I wonder what her ceiling is like.

Knowing the Vents, it can’t be glamorous. Likely just a flat slab of crumbling concrete so low she can push her palm flat against it, viewed from a threadbare mattress thrown on the floor. Though even that would be a warmer sight than mine.

Thirty cavernous meters above me, the featureless plane of the simulacra battlefield’s roof connects with its eggshell-white walls so seamlessly that I can’t even tell where one side of the vast cube ends and another begins. My eyes trail down as the battlefield’s computer squawks for my attention. Heaving for air, chest bare, strands of black hair plastered to my face. I wipe the strands to the side and blink away the distracting thoughts. Ignore the annoying alert blaring from the computer. Return to the moment. Even my breathing and begin the command anew.

“Increase difficulty by ten stages-”

Mid-breath, I pivot and cleave my staff through the featureless holographic fighter that leaps at me from behind, swinging hard enough for the weapon to carry on and bat aside the fencing blade hunting for my opposite flank. Three more of the projections dance around me in a loose alliance, electric-blue nanolines formed in the nondescript shapes of men and women drawn from the Metro Blockhouse’s vast reservoir of combat data.

The combat simulations are my only company in the vast white room. There’s no limit to the shape, number, or proficiency they take. Nor are there breaks in the waves. With every onslaught I beat, the computer recalculates the challenge anew to draw ever closer to impossible, though it hasn’t found my limits yet. An hour’s worth of brutal, nonstop exertion taxes my movements as I whirl through the fading snowflakes of the destroyed simulation.

“Increasing challenge by ten steps,” the computer intones.

I breathe deep. Center myself. First comes hands, always hands.

And I flow back into the maelstrom.

Drop the staff, swivel my hips, and kick it like a bullet at the Mecha dropping down from above; transforming the weapon into a metal javelin the moment my foot contacts the shaft. Duck the punch swinging at my skull from behind. Dive forward, shift to Magus, cast Gaseous Form with a flick of my hand as a spray of micromissiles chews the deck, shift again, a familiar falchion’s grip fills my hand as I sweep up from the ground in a whirlwind crescent to hack two more bodies in half before landing with my staff behind my back once more. The severed torso of a minor league Duelist from five years back tumbles past, splashing and dissolving against the tiled floor. My ears twitch at the telltale gurgle of more projections forming.

“Increasing challenge.”

Another wave. Another slipstream of chaos as I perfect my opening sequence against higher and higher calibers of opponents. I jumped straight to minor league warriors from eras past. They appear in ever-increasing variety and violence. Each a test of my mind’s ability to react to an opponent, analyze, engage, and win the initial engagement in the span of milliseconds. The first strike is the conductor of a battle, and mine is a weapon all its own: a blinding exchange of slashes that harmonizes the offensive mantras of the Lungracian stance with my master’s probing, methodical style. I plow through the simulations like slush pile homework.

“Increasing challenge.”

Another wave falls. Then another, even faster and more dominantly than the last. Single leaguers no longer a challenge, the computer throws them at me in pairs, trios, quadras. Multi-dimensional problems that require ever-escalating adaptation. Major league silhouettes I recognize begin appearing.

“Increasing challenge.”

I lose myself so thoroughly in the flow that I stop hearing the computer at all. Stop thinking of anything outside the moment, the rapid-fire exchanges too fast for my eyes to track. Stop thinking of how little a challenge the machine gives. Stop thinking of her. In the moment, there is only the physical. A flash of holographic blue, a sixth sense of a shape approaching, the gurgle of more projections forming, the glass-shattering sound as I smash through them.

I don’t even hear the computer call out the next challenge. I just feel it. A subtended tremor hits the air like a buzzsaw as another simulation surges into the fray, cascading from advanced Innovator tech hidden in the walls. Feral wind sweeps the field clear. Hairs rise down my arm. My heartbeat spikes in primal danger instinct. A ki fighter is coming. Can feel it in the battle’s pulse. Like the tempo of the world itself was suddenly seized by a new force of nature.

The moment of insight nearly costs me. Tall, powerful, and unbelievably fast, the ki fighter gapcloses with explosive speed, siphoning the energy for a blast from the air as it vaults the shoulders of another warrior. Rather than catch the beam straight on like another ki fighter would, I twist and let it harmlessly obliterate the air beside me, taking out the Tamer who just appeared across the battlefield while I shift classes to Gunslinger and Elemental. The light doesn’t even fade from the air before it’s on me. Not even a full second from appearing to contact. Driving down from above like a bolt of chain lightning. Too fast for me to summon a new weapon; just enough time to reshape my metal staff into a revolver as I whirl and draw.

