Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

Anton spends his last half hour of the countdown getting drunk.

It doesn’t matter when it comes to his ability to play in the games. As soon as he leaves this body, he’ll leave this pleasant haze too, and the original occupant will awaken to deal with the aftereffects.

Just as he is taking in the last of his glass, he feels fingers glide along his shoulder.

Anton freezes. He turns around in the darkness of the bar, squinting into the smudges of color and grayscale blurs.

“Buy me a drink?” the woman asks. She has a red mask strapped over her face, but that’s more fabric than she’s wearing anywhere else.

“Maybe another time.” Anton sets down his glass, then points to the corner of the bar where a raucous group has been increasing in volume. “I think they might be interested.”

Graciously, the woman inclines her head and backs away. The other prostitutes by the door watch the exchange and mark Anton off as a potential customer. He has stayed long enough, gotten his degeneracy out of his system. For the next few weeks or months or however long the games go on, he’ll have to be on guard at every moment. He’s already pulling his jacket tight and undoing his wristband, eyes scouring the bodies he passes on his way out.

A drink spills on the floor in front of him. Anton skirts around the puddle smoothly, grimacing at the teetering man who spilled it. His moral compass is on the more delicate side compared to others with similar abilities in the twin cities, but that doesn’t stop him from jumping around frivolously. In Talin, people are not attached to their bodies. Or rather, bodies are merely another asset to take ownership of—to rob, to borrow, to care for, like apartments and clothes.

Anton rams into one of the prostitutes at the door, pretending to stumble. As soon as the prostitute holds his arms out in aid, Anton pushes his wristband into his waiting hands, then jumps. Light flashes through the bar, drawing a few nearby cries, but Anton is already leaving through the front, closing his new fingers around his wristband and wiping a slight sheen off his forehead. When he steps into the night, he looks like any other man strolling the city before the games begin.

The palace has always declared jumping illegal. But having the gene is like being given a sense of taste: people couldn’t be expected not to seek good food. Those who are caught jumping are fined and imprisoned, but that doesn’t stop the thousands who do it every year. Those who commit crimes in other bodies—or claim that they had been taken over before a crime—end up in legal spirals that go on for so long the jury eventually gives up trying to pinpoint the true culprit and shoves every slightly guilty party into a cell for a year or two to answer for the technicality.

San-Er is defined by its mess, by its confusions and its blur of people meshing and tangling with one another. A birth body is not one’s own. Bodies can be shed, removed from the self. Bodies belong to everyone but the one who was birthed into it, though if you’re powerful, you might have a greater say on how long you can hold on to it.

Anton hasn’t had contact with his birth body since his exile, but it matters little to him. Every miserable event, every bit of trauma that San-Er gifts him, comes through his memory, stays with him because of his memory. What good is attachment to one body?

As the alleyway narrows, Anton takes the next turn onto a wider route, heading in the direction of the coliseum. His head is clear now, thoughts flying at a thousand miles per hour. There’s a pulsation underneath his feet, the thump-thump-thump of San’s heartbeat thrumming just under the narrow, crumbling sidewalks and the muddy unpaved alleys. At the coliseum, the players will show up in various appearances because they know the body they enter with won’t last long if they want to play to their best advantage. When he bites down on the inside of his cheeks, he doesn’t realize how sharp his teeth are, and it almost cuts through before he tastes the first hint of blood and eases his jaw. He checks his wristband. The countdown is approaching five minutes.

The city’s pulsating has grown louder. Accompanying the stomps of its spectators, who trickle through its sinuous routes and flood into its central blot, to the coliseum, standing tall beside the palace. Though there are no boundaries or ropes for spectators around the sides, they mingle a good distance away from the center, making it immediately clear who is a player and who is not.

Better for the audience to keep their distance than get accidentally impaled. This way, they can also pretend that everything is just a show, forgetting that the players entering the coliseum are readying to tear each other apart.

