Chapter Thirteen Arturo
Thirteen
Arturo
We pushed through the residential district and toward the center of Epiphany. As we advanced, we passed taller buildings with metal trusses that looked like they might have been built out of ruins, or even old, repurposed starships.
Several of the buildings featured large posters, only some of which were in English.
Every effort supports the war effort, one proclaimed, while another said simply, We sacrifice one by one, but our victory is for all.
They reminded me of the propaganda the DDF had spread during our fight against the Krell, but I couldn’t imagine who these people could be fighting, isolated and unprotected as they were.
As we neared the center of the city, a structure loomed ahead—a ring of white stone walls that rose above even the tallest building.
Every story was lined with gaping arches, open to the air, and through the highest level I could see the lavender sky beyond.
The crowd swarmed around it, rushing into the building through the arches at the cardinal points.
A coliseum, I realized. It had no roof, and was instead open to the sky.
Maybe Sadie wasn’t far off when she said the scion was going to perform.
The stadium was so big that I wondered if it had been built using a metal truss system, but all I could see was stone.
It was possible it was constructed with techniques inspired by the ancient buildings of Old Earth.
We passed through another commercial district, this one with more permanent shops instead of booths.
They all had racks on the street, advertising their wares to the crowd.
There were fewer staples for sale and more prepared food—rolls of rice and meat wrapped in tortillas, and cups of a fluffy, pale yellow substance I couldn’t identify.
The scent of spices was heavy in the air and made my mouth water.
“I wonder if it’s safe to eat the food here,” I said. I wasn’t particularly worried that any locals would hear me over the noise of the cheering. It was hard enough to be heard by my own flightmates, even pressed together as we were.
“It’s obviously safe for your species,” Alanik said.
“Maybe,” Suki piped up from the pocket in front of me, “but even on the same planet, eating food from another region can sometimes expose you to pathogens that can cause digestive distress.”
A man nearby gave my pack a strange look, though to him, Suki’s voice would sound like small yips. I turned away, and he didn’t pursue me.
“I want to try the food anyway,” Nedd said. “Do we have any money?”
I gave him a look. “Where would we have acquired money?”
“I don’t know,” Nedd said. “But we’d better figure it out because I’m starving.”
“Agreed,” Sadie said.
Food seemed to be widely available—if these people were at war, they certainly weren’t rationing. I wanted to tell my flightmates they were absolutely forbidden to eat the food, and to only eat the rations in their packs. But it did smell delicious.
As we progressed toward the stadium, a vendor on a corner caught my eye, selling a wooden sword to a man with a child atop his shoulders.
The little girl squealed in delight as her father handed her the sword, and he immediately had to put up a hand to prevent her from smacking him in the face in her excitement.
The racks behind the shopkeeper were filled with various play weapons—swords of all shapes and sizes, axes, spears, whips—and something that looked like a light-up toy spear gun, complete with a battery pack.
I didn’t see real weapons on anyone in the crowd—another sign that they didn’t appear to be fighting any kind of ground war, despite what the posters said.
“What do you make of that?” I asked Suki, drawing my pack up toward my face so we could speak quietly, and pointed at the spear gun.
“They clearly have advanced weaponry,” Suki said. “Or at least the memories of it. Kitsen children play with replica weapons. This is the same on Detritus?”
“Yes,” I said. On Detritus, children of all socioeconomic levels played with toy guns.
The kids in the poorer upper caverns sometimes had to make their own out of whatever they could find, but in the lower caverns, ours shot streams of water or laser beams. I remember Nedd and me playing on our estates with the neighborhood kids, ducking through the service alleys and shooting each other with lasers, always arguing about whose turn it was to play our alien enemy.
If the Superiority was only watching these people and not harming them, who did these children fight when they played at going to war?
The crowd—now filling the main street and the nearby arteries that led to the arena—approached the coliseum even slower than before.
The scion had given up lashing out at the crowd and was now sitting at the center of the cage with its branches drawn up around it, as if trying to shelter itself from the chaos.
