Twenty
Rural Virginia
Now that Thymos was under Dr. Iver’s purview it was, like all things within Valeran’s walls, precise. The tournament began
at exactly midnight.
The first phase was entirely virtual. Over the course of two days, the participating students would play up to forty Wi-Fi
battles, where they would be randomly paired off by the algorithm. A loss would cause one’s rating to fall; a win would elevate
it. The four players who had the highest rating—the best win-loss ratio—would proceed to the next phase of the tournament,
which was in person. A semifinal round and then the finals. The winner would be crowned on the fourth afternoon of May.
Julian had spent days poring over Mikhail’s handbook, running calculations. He would half construct a team and then abandon
it when he realized he couldn’t beat Klaudia. Hours of false starts and furious surrenders, pacing around his dorm room in
agitation.
He pulled multiple all-nighters with Jane and Mikhail, the three of them practicing their matchups. Mikhail, having designed
the game himself, had unrivaled insight, and Jane was so creative in her thinking that it inspired Julian to look toward the
unconventional. Sometimes the downright heretical.
“I think I’m done with Cervelet,” Jane said one night, slumping over in her seat. “It’s just not working.”
“It doesn’t fit on your team,” Julian agreed.
Cervelet was an elegant-looking deer that wore a rainbow diadem, one of the many pieces that reflected Mikhail’s inventive and detail-oriented game making.
“It’s too fixed. There’s really only one thing it’s there for, damage, and if it gets knocked out then your strategy falls apart. ”
“You’re right.” Jane tapped a note onto her tablet. “I can afford to sacrifice power for flexibility—don’t you think?”
Julian nodded. “I’ll run it with you again, once you’ve replaced Cervelet.”
Jane gave him a weary smile. “Thanks.”
Cervelet and similarly overpowered pieces didn’t fit on Julian’s team, either. He was currently piloting a balance team, somewhere
in between the slow and bulky teams that aimed to whittle their opponents down and the fast-paced, hyperoffensive teams that
tried to overwhelm their opponents with damage. But his matchup into Klaudia’s team remained abysmal. He found himself baited,
over and over again, into the Ghostly Trap.
Three days before the tournament, as he emerged almost sleepily from a haze of testing and team building, Julian arrived at
their usual table early, before Jane and Mikhail. Distracted running calculations, he hadn’t noticed Klaudia approaching.
When he felt her presence at his back he looked up, startled. Klaudia stood at a slight distance, arms folded over her chest.
He was reminded of their first meeting, when she had ordered him to get out of her seat. Only her gaze now wasn’t cold and
set. Something wavered in it, darkening the usual icy gray.
Julian opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Debate team captain, precocious teenage politician, but Klaudia always
made him so tongue-tied. He felt both chilled by her stare and electrified by it.
Before he could react, Klaudia turned. Quickly, almost flustered, she stalked out of the dining hall. By the time she vanished through the doors, the unspoken words were burning in Julian’s throat.
Wait, he wished he had said. Come here. Come back.
But Klaudia, as ever, accepted help from no one. After that, in fact, Julian barely saw her over the next few days. She emerged
only briefly at mealtimes, ate little, and then disappeared back into her dorm room.
Over and over again Julian rehearsed what he might say to her, but she never gave him another chance. Maybe that was for the
best. What could he say? Sorry for what Carter did. You’re welcome for stopping him. Shame how it all went down, but I’m still going to try to beat
you. She didn’t want his mealymouthed apologies, and he didn’t want her gratitude.
The memory of her on her knees played over and over again in his mind, and Julian found something viscerally repugnant about
it. That Klaudia could be brought low by cheap tricks and guileless cruelty was disgusting. Because Carter couldn’t match
her on the cerebral realm in which she operated, he had tried to pull her down to the mortal, corporeal world.
Julian knew he had no high ground on honor, but it was so fundamentally wrong that anger continued to seethe within him. He
envisioned an alternate timeline where he had beaten Carter to a pulp. It was a pointless thought exercise. For better or
worse, Julian had no constitution for violence.
But the game was different—or at least he tried to convince himself it was. If he beat Klaudia there, he would do it fairly,
in her realm, on an even playing field. Yet as the final phase of the tournament approached, Julian couldn’t shake the sickness
he felt at the prospect.
