5. Olivia
OLIVIA
I hear it before I see it.
That's the thing about the worst moments. You always think it'll be what you see that destroys you. The image that burns itself behind your eyes and lives there forever, unwelcome, redecorating at three in the morning for the rest of your life.
But it isn't the sight.
It's the sound.
The arms come down, and the sound that fills the arena is something I have no clinical word for.
And I have words for everything. Three years of emergency medicine gave me a vocabulary for the worst things bodies can do and the worst things people can do to bodies.
I know the difference between a clean break and a compound fracture by sound alone.
I've sat beside sounds that would make a normal person leave the room and I didn't leave, because leaving wasn't an option, because someone needed me to stay.
I cannot stay with this sound.
It's wet and it's final and it's too loud, like the world is trying to produce a noise that doesn't fit inside itself.
A crack that becomes a crunch that becomes a collapsing — the sound of something irreversible, something that cannot be walked back, cannot be undone, cannot be anything other than what it is.
Khaedren's hands are still locked around my arms, and I stop feeling them.
I stop feeling the heat from the volcano, the ash in my throat, the sting of a cut on my palm from where I hit the stone an hour ago.
I stop feeling all of it at once, the way you stop hearing background noise the moment something louder enters the room, except this isn't louder — it's just more real. More present. More final.
My voice tears out of me.
I don't choose to scream. My body makes that decision without consulting anyone. It tears out of my throat raw and wordless and enormous, and Khaedren's grip tightens and it doesn't matter, none of it matters, because —
Kaelor.
The arms came down and the sound happened and Kaelor…
I shut my eyes.
I wrench my face to the side so hard my neck pulls, both eyelids pressed shut like I can seal the image out, like I can refuse to know it, like shutting my eyes makes the sound not have already happened.
Tears hit my cheeks all at once, not gradually — not the slow build of someone quietly crying, but the sudden complete flood of a body that has lost the argument it was trying to win.
They run down my face and drip from my jaw and I'm shaking.
My whole body is shaking with the terrible tremor of shock, that deep muscular vibration that has nothing to do with cold.
I stop fighting .
One moment I'm pulling against Khaedren with everything I have — every muscle, every ounce of fury, all of it straining toward something I can never reach — and the next, it's gone.
Just gone. Turned off like a switch, because the thing that was powering it is lying on the stone behind me and the sound it made when it fell is still living inside my skull.
Khaedren feels the change.
He loosens his grip, cautious, like he's not sure what to make of it. And then I'm falling — not dramatically, not in slow motion — I simply fall.
My knees hit the platform. My hip. I fold against the stone and stay there, face turned away, eyes still shut, cheek pressed against hot volcanic rock that I don't feel because I can't feel anything right now.
Except the echo of that sound.
My hands curl against the stone until my nails scrape it.
Even though I shouldn't.
Even though I know better.
Even though every self-preserving, rational, Olivia-Carter-ER-nurse cell in my body is screaming at me — Don't look at his body. You know what you'll see. You know what it costs to look —
I look up.
I have to. I don't know why I have to. Some need that bypasses logic entirely, some part of me that needs to know, needs to see him, needs to be a witness even if it destroys something in me to do it. Even though the image will live behind my eyes for the rest of my life.
I still need to see.
I raise my eyes to the place where he fell.
And there's nothing there.
I blink. My vision is salt-blurred and I blink again. The stone is empty. Clean. Undisturbed except for a faint heat-shimmer over a patch of ground that is already cooling back to match the rest.
Gone.
A sound escapes me that is not quite a laugh and not quite a sob but lives somewhere in the wreckage between. I bring the back of my hand to my face and drag it roughly across my cheeks, ash and tears and grime coming away together.
And I breathe.
The Malquarans. Of course! The bodies disappear.
The Games reset him the moment he fell, he's in his pod right now, he's alive, he's waiting.
I knew that but had forgotten. It's part of the mechanics of this nightmare, the clean removal, the tidy impossibility of grief because there's nothing left to grieve over.
They take the fallen ones away and the platform resets and the Games go on.
