7. Olivia #3
Behind me, the other rivals are on the next platform, one platform away now. And across the lake, Kaelor is still running, still coming. He’s not going to reach me in time if Varketh decides to do something to me.
I look at the relic platform. At the distance. At the lake surface and the fixed, unmoving math of crossing it one jump at a time.
If we can get across, if we can claim the relic and the only way is with Varketh’s help… is it worth it?
RUMBLE.
Five.
I don't answer.
The volcano does.
“Ten.”
Ceiling. Pod. Cool air.
I lie there and stare upward. I let the reset do what it does — restore everything, return me to full working order, as if the lava and the dying was nothing and none of it left a mark.
There’s no basin. That's the thing I keep returning to. Every other relic had one — the blood sacrifice, the ritual mechanics, the thing you do with your hands to make your offering. But this relic has none of that.
Did that mean something? Or was I imagining it did?
Kaelor running ahead gave us no benefit. No extra time. Nothing. It was never going to work. Which means we have to arrive together. And that means we need something that moves us across the lake as one unit, faster than our legs can manage… in less than five rumbles.
I stare at the ceiling.
I don't like Varketh. I want to be clear about that, even if only to myself.
I don't like him and I don't trust him. I have personal experience of what his “sincerity” costs.
But he wants to survive — that's the one thing I believe absolutely, the one fixed point I can build from.
He wants to come back for the next Mating Games and the only currency he has to make that happen is to be worth watching.
An enemy who became an unlikely ally at the critical moment.
That's a story the Malquarans haven't seen.
His interests and mine point in the same direction.
That's not trust. But it's enough.
I turn my head toward his pod.
Then away .
I need to know how I'm going to tell Kaelor. Once The argument needs to land clean or he won't accept it.
As I begin to find the words, the floor opens.
I cross to him before I can talk myself out of it.
He's already watching. He's always already watching when the pods open. I reach him and say it straight.
"Varketh offered to help us cross the lake."
"No."
"I know." I fall into step beside him. We're already moving toward the arena again.
"Think about how the Malquarans design these arenas.
Every arena has a layer we didn't see from the outside.
Doesn't this feel exactly like something they'd build in?
Force the competitors to work with an enemy at the critical moment.
Make the audience wonder whether the alliance holds? "
"He’ll betrays us halfway across?—"
"Then we reset and we're exactly where we already are."
"He could kill you."
"He could have killed me on the last attempt.
He was close enough. He didn't." I look up at him.
"He's not doing this for us. He wants to be brought back for the next Games.
Helping us is his best move right now, and his best move happens to be our best move.
I think that's exactly what the Malquarans designed. "
He says nothing. We pass through a corridor junction, the heat already building ahead of us.
"Kaelor, there's no other way across." Quiet now. Not arguing — just saying it plainly. "We can't cross on foot together in time. Going alone doesn't work because the relic needs both of us simultaneously. Varketh is the only variable that changes any of this."
"I don't like it."
"I don't either."
"Olivia—"
"What other choice do we have, Kaelor?" I stop walking. He stops too, and turns. I look at him — really look at him, the set of his jaw and the frustration in his eyes. He’s come to the same answer I did and doesn't want to accept it. "If you have another way, tell me. I’ll do it. I’ve been looking for another way since the second reset and there isn't one. "
He looks at me for a long moment.
Then he looks at the archway.
His jaw tightens. A full clench, held for three seconds, the cost of the decision moving through him. When it releases, something has changed in his face. Not acceptance. Something harder than that.
“Fine,” he says. “But if he betrays us, if he shows any sign he’s not going to follow through…”
I nod. He’ll do whatever he needs to. We’re both in agreement there.
And we pass through the archway.
Varketh is already in the lava when we arrive. He just looks at us before disappearing beneath the lava’s surface.
Kaelor’s hand tightens around mine, his muscles tense and ready to spring at a moment’s notice.
“Take it easy,” I tell him. “Let him make the first move.”
“If he makes the first move, there might not be a second.”
I feel the moment it happens — a nudge from below the platform, testing, and then something pressing against the underside. The platform tilts slightly, then glides across the lake, smooth and straight, cutting through the craggy surface toward the far end.
