Chapter 22
RHEA
Idon’t cry when Ripley finally falls asleep.
I wait until she’s curled up in the corner of the cot, breathing shallow through her mouth, one hand fisted in her favorite ragged plush drone. Then I sit down, wrap a blanket around my shoulders, and let the silence cut me open.
It’s not the kind of cry that feels cleansing. No catharsis here. Just a slow, quiet leak of everything I’ve been holding back since the first time I saw my daughter’s face on a public broadcast.
The compad hums beside me. It’s finished scanning the second crystal.
I wipe my face and square my shoulders.
“Okay,” I whisper to nobody. “Let’s see what got Quinn killed.”
The interface unfolds like paper flames. No showy encryption—just layer after layer of dirty, black-band tricks, the kind you only learn if you spend your nights hacking feed nodes and your days dodging subpoenas.
Valtron’s in the arena right now. Training. Sparring with a brute who’s got tusks for teeth and a hatred for shirts. Kaelor’s down there too, monitoring the impact scanners like it’s still a game. I told them I needed time to work.
I didn’t tell them I needed time to fall apart.
The file crackles to life with a flicker of warning text:
REDACTED // DO NOT TRANSMIT
EYES ONLY // TRIDENT CLEARANCE OVERRIDE
SUBJECT: D. VARN / OPERATION FOLDLINE
And then it starts.
First, it’s reports. Boring on the surface. “Combat Loss Summary Reports.” “Resource Recycling Efficiency Logs.” “Unitized Armor Allocation Tables.”
Until I dig deeper.
The names on the logs aren’t units. They’re fighters. Champions. The people Valtron sweats beside every morning and drinks with every night.
And the “resource recycling”? Not armor or tech.
It’s bodies.
Every combat death in the last six months—every "unrecoverable" corpse—was tagged for internal disposal by Varn’s private cleanup crew. And within seventy-two hours, duplicate serial numbers for Alliance-issued armor, weapons, and biotech show up in civilian export manifests.
They’re stealing from the dead.
They’re laundering it through “accidental” kills in the ring.
And Valtron?
He’s the main draw. The magnet. The gladiator everyone tunes in to see bleed, smash, and conquer.
Every match, every camera angle, every betting spike—feeds the pipeline.
He’s not a fighter.
He’s a fucking distraction.
I shove the compad away, disgust boiling in my throat.
Footsteps echo outside the room. Heavy. Familiar.
I wipe my face again and slide the compad into my coat just before the door hisses open.
Valtron steps in, sweat slicking his collarbones, breath still a little heavy from whatever beast he just body-slammed into orbit. He looks at me, and something in his golden eyes goes sharp.
“You found something.”
It’s not a question.
I nod, throat too tight for words.
He crosses the room in three strides, pulling a towel from his neck and tossing it onto the console.
I pull out the pad and load the main screen.
“Here,” I say, voice rough. “Start with this one.”
He reads fast. Too fast. His eyes scan the first report, then flick to the next, and the next. When he gets to the disposal manifest, his jaw tightens. When he sees the name Drayxon Varn, he curses in three languages—only one of which I recognize.
“Varn,” he growls. “I should’ve known. That smug bastard’s been too clean. Too... untouched.”
“He’s not just clean,” I whisper. “He’s connected. Directly. This whole thing? It’s a blood economy. They make the fights look brutal, but they engineer the accidents. They put rookies against killers. Push hardware to failure points. And they harvest what’s left.”
Valtron turns slowly to me. There’s blood on his knuckles from earlier. It catches the light as he clenches his fists.
“I’m their favorite show pony.”
“You’re their distraction.”
Silence swells in the room, thick and sour.
“We can’t go to NovaCast,” I murmur. “Or the Arena Council. They’re too deep in Varn’s pockets. Hell, some of them probably are his pockets.”
“I know.”
I sit, my legs suddenly too heavy to carry the weight of what we just uncovered.
“They’re using you,” I say. “Using all of you.”
Valtron stands there, rigid and coiled, like the rage is stitching itself into his bones.
Then, slowly, his voice comes—low, gravel-thick.
“Then we tell the others.”
I blink. “What?”
“The gladiators,” he says. “The other fighters. The ones who put their lives on the line every time they step into the pit. If they knew the arena was a front—if they saw what you just showed me—they’d burn this place to the ground.”
I blink. “You think they’ll believe us?”
“They’ll believe me.”
He says it like it’s a fact. Like gravity. Like war.
“Val—”
“They trust me,” he growls. “I’ve bled beside them. Fought with them. Buried friends with them. You show them the truth, and they’ll rise.”
“And then what?” I ask. “We start a riot? A revolution? Turn the arena into a battlefield?”
He looks at me, eyes burning gold.
“We bring the war to the arena floor.”
My breath catches.
The heat of it. The inevitability.
He doesn’t blink.
“This time,” I whisper.
He nods.
And I finish the sentence with him.
“We finish it.”