Anton’s gaze shifts up once he makes his way to the center, observing one of the palace balconies at the south of the coliseum. The throne room. Prince August is up there somewhere, his eye on the games. Anton can feel it. It’s hard to say whether his former best friend has discerned his participation, but once the players are drawn, there is no taking it back. He wouldn’t put it past August to try nonetheless. In those years they had together in the palace, there was nothing Prince August was unwilling to do, so long as it would achieve his goals. He was at once Anton’s best friend and biggest fear, the one he trusted most and could never let his guard down around. When he spent time with August, he never knew if he would get the sensible student who wanted some help with his history homework or the cold, calculating boy who once poured acid on Anton’s hand because they needed to be near the infirmary while a councilmember was sick too.

“What’s wrong with you?” Anton remembers hissing. His birth body would bear the scar for months afterward. “Why would you do that to me?”

“It’s for a greater purpose,” August replied plainly, with no room for argument. “I have to get into King Kasa’s good graces. Or we can forget about our plan to leave.”

“Hey! That’s my spot!”

At the angry shout, Anton flinches back into the present, his unfamiliar body rippling with tension. He turns, then releases a quick breath, finding that the voice was directed not at him, but at another player standing in the distance. Sound carries well in the coliseum, placing the argument closer than it was. One of the arguing players shoves the other, and though they are far enough that Anton cannot make out their features under the coliseum’s golden lights, their yelling echoes cleanly.

“Do you own the land now? Go stand elsewhere.”

“I—”

The player raises his arm. The spectators near the entrance freeze, preparing to witness a premature fight, but then three other players nearby shout in warning, and the two separate from one another with vicious glares, finding their own spots in the arena to stand. When the Daqun starts, there is nothing that says the players need to hurt each other. But it’s the opening event, the first moment when the killing can begin, and if there can be only one victor, who would lose the opportunity to take out their competitors at the earliest possible convenience?

Anton looks down. His wristband starts to flash the seconds of the final minute. He expected to feel more: to be nervous, delirious, frantic. Instead, a deadly calm settles over him, floods his fingertips and turns his lips cold. The purpose of the Daqun is to distribute chips for their wristbands, assigning a number to each of the eighty-eight. It’s the easiest way to log who is killing who, to report on players in the reels without having to remember names and identities and histories. Number Fourteen leads the charts today with expert axe-throwing, the reels might croon, or Number Thirty-Two is especially one to watch with their performance in the bloodbath . The surveillance cameras see everything, and even if the footage quality is piss-poor, the tapes are available upon request for the television networks, so long as Leida Miliu has cleared them in the palace security room first. Every channel scrambles to air their report, working their producers to the bone while splicing together a unique tale out of the extensive raw footage they get from the palace every night. It’s an annual show that the residents of San-Er will always watch, a show that the players will make grand by ensuring their kills are in view of a camera.

We are wretched, Anton thinks. But there is nothing to be done.

Another argument starts up to his left. This time, when Anton turns toward the noise, he finds too many standing in the general direction to even decipher where the voices are coming from, save that it’s wafting into the darkness. He starts to count. Runs a quick perusal of the groups near and far. When there are three seconds left on his wristband, there’s not enough time to do another count, but he doesn’t think he was mistaken either.

Eighty-seven players , including himself.

Who would be stupid enough to skip out on the first event? Failing to secure a chip means immediate disqualification.

His wristband trembles. From the palace, the guards make their appearance on the throne room balcony. In unison, they toss down the bags in their arms, letting the eighty-eight identically colored beige sacks drop like deadweights on the coliseum ground.

And everything around him turns to mayhem.

The players rush for the bags. Reckless and uncaring and coming from every which direction, filling the spaces they can and shoving where they cannot. The only point of stillness is Anton.

He doesn’t move. He watches.

One player is far larger than the rest, lumbering toward the biggest bag of the bunch and holding it to his chest. He has no difficulty bowling others out of his way; he takes a blade slash along the side of his arm and merely keeps going, running for one of the exits.

Anton rips his wristband off. Halfheartedly, they tell players not to invade each other. They’ve made it legal for the games—otherwise the players would do it anyway, and then the palace would get stuck either labeling every player a criminal or looking the other way for the sake of the people’s entertainment. But still, they have to do their diligence to establish a standard for the viewers. They warn that jumping is dangerous, that players should avoid it for their own health, because the palace cares so deeply for their health. They warn that the yaisu sickness can happen to anyone: the result of exiting and entering the same body one too many times in rapid succession. If a player is weak and gets flung back into their own body after repeated failed invasions, it’s a surefire way to burn up, their body taking sick and locking their qi in for certain death. The palace gets even more displeased if the nobility are invaded by the players. Prostitutes and gamblers can be thrown into the fray if their bodies are the ones doubled. If it is one of their own, however, the council gets involved, and the headache is so colossal that most players are wary about who they jump into for the sake of their own sanity.

