Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

After midnight, when the twin cities drop into darkness proper, San-Er’s facade glows with the light of its apartments. The wall at the north of San rises high, but not high enough to completely shield the buildings at the city’s edge, each window emitting light and puffing with its attached air conditioner unit, abuzz, too, with the sound of running stoves and television sets glitching in the corner.

Despite the jumble, no building in the capital climbs higher than fourteen floors. Any more, and these meandering structures might pitch sideways from their own weight and fall over.

Calla’s apartment is one of the few that sits relatively quiet. Already squashed and smothered below all the other floors, it is the final door at the end of a long, smoky hall filled with gambling parlors. The incessant clicking of mahjong tiles garners an echo different from other noises, creeping in under her door when she least expects it. Sometimes when she’s nodding off on the couch, she’ll wake with a start, convinced that the sound is someone coming to summon her for training, hard shoes gliding across the palace floor.

Her television is on mute. From the bedroom, Calla takes a drag on her cigarette, watching the smoke waft up and curl around the molding ceiling paint. Light streams in through her window, a kaleidoscope of neon that bleeds from different sources outside: red and gold through the brothel on the neighboring building’s third floor, deep blue through the cybercafe on the sixth floor, flashes of everything pulsating off the restaurants dotting the nearby vicinity. How strange it is that San-Er glows brighter at night than during the day. Daytime here is dreary darkness, the streets repellant against sunlight. Nothing but the barest gray gloom, illuminating very little on its own.

Calla lifts onto her elbow. Now laughter drifts through her closed window, assailing the inside of her bedroom. By some instinct, she peers through the glass right while a group of teenagers meander past, drunk and happy, talking over one another and paying no heed to their volume.

She settles back onto her sheets, smoothing down a wrinkle. Calla has forgotten what it’s like to laugh in a crowd, what it’s like to talk to people at all, save for Chami and Yilas. These five years have been spent in as much solitude as she can bear, keeping her head down and her mask on. She takes the barest necessities from her former attendants to keep herself alive, but can risk no other work, no other participation in the twin cities. After all, she has a task far above the usual day-to-day business of a regular civilian in San-Er.

Sometimes, though, she feels the weight of loneliness shift and settle inside her rib cage. Like cold tendrils curling softly around her insides. Not enough to hurt, not enough to draw protest from her. But enough to serve as an ever-constant reminder: Here I am, here I shall stay, you can never pull me away.

Calla clambers up from her bed, tapping ash off her cigarette and drawing a meow of protest from her cat for the disruption. When she walks into the small living room, Mao Mao leaps off the edge of the mattress and pads after her with a growl. She doesn’t bother with the overhead lights, so she navigates the living room by the glow of the television. Shadows draw long on every object nearby: the sword propped by the door, the oranges and bananas sitting upon the glass shelves built into a hollow in the wall. The moment Calla sits herself down in front of the bulky screen, the news program still on mute, Mao Mao curls around her ankles, preventing her from further movement.

Calla sighs, reaching down to scratch his furry head with her free hand. The longer the games go on, the less safe it’ll be to come home. She’s fine for the next few days while the players feel out a routine, but then the daily location pings will begin, and as they happen more and more often, it would be suicidal to be here when one goes off. Once another player knows where she lives, even if she escapes the first encounter, she can’t come back to get some rest without risking an ambush.

The clock turns to three in the morning. The reels don’t usually run through the night, but this is a special occasion. All the newscasters look enlivened as they switch cue cards, mouths moving much faster than their usual dull monotone. Calla leans forward again for the volume, turning it up just in time to hear “ and Fifty-Seven, our leading player thus far. ”

“I beg your pardon?” Calla says, exhaling smoke. She stops scratching, and Mao Mao butts his head into her palm to protest. His face and ears are a sensible dark gray while the rest of his fur is an off-white, always molting clumps around the apartment because he enjoys following her to be petted. She picked him off the streets as a kitten when she first went into hiding, a companion while she spent hours upon hours throwing knives at the wall, and years later, as a consequence, her cat has attachment issues.

“ Yes, indeed ,” the second newscaster says, as if he heard Calla’s exclamation. “With the opening event’s conclusion and the players dispersed throughout the cities, the palace has reported our first numbers. It is absolutely thrilling to see twenty-three total hits, with ten attributed to Fifty-Seven.”

Calla chokes on her next inhale, cigarette smoke rushing out from her nostrils.

“For fuck’s sake,” she coughs. “Good job, August.”

