I can already feel the hangover starting as I ride the armored lift down. Shouldn’t have let Mori talk me into that last shot. My liver is as resilient as a titanium slab, but there are few things that can stand against Mori’s encouragement and the sheer volume of alcohol a place like Cayman’s can pour out for someone of my reputation.

My fingers curl and uncurl with sluggish smoothness while I lean against the armored, boxy walls of the prison elevator. An equally drunk, blue-haired elemental taps his feet quietly across from me, checking something on a projection cascading from his JOY. Two guards in formfitting skinsuits watch the numbered levels of the prison bleed past with agonizing monotony. This lift is slow for a reason. Can’t even see the layers we descend through. The capital’s darkest and only prison has an official designation of numbers and letters to disguise it amongst the civic records of the overcity, but to those unlucky few who have reason to know of its existence, it’s a metal purgatory simply called Zone A.

Mellow lights glow beneath my feet; none overhead. Illumination is sparse. Windows nonexistent. Each layer that passes on the holopad belongs to a cell for a single prisoner. Most are empty. From what Jolie tells me, Zone A’s population rarely reaches the double digits. Those condemned here are condemned for life. They’re the worst of the worst. The despicable, the irredeemable, the murderous and inhuman. Stripped of their connection to their JOYs, sentenced to solitary eternity in the dark, their only hope of release is the pardon of the reigning Champion. Most who end up here choose faster methods of escape. I’d pity anyone else. But even my pity runs short for people like these.

The two guards wear the colors of Champion Fang’s personal house; jade green and a rocky red-brown. A third joins them when the lift stops to pick up reinforcements on the level twenty-five. A fourth follows on level forty. Security tightens the deeper we go. The lift’s pace slows to a crawl. It’s the one way in and out of the prison. There’s no other escape than the vertical shaft we descend, which is filled with hundreds of remote antipersonnel weapons and purgeflames for use during a potential prison break. Though they might stand quietly in the late hour, the guards still keep to themselves, making the point of a wary triangle between me and the attendant. Trust between us only goes so far. I might be the Champion’s most favored understudy, but there’s a world of difference between my obedience to hierarchal tradition and the dogmatic loyalty of Fang’s personal praetorians, his Adepts. He earned these warriors’ undying dedication over decades of combat and rule. And even if they might not be able to stop me individually, there’s a reason they- and no other- were chosen to keep the prison sealed. They’re pack hunters. As dangerous as any major league fighter when their skills combine.

Hair raises along the back of my neck when we finally come to a stop on the fiftieth layer. I can feel the weight of the city above pressing down on my shoulders. My neck pops quietly as I tilt my head to the side. The lights seem even dimmer, the air heavier as I breathe it in. A clammy chill settles over my shoulders. Even the Adepts bristle as five layers of blast-shielded doors, enough to hold back a ki fighter of my caliber for several minutes, hiss open to reveal a vast metal cavern filled with utter darkness.

I nod my release to the guards, crossing the threshold in a single step. “I won’t be long.”

Grey-haired Nhora, one of the Champion’s longest-serving Adepts, dismisses the silent distrust of her juniors with a single raised hand. She sheathes her tower shield and bends in a respectful half-bow. “Shall I expunge the records of this visit?”

“You know the drill.”

The blast doors seal shut behind me with a gaseous hiss. Subtle lighttrails glow to life along the seams of the decking under my feet, spreading forward like liquid to circle the circumference of a glass-walled cylinder no larger than a fighting square. Venomous yellow color paints buzzing, sharp-edged shadows across the floor. And in that dismal light, humbled by torturously amplified gravity, the most dangerous creature in the Section sits coiled in cross-legged repose like a young serpent king.

I and the world know him as Akis Prazen. Traitor, seditionist, and terrifyingly skilled murderer. Only the legend who raised him, Champion Fang, ever knew Prazen as something else. Carra Kyriaku, a martial prodigy whose potential exceeded any person Fang had seen before.

Four years ago, Ajax and I put Carra in this prison for good. Only together were we able to stop him. Stripped of all the supernatural abilities a JOY can give, Carra still sits like the gravity Elemental watching his cell isn’t multiplying the local gravity to five times the norm. Like his internal organs aren’t groaning and straining simply to not be flattened into paste. He should look like he’s dying. Instead, it’s like I’m looking on the essence of entropy itself; liquid power finding the easiest and most graceful path to its rightful shape. A dormant weapon trapped in mortal flesh.

It takes what soberness I have left to remind myself that he’s the powerless one here. Hard to remember, seeing him in the flesh again. The circuitous scar ringing my left bicep was left by his talents. Back still turned, his head ratchets up to stare up into the darkness as his melodically spiteful voice rebounds from the cell’s glass walls.

“You can almost hear the cheering,” he sighs, dramatically. “All. The way. Down. Here.”

Grabbing the lone chair left out for me, I spin it around and take a disgruntled seat, resting my arms on its back. My head aches worse than it did on the surface. Narrowed, midnight-blue eyes dig into the space between Carra’s shoulder blades.

I say nothing yet. The scraping of metal legs announces my presence enough. And he’s not done talking yet.

“How quickly they forget what happened today,” he says. “Give them bread, give them clowns fighting on stages, and they forget so easily the reason you stood before them tonight.” He counts his words like bullet casings, each ringing as they echo. “Every, last, one of them.”

Only then does he stir. And slowly, ever so slowly, one of his draconic golden eyes fixes the full weight of its attention on me.

“Except you. And except me.”

