I find the mightiest of my people in an abandoned battlefield on the thirtieth floor of the tower he calls a throne. The night’s events, like most across the Section, were canceled in uneasy anticipation of trouble to come. Stands that could fit five thousand now contain only one.
He’s still sitting exactly where I imagine he was when the news broke. An unglamorous metal bench halfway up the stands, too far from the action, too near to the doors. The cheapest in the house. Dead center of the crowds. He always did enjoy playing a man of the people. It would have made any child’s night to have the Champion himself take an indecorous seat at their side.
It does not make my night to see him now.
Fang’s eyes are fixed on the empty stage to the exclusion of all else. The electric city stretching from wall to wall beyond rainy viewports hangs on a pindrop balance. He ignores its weight like he ignores the firing squad of media streams waiting in the atrium of his home. Perhaps he carries so many weights he doesn’t even recognize the feeling of another. I wouldn’t put it past him.
I stalk through the rows of stands with my hands in my pockets, gauging the old man again for myself. Deep creases in his face make the twenty years of his rule look like sixty. His limbs are gnarled, hair sharp, mustache bristling from frustrated breaths. That indomitable spirit within him still burns brighter than any I have ever felt before. He is the lone star of a gladiatorial solar system. His power is an ocean without end, stirring the air around him in an undertow tide. Yet for all that strength, he waits here in an empty floor of his empty throne, using it for nothing while his enemies set their stage.
He waits because patience is the path he has always followed to victory. But it’s not his victory that brought us together tonight. And my patience is running out.
“You have made another mess,” Fang mutters.
“That was the intention.”
He doesn’t even bother to look my way when I fill the seat beside him. We watch the empty stage together.
“What are you hoping to get out of this?” he asks. “Fame? Adoration?”
My elbows rest on my knees. “At this point? I’d be happy with a thank you.”
“You have the gall of a man with ten times your reputation, boy.”
“Lucky for me I have that reputation tonight.” I point a finger up at the distant roof. “The largest corporation in the city kidnapped your fighter to make a weapon to kill you. I stopped them while you were busy giving lectures on benchwarming techniques. I think a little gratitude is in order.”
“You think you’ve earned my gratitude?” Fang snorts and slaps my finger down like a gnat, so quickly I don’t even see him strike. “Your naïve act of heroism has multiplied my problems immensely. Bishop has returned, yes. But none of those who are responsible for his imprisonment remain. They scattered to the wind the moment you disrupted their plans.” Jade eyes hardened by the pressure of an entire world’s expectations finally turn their full attention onto me. “You have ensured that when next they gather, they will do it in a place they will never be found.”
“So what was I supposed to do? Just sit around and let them have their way?”
“Sit around and trust in your champion, boy!” he replies. “I have not held this throne for twenty years by being a dullard, Mars Mons. If you thought I could ever be defeated by a technological chimera and a line of code, you have much yet to learn about this world. You are still a pup in a land of lions. You do not even know how loud you bark. All your flash, all your flair, are the tantrums of an animal who does not stop to think more than one step at a time. Again and again I have told you to wait. But you adore the spotlight too much. And now your recklessness threatens more than just yourself.”
I fume in silence as I look away, unable to win that contest of gazes. Shame flashes through me. But it does not keep me from gritting my teeth.
“You say to wait,” I growl. “But waiting means compromising who we are. It means forgetting to do the right thing, no matter what. And you’ve grown far too comfortable with that.” My face darkens as my eyebrows knit together. “I know about the Vents. What you do to keep the peace there. It isn’t right.”
Fang’s anger leaves him in a long, infinitely patient sigh.
“Fate truly has a way of giving its gifts to those who stand the highest chance of misusing them,” he mutters. Bristling silver hair shakes once as he lets out a disenchanted noise. “In so many ways you remind me of the boy I used to be.”
“So why aren’t you more like him?”
“That boy’s ideals were incompatible with the realities of our world. He wished it was better than it truly was.” One finger taps a perfect beat against his armrest. “Then he understood the true nature of our societal pyramid. He understood the weight of the responsibility that comes with shepherding it. What it meant to sacrifice a piece of himself for the greater good. To think of others before himself. To be a father to many, not to one. Years passed. But by the time he realized how many of those pieces he had sacrificed on the way, it was too late. He was already a different man. Perhaps not a good one. But a capable one who still believed he could do good.”
Fang’s voice sinks to a drawl as he regards me once again.
“You are impetuous and willful and young. When I first saw you, I saw a potential that could replace myself in some faraway future. There are those who already believe in it. They see the same naïve goodness in you that I do. Not as a weakness, but as a strength. A rallying light in a world that often lacks such hope. Like your friends, people would follow that light to their own end. If you put out the call, how many of your peers would swell to your ranks against the Shimanos? All of them, I imagine. There would be a slaughter unlike any other to sate your need for good to prevail. The young and the proud against the old and the powerful.” He nods, more to himself than to me. “Yet all you are now is potential, and I have seen that same spark in Ajax as well. He has mastered resolve. You, spirit. But you know already. His time is near. Perhaps he could have taught you what it means to become the best. Now it seems that is something you will have to learn alone, or not at all.”
Stolen novel; please report.
I cross my arms, shifting in my seat to face him. “I hope you didn’t bring me here just to bore me with platitudes.”
His mustache flutters as he lets out a sideways breath. “For a far simpler reason, actually.”
“Then get on with it. I’ve got a date waiting back home.”