Anton throws his wristband right into the player’s path. He slams into the new body so hard and so fast that he’s almost certain he has gone beyond notice, only then the outcries of protest start around him, and he figures his light flashed after all. A shame. Perhaps he should be grateful he didn’t bounce out from the jump, which the palace warns is the norm, which was what almost killed Otta and left her comatose in the hospital. But he already knew he was stronger than everyone else in this arena, in these damned twin cities.

“Better luck next time,” he shouts over his shoulder, scooping up the wristband in his path. He runs, wasting no time fighting or watching players tear into one another. When the spectators outside the arena dart back to avoid his path, Anton cuts a fast line through, hurrying into the nearest street, then taking another sharp turn.

He finds himself in a narrow alley lined with hair salons. The people here do not startle at his sudden appearance. After hours, they are either sweeping their floors or planted on tiny plastic chairs around a low table, blowing on their tea and watching their television screens in the corner. Any moment now, the live reports of the games will start, the news stations running whatever early surveillance footage they can get their hands on.

“Hey, catch.”

The shopkeeper turns at Anton’s call, frowning in puzzlement. On instinct he holds his arms out and catches the items that Anton tosses over. The young man’s purple eyes widen, realizing what he is holding. By then, Anton is already in, blinking fast to focus the new body’s poor vision, ducking quickly to escape the other player once he returns to consciousness.

Anton tears open the bag. His heart pounds hard, fingers rummaging through the coins in search of one stray chip. On the other side of the counter, the player starts to yell. Briefly, Anton pokes his head over the counter in concern, but it doesn’t seem like the player is looking his way.

“Which one of you did it? Which one of you has the nerve?”

The beefy player kicks his foot at the ground, drawing a shriek from an elderly lady nearby and then a click of her tongue in reproach. With no memory of what his body was doing in the time he was occupied, he cannot gauge where the intruder’s flash of light went unless someone else points it out. No one does. The other shopkeepers stare and stay quiet, knowing the games started with the stroke of midnight. Anton remains hidden behind the counter, his hand still prodding through the bag. It’s too late for the man to go back for a chip now. Any remaining bags will have been taken by those who stayed and fought. Even if they don’t need more than one chip, they want the coins each bag comes with. This player has been eliminated. He should be happy; he could never have been the victor anyway, and so he has been spared his life.

By the roar he makes before storming off, clearly he does not agree.

Anton finally finds the chip and breathes out a sigh of relief. The alley has gone back to its low conversation. When he brings the chip out, its metallic lines catch the light above him, looking out of place alongside the rough coins and the sack’s fraying burlap. He turns the wristband this way and that before realizing the slot runs vertical down the side. He presses the chip in.

The screen flashes white, before 86 appears in its place.

“All right,” Anton mutters aloud. He gathers up the rest of the bag. “Let’s play.”

The back door is stuck, sealed in by the mold and grit that has built up at the corners.

Calla plants a boot on the doorframe, then grips the knob tightly with both her hands. Her wristband passed the midnight countdown seconds ago. The other players will have started dispersing across San-Er. She tugs harder.

When the door finally opens, the motion is so vigorous that she stumbles a few steps, her coat rustling as she hits the wall.

“What’s this, then?” An old man turns over his shoulder to examine who just broke his back door, a cleaning rag in one hand and a pipe in the other. “Am I being robbed?”

“No, you’re being monopolized,” Calla says breathlessly, flashing a smile and hurrying in. She tugs the cleaning rag away from the shopkeeper and slides a large monetary note into his palm instead. “Take this. I only ask that you close shop for five minutes.”