“It is absolutely thrilling to see twenty-three total hits, with ten attributed to Fifty-Seven.”

Though the night grows exceedingly late, there remains a flock of spectators outside a barbershop at the southern end of San, watching the outward-facing television screen. Anton no longer has access to the apartment with the fancy television—which, anyway, is shattered now, and would be even if he were still in that body—so he joins them, hovering at the periphery and smoothing his sleeve over his wristband.

The reels continue to play surveillance footage of the games. The palace guard tries its very best to regulate San-Er with these cameras, but they have one very fatal flaw: cameras can’t pick up the light of body-jumping. When the Crescent Societies are responsible for most of San-Er’s crime and their networks of people are the cities’ most persistent jumpers, it’s easy to understand why so many cases of trafficking and murder keep slipping under the palace’s radar.

Why the palace has never bothered to address this loophole is beyond Anton’s grasp. At the very least, the surveillance reels finally have their use during the games as a constant feed of the killing action. The television networks don’t need to put film crews on the ground when there are already cameras installed at every corner. Proper film crews might even cause the Palace of Union to bristle, if networks were to share footage of the games that hadn’t first crossed Leida’s inspection. The people aren’t ready for close-ups, in any case; they need those grainy high angles that render each player into a little avatar of themselves. That way, San-Er doesn’t have to see how far it has decayed. Slaughter as an accepted entertainment track. Slaughter as a shortcut to wealth.

Anton frowns, pushing closer to the barbershop screen. They’re replaying Fifty-Seven’s first kill inside the weapons shop. He dropped into the same one earlier, acquiring the crescent moon knives that now hide under his jacket. By the time he was there, the bloodstain he sees on screen was already long gone.

Fifty-Seven pulls her sword out. When she turns around, her long hair whips into her face, and though the footage is fuzzy, though the saturation is turned so low it is almost grayscale, her eyes are bright with their unidentifiable color.

The crowd around him starts murmuring about the player, stunned by how professional her strike looked, enthralled by how fast she was. As Anton stands there, however, staring at the screen even when the newsreel moves on, he realizes what it is that has caught his attention.

Number Fifty-Seven was not at the Daqun. He would remember someone like that. Even if she has swapped bodies since then, there was no one moving with her precision, because if there was, he would have marked her as a threat immediately.

“Interesting,” he mutters, stepping away from the crowd. He pulls his collar up, ruffling the short hair at the base of his neck. No one gives him a second glance as he merges back onto the streets. “Very interesting.”

San closes in around him. He picks his way through the wilting alleys, careful to watch his feet at the inclining steps on certain corners and paying even more attention at the declining ones in case he trips. If it weren’t so dark, he might take the rooftops instead, hopping from building to building above the city instead of below, but at this hour, there will be Crescent Society members peddling drugs and littering needles, and Anton isn’t eager to get into more fights than necessary, especially if they’re not game related.

He hasn’t been walking long when he comes across another gathering. Curiosity slows his stride. There’s a clump of people inside a small shop—one of those little corner businesses among hundreds that line the street-sides, operating in close proximity to one another. While the shops next to it have shuttered, this one has its overhead lights thrown on, and the owner stands right in the middle upon a table, raving to his captive audience.

Instinctively, Anton eyes a body in the crowd and prepares to jump again, just to get the itch out of his system. Then his gaze catches on the shop owner delivering his spiel, and though he hears none of what the middle-aged man is saying, he does see the flashing wristband.

A better idea occurs to him. He doesn’t mull on it a second time; once his mind is made, the course is set. Anton Makusa has always liked being the initial aggressor, and it has served him well for as long as he can remember… though, really, that isn’t saying much. Anton remembers very little of his childhood, nothing but shades and impressions when he tries to think back. Maybe it’s grief that has pushed it away. Maybe it’s trauma, his mind protecting him from his past because it would hurt more to access it. He doesn’t recall the palace before he was given a room alone. He doesn’t recall the first eight years of his life except in vague feelings: when his father sat on the council and his mother, the daughter of a former councilmember, strolled through the corridors of the Palace of Earth like she owned the whole kingdom.

The Makusas were high palace nobles. And one day, when his father took the family out on vacation to their house in Kelitu, the province he oversaw in rural Talin, a group of country civilians charged into the house armed to the teeth. That’s his earliest memory. It’s the only memory that ever plays with vivid color in his mind’s eye: his parents, diving in front of Anton and screaming for him to Get back! Get back! Go hide! and an intruder swinging steel and five-year-old Buira running and ten-month-old Hana upstairs crying as she woke up from the noise. That moment in time—that everlasting, terrifying moment—is the only reason he still remembers what his parents look like. When they were taking wound after wound, and all Anton could think was If I could jump into the bad man, I could stop him. I could stop anyone who ever wanted to do bad things. If only I could jump.