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Carra defies the crippling gravity in the cell without visible effort. Even after years of imprisonment, he’s dangerously youthful. Barely younger than I am. Without the outer shell of his Mecha class, his true body is slight, yet strong. A knifefighter’s wiry frame. Naked in the pale light, his features are more beautiful than they are handsome. Shaggy black hair and molten, magmatic golden eyes that would melt hearts if they belonged to someone with a soul. His focus wanders over my face for only a moment before he turns away once more, never moving from his seated position. The rest of his cell is a flat metal plate devoid of any features, even a mat.

“I never took you for the gloating type, Mars. Five years, now?”

“And a mistake every time.” I wince at the roughness in my voice, running a hand through my hair.

“But you do it anyways. Some dogs never change.”

I snort quietly. “You’re one to talk.”

Carra shrugs with predatory ease. “I am what I am. Just like you. Just like Lionhart. Did it irk you, when no one came to his lantern-lighting today? When you alone left flowers on his grave?”

“I wasn’t alone.”

And he’s not entirely wrong, either. He’s too precocious. Reminding me again of how dangerous the intellect behind those golden eyes truly is.

“But there were less,” Carra sighs. “And there will always be less, year after year. Everyone forgets the weak.”

I don’t rise to the bait. Solitary confinement has done its work on him. The silent, peerless hunter Carra used to be has cracks, now. I don’t have to wait long for him to move on. Though I suspect half the reason he keeps talking is to hear something at all.

“I thought you’d be too busy celebrating to visit this year,” he eventually says. “The watchdogs were kind enough to inform me of your recent promotion. Not that I needed their help to hear the fireworks.” Chains clank as his pale fingers make a vague motion at the cavernous darkness above us. “You would know better than most how far sound can travel through metal.”

Long, crimson hair shifts over my shoulders as I shake my head. “All this taunting. What did Fang ever see in you but a monster?”

“More than he ever saw in you,” Carra replies. “You’d never understand what drives men like he and I. You think you’re different. Everyone does, as long as they keep believing the great lie you love to preach: that good men always triumph over evil ones, and the best, not the strongest, are meant to rule. But they still obey their traditions. They eat up the legends, mythos, warrior worship. They nod along when old men tell us power is the only thing that truly matters, but chide that we should be good, not great. And when the end result of those old mens’ tradition finally arrives? What do they see then?” His unblinking gaze finds mine in the glass reflection. “Themselves, unshackled. And suddenly they are afraid.”

I rise from my chair in silence. My gaze drifts to the deck. Toes rising and falling over the inlaid lights beneath my feet. Why come down here if not to hear him talk? It’s a terrible way to cap off a night that should have nothing but happy memories. But I can’t drag myself away just yet. There’s a morbid curiosity that keeps me here, listening despite all the instincts telling me to leave and forget. The same curiosity that’s kept me coming back year after year.

“The old man and his world made us both,” Carra says. “Yet he calls me a mistake- a monster- because I strive for the same things he does, but without limits, without subservience to the same tradition he has made himself a slave to.” A pause, then a dark chuckle. “There’s a time in every life when we humans think it good to see ourselves reflected in a child. Fang learned his lesson too late. Mirrors are dangerous, Showmaker. Not because they’re sharp, but because they show you things you never wanted to see.”

“You’re wrong,” I murmur. Memories of blonde hair, flashing blades, and wan smiles flit through my mind. “They show you the things you need to see.”

“Ajax? He was the worst offender among us. The cardinal sin of our world is to deny another the ability to fight or be fought. He beat me once. But he took his victory and robbed me of the chance to ever sharpen myself against him.” A feral shiver shudders down his shoulders. “That did anger me. It still does, from time to time. But I made my peace with it. One day, I will prove myself the strongest on this world. And-”

A loud tock echoes hollowly off the metal behind me, surprising Carra into silence. An even colder voice follows hot on its trail. “And by the time that day comes, Prazen, you’ll have rotted in this cell so long that not even your JOY will remember who you are.”

Carra’s eyebrows arch as he shifts to look at me. Or rather, the crimson-haired twin who somehow snuck up on us both in full heels. Off-yellow shadows claim Jolie’s torso as she emerges from the darkness behind me, highlighting the lines of her neck from beneath. Her nails dig hard into my shoulder in reprimand.

“Ah,” Carra says, narrowly suppressing the urge to roll his eyes. “The industrious sister, always just out of sight. Is it you I have to thank for the gravity torture? It’s done wonders for shaping my bone density in all the wrong ways.”

“I wish, asshole,” Jolie growls. Her head cocks to the side, stealing my attention. Eyes flash with late-night temper behind her glasses as her voice drops to a murmur only I can hear. “It’s time to go, Mars.”

I lightly brush her hand away. “I’ll be done in a minute.”

She cuts me off with a raised index finger and a dangerous tilt of her head. “You have better things to be doing. There’s nothing to be gained from talking to him. He’s…” Her voice pauses as she motions to the cell. “…He’s not like you or me. Or anyone, for that matter.”

“Is that coming from my sister, or my manager?”

“Both.”

She leaves without waiting for me to contest, clicking heels bidding me to follow. I linger for a moment longer, casting one last glance at the cell while the lights ebb and fade back towards the lift. Carra’s already returned to his meditative position. Head bowed, dark hair veiling his eyes behind long bangs. Dormant once more. Silence falls over the room. If he feels me leave, he makes no sign of it. But the instinctive itch of near danger doesn’t fade from my spine until I’m back in the lift with the doors fully sealed, rising back to the overcity.

I nudge Jolie with my elbow and lower my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “How did you sneak away from the party? I told them to watch you.”

A smug, knowing grin tugs at her lips while she taps on her holopad. “Mori and Fang got into an arm wrestling contest. The entire capital is in an uproar.”

My head rocks slowly from side to side.

“…Is she winning?”

“Stalemate.”