My eyes snap open. An ice-water shock crashes through my nerves. Crimson hair fills my vision like an incoming meteor. Recognition hits me like a gut punch the microsecond before I see the ki-sheathed fist driving for my head and my instincts pull the trigger for me.

A bag-of-chains clang smashes across the battlefield.

The closest thing I had to a father dissolves into a slurry of nanoparticles that sprays over my side, a smoking bullet hole in his heart. I stagger backwards. Thrown from my combat flow and hurled into the shellshocked past. Rain, not sweat, plastering my clothes to my body. A bloodied blade filling my trembling hand. Looking down at it, a muddy field under my boots, ears ringing in the gaping silence.

My empty stomach lurches into my throat.

I jerk away from the memory and plant myself back in the present. Shaking off the shock. Grasping for control as I gasp for breath, eyes stung by gunpowder, the revolver’s orange-hot barrel trembling in my grip. The gun slowly lowers. I cast it away with a shaking hand. It clatters loudly across the tiled ground just as the computer chimes again and a slow clapping begins.

Still reeling from the image of Mars, I almost think the computer used my own image to create the simulation that I turn to see standing behind me. It stares me down with a soulless, hungry gaze. I blink in confusion. The colors of the holoprojection are those I see in the mirror every morning. But the sardonic humor in its golden eyes belongs more to my sister’s personality than it does mine, as does its middling height and slim, switchblade shoulders.

“You made that look easy,” the projection says, kicking through the dissolving particles of Mars’ holographic body. Eating up the tight-faced shock that’s still gripping me. Another clap echoes across the hollow battlefield. “Not your first time, either. I know that look. You’re mine, alright.”

My knuckles turn sheet-white. The simulation’s thin lips twitch towards a smile. Pleased by the flash of ire, or maybe just a carnivoric craving for a fight.

“That’s no way to greet your old man,” he goads. “At least I left mine with a reason to remember me.”

He watches with a deviant killer’s self-satisfied smirk as I throw a hand out at the castaway revolver. And he’s still smirking as the familiar shape of a metal staff slithers back my hands, a snarl twists my face, and I cleave through him like a stubborn tree to the sound of glass and cannons.

----------------------------------------

Steaming water crashes into the tub while I wander the depths of my suite in a rattled silence, picking through clothes until I find an outfit suited for the coming day. My fingers shake slightly as they sift through an old, oversized shirt to run up the dark fabric of a silken tunic. Luxuriously appointed, like everything I’ve earned under Gami’s apprenticeship. I’ve grown used to the tedium of the tight fits and randomly draping accents; standard fare when appearing in public as a Champion’s premier apprentice. Tay would hate it. Not just on herself, but me as well.

She hated every small change the capital worked on me while we were apart. The changing styles of my clothes, my diplomacy, even the way I cut my hair. I asked why, once. It took her the entire day to find the words for the feelings that troubled her. She said it felt like the city was stealing me away. At the time, I thought it was a very her response. Impulsive and naïve to the greater world; endearing nonetheless.

These days, I envy her monochrome morality. How easily everything distilled to black and white. Good and evil. Liked and disliked. Rarely thinking beyond, never losing her way in the rabbit hole of questioning and doubts as I so often do.

She would never wear something this expensive because it was expected. I don’t have such luxury.

The silk shirt joins the rest of my outfit in a loose pile atop the floor-height bed in the main chamber. Framed photographs turned towards the wall call out to me as I pass. I know each of them by heart, but I refuse to even glance their way. There’s no escape in those memories that can replace the shaken feeling that’s followed me up from the training rooms. Though I do stoop to check the end table. Top drawer, Mars’ last JOY still lays perfectly preserved in felt, clunking faintly as I shut the drawer again.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Pale, electric-blue light from a wall-mounted projector beats an ungodly hour of the early morning against my retinas as I pass the floor-to-ceiling windows. Grey snow blankets the darkened metropolis below. Thirty stories up in the Metro Blockhouse, sequestered in one of the ill-charted levels between the minor and major league barracks, this suite is another one of those opulent trinkets I’ve earned. One large chamber that holds five smaller rooms’ worth of partitions within. Every personal memento is tucked neatly away in the closet- the first staff I carved, a haori Tay bought me at our first fireworks festival, my first trophy rope from a tournament. What remains is sterilized and sleek. There’s more money under this ceiling than the quarters of most of the professional fighters on retainer here. I’ve always felt a stranger inside it. Group homes and Mars’ estate gave me a longing for the simple things that no amount of wealth can ever sate.

It'd be ironic, if it weren’t so empty in here.