He knows now that it would have made no difference. There were too many of them. His parents might have tried, even if their skill was rusty given the palace’s intolerance for jumping, but they were more worried about pushing him out of the way, and then it was too late. Anton had been only eight years old. He could do nothing except hide behind the cupboard and watch his parents die, watch the attackers snatch Buira and storm the house for Hana. He didn’t know why they hadn’t come searching for him. They had seen him when they entered the house, but he had been spared, maybe because the scene had been too chaotic and he slipped their mind, maybe because he was too old to be of any use. When the palace guard arrived from the distress call, they said his sisters were gone. Assumed dead, but likelier trafficked into rural Talin as farmhands where help was needed. Anton wants to believe they are dead. It seems like a better fate.

They never found out why his parents had been attacked or who was behind it. They simply appointed a new noble as Kelitu’s councilmember and settled Anton back into the palace like nothing had ever happened. San-Er doesn’t care. The throne doesn’t care. Even councilmembers are replaceable if it lets King Kasa avoid acknowledging why his rural civilians hold such ire for his reign.

Anton would develop jumping when he was thirteen. The ability is hereditary, and so he had known he only needed to wait. He had passed those preadolescent years with a feverish energy, testing and testing until, one night, it finally happened.

Then he went overboard. With no parental figure to reprimand him or remind him that jumping was an act frowned upon in their elite society, he scared all his schoolmates with how often he did it—he even scared his best friend when they were reading together on a dull afternoon, jumping in and out of August Avia without permission, but August didn’t tell him off. August only asked whether Anton had found anyone he couldn’t jump into yet.

That was an easy question, the answers all obvious ones. Bodies that were too feverish and sick, which automatically repelled invading jumpers. Doubled bodies that had already reached a two-qi limit. The Weisannas, with their birthright that somehow allowed an imitation of being doubled. Everyone else was fair game, so long as he concentrated hard enough.

The shop owner has reached the end of his spiel, if the interspersed laughter is any indication. Hovering outside the shop, Anton spots a hooked blade hanging off the man’s belt, stained at the edges like he hadn’t cleaned it properly after its last use. Given Anton’s childhood, a natural assumption would be that he couldn’t handle bloodshed. But blood is faultless. Blood is only a consequence. Better to draw blood before it can be drawn from you; better to exert power and hold control—to seize power and maintain control.

Anton leans his body up against the alley wall. He readies himself. After seven years in exile, he’s learned that he’ll always choose the easiest path. Not the most honorable, not the cleanest, not the messiest. If he’s offered an opportunity, he will take it.

Anton jumps, opening his eyes after the flash of light, standing in the middle of the crowd. They jerk back suddenly, blinking in bewilderment.

“My apologies,” Anton says. His voice is scratchy, unaccustomed to such a low timbre. “You may wish to step back.” Then he pulls the knife from the player’s belt, holds it to his throat, and slashes. He feels the blood move fast, but before it can sap his own qi, Anton is jumping again, invading the body he left by the wall and letting the other player return to his own body, to the gaping wound made in the artery gushing at his neck. The crowd gasps—some in terror, some in delight.

Whatever their reaction, Anton is already hurrying away, looking for the nearest surveillance camera and tapping a finger to his wristband when he spots it. They need to know that it was his doing, in case the reels don’t put two and two together without seeing the flash of light. He wants the hit logged to him.

He wants the palace to tremble.

August follows the sound of the television broadcast into his study. He barely stops to shake the mud off his shoes first, even as he presses dirty prints onto the gleaming marble tiles. Palace servants apply a new layer of polish to the flooring every afternoon anyway. By tomorrow, all the mud will be gone.

The window in his study is open. When he enters, cheeks reddened from exertion, the cool easterly air from the distant seaside is a shock to his senses.

August reaches for a blindfold on his shelf.

“Dozing on the job?”

Galipei startles, jerking upright in his chair. Beside him sits August—or his birth body, blond head lolled downward and crown lopsided as if he’s simply having a rest.

“I figured I’d hear intruders approaching,” Galipei mutters, standing, “so long as it wasn’t you and your ghost feet.”

“Did you hear me ?”

Galipei jolts again, his stance immediately shifting for combat, before the owner of the voice makes her appearance around the corner and Leida strides into the room. She pulls her breathing mask down to her chin so that they see her thin lips press into a line, immensely unimpressed.

