Chapter 47
Chapter Forty-Seven
The Games
Elmo — Thirty-Two Years Ago
I look out over the nightmare I have walked myself into and wonder, not for the first time, why I ever thought this was going to be manageable.
It was never going to be manageable.
My arms are still shaking. Three-quarters of the way up, a whole section came away under my grip, and I finished up hanging off this thing by one hand with my heart going like a bird’s.
I laugh inwardly. Outwardly, I keep my face exactly as my mother trained it: still, composed, giving nothing away. She told me to be brave. Not to become girly and weepy about it. Vivian handled everything with grace, and I had to do the same.
Grace, for me, means keeping my mouth shut and the fear off my face.
The pride of the Ink District does not cry on camera.
There is no best way through this. I am up here clinging to a tower of bones like an idiot, and the longer I stay, the more obvious that becomes. I cannot believe there is a moat with green sludge. Who thinks this stuff up?
My hands tighten around the bones. They belonged to real people once, and the thought makes me want to scrub my palms raw.
I force myself to focus.
At home, my mother is always watching. Always making sure I do the right thing—aggressive about it one moment, completely indifferent the next. I have never been able to work out which version of her I am going to get.
It is exhausting and confusing.
I have spent my whole life trying to read her and failing.
Stop thinking about her.
I have been up here too long. The other contestants have already disappeared into that awful building. I need to get down, start moving and work out what I am going to do about the sword-wielding skeletons shifting near the far wall.
They have not moved from it since I climbed up. Guarding the way out, then, rather than hunting whatever wanders past.
And the temple stands between me and them, so they are a problem for later.
I am fairly certain they did not have magically animated skeletons in Vivian’s Games. Hers involved the elements.
I get bones.
Lovely.
I tell myself the skeletons are made of wood.
I do not believe it for a second.
I climb down slowly, testing every hold twice. When I reach the ground, I break into a slow jog towards the house, which has been completely decked out by Bone magic users who have clearly decided that, if you are going to commit to a theme, you should commit entirely.
Creepy does not cover it.
I am past the moat and almost at the doors when I see her.
A small girl sits with her knees pulled to her chest, her head buried. Her shoulders shake as she wails quietly into her own kneecaps.
I look at the door.
I look back at the girl.
Keep going, my mother says inside my head. Do not help anyone. They are all your enemies.
She is just a little kid.
I remember the bird.
I was nine when I found it on the estate grounds—small, fragile. I hid it in the old rabbit hutch, visited every day and kept it fed and quiet until it healed. Weeks later, when I opened the hutch, the bird flew free.
I wept happy tears—quietly, where no one could see.
It was the first time I remember doing something kind when no one was watching.
No reward. No praise. No point, according to Mother. Only the bird flying free and the strange, aching happiness of having helped something fragile survive.
I change direction.
I crouch beside her—close enough to speak, but far enough away that, if she panics or this is a trap, I have a moment to react.
“Hey.” I keep my voice low. “Are you all right?”
“No.” Her voice is muffled between her knees.
“You can’t stay here. If we stop moving for too long, they make us move.”
A small tear-streaked face appears. “I don’t want to go in. There are mirrors and clowns and—” She twists to look at the building.
I follow her gaze. Canned laughter rolls through the open doors. Beneath it comes something that sounds disturbingly like a bone saw.
Brilliant.
I am glad I have never been interested in horror films, or I would be sitting beside her, rocking back and forth.
“We can do it together,” I say.
She lifts her head properly. Her eyes are large, brown, and suspicious. “Why would you help me?”
“I shouldn’t,” I say honestly.
I think about Vivian. If she were here, she would help everyone. That is just who she is. I am not Vivian. But the girl is small, and terrified, and I know what it feels like to be both.
Right now, in this particular nightmare, having someone beside me would be very nice.
“My name’s Elmo.”
“I know who you are.” She gives me a look that is impressively unimpressed for someone who was crying thirty seconds ago. “You’re from the Immortal Zone. You’ve got all the gear.”
She is not wrong. I have magically reinforced clothing and knives strapped to my thigh. Not enough to stop this place from killing me, but it is something.
The gear does not come from my family or the Immortal Zone.
It comes from the people of the Ink District.
They pooled their money and gathered what they could: reinforced clothing, wards, knives. I cannot begin to calculate what it cost them. Most of those families are not wealthy by any measure, yet they provided the entire outfit because if I win, they win too.
I try not to think too hard about that. About what it means that strangers scraped together what little they had for a girl they were never going to meet.
I have knives, but my knife training is another matter entirely.
I glance down at the blades strapped to my thigh. Calling it poor would be generous. I attended the sessions half-heartedly because who wants to learn how to stab things? More to the point, who wants to get stabbed while learning?
I do not like pain. I do not like causing it. I am not particularly aggressive by nature, and I avoided every lesson I could get away with.
I know enough.
Just not enough to be enough.
I hold out my hand. “We could help each other.”
“Why would I?”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
It is the first smile I have managed in days. Something in it must land because she grabs my hand and lets me pull her upright. Her grip is sticky and sweaty, but I hold on more tightly anyway.
She tucks herself behind me, using my body as a shield.
I do not mind at all.
I walk towards the doors.
“Wait,” she says. “We need to go up first. There’s a pattern to it—up, then down, then up, then down to the basement. That’s the exit.”
I turn to look at her. “How do you know that?”
She stares at me with her big brown eyes. “Everyone knows that. Why don’t you?”
I shrug. “Maybe they thought it was cheating.”
“It’s tactics,” she says with great dignity, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She lifts her chin.
We go in.
The floors shift beneath our feet. Staircases swing and jerk, sections jutting out without warning. Canned laughter booms from somewhere above us. Beneath it comes the roar of a cheering crowd, and beneath that, the bone saw.
The colours are wrong—red bleeding into purple, nothing ever settling. Bones are everywhere: the bannisters, the walls, the stairs themselves.
“Right,” I say. “Let’s go.”
A staircase rotates into our path just as we are about to step forward. Another girl appears from a side corridor: dark hair, green eyes, wiry and quick, with something careful in her expression that I recognise at once. She has an iron knife.
“Are you working together?”
“Yes,” says the little girl.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I tell her.
“Doesn’t matter.” She holds out her hand. “Nessa.”
“Elmo.” We shake.
“Keeley,” says the little girl with a small wave.
Nessa looks at the shifting staircase. “We go up, then.”
“We go up,” I agree.