The washroom’s tile is hot against my feet as I return to the bath, twisting off the faucet as I pass. A softly-voiced command shuts the door behind me. Steam builds in the confined space. I sink into the bubble-topped bath with a groan that’s half soreness, half grateful release.

Scalding water unspools the tension in my shoulders one knot at a time. My head comes to rest on the edge of the tub. Only for a moment do I allow my body to relent to the relaxation. Moisture beads and drips down my bare arms, my cheeks, my forehead. I count the droplets to pass the time. Stretch my legs. Blink slowly, still replaying those last moments in the simulacra battlefield. Mars. My genetic contributor’s taunting voice. Only Jolie would know how the arena came to have his data on file.

Gently, I scold my raven mind for wanting to reach for distractions mere moments after I escaped them. Instead, I rake my hair back, close my eyes, and breathe in the steam while I pretend I can sleep in the dripping quiet. These days, I rarely can manage sleep anywhere. Too much on my mind. Too many things that appear when my eyelids close; none of them fond.

Not unlike the one that’s been watching me from the moment I closed the door.

Weary resignation settles over my chest. I don’t have to open my eyes to know I am no longer alone in the steaming silence. A familiar prickling feeling bores into the space between my shoulder blades. My instincts warning me that I am watched by something with a very real intent on killing me. A simple sweep of the suite with any expanded sense from a JOY class, one I was too tired and preoccupied to bother using earlier, would instantly have revealed its source to be the strange void sitting directly across from the tub. The fact that I can’t use that sense now tells me everything of how the next moments are about to unspool.

It’s not the first visit Feint has paid the Metro Blockhouse.

Most of those visits, I assume, started something like this. Peaceful and relaxed until the moment a familiar head of black hair taps her heel loudly, just once, and I look up as the fog clears to see my wayward sibling patiently sitting there on the closed toilet seat with elbows on wide-spread knees; a knife filing under her nails like it’s hungry for a human sheath.

My eyes slink to the closed door. Calmly taking in the variables. How did she get this far inside the M? Did Valance let her? And if she’s here, where is Tay?

Even when Cal confronted me on that rooftop in the Electric Town, she still pretended civility. Still wore that charismatic shell she always put on in public. Those smirking smiles and coy looks have finished their evaporation since I saw her last. The Vents has worn her shell down like an acid shore, stripping my sister down to her barest essence. But rather than weaken, her time in the Vents only revealed the iron lying beneath the nineteen-year-old prodigy. The face that stares back from atop the shitter is that of a stranger. A deadpan killer who no longer looks at me like family, but an enemy, an obstacle, devoid of personal attachment.

Ten feet apart, the gulf that divides us now might as well be miles long.

If any care for our siblinghood still remains in her, I’d never know. She shows me nothing. I regard her carefully with one eye open. Don’t even bother to look at my JOY. If she left it within reach, it’s just a carrot on a stick. Instead, I study her.

Though we’ve never met the man whose colors stain us both, Cal and I were spun from the same strand of his genetic code. We’re as close as twins despite the two years that separate us in age. Which is how I know exactly how tired and dangerous my little sister is. Her favorite boyish fashions have been exchanged for a blackmarket skinsuit the color of an oil slick on asphalt. Grime coats the undersides of her fingernails. Impact bruises mottle one side of her neck. Blackened veins of some old corruptive damage worm along the same arm as her Relic. She’s been fighting. An old scarf, a weathered gift from Jolie that she shelved years ago, now curls around her neck like a declaration of war. It’s her eyes that arrest me, though. Light, crystalline yellow irises narrowed by unmistakable, protective hostility.

I know that look. And we both know what it means.

I’m threatening what’s hers.

“Quit doing that,” Cal snaps, ending my visual dissection.

Not so much my little sister anymore, either.

“I assume Tay’s absence means you’re not here to talk,” I say, legs shifting beneath the water. My mind races while I talk, searching my immediate memories of the room’s features for any possible way to change the situation. A towel. Unconventional for a weapon, and just as unexpected. Enough material to slow a knife. One hangs above and behind me. I plot where I’ll need to reach for as I continue to stall. “That, I understand. You don’t want to tarnish how she sees you, but you’ll do whatever you think it’ll take to protect her once the doors shut. Or did she send you herself?” Her silence answers for her. “I didn’t think I’d see you again so soon, sister. I would ask how you bypassed the arena’s security this time, but that won’t matter a minute from now.”

Cal thumbs over the blade of her knife, letting my attempt at stalling fade into the steam. Her voice is low when she eventually asks, “Would you ever kill me, Thane?”

An honest pause stretches between us.

