I wash the gore from my prosthetic with the trembling fingers of my one, real, hand. Cold, muddy water spits out of the faucet. Rain patters endlessly against the thatch roof. Expired pill bottles and Dad’s personal effects- razors and sunscreen and soaps made by local villages, all still in their gift baskets- line the countertop of the spartan washroom around me. Pausing my scrubbing, I wipe my hand on a dusty rag and pick out a handful of narcotics from the different bottles, swallowing them all down with a palmful of brackish water. My throat pulses as I swallow. Then I sniffle, smear the back of my hand across my face, and get back to work.

The monotony of the cleaning holds my attention while the narcotics do their work. It doesn’t take long for the first meds to hit. The throbbing pain of my shoulder- now just a rounded nub of smooth, marbled skin- gradually fades from paralyzing to survivable. Credit where it’s due, the caliber of medication a Champion can get is almost miraculous compared to backstreet Dynasty drugs, and Dad wasn’t hurting for help from the Section’s Biohancers. The Metro Blockhouse alone probably keeps a small army of them on staff.

Dad’s washroom bottles in the noise of the running water. I scrub relentlessly at my detached right arm, digging chunks of dirt and muck out of the interlocking plates that cover its mechanical guts. Biocircuits wither and fall away from the shoulder socket like dead plant roots. Chunks of torn, bloody nerve tissue wash down the drain. I pinch one of them and hold it up on a whim, watching water drip from the fibrous ends. There’s globs of organic circuitry melted in with the nerve tissue. Probably what started the seizures in the first place.

For a variety of reasons, overruse of ki can turn nasty fast. It’s one of the class’s balancing factors: utilizing ki is like utilizing any muscle, which means that if you overclock it, you can and will absolutely blow something at a certain point. There’s warning signs before it happens- when your body can’t expel the aura that you’re making quick enough, or can’t handle the load of conducting that energy, the pain of literally incinerating yourself from the inside out is usually enough of a deterrent- but to someone who doesn’t exactly have those warning signs, they’re pretty easy to ignore. There’s a reason people get apprehensive around me, after all. My body has no problem generating, conducting, or expelling a level of ki that would fry even someone like Dad from the inside out… unless it’s already recovering from a near-death experience. Then all bets are off.

Seizures like the ones that’ve been hounding me since the capital are a slap on the wrist compared to the outcome most people would suffer from going as far as I did to beat Thane. They only ever happened a few times when I was little. Few enough that I can count them on my one hand.

My scrubbing stalls as I run the rag over the back of the carbon-fiber hand; the chunk of damascene reinforcing the knuckles. Thumbing the smoothed material like Cal always had a habit of doing. The ambient glow I exude begins to heighten as my eyes narrow dangerously. Unthinking aura seeps from my pores with an airy sizzling sound. The sound builds to a crackling intensity the more I get mired in thinking about her. How close we were to making it. How far we are now. What must be happening to her at the hands of Valance, of Aurix, of Gami. If she’s even still alive.

The threat of a complete breakdown waits with snapping jaws on both sides of the knife’s edge I now walk. Momentum is the only thing keeping me together- that, and knowing what happens if I falter. My back’s against the wall, Cal is in the hands of the Champion, and I’m sleeping back to back with the boy who murdered my father.

Things… aren’t so hot right now.

The damascene is polished to a shine by the time I finally snap out of it. My glow dims, though only just. Shutting off the water, I leave my arm to dry in the basin and dab at the droplets of blood still welling out of the pinholes in my right shoulder. I wipe the cloth over the grimy mirror before I left, verifying that yes, I do look almost exactly what I feel like: a wreck on two long legs.

I’m a half-and-half mixture of my old colors and the disguise I donned in the capital. Scar-notched nose, sunbaked skin, lethal intent simmering behind driven eyes the unmistakable shade of freshly spilled blood. White hair like a dirty snowdrift, long bangs framing the crown of my forehead in flower petal shapes. All of it shot through with the subdermal glow of a ki fighter’s aura and sandblasted by a menagerie of scars and half-healed scabs that said aura has been ravenously trying to repair since the capital. Taking a thunderbolt to the chest and getting blasted off a hundred-meter industrial cliff isn’t so good for the regeneration, though. The starvation diet doesn’t help either.

