Chapter 52
The Games
Cáel — Thirty-Two Years Ago
Immortal Zone candidates always go through.
The portraits grey out one by one as the eliminated names are confirmed. I sit with my head in my hands, the device balanced on my lap, fingers buried in my hair.
When the highlight reel begins, the commentators laugh at Elenora. They call her a waste of a contestant who threw away her chance.
She gave up everything she came here for to save two kids, and they’re jeering like she tripped over her own feet.
I lift my head and watch Elenora Morris standing in the rain once more, one hand clamped around the knife in her side, blood soaking the clothes that people in the Ink District must have nearly bankrupted themselves to afford.
Beyond the gate, the kids she saved are gone. Safe, or at least safer. Through to the next trial.
She is not.
Elenora sways but does not fall. Her face is white with pain, her mouth set in a line so hard it seems carved there. The cameras relish her humiliation. They circle it, capture it and polish it into entertainment.
They call her a failure.
I know better.
The theme music drones on while the announcer rattles through the updated statistics.
“This round has been absolutely brutal; we’ve never seen so many contestants fail to progress,” he says.
“Our current front-runner is Arran Scullard, and—in a result that will have surprised every bookmaker in the country—Keeley Boneson has made it through. Anyone who backed her will have earned a small fortune tonight. What a competition. What a trial. Tomorrow brings the ocean challenge; let’s hope our remaining candidates can swim. ” He laughs.
I switch it off.
In the sudden quiet of my room, I promise myself I’ll never watch the Games again.
The dull headache has sharpened into something close to a migraine. I press the heels of my hands against my eyes until sparks flare behind my lids.
Elenora saved them.
The brave, terrified girl with grey eyes. An Immortal Zone candidate who had every reason to run and didn’t.
She rescued Keeley, helped Torin, and kept moving with a blade lodged in her side until the portcullis fell.
I get up, pour a glass of water and drink it in long gulps.
I want to throw the glass at the wall. Instead I set it down carefully and grip the edge of the worktop with both hands.
How can they allow this to happen?
How can they broadcast it?
International bodies call for the Games to be halted, for the Fade to be addressed, for something to be done about a city slowly being hollowed out by a disease nobody will name for what it is.
But nothing’s done.
Nothing will be. Not by the people in charge now.
I think of my father, a governor, and my mother, a surgeon. Politics and medicine have always felt like my path, the shape of me before I understood why, but I’ve never had a reason that mattered.
Now I do.
I am eighteen. I lack knowledge, influence and experience. I may never learn what became of Elenora. I may never know whether she survived.
And that hurts.
It sounds strange—not a thing I’d say aloud—but it hurts in a way I can’t yet name.
She was not performing for the cameras. She helped because help was needed, and the cost was everything she had entered the Games to win.
They laughed at her.
An entire city is being exploited. Kids are thrown into arenas and called contestants. People are told they have caught a disease as they Fade and die, not that harm has been inflicted on them.
Sometimes, you watch and do nothing.
Sometimes, you decide to become the person who tries to fix it. The person who will probably fail at first but try all the same.
I have my direction now.
I will train. I will learn. I will become the best version of myself—for that city in a foreign land, for those kids and for every person the cameras turned away from tonight.
They called her ‘weak’.
They said she ‘wasted her chance’.
She is the strongest person I have ever seen.
The Fade was killing me.
Then the magic came back.
Then they came for my only friend.
Thank you for taking a chance on my book!