Kaelor is quiet, eyes focused on everything within his vision. If a gnat farted, he would know it.
I don't look at him. I keep my eyes forward and I hold on.
Behind us, the rivals come to the ledge and find the first platform gone. The gap to the next one is too wide but they make the attempt anyway.
Then debris starts falling — chunks of rock and hardened crust, falling short or wide but getting closer. A gas vent triggers to our left, superheated air that closes my throat for one burning second. I duck but the platform doesn't slow.
With Varketh beneath us, pushing through us across the lake as if the heat is not even a minor inconvenience, every terrible thing he's done in these arenas sits alongside the fact that right now he is the only thing capable of carrying us across it.
The ground shakes.
It’s the third one so far. Only two left.
More debris falls. The other alien males are getting frustrated now. One rival is racing across the platforms and crossing fast, trying to close the gap. But he's not going to beat us. The gas vents are finding their range, and the platform edge takes a hit that rocks us both sideways.
We hold.
RUMBLE.
Four.
One remains.
The relic platform fills my vision now — the raised stone surface, the relic at its center, that warm urgent glow that means the end of this whole damn nightmare. A low excited whine escapes my throat. I didn’t even know I was making it.
One more relic and we're free. One more and I never have to count shudders again, never have to calculate my own death, never have to watch Kaelor die and wait in a pod knowing I couldn't stop it.
Just one more.
"When we land…" I say, voice quivering.
"We run," he finishes.
The platform makes contact with the base of the relic platform. It’s a starting gun.
We sprint.
The relic is right there. Twenty steps away. Ten. The pull is so strong now it's almost solid. Below us, somewhere deep in the volcanic structure, something builds. I can feel it in the soles of my feet. In my back teeth. The fifth rumble, coiling, not yet loosed but it will be. Soon.
We are close. So close.
The relic platform is broad and flat and solid under my feet and I don't look at anything except what's at the center of it. Not the lake behind us. Not the rivals scrambling at the ledge. Not Varketh, somewhere beneath the surface.
Just the relic.
Above us the volcano has changed.
I feel it before I understand it — something in my chest, a low wrongness, the animal awareness of pressure dropping before a storm.
The sound is different. Deeper. Not louder but lower, below the register of hearing, something I'm feeling in my sternum rather than processing through my ears.
The heat is coming from above now, pressing down, and the ash is falling thicker — not curtains but weight, collecting on my shoulders and in my hair.
The air tastes like sulfur and deep rock and something final.
It’s the eruption. I’ve felt it so many times, it’s predictable. It’s about to blow.
I dig deep and run faster.
Eight steps to the relic. Five. The pull in my chest has stopped being a pull — it's a pressure now, an urgency, the bond straining between us with everything it has. I can feel Kaelor through it, right behind me, his presence in the bond like a hand at my back?—
Three steps.
Two.
I reach out and close both hands around the relic.
It fits my palms exactly.
I wasn't ready for that. For how completely it fits, the dimensions of it calibrated to my hands and not the other way around.
The warmth floods up through my palms and into my wrists and up through my arms, latching onto the bond.
I feel the bond flare — bright, bright, brighter than it's ever been.
All three points of the bond align and I think:
This is it, this is actually it ? —
I turn for Kaelor, a broad grin on my face.
He's three steps behind me, reaching, face unguarded, his usual careful expression gone, the combat stillness vacant, nothing left but him looking at something he stopped letting himself want a long time ago and finding it right there.
Our future is here. Right here. Right now.
Already I can see my future with him. Us. Alone. Somewhere safe and quiet and without danger. Without Malquarans. Without alien males chasing me. Just… peace.
Then Kaelor jerks to a stop .
The smile of hope fades. He glances back over his shoulder.
A hand closes around the back of his armor.
The sound of it — the arrest of his momentum, the grunt forced out of him — hits me before I fully process what I'm seeing. One moment he's three steps away and reaching and then he's simply not there, pulled sideways and back. I take one step toward him and stop.
Varketh stands where Kaelor was just a moment ago. Like a terrible magician’s trick.