I run a hand through my hair, eye the hairtie on my wrist, then snatch up a half-charged can of nanospray from the counter as I head out, spinning it idly. The only place I stop in the bedroom is to grab Dad’s modded uni jacket from where I hung it to dry, pulling it on over a moth-eaten white shirt that hangs to my mid-thigh. I can’t deal with the rest of the room. Not tonight. Maybe never.

The jacket slides awkwardly over my shoulders, inline heating activating with a toggle inside the collar. Perceptive as she always is, Jolie moved the switch from the right side to the left when she tailored it down to a cropped cut more suitable for the dynamic combat I normally engage in. Crimson red, faded white, midnight blue colors; it’s still as comfy as it’s always been. The only wearable thing I have right now, too. At least while my skinsuit’s drying.

I breathe a little easier once the jacket’s warmth blossoms against my back. Though not too easy. I’ve got Valance’s thunder spell to pay back for that one.

My right sleeve hangs empty at my side as I make my way down the long hall around the perimeter of the house. Warm firelight pulses behind the paper walls separating me from the common room at the center of the house. I don’t even have to reach out to confirm with my kinetic sense that that’s where Thane is- I can see his elongated shadow busy working on something. I almost reach out anyways to get a sense of his mood. Almost.

The kitchen appears on my left as I enter the north wing; the only place in the house that doesn’t smell like must and abandonment. It smells like fresh air. Rain and stone. Out the kitchen’s back exit and past the dilapidated porch, grey curtains of downpour crash over the marble fighting square I trained on beneath Dad’s watchful eye. My gaze lingers on it for a wistful moment before I finally shift back to the common room.

I open the double doors one at a time, nose wrinkling as a wave of woodsmoke and welcome heat flows out of the room. The common room is a large, high-ceilinged square in as bad of a state of disrepair as the rest of the house. What little furniture remains is huddled around a collapsed fireplace. A small campfire of broken wood planks stacked right in the center of the room sheds the firelight instead. Blankets and towels have been hung out to dry on the dusty armchairs.

I spin the nanospray again as I enter, staring into the pair of golden eyes that locked onto me as soon as I opened the door.

My heart still doesn’t know what to do with the sudden contact. But my mind has had three horrible years to figure out the exact answer to that dilemma. Because the boy those eyes belonged to, the memory that still stirs those conflicted emotions in my heart, is long gone.

What I’m staring at is the summation of all that boy’s goods and evils. A person equally capable of both, and doubly dangerous for it. No other fighter our age can lay claim to the triumphs he does. No one else can fight like he can. And no one else needs him like I do. Even if I don’t enjoy it.

The irony that I might be the only person left in the world counting on Thane Kyriaku to watch my back isn’t lost on me.

The resemblances between Thane and his sister are still there beneath the grime of travel- same black hair, same dot nose, same dogmatic intensity. And both of their features, even Thane’s, could be just as easily called beautiful as handsome. But that’s where the similarities diverge. Despite being identical twins from the same genetic donor, Thane is two years Cal’s senior, a foot taller, and sixty pounds of lean muscle heavier. A laconic killer with a dispassionate temper and hands callused by the dark deeds it takes to become the favorite apprentice of a tyrant king.

I keep a wary eye on those hands as I toss the nanospray his way. He catches it easily. Turns it over to check the charge. What he was working on earlier becomes visible once I pad around the fire. A waterlogged chessboard, in the middle of a match against his own mind. Or maybe just playing out some puzzle he still remembers.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“There’s not enough for both of us,” Thane says.

“No. There’s not.” I spread one of the drying blankets next to the fire and pat it flat with my foot, not yet sitting down. “I can heal myself now that my arm’s off. Your cuts are infected. You need it more.”

“I can heal myself too.”

