No matter the result today, I will win what we need.

It’s the nature of Truth Hour. Spill a secret and survive the round. Distrust your opponent or speak a lie, and you’ll lose faster than you can name a syndicate sellsword’s favorite color. I’ve never used the game as a weapon before. It’s only ever been a fun icebreaker for Jolie and I and whatever friends we invite to our apartment.

I’ve no doubt losing to Tanis will mean far worse than just taking a shot of some shoddily mixed bottom-shelf war crime. I still don’t have a bead on the Executor’s reason for inviting me here in the first place. Fortunately, there’s no way to lose the game but through lying, and I’d have to be a complete idiot to try lying in a place like this. I’m safe as long as I have no qualms about answering even the most embarrassing questions. And that? That I can do. I’ve even got an Iros’ vouching in the matter.

“If you think the other person is lying, you can say so out loud,” I explain, working my way through the last of the rules, now from behind Tanis’ desk. My sneakers own one of the corners from where I kicked them up to rest. The Executor waits with a predator’s patience on a small stool across the trinket-littered expanse of hardwood between us, examining me from behind that eerie black blindfold while her small feet swish through the air, sending her hair flap into a quivering frenzy with every change of direction. She plays with an archaic bracelet made of unusual black stone, dim light catching and refracting in the silvery folds.

The bipolar combination of a child’s body and the reputation of a Dynasty Executor makes Tanis’ quirks far more unnerving than they would be in a vacuum. There’s no way a pre-teen managed to become one of the underworld’s most feared criminals, which leaves her true age a mystery. Maybe I’ll make that my first question.

Tanis interrupts the thought by thrusting a tiny hand straight up in the air so forcefully that she begins floating upwards. Forgetting gravity’s role in the universe yet again, or perhaps just choosing to ignore it.

“And if you are lying, hm? Do I win that easily?”

“As easy as that. But if you’re wrong, you lose. So make it count.”

“Hah! How dangerously simple.” Performing a tumbling loop through the air, she returns to perching on the stool with both hands curled firmly around the lip of the seat and sets the bracelet daintily atop the desk. Her head tilts to the side in a motion eerily identical to one I made when levelling the challenge of the game.

“And to the victor goes the spoils of their choosing.” The Executor’s singsong tone evaporates like the flick of a light switch. Her neck cranks even further, nearing a full right angle. “No limits. Oh, this will be fun.”

Then Tanis’ head snaps back upright and she claps her hands together, letting out another giggle.

“If only the children outside the door were as adventurous as you! I grow so bored with their bowing and kowtowing, mhm? They don’t like to have fun. They’re afraid of failure, afraid of the dark, afraid of ending back up in a cage. Your Champion is right about one thing: bravery only comes from Icarian delusions. How can rats who have never seen the sun ever dream to burn with it? They can’t. They only know what it means to be afraid.”

A fanged maw splits open behind her veil, baring a grinning void as empty as the Abyss.

“I suppose that can be my first question, child. Are you afraid?”

I fire a smirk right back across the table. “I’m afraid of a lot of things. Failing my dreams. My sister. Myself. My friends, my peers, all the people who look up to me.” I hold an open palm up to the desk lamp’s light. “Lots of people look up to these hands. One day, I hope the entire Section will. Did you know they call me a hero?”

“I don’t have time to keep up with the local gossip, fortunately.”

“It’s a heavy weight, being a hero. And I know it’s only going to get heavier. But it’s one I’ll shoulder every morning, because no matter how hard it gets, everyone needs something to believe in. Even me.” My voice sinks to a cocksure steel. “Unfortunately for your ego, Executor, I’ve never been afraid of a challenge. You’ll have to work a little harder to earn that.” I pause to look around the cramped confines of the room. “Though I was expecting a little different of you, too.”

“Hm hm, indeed. If you’re looking for a view, I’m afraid you won’t find one. There was a slip and fall incident involving a little girl and a window several years ago. Not very safety compliant.” Her smile tightens playfully. “I noticed that wasn’t a question.”

I shrug and snap a finger at her colors. “Why the white?”