“I’m starting to think you keep around one of the worst Weisannas,” she says to August.

“I’m inclined to agree,” August replies.

“ Excuse me,” Galipei protests.

They ignore him. August ties the blindfold over his forehead, fixing it just loose enough to fall into the body’s eyes after he gets the last glimpse he needs to trigger the jump. When he opens his eyes from his own body, Galipei is already reaching for the one he vacated, a rapid grip around their neck to knock them out before they can grow fully conscious again. In a quick swoop, he throws the body over his shoulder, then takes the stranger from the study and out of the palace without being asked.

“Did something happen?” August asks when only Leida remains. He rises from the chair, working out the crooks and knots in his birth body. Now his shoes are clean, polished with wax and nary a speck of dust on them. His footsteps echo while he walks a slow circle of the room, trailing his finger over the desk and bookshelves. There is space—more space than necessary—up here, in the tallest turret of the palace.

“We picked up all the casualties.” Leida puts her hands in her pockets, rustling her black nylon coat. She dresses in dark colors to blend in with San-Er, as does the rest of the guard, but contrary to the very purpose of dressing for concealment, Leida Miliu also wears dark-blue glitter around her dark-blue eyes regardless of which body she is in. When they were sixteen, August very narrowly escaped being her experiment because Leida had noticed his eyes carried that ring of blue in them and wanted to see whether glitter would bring out the color more.

Since her mother passed away last year and she was promoted, Leida no longer has time for the nonsense of tricking August into putting glitter on his eyes. Neither does August, really, but he has never had the time. Leida merely possesses the magnetic pull to demand anything she wants, even if her closest schoolmate was also the crown prince of San. She’s only twenty-one years old, the same age as August, but given their peers used to joke that Leida Miliu came out of the womb giving orders, it’s easy to see how the palace guards fell in line before her without the slightest muttering of dissent. Other units outside of San-Er are led by generals, slow-moving armies dispersed across Talin to maintain peace. San-Er’s streets and buildings are not suited for large formations and order. They suit quick thinking and dirty tricks, and Leida has plenty of both. The palace guard runs entirely under her command, dispersed in little groups and reporting back to her a whole image of San-Er to piece together how the twin cities fare.

The cities are not thriving. But that’s less Leida’s fault and more the all-powerful incompetence that sits on the throne.

“Did you hear the report we gave out? Twenty-three hits since midnight.”

August perches on the side of his desk, hands braced to either side of him. Galipei returns too, but instead of coming into the study again, he hovers at the circular doorway, picking at the whorls carved into the wood there.

“You phrased that as if we gave false information,” August says plainly. “Did we?”

“No,” Leida answers. “Twenty-three eliminations is correct.” She pauses. “But if you paid attention to the count that the newscasters gave, only twenty-one were attributed to the players. You think anyone will notice the math?”

“Did they leave the games voluntarily?” Galipei asks from the doorway.

Leida reaches into her coat. She brings out a set of photographs, and though it was Galipei who made the suggestion, she doesn’t spare him a glance, continuing to address only August.

“We can hope that the rest of San-Er assumes so, but we found the two other bodies. Both happened out of sight from any camera. Yaisu sickness.”

August frowns. He gestures for the photographs. The yaisu sickness. Jumping, at the end of the day, is still a dangerous matter. Fail too many attempts to invade another body, and your own will start to burn from the inside out, unable to handle the barrage of exit and re-entry each time you’re kicked back. He hasn’t heard of a case in so long. Not since Otta. There have been other instances, surely, but no one is bringing them to the palace’s attention when jumping is forbidden in the first place. They merely take the loss. If his palace-raised half sister couldn’t be saved, there’s little chance that anyone else in San-Er can survive the burning once it starts.

“Murder?” Galipei suggests, his voice booming from the door again. “The yaisu sickness can be brought on by another culprit.”

If the murderer moves fast enough. In and out and in and out, using different bodies nearby to make landings but returning into the same victim. Then the body burns up, trapping the original occupant’s qi and condemning them to death.

Leida finally turns to face Galipei, mouth pinched. “Murder, yes,” she says. “But…”

“But why do the bodies look like this?” August says, finishing her thought. He crooks a single finger at his bodyguard, and Galipei bounds in quickly. When Galipei comes to his side to peer at the photographs too, his silver eyes widen, swallowing the light in the room.

“This is—”

“The Sican salute,” Leida confirms. “Which is incomprehensible. How could Sicans have gotten into San-Er?”