He starts to toss it back when I raise a palm in warning. No aura swirls to gather between my fingers, but the threat might as well be there.

“Use it, or I’ll make you use it,” I growl.

After an indecisive moment, the familiar hiss of the sprayer activating begins to fill the room. Firewood crackles and pops. Gouts of embers erupt as the fire shifts around, finding its most comfortable position.

Checking that Thane is working on his injuries with a final sideeye glare, I finally sit down and start fighting through the complicated process of putting my hair up with one hand.

“We can’t stay here for long,” I say once I’m done. “This house is the first place Gami’s agents are going to come looking for me. Tomorrow we scavenge what we can, then we keep moving on.”

I’m already pulling out my JOY- or, the JOY I’m now calling my own. The sphere’s eggshell-white exterior blinks and chimes as it enters its boot sequence. Then the holoprojector flares to life; angry red warnings interposed over a blank ion-blue screen.

[THIS JOY HAS BEEN FLAGGED AS STOLEN PROPERTY BY AN AUTHORIZED DISTRIBUTOR. PLEASE DELIVER TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT.]

[NO SOCIAL PROFILE ENTERED]

I swipe them away.

Thane pulls off his shirt and throws it into the fire. Thing was already rags; there’s spares in his size somewhere in my old closet. The lines of his torso stand out in tension as he sprays and rebandages the nasty wound directly over his heart- Cal’s parting handiwork. A starburst of ill-healed tissue infects the area around it. More slices, tears, and burned stretches of flesh cauterized by ki blasts maul the upper half of his body.

All that and a month of grueling survival, and he’s still a jaw-dropper by any measure. Anyone else would drool over a physique like that.

I just push the stinging thoughts away as he says, “More running, then?” without looking at me.

“You have nothing to say?”

The sprayer hisses again.

“Not directly,” Thane eventually replies. “Forgive me if I still need time to figure out how to say something I know you won’t like.”

“Just say it. It’s not like there’s much more you can do to hurt me.”

He flinches. Visibly.

“We’ve been crawling through the countryside and stealing from farmers for weeks.” His jaw works as he exhales coldly. “We’re at the dregs of our strength and one bad day away from collapsing. We’ve heard nothing from your aunt. Wherever she flew off to, the chances of her finding a way to contact you when we had to abandon our JOYs are next to nil. As are the chances of seeing Cal alive again.” He rips off a length of griptape with his teeth, winding it over a cut on his palm. “If Gami or the Shadows wanted to use Cal as bait to lure either of us back to the capital, they would have done it long ago. A video on the ‘Net, a press release tied to something about apprehending the serial killer Feint; there are a plethora of ways they could make it abundantly clear even if they can’t trace us virtually. Since they haven’t, that means only one of two things have happened: either she’s already dead, or they’re not done torturing her for information.”

My eyes burn at him across the fire as my aura intensifies to a skin-nettling glow. Thane meets my gaze without emotion, then finds something better to look at in the chessboard problem. He sweeps a handful of black hair to the side.

“Let’s be generous and say it’s the latter.” He shuffles the pieces on the board. Two of the pawns, one black and one white, face off against several others. “Even uninjured, the two of us combined would stand near-zero chance of infiltrating the capital. Not when the entire Metro Blockhouse counter-espionage division,” he stacks more pieces against the pawns, “both of the leagues,” till there’s an entire horde blotting out the board, “the Shadows, and Gami’s trusted elites will be on top alert. There will be no more holes to exploit like Cal did.”

Touching the white pawn, he pushes it all the way into the board’s final row.

“If you’re still set on Cal, the only way you’ll see her again is by fundamentally changing the pieces on the board. Running more is only going to drain the last of our strength. And it’s not going to achieve anything on its own.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“I think you do.” Thane trades out the pawn for a queen, then brings it back to friendly lines, reinforcing it with previously discarded pieces. “But I don’t think you understand the true scope of what you thrust yourself into. Gami has leverage over you, but you have something even more threatening to him- you represent the only thing that still threatens him.”

“And how’s that?” I scoff. “As far as I could tell, he didn’t even know I was still alive until the capital.”

