I'm not asking you to stop feeling it." He pauses. "I'm asking you to be practical."
I watch the relic as we approach. The pulse of it. The warmth.
"But you should know, he's not as clean as he appears," Varketh says, quieter now.
"I've competed against him before, in an earlier cycle.
I watched what he was willing to do. The choices he made.
" Another pause, weighted, deliberate. "He isn't innocent.
Whatever he's told you, whatever version of himself he's shown you?—"
"Stop." My voice comes out low.
"I'm not trying to?—"
"You're trying to get inside my head. It won't work.
" I look up at him, straight on, and I hold his gaze.
"Kaelor would not harm anyone who didn't come for him first. Whatever he did in that cycle, it was to protect someone.
That's who he is. I hold the gaze a beat longer.
Because that's the only thing he is capable of being. "
Something dark flashes across Varketh's face but it’s gone an instant later. He doesn't answer.
We stop at the basin.
"Here is the practical argument," he says. The gentle voice is still there but there’s a sharp edge to it that wasn’t there before.
"You want to get back to him. You want to reset.
This is the only mechanism by which that happens.
The only door." He looks at the basin, then at me.
"Put your hands in, and it's done. It's quick.
I told you I'll be… gentle with you. And then you're back in your pod and he's there and this round is over. "
He steps up to the basin. He puts his hands in — both palms down, fingers spread — and waits. The relic's light brightens slightly, recognizing the first half of the pair, patient and ready, needing only the second.
Needing only my consent.
I stand there.
And I think.
The anxiety comes in waves. That's the only way to describe it — a nausea that rises and recedes and rises again, my hands shaking at my sides, my breath coming shallow and fast.
I look at the basin and I try to hold the thought that mating would be over quickly, that I've already survived terrible things in these Games, that consent under duress is still a kind of choice, that there is no other door available to me.
I look at his hands in the basin.
I look at what it means.
Not just what it is. What it means.
Betrayal. Irreversible betrayal. The kind that lives in you afterward, in the quiet moments, in the moments with him, in every moment where both he and I would know the truth.
Undergirding every moment of our lives going forward.
There would always be this thing between us that could never be unmade.
I think about Kaelor’s hands. The weight of them when he holds mine. The way he does it like he's been waiting to his entire life and has finally been allowed.
I think about his face when the arms came down. The smile he made — the costly, aimed-at-me smile of trust from a creature who was dying and chose to spend the last thing he had on making sure I saw something other than fear.
Come back to me.
Not a request. A prayer. Come back. Come back to me.
I cannot go to him as something other than what I am .
As less than I was the last time he saw me.
I would rather die.
I lift my chin.
"No," I say.
The platform shudders.
The volcano roars.
And Varketh's expression changes completely. The gentleness is gone in an instant. It’s not dramatic, not a caricature, but as if s shadow has passed over his features.
His hands come out of the basin and straightens. His eyes move to my face with a flat expression of disinterest.
"Then I must make you give me consent," he says simply. “Know that it is your choice that makes me do what I must. I take no pleasure in it.”
I see the crooked, twisted curl at the corner of his mouth, and I know with absolute certainty he will enjoy every moment of it.
I back away. I could try to run but I know I won’t get far before he catches me again. I edge backward, inch by inch, until I meet the rising magma.
And I look back at it . At the magma.
And I see it. The way out.
And I wonder how I couldn’t have seen it before. Idiot!
It arrives not as a thought but as a complete understanding, fully formed, the way solutions appear when you've been too close to a problem and then take one step back and the whole shape of it becomes visible at once.
The kind of clarity that only comes under extreme duress, when the brain strips everything unnecessary and shows you just the structure.
The crown.
It protects me.
The crown that perches upon my head, warm and present, humming its quiet certainty against my temples, the relic that Kaelor and I bonded together in the sweetest, most terrifying moment of my time in these Games.
Hell, in my entire freaking life.
So long as I wear the crown, the magma cannot harm me.
Varketh watches me.
He sees the calculation happening. I watch him see it, watch the recognition travel from his expression down into something more urgent, and his hands are already moving, already reaching?—
I duck.
His grip finds air.
I do not run. Instead, I leap. Backward. Into the magma’s reach.