Both elbows outward, fingers pressed together and thumbs cast straight to make a triangular shape. Flip open any textbook about Talin’s war with Sica, and the Sican salute is the first image to be printed as an introduction: the proud gesture of a conquering, warmongering nation. Except here, it’s awkward and stiff on both bodies, because their arms were certainly forced into the salute after death. The first photograph shows a burned corpse at the back of a shop. The walls stand sparse and bare, but the floors are littered with aluminum foil, blackened with the stains of heroin vapor. Depending on their priorities, some players will take their coins to these sorts of places first, pump themselves as high as the clouds before going to gather weaponry.

The second photograph is a similar scene. A burned corpse at… a factory, August guesses. There are machine pieces scattered near the body, misshapen springs and broken levers that were likely shoved into a back room as the quickest method of discarding unwanted objects.

“Even if they made it past the city wall,” August muses, “how did they get an identity number?”

Leida stays silent. Galipei’s frown deepens. Since their war with Sica, Talin’s regulations have stayed the same. No identity number, no entry into San-Er. The only reason why San-Er has a wall surrounding it in the first place is because it was the last stronghold before Talin finally won the war. The twin cities, located in the kingdom’s southeast like a little tail, were the nation’s last salvation at a time of need and their enemies’ defeat, now the beating heart of Talin even while situated at its very, very corner. There used to be other cities inland, but they never recovered from being turned into battlegrounds, their deterioration exacerbated by heavy casualties and negligent bureaucrats. As time went on, it became easier for the countryside to migrate to the new capital rather than rebuild and tend to its problems; while San-Er advanced and built new factories, invented new technology and installed better signal towers, the rest of the provinces seemed to move backward, unable to put a plug in their drain of labor. Too many councilmembers have already complained about the ghost cities in their assigned provinces, a waste when those buildings could be torn down and the land used as farm plots more suited for the rural skill sets that remain prevalent past the wall of San-Er.

Despite the palace’s preparedness for war, Sica has not posed a problem since its defeat. The border holds steady, cutting a line down the middle of the near-uninhabitable borderlands between the two nations. Talin minds its own, with most of its conquest energy on its rural provinces; Sica started expanding in the other direction, nursing its wounds after wasting so many resources failing to invade Talin.

If these deaths are truly a message from Sica, it is hard to imagine what could have prompted such a change in the air.

“Either way,” Leida says suddenly, taking the photographs from August and gathering them up in her hands, “I’ll keep an eye on the situation. Someone or other will report to the king once we’ve gauged the foreign threat—”

A series of drums play through the palace wing. August, Leida, and Galipei all freeze, running an immediate sweep of their eyes through the study, making the quickest catalog of what is currently out in the open. With that herald, a commotion of activity follows before two royal guards push through into the study, yelling an all-clear.

King Kasa follows closely.

August breathes out. He levels his expression: pleasant, jovial, always at the ready to accommodate his king.

“August,” King Kasa says. His golden-robed clothes are pristine, but his expression is haggard. He has been aging faster these past few years, looking wearier with every new day. Lines carve deeply into the sides of his eyes, the corners of his mouth. If August were a more patient person, he might wait for the natural tide to take his adopted father instead.

But he is not.

“You will come see me after the day’s reels have finished.”

The instruction has no room for argument. August inclines his head.

“Yes, of course,” he replies smoothly. When his gaze darts to the side, Leida taps silently at the desk, where she has set down the photographs. August clears his throat, then adds, “If I may, there is some strange business that the palace guards have seen.”

King Kasa puts his hand behind his back. His eyes narrow, and his wrinkles deepen tenfold. “How so?”

“There are yaisu deaths. We may have to investigate—”

But King Kasa is already walking out. “Deal with it,” he calls back. “Report soon.”

The guards trail behind him. The drums herald him into another part of the palace. And before long, the study is quiet again in the wake of the visit.

Unbelievable .