It was the afternoon before the tournament and Julian was poring over last-minute calculations with Mikhail. They’d played dozens of games by now, testing their matchups, and while Julian had won consistently, there was still something missing.
“It has a good matchup into all the other major threats in the tournament,” he said. “Except for Klaudia’s.”
“I told you, just accept it. You’re playing for second. I swear, I’m removing Psycha from the game with the next balance patch.
Clearly I didn’t consider all the possible niche interactions between different pieces and mechanics.”
But Julian refused to accept that. He went back through the handbook, reexamining every single piece. He analyzed every ability,
every move, every base stat total. He just needed something—anything—that gave him a chance against Ghostly Trap.
It was an hour later when he finally saw it, a maligned piece that he had overlooked again and again. Tradecrafter, a massive
arthropodin creature with what looked like a spy mask and headset. It seemed rather unimpressive at first glance, but its
ability caught Julian’s eye.
When he pointed it out to Mikhail, his roommate laughed.
“You’re kidding,” he said. “I literally designed it as a joke. To make fun of the espionage students. You know, because of
bugging . . .”
But while Mikhail trailed off, Julian was studying Tradecrafter closely. And all of a sudden, everything came together in
his head.
Midnight. There was surprisingly little fanfare to the actual moment the tournament began. Julian was refreshing the page,
and then all of a sudden a notification blipped across his screen.
Matteo Alemu Sorensen is challenging you to a Wi-Fi battle.
As he loaded into the game, Julian felt only minimally nervous. He had practiced every matchup multiple times. When he saw the pieces Matteo sent out, his opponent’s entire strategy unfolded before him. Pattern recognition, visualization. Just like chess.
Julian won his first game decisively.
Jane Lin is challenging you to a Wi-Fi battle.
Moonlight washed through Julian’s window, casting his room in silver. It reminded him of—well, nothing he could afford to
think about right now. But it compelled him to look down at his watch: 3:16 a.m.
Emile Vo is challenging you to a Wi-Fi battle.
With every game he won, Julian’s pulse ticked up. He was getting close, so close. Winning gave him a high comparable to any
he’d experienced with Landon’s uppers. He never wanted to come down from it.
The way the tournament matching system worked—the pairings were random—he didn’t end up facing Klaudia during the first phase.
It left him both disappointed and relieved. Yet each time he allowed himself to dream of home, of the weekend furlough, thoughts
of Klaudia crept into the corners of his mind. He no longer knew what he wanted more.
The next morning, in the dining hall, the other students were in an uproar. Their pale faces and dark circles showed their
exhaustion, but their eyes gleamed with bitter suspicion. Every single one of them seemed to be staring at Julian’s table.
Did you see their teams—
Not fair—
Rigged—
Mikhail also looked weary as he sat down. Klaudia’s expression, as usual, revealed nothing. Jane was nervously picking at her nails.
“They’re calling the four of us the Athenians,” Mikhail said.
“In the context of their historically unrivaled artistic and political culture?” Julian asked, raising a brow.
“In the context of something called . . . the Melian Dialogue?”
The Melian Dialogue was the text from which all realist theory was derived. Thucydides, a Greek historian, had reported on
the supposed negotiations between the Athenian invaders and their victims, the Melians. Prior to the siege, the militarily
superior Athenians had offered the Melians terms of surrender, leading to the famous line: The strong do what they will, and the weak endure what they must. After the Melians refused the terms, the Athenians massacred them without mercy.
Klaudia swiftly explained the finer points of this to Jane and Mikhail.
Jane wrinkled her nose. “They don’t really think that about us, do they?”
It was true that the four of them had been summarily trouncing the rest of the school. But Julian suspected that there was
one person responsible for this particular epithet.
“No,” Julian assured her. “This is just Carter’s way of coping with his inferiority and inevitable defeat.”
Jane still looked distressed. Another chorus of whispers rose, and more sharp glares. Finally, Mikhail said, “I’ll drop out.”
“What?” Jane’s eyes widened. “No, you can’t.”
“It’s okay,” Mikhail said. “My ranking is safe. And besides, I kind of get why they’re upset. I’m the developer of the game.
I wrote all the code. I do have an unfair advantage.”
Jane opened her mouth to argue, and then shut it again. Julian’s stomach fluttered with unease. None of them pointed out that Carter’s quarrel was obviously with Klaudia. She was the favorite to win. But Julian doubted that anyone could have convinced her to drop out.