“You picked your side, Cal. What’s been started, both of us aren’t walking away from it. Maybe neither of us will.” I nod at where the chunk of flesh I carved from her arm would be. “Confronting me here is suicide, even if you could beat me. But you already know you can’t. You’re not stupid. Yet you’re here all the same.” I click my tongue. “I expected better of you.”

The knife twirls in her hand. “Answer the question.”

“I don’t know if I would,” I shrug. “Perhaps. If I had to. Maybe not even then.”

“Because I would kill you,” she replies, eyes as cold as a dead body. “I’d do it and I wouldn’t think twice.”

Hairs prickle along my arm.

“There was a time where I made a promise to my brother that I’d keep him honest. I would protect him like he protected me. Even if it meant saving him from himself.” Those golden irises drift up, staring straight into me. Through me. “But the funny thing is, Thane, I don’t know if I’m looking at that brother any more. I think I’m looking at the monster that replaced him.”

“And you’re fit to be the judge of that? You, the assassin who had a change of heart?” I crook my chin to the side. “Come on, Cal. Even you understand that sometimes, it takes a monster to beat one. You’re sleeping side-by-side with the most dangerous one of all.”

“You made Tay what she is, Thane, whether you accept it or not. You betrayed her. You abandoned her and left her for dead. You tried to use her like you’ve used everyone else- like tools, things to be picked up, used, and discarded. Even me.” She trails off with a disbelieving shake of her head. “What happened to you?”

“I’m doing what has to be done,” I say, dangerously calm. “Mars was right when he said that our world is cruel. That good people aren’t supposed to win, and it’s the bad people who usually do, because they won’t let anything stand in the way of what they want, even if it’s something good. We can’t all be heroes, Cal. We can’t all be loved.” My face darkens. “You would kill to protect Tay, even if she hated you for it. I would do worse to help more. Someone has to. Gami must be stopped. He is a monster and a murderer, and he’s powerful enough that it will take a century for another person to be born who can claw him down. Every day he sits on the throne drives us step by step towards everything Mars stood against. A world where anything can and will be justified by might makes right.” My eyes bore into her.

“So I’m supposed to believe that you’re acting for what, the greater good?” Cal dismissively says. “Don’t give me that drivel. The day the ends started justifying the means is the day you forgot what Mars saw in you in the first place.”

I say nothing, and in her eyes, I watch the last hope that I would listen crumble away like dust. How I hate the very words I say. How I wish I could turn back time before that day. How I just want to go back to that house by the sea and pretend it all never happened. But I can’t. There’s no changing the past.

“Go take a real long look in the mirror, Thane,” Cal says, voice dripping with contempt. “Dad would be proud of you.”

I flinch. Seeing that smirking, holographic visage behind closed eyelids.

Masking the sting her words leave, I grip the sides of the tub and slowly begin to rise. Folding away the sorrow of knowing what I’m about to have to do.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Cal. But I can’t allow you to stop my plans, either.”

“Sit down.”

Her knife smashes into the slit of space between my fingers, driving into the tub up to the hilt. Cal rises, takes three steps, and jams a boot down on the tub’s edge, grinding Venter dirt from her soles into the water. “I don’t give a damn about why you think you aren’t just as bad as Gami. There are exactly two things in this city that I care about, Thane and you’re a threat to both of them. So I hope you understand exactly what it means that I’m here speaking to you at all.”

Leaving the knife in, she grabs the towel I was eyeing and throws it down at me.

“Tay doesn’t want me to kill you,” she growls. “She wants to talk.”

I actually laugh, glancing to the side.

“And I suppose our father is with her, sharing a cup of tea? Tetsuka doesn’t talk things out with her enemies, Cal. She destroys them.”

“She talked with me.”

“Then suppose I did believe you.” My eyes narrow, looking over those impact bruises on her neck with fresh awareness. Distracted for a moment by a fleeting suspicion. “I killed her father, Cal. You may have an inkling of what that means, but I assure you that you’ll never understand the entirety of it.” I shake my head. “You saw how she reacted last time. What’s between us can never be water under the bridge.”

“That’s up to you and her. Not me.” Her boot lifts away, and the sound of her steps heads for the door. “She’s waiting outside, right now. So we can end this.”

What-if.

The dangerous allure of the offer reaches out with a temptation I almost can’t resist. A chance just to speak with her and put to rest those endless mornings of rolling over expecting to see her. A chance to convince her of the necessity of what I do, and how it hinges on her help. But I know exactly how that meeting will go; how those words will be received.

Not well.

The towel hits the floor with a dry thump as I release it. “Tell her I’m sorry.”

Cal’s quiet steps pause at the door. “If you really meant that, you’d tell her yourself.”