Chapter 49
Chapter Forty-Nine
The Games
Elmo — Thirty-Two Years Ago
I have an overwhelming urge to prod the tongue-like staircase we are climbing. It is spongy beneath my boots, and each step clings faintly to the soles. The temptation to poke it lasts until the whole structure begins to ripple under us.
“Run!” Keeley screams as she seizes my hand.
“This is awful,” I mutter—an understatement of heroic proportions.
The staircase curls upwards behind us. I refuse to look back. If those teeth close on us—
I drag Keeley forwards, catch Nessa’s wrist with my free hand and haul her after us. A jagged tooth snaps shut millimetres from Nessa’s heel.
We collapse onto the landing at the top, gasping.
“That was fun,” I manage.
Keeley giggles. Nessa does too, despite herself, and for a moment, we lie there and stare at the red ceiling as we try to catch our breath.
The floor creaks.
We spring upright.
Arran stands a few feet away, his head tilted as he studies us with an expression hovering somewhere between contempt and bewilderment.
“How have you lot survived?”
My hand finds a knife, but his gaze passes over my blades—and Nessa’s iron knife—without interest.
“Don’t follow me,” he says, then disappears down the corridor and onto another flight of stairs.
I exhale slowly.
We wait a full minute before moving. Nessa takes the lead—she clearly does not want the rear position—and I nudge Keeley between us so she has two layers of cover.
We start down.
The stairs do not move this time. Small mercies.
Instead, the walls run with something disturbingly like blood and, at irregular intervals, begin to spin.
The steps remain firm, but the turning walls make every pace a battle against dizziness.
I fix my gaze on my boots and refuse to look up.
If I watch the walls, I shall be sick—or, worse, fall.
There seem to be far more steps down than there were up. The staircase stretches endlessly beneath us, and the air grows colder with every turn.
Then Nessa rounds a sharp corner ahead of us, and we reach the basement.
I wish I had controllable magic like Torin. I am not a proper magic user. Not really.
My mother knows I have come into it, but she appears not to care what kind—or at least, not enough to ask me. I have not shown her the sigils that appeared overnight. I suspect she would not notice them anyway.
When I try to channel power, the sigils on my skin turn black. I have so much power and yet nothing happens.
Only once, in our home library, did a flash strip the ink from every page, label and marginal note.
Gone.
I told no one. My family barely uses the library; to them, books are ornaments and the room is a backdrop for business meetings and absurd parties. With luck, they will not notice until I am grown and living somewhere else.
So: one accident, and a great deal of nothing.
I have no idea what I am doing.
The basement does not remain empty for long. Other contestants spill down four or five staircases—some cut, some limping. One girl cradles an arm that is plainly broken against her chest, yet she keeps moving.
We drift towards the exit one by one.
The ground rises behind the building, and I am grateful for the time I spent atop the bone tower. I know there is no moat on this side.
We step out.
Fresh air has never smelled so good. Rain falls in heavy sheets and drenches us. It feels cathartic, as though it rinses away the temple’s fear and sweat.
The skeletons are waiting.
Each grips a two-handed sword. There are more of them than I counted from above, and at close range, the mismatched joints are worse—three arms on some, four on others, bones of different sizes forced together where they do not belong.
Their jaws clack, teeth chittering in a dry, relentless rhythm that lifts every hair along my arms.
I completed combat training, though I scarcely paid attention. My practice blades were wooden. What I truly enjoyed was sword dancing—movement set to music, all footwork, form, turns and rhythm. Good exercise. I did a great deal of it. I know how to hold a sword. Technically.
But sword dancing is nothing like fighting, and fighting is nothing like fighting a magic-made creature that does not bleed or tire or feel pain.
I also do not have a sword.
You do not bring a small knife to a skeleton with a broadsword. That is how you get your head taken off.
Vivian urged me to be more diligent. To study harder. To prepare properly. I convinced myself I didn’t need any of that. Her Games were different: fireballs, swimming, running, diving, climbing. No swords. Earlier years featured no blades either. I told myself I was training for the right trials.
I was not.
We bunch into a loose cluster and stare at the skeletons.
Frightened sheep, all of us.
My gaze sweeps the remaining children: at least twenty contestants are missing. I jump as the basement door slams behind us. I tell myself it is only my imagination, yet somewhere beyond that door I can hear more screaming.
Keeley points. “There’s a tunnel. I suppose we go through it.”
“I suppose we do.” I stay where I am, though. I want to see what the others do first.
Only Arran moves. He grips Torin by the nape and strides towards the skeletons despite the blood still trickling from the boy’s mouth. He bends and mutters something into the shaking boy’s ear.
“What is he doing?”
Nessa edges away from me.
That tells me everything. She thinks I am about to do something stupid, and she does not want to be close when I do.
Keeley presses closer to my side.
Arran keeps walking. As he passes two trembling girls, he snatches one by the wrist. She flails, loses her footing, and crashes onto her back.
I expect him to stop.
He does not.
He drags her through the mud pooled between the bone temple and the wall, her body gouging deep ridges into the ground. She kicks, screams, and claws at his hand. He seems not to notice.
One hand on Torin. One on the girl.
He is using them as shields.
I stand uselessly, painfully aware of the cameras. My mother’s voice is as clear inside my head as though she is standing beside me. Stay back, let him draw their attention, use it, slip through the tunnel, don’t waste the opportunity.
Strategically, she is right.
Morally…
When people suffer, I cannot stand by. Mother would call that a failing, and Father would insist I protect myself first. Yet who would I be if I merely watched—if I let an innocent be hurt or, worse, killed while we all stood idle?
I am better than that.
The girl is still screaming.
“Don’t.” Keeley’s nails dig into my wrist—small, sharp and desperate. “Please don’t.”
The skeletons move.