He isn't here because he's there. In his pod. Whole and reset and hammering the glass with both fists and furious in a way I can picture so precisely it makes my chest ache.
He's alive.
He's waiting.
Come back to me, he’d said.
And I find myself promising him:
I will try, my mate. Believe me, I will try.
Khaedren screams.
Not in pain.
In triumph.
The sound rips through me worse than the first because the first was horror and this is joy. There’s something so profoundly, cosmically wrong about joy right now, in this moment, in this place, that it almost brings me back to myself on pure outrage alone .
He screams with his whole chest and his whole body and the sound of it fills the arena and bounces back at me from every wall, every surface, his victory playing on repeat. I press my palms flat against the warm stone beneath me and try to breathe.
Heavy footsteps move past me.
Then a collision — as two massive bodies make contact, braced forearms meeting and holding, an enormous pressure-greeting that I can hear even through my hands over my ears.
And then the voices: Varketh low and triumphant, Khaedren answering in kind, that deep harmonic overlap of two things that got exactly what they wanted.
"—couldn't have predicted it would go so cleanly." Varketh's voice is enormous, built the same way everything about him is built, to take up more space than anything else in the room. "Did you see his face when he understood what we'd done? He saw it and he still couldn't stop it."
"He was stronger than last round," Khaedren says, with a genuine, revolting thread of admiration in it.
Praising a dead opponent with one breath, celebrating his death with the next, like both things belong in the same sentence.
"Better. He's accumulated something across the resets. More than the others. Maybe it’s the relic? "
"Better doesn't matter." Varketh's laugh is boulders in a rockslide.
"Better is nothing when you're lying on the stone.
" He spreads his arms wide — those enormous, terrible arms — and looks at the relic glowing in its niche across the shrinking platform, and his voice drops into something reverent. "This round is ours."
Khaedren makes a deep sound of agreement.
They're still celebrating. Still circling each other with that grim, male satisfaction, all that violence redirected into something adjacent to joy. Two creatures who just killed someone, congratulating each other on it.
It turns my stomach inside out.
I get to my feet.
I don't decide to. My legs do it without asking. One moment I'm on the platform floor and the next I'm upright, shaking so badly I can feel it in my jaw, both hands fisted at my sides, staring at the backs of the two creatures.
"The only reason you managed that," I say, loud and flat, "was because you worked together."
Both of them stop. Turn.
They look at me the way you look at furniture that has just said something. That blank, recalibrating moment before the face catches up to what the ears heard.
"He would have taken either one of you apart individually," I say, and I'm proud of how steady my voice comes out. "You know it. He knew it. The only reason he's in his pod right now is because you cheated."
"We strategized," Khaedren says.
"You couldn't beat him one on one and you made a deal because you knew it." I look at Varketh. "That's not a win. That's humiliation. You’re pathetic."
Varketh tilts his head. Those flat, colorless eyes move over me with an assessment I recognize and actively refuse to think about. Something moves in his expression — not quite amusement, not quite threat. "Do you want to keep talking, Prize," he says, almost gentle, "or would you rather run?"
And that's when my brain — which has been running on grief and pure animal fury since the arms came down — finally, catastrophically, catches up.
The moment Khaedren released me.
The moment they turned to each other, absorbed in their celebration, forgetting I was standing three yards behind them.
I should have run then.
I knew it. Some part of me knew it with perfect clarity and I stood here anyway and said the true thing instead of the smart thing.
Because I am apparently constitutionally incapable of keeping my mouth shut when I am furious.
And that character flaw is going to get me killed — again, or worse — within the next thirty seconds.
Both of them are looking at me now.
And they've just arrived at the same calculation.
I turn and run.
I get one full stride of momentum before Khaedren is behind me.
Then his hand closes around my arm and the physics of my velocity against his immovability is immediate and brutal.
I'm wrenched backward so hard both feet leave the stone.
I hit the ground on my palms and scramble up before he can fully reestablish his grip, elbow driving back, connecting with something, the impact vibrating up through my arm.
He adjusts without seeming to register the blow.