The wagon pulled down a side street, made a three-point turn, and then backed down a ramp into the bowels of the stadium.
The wagon disappeared below while the crowd dispersed up sets of stone stairs to seating on the upper levels. There was no one checking tickets at the door—everyone was admitted.
We followed the crowd into the stands while the wagon reappeared on a ramp to the arena floor.
The oval stage was covered in sand and the corpses of several scions, huge trunks lying on their sides with branches and roots jutting outward in large tangles.
I guessed this End Times Tournament wasn’t going to involve anyone giving the scion a hug.
“I don’t think it’s going to be in a play,” Sadie said sadly.
“This place is enormous,” Nedd said. It was—much bigger than the digball stadiums back home.
There wasn’t a single building this size in all the Detritus caverns, partly because when we were being attacked by the Krell, it wasn’t safe to gather so many people together, even in the deep caverns.
Another sign they weren’t under constant attack here.
Alanik shrugged. “The stadium on ReDawn is bigger,” she said quietly. “Though our competitors are in starfighters, so they require more space.”
We filed along behind the people in front of us—who were speaking a language I didn’t recognize—until we came to an empty row of stone benches about two-thirds of the way up.
This stadium was obviously well used, and had been built to last. The top was open to the sky, but floodlights were positioned around the arena to clearly illuminate the floor.
The stands could hold thousands—maybe even tens of thousands—of people, and it seemed that, today at least, nearly every seat would be filled for the so-called End Times Tournament.
I sat in the middle of my team, with Alanik and Gilaf on one side of me and Nedd and Sadie on the other, their attention already riveted on the arena floor.
I set my pack on my knees with the pouch pointed outward so Suki could see, though I wasn’t sure if she was raptly paying attention to everything or busy taking notes.
A family sat in front of us—a man and a woman with two small children, one seated on the man’s lap and the other on the bench between them.
There were a lot of other families in the crowd, as well as teenagers, young adults, and groups who looked like they might have come together on their work breaks.
The elderly mostly congregated on the lower floors; I wondered if that was a cultural thing, to give them lower seats so they wouldn’t have to climb as many stairs.
There were a sizable number of people of all ages in the crowd whose gender I couldn’t identify—on Detritus we all wore more or less the same jumpsuits, so men’s fashion differed from women’s mostly in the cut of our hair.
I was pretty sure headscarves were worn only by women here—roughly a quarter of the women in the audience were wearing some kind of fabric on their heads, in a wide variety of colors and textures, all tied at the napes of their necks.
Some had their hair tucked up inside the scarf, while others let their hair fall over their shoulders beneath it.
Many people had haircuts that were short on the sides and longer on top, with bangs falling partially over their faces or tucked behind their ears. They looked so ambiguous that I wasn’t sure which gender they indicated, or if they indicated gender at all.
Down on the ramp, the barge team used their hooks to drive the scion out of the cage and into the arena, where it stumbled among the carcasses, waving its branches menacingly at the audience.
Camera drones no bigger than our backpacks floated around the wagon, capturing footage of the scion and broadcasting it to enormous screens mounted around the rim of the stadium.
I hadn’t seen much advanced technology outside, but it was useful here: otherwise it would have been difficult to see the action on the arena floor from the higher seats.
The family in front of us began to cheer, and a deafening roar rose from the rest of the crowd as a woman waving a pair of bright red flags ran along the wall that ringed the arena floor.
She signaled to each section of benches as she passed it, indicating for the segments of the circular stadium to stand and cheer. The roar of the crowd grew louder.
And then a voice boomed through the stadium, loud and clear, speaking in English. “Welcome to the Ascension Games!”
“Oh stars,” I muttered. I recognized that voice. “That’s Ivy.”
“The what games?” Alanik asked in English. “What does that word mean?”
“Ascension,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the crowd but hopefully not by those around us. “Like, to rise up.”
“To stand?” Alanik asked.