He has Kaelor by the shirt, one massive hand twisted in the fabric. He's not struggling, not rushing. He's still. His eyes find mine and what's in them isn't triumph, isn't cruelty — it's the flat satisfaction of a creature looking at exactly what it came for.
I understand, in a way that moves through me like cold water, exactly what just happened.
He carried us across the lake. He pushed the platform steady through four rumbles, through the debris and the gas vents, through everything the rivals threw at us — and he did it because this is where it ended.
Not at the ledge. Not halfway across. Here, at the relic platform, with Kaelor's armor within reach and me three steps away holding the one thing she can't put down.
His interests aligned with ours. Right up until the moment he made sure they didn't have to.
He looks at me with those pale flat eyes.
"Promise what they want," he says. "And they’ll give themselves to you."
He’s after me, I think. After the relic.
I instinctively pull it away so he can’t grab it, can’t claim it and me. But he doesn’t move toward me.
Instead, his hands find the seams of the Magma Plate. And the blood drains from my face .
"Don't—" The word comes out before I can stop it.
Kaelor's hands lock around Varketh's wrists and they struggle.
But I feel it through the bond before I see it.
The first piece of plating pulling free.
A cold at the edges of the connection, a dimming.
I press my hands harder around the relic as if holding it tighter can compensate for what's leaving.
The shoulder plating. The forearm ridges.
Each piece a thing we earned — the basin in Arena Two, the blood sacrifice, the warmth of it sinking beneath Kaelor's skin for the first time.
He takes it all.
Varketh rips the relic free and slams it to his own chest. It settles there and shifts, the living material reconfiguring around a new body. I feel the absence through the bond as it weakens. Still present, but a sliver that had been a river.
The Ember Crown comes next.
Kaelor lunges for it with both hands but Varketh wrenches it sideways with his full strength. And the crown comes free.
Varketh sets it on his huge head.
He stands on the platform, in Kaelor’s armor, wearing his crown. It settles on his head like it was always going to be his.
“At last!” Varketh growls, releasing Kaelor and flexing his muscles. “At last, I have the power to defeat you!”
Kaelor looks at me — at the relic in my hands, at the distance between me and Varketh.
"Throw it," he says. His voice is quiet. "Don’t let him claim you."
We came all this way. Managed to get the relic… and now I have to lose it? I look to Kaelor on the ground, at Varketh between us. He can keep the damn relics. I only wa nt Kaelor. But there’s no way I can reach him without Varketh snatching it — and me — first.
"Olivia." Now Kaelor’s eyes drill into me. "I cannot lose you."
And I know he’s right.
Varketh lunges forward at a speed I never would have thought a creature of his size is capable of.
I have no time to pull my arm back. Instead, I hurl it, release it, toward the lava lake.
Varketh stretches for it as it sails through the air, time seeming to move in slow motion. His attention is focused on it as he reaches out with his other hand for me.
But I’m already moving away — toward Kaelor — and his fingers find nothing but open air. His momentum forces him forward, still reaching for the relic.
RUMBLE.
Long. Low. Not a rattle but a grind. The whole volcano is moving through its eruption gears. I feel it travel up through the stone and into my feet and up through my legs and into my chest.
Five.
I fall to my knees beside Kaelor.
He looks at me.
One breath. His eyes, the bond between us burning at full frequency, weak though it is now. He wraps his arms around me. Unable to protect me from what we both know is coming.
The top of the mountain comes apart, peeling outward.
Its cry isn't a sound but a deep groan of pressure that wipes everything out before it.
Superheated debris rains across the arena.
The lake rises — not in waves but as one mass.
The whole surface climbs, the pressure from below forcing it upward, consuming the platforms .
Varketh howls in victory as he snatches the relic from the air. He looks back at us, at the scene, and realizes he is already too late.
I scream at him, at the moment, at the sheer injustice of it all.
The lava meets our platform’s edge and rises up over it in a sheet. The blistering heat arrives a half-second before the lava itself and moves up my legs, my torso.
My hands lock around Kaelor tight.
I don't let go. Will never let go.
I shut my eyes against the searing pain as the dark comes and I wonder:
Will we ever be free from this place?