Weapons are heavily regulated in San-Er. Which means there are only three shops in the twin cities selling them, intended exclusively for the palace guards—except in the twenty-four hours after the Daqun, when the shops will cater to the eighty-eight players of the games too, if they can show their wristband to make a single purchase. While the Daqun might be the first bloodbath, the three weapon shops across the cities will always be the next fight. Still, it’s common knowledge that these shops are often in collaboration with the Crescent Societies, distributing items on the black market when profits are low. If players really lose their one weapon midway through the games and reappear with another, the newscasters will abstain from commenting on the switch for the sake of palace decorum.

The old man holds her legal tender up to the light and grunts, then pulls the security gate down over the front of his shop. Other players will soon be coming from the front of the building, weaving in and out of the numerous hallways and corridors.

“Quick, quick,” Calla says, slapping her hand on the tabletop.

The shopkeeper narrows his faded-gray eyes, adjusting the cap on his head. “What’s your number?”

“Fifty-Seven.”

“Wristband?”

Calla shows him her wrist. The shopkeeper frowns.

“Hmm…”

“ Hmm ?” she mimics, an octave higher. “Come on !”

The shopkeeper finally reaches into the drawers around the table. He continues moving at leisurely speed as he brings out the rare stock, one after the other. The games do not suit a mere dagger or a standard sword. They require a flourish, a weapon that others will not know how to combat when taken by surprise.

“All my products guarantee good speed, deep cuts,” he says. “What sounds good to you? A Yanyue dao?” He brings out a curved blade mounted on a wooden pole, with a red sash flowing off its end. “We’ve got a replica of the mythical”—he grunts, bringing out a heavy matching sword and saber—“Yitian jian and Tulong dao. If you can handle wielding them both at once, that is, because I won’t have them parted. Or even…”

The table rattles as a giant mallet thumps beside the blades, its handle decorated with gold. Too lavish. Too gaudy.

Calla spares a glance at the digital clock on the shelves.

“How about a thin sword?”

“Thin?” The shopkeeper frowns, looking almost offended. “You want something thin?”

“Give me the skinniest, sharpest thing you have.”

He mumbles something beneath his breath, hunching over carefully to look in a different drawer. After a few seconds, the shopkeeper brings out another sword, this one so narrow that it almost appears circular. When he turns it, letting the metal catch the light, Calla sees there is some flatness to the weapon after all—no more than an inch—tapering to create two bladed edges and allow for slashing.

Perfect. Calla holds out her hand, accepting it without further question.

“Are you sure? It’s not very—”

The security gate shudders. In that single heartbeat, Calla’s gaze whips over, and her arm strikes out of its own accord, drawing the sword from the shopkeeper’s grip. The gate whips up; a figure lunges in. Before the player has scarcely taken three steps into the shop, Calla plunges forward and has her blade deep in his gut. She twists. Pulls it sideways until the sword exits.

The player drops. His wristband smacks against the linoleum ground with a discordant sound, followed by his body.

And Calla stumbles, losing her balance.

For the good of the kingdom. For the good of the kingdom.

She recovers quickly, her hand bracing against the wall before she can fall into the bloody puddle. The player stares up at her, eyes pale yellow and dull. If he had escaped fast enough, the body would merely be abandoned. It would sit empty, a bloodless vessel with a cut down its middle, ready to be reused and occupied by another once the cut slowly stitched itself together. Empty vessels know how to fix themselves, just as a plant can regrow its bud. But if the qi inside dies first, the body follows, rapidly gaining the odor of rot, skin sagging right off the bone.

The shopkeeper sighs. “This is not the first year the fight has been brought inside, but I do wish you would be more careful with the splatter.”

Calla glances at her sword. The blood has dripped off, leaving the barest red stain upon the blade. She forces back the tightness in her throat, takes a deep breath until she has expelled the weight on her chest. The shopkeeper is waiting for her to respond, wearing the plainest expression on his face, and she clings onto the sight to convince herself that this is fair, that she’s only doing what she is meant to do.

“Better hurry, then,” the shopkeeper says, shooing her. “Out the back, go on.”

Calla has never claimed to be good. She has never wanted to be good. But she seeks it in every corner of the twin cities: a sign that goodness is something Talin is capable of. Every day, she wakes up and she begs for what she has done to mean something, for the kingdom to tell her she is right to believe it could be honorable, that it’s befitting to spill blood until there is nothing left of her, until all the pieces are gone, until she cannot feel this twinge of doubt each time her blade slips in and out. There is peace at the end of this. There must be.