Raising an eyebrow, Tanis breathes out the sigh of a doctorate student asked about the subject of their thesis and leans back grandiosely on her stool. “The syndicate has such an appalling palette to choose from. Orange is so droll, so dull, so silly. It only goes well with black. And black? Well, what can I say that hasn’t been said already? It’s a sealed envelope.” Gears turn behind her blindfold. “Have you ever killed a human?”

“No. What are your classes?”

“Magus, Modd, Plague Elemental.”

The first explains the bizarre floating- probably a levitating spell she casts at the start of every day. The second covers her eerily shifting, nonhuman traits. The last, like the vines crawling throughout the office, draws out my curiosity before I can put a lid on it.

“Plague Elemental?”

“Something from before your time, I suppose. It means Biohancer by the literal labels of our patron game. But please, use Plague. My psyche is built on a jenga tower of pedantics. And I’ve always been more interested in the deconstruction of humans than their restoration, anyways.” Tanis smiles at the gambit and the free question it earned. “Would you prefer I remove my blindfold? I promise there’s nothing evil or mysterious hiding underneath.”

“Is that a lie?”

She somehow manages to click her tongue without a mouth. “Very clever, but to answer would break our order of operations.”

Worth a shot, even if it failed. “Go ahead,” I say.

Tanis’ lips reappear as she flings her blindfold away in one fell swoop, revealing not the eyes I was expecting, but instead a second blindfold beneath. Electric-blue nanolines dissolve the first into nothingness as it passes beyond the reach of the JOY creating it. Giggling at the begrudging groan I let out, Tanis rips the second blindfold off, titters out an apology when there’s still another beneath it, then removes that one, finally unveiling the face beneath them all.

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Catlike is the first word that springs to mind when I see her features in full, and they continue to evolve in front of me. The languid patience of an apex feline dangling a rat by the tail fills her two true eyes; both orange-gold and lurking beneath heavy lids and slick membranes. The vertical third-eye slit closes for the first time as she blinks. Scarless, porcelain-white skin paints a round, feminine face and button nose surrounded by fleshy tendrils of hair. Her flawless skin would have me believe she’s some eldritch angel no older than a pre-teen. But the sinful weight to her eyes bespeaks an intelligence centuries in the making.

An eerily thin-lipped smile stretches across the lower half of Tanis’ face while she preens in the sudden attention. “Executor Tanis D’Janias of the Dynasty Syndicate,” she sings. The playful tone snaps in half when the right half of her face twitches. “Your turn.”

Infinite questions spring into my mind, but I know the trick she aims for. Jolie uses it all the time. It’s a voluntary revelation meant to distract from other, more critical topics. I should be asking everything I can of Dynasty and their connection to Vex. Yet I can’t resist indulging my curiosity just yet.

“Is this your real appearance?” I ask.

The twitching stops. “As real as it can be, mhm. Human meat never did my true self justice. How do you find it? Be honest.”

“Unnerving. How old are you?”

“Two hundred and seventy… two hundred and eighty… I can’t quite remember. The decades tend to blur together after a time. How many megajoules of ki can you generate per second?”

I smirk. “Liar.”

The entire world shrieks to a halt when Tanis freezes. She shits dead-still for a moment longer than comfortable before tilting her head innocently to the side, spinning flesh hair through two fingers.

“How did you know, boy?”

I motion to the room around us. “You’re a scientist. Precise numbers define you.”

“Hilarious. And what is the normal penalty for being discovered?”

“Usually a liar takes a shot of something toxic, but-”

Without warning, Tanis primes a starbust of arcane energy on her fingertip and presses it against the side of her head, then releases it with a snap of her fingers. A sickening squelch hits my ears as her head explodes. Gore and brain matter spray paint the carpet with modern art. A nauseating stench of burnt ozone suffuses the air. Then my ears pop as the pressure in the room changes and she materializes again out of thin air, plopping down onto the stool while her previous body topples to the floor with a meaty thump, smoking from the slag of its brains.

“Shot taken, haha!” Tanis giggles. “Let’s keep going.”

I’m stunned by the instantaneous violence. “That’s enough,” I say, shaking my head.

“Running out of secrets already? But I’m just getting started.”

That freakishly childlike smile returns, and I’m starting to realize just what kind of devil I challenged to a game of verbal chicken. I try to forget the image of her head exploding and say, “...why does Fang continue to let you exist?”

