Chapter 46
Chapter Forty-Six
The Games
Cáel — Thirty-Two Years Ago
I head into the student union bar.
Jimmy spots me. “You’re up, big guy.” He waves a pool cue.
We’ve got a proper pool tournament going, and I’m doing reasonably well. Anything involving hand-eye coordination tends to come easily to me. Football, pool, darts, surgery drills: give me a target and a clear set of rules, and I’m happy.
But I’ve got a low-level headache from anatomy, so I shake my head.
He scowls. Jimmy is pathologically competitive. It’s why he does kickboxing, why he tries to out-train me at football, and why he genuinely believes he’ll be a billionaire by thirty.
Adam appears, grabs my arm, and drags me across the room to a private corner. He catches me by the shoulders and shakes me. “Pal. Look what Jimmy did to my face.”
Adam’s forehead is bright red, and his face is entirely hairless. His eyebrows have been singed away, and half his eyelashes are gone too.
I cover my mouth with my fist. “How did that happen?” I ask once I’ve wrestled back some self-control.
Adam has the grace to look slightly sheepish. “You know how it is. We got talking about flaming shots, and there’s a second-year student with fire blood, so he lit the alcohol. You’re supposed to blow it out before you drink, yeah? But Jimmy said it’d be much more fun if—”
Jimmy said.
Poor Adam.
“I can fix the burn. The eyebrows, though…” I study the shiny red skin above his eyes with a smirk. “I can’t regrow hair.”
“Jimmy said you could grow anything—”
“Skin cells, not hair. May I?” I ask, already lifting my hand.
Adam flicks his hair back and thrusts his forehead towards me. “You’ve healed my nose twice. Get on with it.”
Fair.
“You know I have to ask. It’s part of the training.”
“Come on, pal, please,” he whines, bouncing from foot to foot.
“All right.” I press my palm to his forehead.
My magic rises, warm and gold, then sinks through his skin, drawing the heat from the burn. It makes me a little dizzy. The room tilts for half a second before settling again. I’ve only been using my magic properly for a few years, and the balance still catches me out sometimes.
Adam pats his forehead with both hands, delighted. “You are the best.”
He struts away, still entirely without eyebrows.
He never listens.
The big screen that takes up most of one wall shows the Games. Jimmy, still laughing at Adam, turns up the volume, and this year’s cohort flashes across the screen.
Contestants, they call them.
My jaw tightens.
The Games. Every year I try to ignore them.
The Games make magical children fight to keep what they were born with. They fight one another and the terrain for the right to live, all because a government has learnt to turn control into spectacle. They give it a theme, an announcer, and dramatic music, then sell cruelty as civic pride.
It knocks me sick.
And it’s enough to give me nightmares.
I’m studying both politics and medicine, which means I probably think about this more than I should. My friends find my objections hilarious. They don’t seem to register that those kids out there are fighting for what we use every day without a second thought.
Magic is simply there for us.
For them, it’s something that can be taken.
Barbaric doesn’t cover it.
The announcer runs through the unfortunate contestants.
Nobody down there looks ill, either. Thin, several of them, and small for their ages. Not ill.
Elyrion tells the world it has a sickness in its lower districts. Whatever that is, it’s not touching these children—and from everything I’ve read, it never touches anybody with money.
Diseases are not usually that well behaved.
I have no word for what I’m looking at.
I only know the story doesn’t fit.
They’re almost halfway through the line-up when a boy’s avatar disappears, and a girl of about sixteen takes its place. Her avatar turns slowly on the screen: dark hair pulled into a tight French plait, grey eyes, round cheeks. No smile.
The announcer talks over her image—“representative of the Ink District, born in the Immortal Zone”—while her statistics scroll along the bottom.
A privileged girl, then. Well-fed, well-trained, and sent down to compete against kids from the Districts her city keeps starving.
Immortal Zone candidates always go through. That’s my first, uncharitable thought. The district represented by their bloodline magic receives a few extra ration tokens, and the families are expected to feel grateful.
Win, and the Ink District receives repairs, placements, extra food—some carefully measured kindness from the people withholding it. The winners also keep their magic. Lose, and everyone knows whose name to curse.
And yet.
She intrigues me enough that I drift towards the screen.
“See something you like, Cáel?” Adam digs me in the ribs.
I give him a look and step away. He means well, and he’s harmless. He’s just not particularly intelligent.
Fifteen minutes until the start.