His Majesty hasn’t left the perimeter of the palace in five years, and nothing will prompt him to do so now. No one can tell him otherwise. Er’s councilmembers govern the sixteen provinces of Talin on the north side of the Jinzi River, while San’s councilmembers govern the twelve provinces on the south side, which lie closer to the twin cities. The basin of the Jinzi River was the original site of Talin’s civilization, in the days when the history books speak of old gods walking among mankind. Centuries passed, and the southward floods of the river turned the land plentiful for wet crops and produce, cultivating rice paddies for its farmers. The north stayed dry, which meant fields of grain and wheat and grazing animals, dependent only on the rainfall with the farther they migrated from the river. They used to keep Talin’s palaces out there: the Palace of Heavens to the north, and the Palace of Earth to the south. Then the war with Sica came, and the nobles of the kingdom funneled into San-Er for protection. The Palace of Heavens was rebuilt in Er, the Palace of Earth in San, and once the war was over, there was no need to move again when they could assign councilmembers to overlook the territory they had once controlled directly, especially while San-Er flourished into Talin’s core metropolis. The kings of Talin became the kings of San-Er, and the rest of the provinces became mere collateral resources that the twin cities could suckle at whenever was convenient.

Even a few years ago, when Calla’s parents were still around, they used to meet with Kasa, sharing the reports their separate councils gave about each province, reviewing Talin’s matters in tandem. Now, the councilmembers of Er report to King Kasa directly, the affairs of twenty-eight provinces and two cities directed to his solitary throne at the corner of the kingdom. The armies listen to their generals, the generals are loyal to their province councilmembers, and the whole council bows down to King Kasa. Such power is impossible to break without breaking the very nation. August is certain of this. The system has been instilled so deeply and for so long that the only possible path toward betterment is a smooth transference of the crown.

August pinches the bridge of his nose. He feels Leida’s and Galipei’s heavy observataion like a physical sensation. Instead of turning to meet either of them, he faces his window, searching for the line in the twin cities where the water cuts between San and Er. The palace turret is high up enough to sight it.

“Have you run through the names of the contestants?”

Leida’s switch in topic takes him aback. He frowns. “Of course. I looked through all the entries before the lottery was drawn.”

“Then you were slacking. Look at who was assigned to number Eighty-Six.”

She pulls a screen from her pocket and passes the clunky device. August presses the left button, flipping through the names backward.

88 — Decre Talepo.

87 — Sai Liugu.

86 — Cedar Yanshu.

He senses Leida’s observation grow even heavier. There is no minutia that she will miss while tending to palace tasks. She’s waiting for his every reaction, watching to gauge if he is telling a white lie or genuinely in the dark. Leida doesn’t know about his plan to recruit Calla as his weapon, so he’s careful not to appear too flippant. Or else she might ask why he doesn’t care, why he is so certain that every other player is going to die anyway.

“Cedar Yanshu,” August reads aloud. He waits for something to register.

“Did you forget about those letters we got last year?” Leida asks.

August looks up from the screen immediately.

“No,” he says, realization dawning. It is both an answer and a reaction. No , he did not forget. No , this is absolutely ridiculous.

“That’s a stolen identity number,” Leida says. Her voice leaves no room for doubt. “It’s Anton Makusa.”

The same identity he used last year to try to scam money from the palace. The moment he was caught, he disappeared again, returning to his exiled invisibility. Despite himself, August flicks his eyes to a spot on the wallpaper, a rectangular shape where a picture frame used to hang before it was torn right off. He couldn’t get rid of its sun-faded imprint—because this part of the palace actually gets sunlight, unlike everywhere else in San—without tearing the wallpaper down and renovating the study anew, so even with the picture gone, its phantom remains. August, Anton, and Leida: the three of them a formidable trio with plans to transform Talin.

Before Anton walked away from them.

“Should we take him out?” Galipei asks.

August tosses the device onto his desk. He wipes his hands like the screen was slick with grime.

“It’s fine,” he says tightly. “He won’t be trouble. He doesn’t have the resources to be trouble. I don’t want to draw more attention to this than necessary, and Anton is nothing if not an attention seeker.”

He’s also a powerful jumper. One who might put up a fight against Calla, who needs to win. But the mistake has been made, Anton Makusa has been drawn into the games, and now there’s nothing to do except let him play and try not to wince when someone takes him down.

Before Leida can argue against the verdict, something tremendous shakes in the distance, creaking the floor beneath their feet. At once, August and Galipei hurry to the window, searching through the night. The disturbance is easy to see: an explosion engulfs a section of Er, the flames flickering high and tossing debris off the buildings it has swallowed.

Leida sighs. She strolls to the window too, albeit with an unhurried air.

“That’s going to be tiresome to sort out,” she says. “We’d better hope the nonplayer casualties are too poor to bring it to the council.”

August says nothing. All else is forgotten in that moment, even Calla Tuoleimi and Anton Makusa, both entered as players in the king’s games. There is much to tend to, starting with possible foreign intruders in his city wreaking havoc before he can take over.

He reaches out and slams his window closed.