Tanis hops off the stool and walks right over her dead body to one side of the room, where a small growth pod for gestating unborn children lies dormant between bas reliefs of the Shifter and Ki Fighter classes.

“Because he has no choice,” she coos, taking the empty pod in her arms like a baby. A warped reflection of her unveiled face and those two orange eyes fills the glass. One of her padded fingers slides down the pod while she stomps back to the stool, squelching through a puddle of her own brain matter before retaking her seat with an airheaded spin. “This Section is but one of the syndicate’s fingers, and in it, we are predictable. We know the rules and play by them. That makes your leader believe he can control us. That it is better for us to prey on the undercity than someone who he cannot.”

Her head jerks up. “Shimano Yor and his seven sycophants do not play by the rules. How desperate are you to stop them?”

I blink twice, surprised at the question. “…Very,” I admit, thinking through each word before I release it to the Executor’s rapidly-devolving mannerisms. “They’re nearing completion of a weapon capable of defeating the Champion. It’s a… program of some kind that they’ve been feeding pro fighters to. They can’t be allowed to finish it.” I take in a cautious breath, eminently aware of the raised hairs on the back of my neck and the cold sweat trickling down my spine. “They had a deal with you several weeks ago. Delivery of some liquid, organic substance. Something you made.”

“For Shimano Vex and his so-called Project Delphina. It was a byproduct of an unrelated venture.” Tanis’ fingers come to a rest atop the growth capsule. “Its sale was a bargain made in secret that came with strings I did not know existed, and now desire to sever. I did not concern myself with what it would be used for-”

“-Liar.”

“You possess a modicum of precocity that is too surprising for your own good,” the Executor growls.

I shrug. “Can’t help it. I’m a people person.”

Another sneer. “Dynasty has interests that would be better served by not having our involvement with Shimano Heavy Industries made public.” She twitches. “I can give you what you need to destroy their infantile ‘weapon’, that DeLeon ex machina that they think capable of pilfering decades of combat experience from human meatbags and compressing them into one perfect vessel.”

“You mean, you can give me what I need to be your weapon.”

“The difference is irrelevant, clever lemming. You desire a gluttonous corporation struck down and a threat to your fighting society eradicated, with a little glory and fun on the side. That future is amenable to both the syndicate and myself. But you will not reach it without assistance.” Tanis spreads her hands plaintively, reaching up to remove the band tying her hair-tendrils in place. Wormlike lengths of shock-white skin spill down freely, shadowing those centuries-old eyes behind jagged bangs. Her lips reappear just to quirk in an upwards curve. A seizure or just amusement, I can’t tell.

“Vex Shimano will soon be transferring your precious Bishop to a corporation blacksite outside the capital, mhm? There, Vex’s computational matrices will have all the time they need to dissect that poor fighter’s brain and force-feed its experience into a puppet who calls itself Akis Prazen. I can tell you exactly how and where the transfer will occur. And more than that, I can tell you something quite valuable about Prazen himself.” She quirks a pinky finger in the air and swishes it in a small circle. “But only if you promise.”

So this is how it happens.

This is how Fang lets them go.

All it takes is one slip. One bargain to put our interests on the same side. One moment of seeing them as anything other than the enemy. And it will lead to a lifetime of slips and bargains. It’s all too easy to hate Fang for it from the outside. Yet Shimano Heavy is not his only enemy, nor can it be his most dangerous. Adding Dynasty to the list would be a fool’s errand. As perverse as it is to think, the syndicate provides a stability that the undercity needs to function. They keep the Vents in line.

It’s so simple, really. A logical compromise anyone could justify.

I’m sure Fang thinks the syndicate a necessary evil. A lesser among many. But what kind of world is ours that we should be choosing between evils at all? Logical compromises can go to hell. The Vents became like this because of them. Not listening to that logic is the only thing that can change it for good.

But tonight, I know that despite everything in my heart that tells me not to, I must listen.

A heavy sigh steals the life from my heart. “What’s it going to cost me?”

No amount of restraint would hide the Cheshire grin that answers my question. Gingerly, Tanis plucks up a lone strand of crimson hair that fell across her desk, holding it up to a nearby lamp.

“Nothing in this chapter of your life, little hero. But another story, another book? Who knows. Who knows.”