Calla tightens her grip on her sword, takes its sheath, and whirls out the shop’s back door. Each second in the open is a second exposed. Especially now, when the players are all congregating so close…

She pauses at the end of the alley, listening hard. The crackle of an electric wire. The whirring of an enormous factory exhaust fan. Someone is near, watching. The sleeves of Calla’s red coat cut off shortly above her wrist; she doesn’t bother hiding her wristband. If she is combatted, she’ll fight as a player should.

The rustle finally comes again—from above. Calla darts back, grimacing when her boots splash into a dirty puddle, but she has narrowly avoided another player’s sword. The woman whirls around, her face caught in a snarl, her hair scrunched in two symmetrical buns at the top of her head. Blue-white light darts along her blade, as if a live current of electricity is running through the metal. On the ground now, she gears up for another slash, her knees bent and braced.

Calla was trained like that too, to stand so that no one could tip her off-balance. To imagine herself as heavy as a mountain. For her first lesson, she was taught that she wasn’t allowed to flinch, and they couldn’t move on until she learned how to plant her feet down and hold her ground no matter how hard she was hit.

Don’t you want to be strong? they had asked. Don’t you want to be infallible?

Yes, Calla had answered. Twelve years old and honed to be a weapon. Fourteen years old and molded into an unquestioning arm of the throne.

Good. In her memory, every face in the training room blurs together—former generals and retired soldiers who held enough favor in the Palace of Heavens to be teaching the young princess. They didn’t care to go easy on her. They all said the same things. Take the cuts. Take the burns. You will heal, and you will be braver.

Braver? I want to be stronger.

Strength is a conscious effort. First, you will be braver, and then you will be stronger.

They trained her for war. And she rose up to wage it on them.

The other player lunges. Calla’s sword arm lifts without thought. Instinct determines how she holds herself, blocking the strikes and deflecting them away.

“Coward,” the woman hisses. “Are this year’s games made of the weakest that San-Er has to offer?”

“I hope you’re not talking about me right now.” Calla throws a glance over her shoulder. It would be a faster course of action to retreat. She only needs to find an opening…

The woman’s next strike comes viciously, and Calla jolts, her lips thinning. There is hardly reason to be this intense so early in the games. To expend all this energy on the first fights.

“Disgusting,” the woman sneers. “All of you putting yourself into the games when you do not care to play. Taking up the space and keeping us from our—”

Calla spins fast and cuts her sword across the woman’s stomach. There comes a pause, a moment when the other player gasps and searches around, looking for a civilian body to jump into.

There is no one. It’s always this moment when viewers find the most entertainment during the games. That gasp of shock, an overly assured player being proved wrong. No player would register unless they thought they had some chance of winning, and no player would think they had a chance of winning unless they were good at jumping. Being skilled at jumping creates a certain type of person that San-Er knows well: someone who cuts corners, someone who deserves to be taken down a notch. And in the games, it happens over and over again. The viewers lean close to their screens; their hearts leap to their throats.

“Disgusting,” the woman says again, a whisper this time, and Calla grits her teeth. One more strike—it’s so easy. A line of red appears across the woman’s throat, and when Calla lowers her sword, the woman falls too, dead on the wet ground.

The alley is humming. The lightbulbs mounted to the walls flicker on and off, attracting small flying bugs that gather around the noise. Calla uses her boot to nudge the dead body, rolling its wrist over. 66 flashes on the screen, one more number to add to the first day’s casualty count playing later tonight.

One of the alley bulbs shorts out. Calla peers into the water puddles and catches her own distorted reflection right then, hazed in red by the blood seeping from the woman’s wounds. For a second, she wonders if there is another opponent looming over her, and she startles, whirling around.

Nothing. Just a camera installed on the wall. Just Calla—long hair tangled around her neck, face and clothes splattered with blood, her surroundings contorting around her as the surface of the puddle catches irregular light.

She doesn’t look like herself. She’s never really looked like herself.

Calla Tuoleimi, princess of Er. She could do nothing on a throne, but she can do everything with a sword in her hand.