I nod at nobody in particular and return to my room. I lock the door, grab my device and settle on the bed with one arm behind my head.
By the time I’m set up, the broadcast has begun.
“Welcome to the Immortal Games. This year, we have fifty-four candidates—”
I groan at the announcer’s preppy voice.
“This trial is The Temple of Bones.”
Ominous music swells from the device’s speakers.
I don’t know why I’m watching this.
The screen opens on a set that looks disturbingly real: an island off the coast of Elyrion, the kind of place where they can do whatever they want without complications over health certificates.
The Temple of Bones is aptly named. The entire set is built from bones.
I pull the screen closer. The camera obliges and pans slowly across the set as though the cameraman is proud of it.
I study anatomy every day. I know what I’m looking at.
That’s real bone.
The disgust of it makes me shiver. You can see where it has splintered at the breaks, the pale interior exposed beneath the smooth outer surface.
The camera sweeps past the ‘temple’—easily the size of a manor house—and the full layout comes into view. Long grass, deep mud, the entire course. I presume the candidates haven’t been given this information. Half the fun, most likely.
Tall, tower-like columns of bones flank the temple. There’s also a moat filled with liquid that’s an aggressive, comic-book-villain green and glows faintly even through the screen. Magical waste sludge, I’d rather not fall into.
Beyond the temple stands a wall. Bones again, naturally. A narrow corridor has been cut through it, just wide enough for one person at a time. Those who reach the tunnel advance. Those left behind are out.
It’s guarded by magically animated skeletons.
Full-sized and standing upright, each one carries at least two enormous swords. Some have three arms. Four. Mismatched limbs cobbled together from multiple bodies, their joints wrong in ways my brain registers immediately and strongly objects to.
The purple-grey sky presses down over everything, the kind of sky that promises rain. Bones and rain and a moat full of something that glows. I genuinely can’t explain why I’m still watching.
It’s a horror show.
The headache, which has been manageable, begins to pound.
I’ve known Bone magic users. Decent enough people. There’s one in third year who makes the chicken carcasses from Sunday dinner stand up and walk around the table, which us lads find hilarious and the girls find deeply unsettling.
I know enough about Bone magic to understand that candidates with that talent will have a significant advantage today.
There’s one in particular, big for his age, with light-brown hair and a smile that says he already knows how this ends. A list of contestant portraits runs down the right-hand side of the screen. His name is Arran Scullard.
I search the screen for the girl.
Elenora. The announcer said it, and the list confirms it. They keep calling her Elmo. It’s an odd choice for a girl who looks like that.
Elmo.
I frown at it for a moment, then work it out.
Elenora Morris. The first two letters of each name. Not exactly inventive. It doesn’t suit her. She looks like an Elenora. Or Nora, perhaps.
But not Elmo. It’s too small a name for the girl on the screen. Too easy to chant. Too easy to mock. A name made for crowds, not for the person forced to carry it.
I find her among the contestants. The camera lingers half a second too long, and I look properly.
She’s not smiling. She’s not waving. She stands very still, her wide grey eyes fixed somewhere beyond the lens.
She’s frightened.
I immediately want to shout at the screen and tell her to run.
“Keep away from Arran Scullard, the big guy with light-brown hair,” I mutter. “And that girl—Nessa Ironwell, dark hair, green eyes. She’s got an iron knife, and she looks like she knows how to use it.”
The horn sounds, and most of the fifty-four break into a run towards the fake temple.
Elenora doesn’t. She hangs back, glances around, looks up—and then climbs a bone tower on the perimeter.
She moves like a cat, all reflexes and economy, finding holds I can barely see.
I sit up.
About three-quarters of the way up, a section gives way beneath her. Bones tumble to the ground in a clattering white cascade, and she loses her grip. She dangles by one hand, her right foot scrabbling for purchase.
My stomach drops.
Then she shifts her weight, grits her teeth, gets both hands back on the tower and keeps climbing.
The camera cuts to someone else.
I watch Arran smash into a kid who can’t be more than twelve. The smaller lad tumbles into the moat with a scream. The camera cuts away before we see where he lands.
But not quickly enough to hide Arran’s smile.
What kind of person does that?
One by one, the faces on the portrait list turn grey.
Knocked out, or worse.
I’ve got enough medical training to know that what I saw a moment ago isn’t something you recover from. They don’t show dead kids on the broadcast. They don’t need to.
“Come on,” I say under my breath. “Show me Elenora.”
As though it can hear me, the camera snaps back.