I crack a fractional grin when the champion snorts in his chair. He mutters something insulting about impatience and youth. It’s reassuring to see. Means that there’s plenty of bridges not yet burned between us. It takes a mental step back for me to realize he doesn’t want to have me at his throat. He is a teacher. A father of fifteen million children. And like any father, he wants to see me grow. But he’s also gardener at heart. Growth in his world is a tiny box and a careful hand. And I’ve never been one to draw inside the lines.
Fang tilts his head at the empty stage. “Do you know why I only ever took one student in my twenty years of reign?”
I shrug. “Most do it as a publicity stunt. I assumed it was because you had all the publicity you need.”
“If only it were so simple.” Lightning splinters through the thunderheads outside, silhouetting his bony frame while he watches the storm pound futilely at the windows. “My first and only apprentice was a young man not unlike yourself. I found him just a child, already so precocious in the ways of war. More capable than any fighter I have ever seen. Hungry for battle, and blessed with boundless aptitude for it. He was a child born to reincarnate the singular law of our land.”
“Only the strongest will rule,” I mutter.
“He became infatuated with his own destiny and devoured every challenge he could find. Unlike you, he did not do it because he craved simple admiration. Nor for some vapid thrill. He cared for nothing but the domination of others and the proof of himself over all. For so long I thought it a quirk of personality, one that made him a stoic reflection of myself and my values. I fed him challenge after challenge and encouraged him as a father should.” Fang’s eyes dim for a moment, lost in memory. “I treasured him. I gave him everything I could. And like any father, I saw too late the insatiable monster I was raising. I did not realize his hunger had long since outpaced his boredom until he committed the cardinal sin. That boy killed to prove he had no master; not even the law. Then he left me with this when I tried to stop him.”
Fang runs a hand around a circular scar that rings the front of his throat like an unfinished noose. “Years ago, I gave that young man my name for his own. Carra Kyriaku became Carra of House Fang. I banished him from the Section for his crimes at the age of fifteen. Now he has returned with a new name and allies finally capable of sating his unending hunger for more. He calls himself Akis Prazen. And as you have no doubt learned, his nature has not changed in the slightest…”
Fang’s cracked lips set in a hard line as his JOY buzzes in a nearby cupholder. He gives a grumble entirely fitting for his age and leans over to fetch it, uncoiling from his chair like an ancient cobra. Scars wrap his wrinkled hands like grip tape. Not for the first time I find myself admiring the man despite our differences. His elderly distaste for the sphere that changed our world makes itself known while he fumbles through the menus like he hasn’t been using them for every one of his five decades of life. I feel the brush of his kinetic sense wash over me like a mountain’s gentle shadow as his classes activate.
“Bah. Children these days. Always chasing adrenaline rushes, never shutting off their links. When you get to be my age, you learn to enjoy being tired.” He reads my soul without pause. “Life’s peaks are nothing without its valleys.”
“You’re barely not even fifty, old man.”
“With the body of an eighty year old. I have fought more battles than you have lived days, boy. Show some respect.”
I groan. “Save it for when we’re drinking.”
“Hmph. That you think you have a chance of that happening at all…” His voice lowers, mouth hiding behind his silver mustache. A darkness hollowing away the sparkle in his eyes as his focus wanders in a quick, distracted flicker. One I know intimately well.
He senses something.
As I begin to stretch my own kinetic sense to investigate, a soft rumbling echoes through the battlefield. The great doors behind the stands part down the center and creak ponderously inwards. Through the growing gap strides a single figure. Behind him, two lifeless bodies just finishing their fall to the floor.
Fang unravels from his chair in a heartbeat. I rise to match. My skin bristles as I recognize the features of the boy who comes to a stop atop the stands. The murderous disinterest he emanates. And in his hands, the waterlogged pages of a dogeared romance novel.
Jolie’s book slaps into the floor.
Akis Prazen places a boot firmly atop the book, staring down at me with dead gold eyes. Cold rage ignites within my heart. My hands tighten into brutal shape as I start to surge for the steps. The old man beats me to the punch, voice whipping out cold as a midwinter freeze.
“You go too far, Carra.”
“Ironic, coming from the only one here who hasn’t moved at all,” Prazen says. “Keep comfy in your seat, Pops. I’m not here for you. Just came to drop off a gift for the big hero.” His gaze bores into me like a flatline heartbeat. “Time for round three, Showmaker.”
Fang bars my way to the alley between the stands. “If you leave this tower…”
“I’m leaving.”
“He will kill you.”
“Then stop him yourself.”
“I have sacrificed much for peace, Mars Mons. I can sacrifice a little more.” Fang's hand rises, palm empty, each word rasping like rusty steel. “You believe I am wrong, yet you have thrust yourself unknowingly into a game that stretches far beyond this night, beyond him.” He nods up at Prazen. “An all-in now is what Shimano Vex desires. It is his only chance to escape the noose his failure is weaving. You are playing right into his hands.”
I shove past the old man and take the steps with barely restrained violence. “No one lays hands on my sister.”
Prazen waits. The champion’s voice echoes through the hollow chamber as I leave him to the empty stands and barren stage. “There is only one rule in our land, Mars, and it is not that good men will always win. It is that strength reigns over all.” His grey head shakes once, regretfully. “Sometimes the strongest are mountains, unbending to the provocations of fickle winds. Sometimes they are the avalanche. If you are right, you will choose which you are. If you are not, it will be chosen for you.”
“You are wrong,” I say without turning back. “The strongest are fires in the dark. And if they ever find a way to extinguish our light, it will only be because we taught them not to fear what makes the shadows.”
Prazen lifts his boot as I mount the steps. I scoop to gently collect Jolie’s book, wiping water from the cover. I wait for the old man to say one last platitude. And when he does not, whether because he has finally run out or because he knows I stand on the right side of wrong, I leave at the murderer’s side.