Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20

August gives her ten days. Though Calla was unsure whether he would help, he shuts down her wristband—or at least puts it into stasis mode so that she is kept in the games without pings every few hours, sent on a chase across San-Er like the other players. The reels have noted her absence. The newscasters have remarked on Fifty-Seven’s idle number, unmoving while the rest of the players catch up and overtake her, with Eighty-Six now in the lead, running his own battles across the city, always in direct line of the surveillance cameras. They gather that she must be hiding out of view. If someone knew their way around San-Er well enough, the newscasters muse, perhaps they could stay free of the pings, keeping away from the other players. They hypothesize. A sick mother. A mental break. A fight with Eighty-Six—who’s swinging harder and faster day by day, which doesn’t help dispel the rumors that the two had a lovers’ spat. It doesn’t matter. So long as Calla’s wristband is still active, there’s no reason to eliminate her from the games.

They just can’t comprehend why she would hide.

She stays in Chami and Yilas’s living quarters above the diner, sheets drawn up to her neck and sweating out her fever. The clacking of plates, the snippets of elderly gossip, the hiss of cigarette butts stubbed out in the teacups—they all drift up, harmonizing with her delirious dreams. By the fourth day, her fever has broken, and she can move without pulling at her wound. By the sixth day, it’s scabbed over, no more blood seeping down her side. Her qi is strong—it helps her heal more quickly than the ordinary civilian. Still, she stays hidden under the blankets, legs pulled up to her chest and her chin pressed to her knees. Yilas comes up every few hours to talk, and though Calla is too exhausted to reply, she knows that Calla is listening. She talks about the games, about how they’re progressing. She talks about what she was looking at just before she was kidnapped in the Hollow Temple, how she had stumbled onto screen printouts that indicated someone in the Crescent Societies was tracking the locations of the players. Yilas says that Matiyu has since left the Hollow Temple. It’s certain that there’s something peculiar going on there, and he’s smart enough not to mess around with that, no matter how much money he earned working for them.

On the eighth night, after Chami and Yilas have already retired into their bedroom, the reels are playing on the television box in the kitchen. Calla wanders over, a blanket pulled around her head and a cup of tea in her hands that she’s been nursing for so long it’s gone cold. When Yilas isn’t giving a straightforward report into Calla’s ear, Chami tries to care for Calla like the attendant she used to be. For as long as Calla is willing to sit still, Chami brushes her stick-straight hair—falling back to their old routines in the palace—but Calla usually shakes her hair loose and messy again in minutes, waving Chami off to go tend to the diner. Chami brings up plates decorated with food and piping-hot teacups perfect for drinking too, except each time, Calla doesn’t pick them up until hours have passed. She needs to make her food and drink more suited for the body she’s putting them into: icy and miserable.

The reels are moving through the day’s footage. Her feet bare and the night dark around her, Calla walks closer and closer until she is directly in front of the clunky box. She kneels before the counter. Her nose is a hairsbreadth away from the thick screen. The television is muted, but she can hear every image, pair up the clang of metal and the high-pitched shouts outside the window with the screen as it flashes and glows, white and blue light casting shadows inside the silent apartment, white and blue light caressing down her face.

Her hand lifts for the screen. Before she can touch it, the reels change to show an alley fight between two players, and her fingers move to her chest instead, circling around the wound, now freed of bandages and allowed to air past her thin cotton shirt.

“Anton,” she whispers, recognizing his movements. His knife slashes a straight line down, throat to stomach. It’s so quick that the other player doesn’t seem to feel a thing before falling in pieces to the ground.

It’s possible that she is still delirious from the remnants of her fever. That her brain is rotting from the inside out as a result of this idle behavior, waiting for her body to stitch back into commission. While her head burned and her heart bled, she could think of nothing save the pain. Somehow, it was worst when the injury started to get better, because then her mind could wander, and wander it did, to that basement in the temple, to the knife in her chest, to Pampi standing over her. That shouldn’t have happened. No one should ever stand over her. What lesson slipped from the palace? What practice did she forget in those years hiding out? For the first time since she became Calla Tuoleimi, she felt powerless, and that isn’t allowed.

The reels change to a display screen of the kill numbers. Nine players remain in the games. Calla’s numbers have sunk down to be ranked fourth. It doesn’t matter, she supposes. First or fourth, it is still the final survivor who is crowned victor, who gets to shake hands with the king. The numbers are a different part of the games, mere entertainment for the masses who tune in every year and watch the blood run.

Forget the renown and the rankings. She’s playing to win. What matters except making sure every person in her way dies?

Her fists curl; her lungs grow tight. Anton comes back on-screen, and this time he looks directly at the surveillance camera, tugging his mask off and flashing a grin. Now that they’re nearing the final players, San-Er will have started making bets. Life savings and personal assets drawn up at the casinos, because why should the victor of the games get all the fun when it comes to monetary reward? Those who can identify the final victor with as much confidence as they’re willing to wager shall have their reaping too. Anton will be leading the bets. He radiates with promise, with… power.

That is what this pull to Anton Makusa is, Calla tells herself. The kitchen rustles around her—water pipes settling and rats darting between the dry walls—and she can’t stop watching him on these reels, tearing through the darkness of San-Er with his coat billowing behind him. Sheer power. An uncompromising, unwavering power that she is drawn to, that she has been drawn to since the beginning, when he convinced her it would be beneficial to work together. And now she feels like there are thorns growing under her skin because she’s losing grasp on her own power while Anton whirls about like a rival prince, someone who could sweep into the throne room and do exactly what Calla has been preparing to do for five years.

I hate you , she thinks without hesitation. Seconds later, her mind catches up, stutters, provides: Wait, I don’t mean it , and then the hatred only grows. She hates him for his strength, which doesn’t make sense, not when she agreed to team up because she wanted to make use of it, but that’s the only way to justify the heat burning up her throat, to explain why watching him fight prickles at her neck and flushes her face.

“I hate you,” Calla says aloud.

These games allow only one victor. His death is fated by her hands, or her death in his. Calla doesn’t want to die. So this hatred will make her killing blow come easier.

“Calla?”

The kitchen floods with sudden light, and Calla flinches, throwing a hand over her eyes. It takes her a few seconds of rapid blinking, adjusting to the overhead bulbs, and only then does she lower her arm, rising from the cold kitchen tiles. Yilas is standing at the doorway, one hand on her hip and the other on the light switch.

“What are you doing, kneeling in the dark?”

“Praying,” Calla answers easily. Half a lie, half a jest. Half a truth, wholly out of character.

Yilas raises an eyebrow. Her eyes swivel toward what sits before Calla: the screen running into commercial. “To the television?”

Calla is looking at the television, but she does not see it. She stands in the kitchen, but she does not feel it, the ceramic floor under her bare feet and the grimy counter beneath her fingers fading into the abstract.

“To the television,” Calla confirms lightly, “and the gods inside.”