“He’s suspected for far longer than that.” Firelit shadows lick at Thane’s shoulders while he pauses, gathering his thoughts. “He won’t stop looking for you now that he knows for certain. Gami has many enemies, and not just in our Section. The daughter of Mars Mons is something that those enemies would have a very real chance of rallying behind. Old grudges can be easily forgotten if there’s a reason to look beyond them. Something that represents both the future and the past.”

I stare at the chessboard. “Was that what you were going to use me for?”

He doesn’t say anything for a long, long moment. And then, “…it’s why I don’t think you should take me with you, wherever you’re going next. For both of our sakes. Even now I can’t stop myself from thinking like that.”

“Like your father,” I say. Not a question.

His eyes slide away from mine. “Yes,” he says. The fire crackles. “Like my father.”

We fall back into bitter silence, as we usually do. Sleeping back-to-back in the mud for a month can only salve so much awkwardness. I know I play my own part aggravating the wound that his presence alone has reawoken. The empathy that made me go so far to give him one last chance in the capital has been corroding ever since that day.

There’s a part of my brain, usually overridden, that blames him for all of this. And it’s probably right to. But blaming him for the situation I’m in isn’t going to miraculously fix it.

Sprawling out on the blanket, I flick my fingers in small motions through the air, navigating my JOY to tune into the news streams from the capital. For weeks, the nightly ritual has been as luckless as my infrequent flights to the radio towers. I page through a few streams before pausing on one showing the capital’s University District at eventide. Cherry blossom season, wide shot of the marble front steps of Concordia Uni. A mixed group of students and faculty sit behind a thin podium atop the steps, and a large crowd gathers in the plaza below.

I sit up as a woman’s clipped, Electric Town accent plays through crackling speakers. Sasha, minor league second-rank, stands awkwardly in the spotlight that Jolie normally would. The late-twenties Gunslinger fumbles with the pages of a prewritten speech and touches a crimson rag that hangs around her neck before continuing.

“…Which is why, in a memoir to the legacy of our last Champion, Gami has extended his personal recommendation for this year’s university representative amongst our delegation to the Summit of Champions. Normally this honor is reserved for the highest rank fighter, but as Thane Kyriaku is unable to attend, a new student needed to be nominated for the events on Olympus.”

Thane perks up too, watching intently from across the fire. A great roar of applause rises from the crowd. Sasha steps aside with a sheepish smile, letting another figure come from the group behind her. I stare with narrowing eyes as she claps him on the shoulder and whispers a reassurance in his ear before fully stepping back. The camera ascends as people began standing to cheer.

My fingers clench into a white-knuckle fist.

“Please join me in welcoming a face that’s very familiar- and very close- to all of our hearts. Ladies and gentlemen, the son of our city’s very own Showmaker: Aurix Mons.”

The mic washes out as the son of my father surges up the steps with a manicured smile. He basks like a peacock in the flashing lights. Waves his brutal hands. Grins with the same mouth that called me a bastard who didn’t deserve my name as he tosses his mane of red-orange hair. And they eat it up like Dad himself is back from the dead.

I devour every last pixel of Aurix in a cold, unblinking silence. Watching as he’s handed on a silver platter the life that should have been mine. The name that should have been mine. The spotlight that should have been mine. The future that should have been mine. All of it.

And that bastard has the audacity to smile.

No one cares how badly I humiliated him, because I don’t even exist. I’m a ghost watching through a screen. He’s the son of the Showmaker.

I stop just shy of shutting off the stream when the cam zooms in on Aurix one last time, inadvertently including the cats-eyed Psi sitting next to his empty chair. Valance, one leg folded over the other, dressed in Metro Blockhouse blues. Her glossed lips are formed in a smile of prim amusement. Caught up in bumping fists with another Concordia fighter, Aurix doesn’t even notice the camera trailing him. But Valance does. Oh, she does alright.

She cocks her head and gives a dainty wave to the camera. And around her wrist is a familiar damascene bangle.

I snap the stream off.