Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

The restaurants that operate near the coliseum are less a row of buildings and more a collective operational body, second-floor kitchens with staircases that lead into the first-floor sitting area of another unit and third-floor seating areas that only get patrons from the dumpling shop on the fourth floor, directly above. Though San-Er is claustrophobic, at least everything one could want is always within reach.

Calla plucks a dish from a waitress’s platter as she passes, leaving a coin in its place. The waitress doesn’t even notice, too busy trying to fulfill the breakfast orders being shouted in her direction. With one finger twisting around the cord of the landline she’s standing beside, Calla clamps down on the receiver with her shoulder, then uses her free hand to pinch the top of a dumpling and plop it into her mouth. She’s barely listening to August on the other end.

“—you have to get it back. I’m not amused at all, Calla.”

“When did I suggest this would be amusing?” she asks, words muffled around her mouthful of dumpling. She makes a round shape with her lips, sucking air in to cool the rich meat and salted cabbage on her tongue. It burns her throat as it goes down, but the fridge in her apartment has been bare since yesterday, so even the cheapest dumplings taste as good as gold on her empty stomach. She can imagine August pinching the bridge of his nose as he listens to her eating.

“None of this is going to work if you’re eliminated.”

“Hey,” Calla says. She swallows her food and clears her throat to speak again. “Can you please get it together? I was already in these games before you got involved. I’m not getting eliminated that easily.”

August gives an irritated huff. “Fine. I can keep your wristband functioning so that it doesn’t expire today. Just get it back. Which player took it?”

Calla shrugs, then realizes that her cousin cannot see her. She was given his personal cellular number, but it’s been so long since she used a telephone—not since she was in Er’s palace—that she hardly remembers how they function. He’s already furious that she didn’t contact him immediately when the incident took place yesterday, but it isn’t her fault that she needed to hunt down a public line first.

“I don’t know,” she replies. “I didn’t think to ask while I was trying not to get stabbed. Male. Tall. Pale.”

Another vexed noise from August. None of those physical descriptors mean anything when the body she’s describing is at the hospital, returned to its original occupant. The newsreels had too much to cover last night with the first location pings starting across the twin cities, so Calla hadn’t seen the fight at the market broadcast anywhere. Most of the battle had happened out of view from the cameras, in that storage space, so there was very little footage to offer. Today’s reruns might insert coverage of Calla’s wristband being stolen when they finish filtering through the bloodiest footage for the more boring encounters—Calla only needs to wait until one network is interested enough to announce her thieving opponent’s number. After that, August can look at his lists and get her a name. She supposes that he could also go into the surveillance room right now and find the footage himself, but he’s already meddling to keep her wristband active, and Leida Miliu might start asking questions if he attempts anything more.

“Start tracking him down,” August demands, though surely he knows there isn’t much Calla can do at present. “And keep an eye out—there’s a possibility that the twin cities have been infiltrated by foreign agents from Sica. Their motive is unclear.”

Calla frowns. She picks up another dumpling, but this time she only gnaws at the edges of its floury skin. “Are they planning to invade?”

“Again, hard to say.”

“We’re not even in contact with Sica anymore.” At least, that was the case five years ago, the last time Calla got a glimpse into Talin’s national affairs.

“Which is precisely why I’m puzzled,” August says. “I can keep you updated. Just… find the idiot who took your wristband and eliminate him quickly.”

Calla takes a proper bite of the dumpling. The hot juice inside dribbles down her chin, and she hurries to catch it. Heavens, if her old palace etiquette tutors could see her, they would have a heart attack. “Yes, Prince August. Your wish is my command.”

August hangs up without a response. Meanwhile, when Calla sets the landline down, she chews thoughtfully on the rest of the dumpling, mulling over what August said. Foreign agents from Sica. The last maps she saw on her parents’ tables had been pencil drawn, showing a completed conquest of the rural outskirts and almost broaching the mountains that separate their kingdom from Sica. Perhaps King Kasa has been inching even farther into the borderlands. Perhaps Sica is sending people to put a stop to it. And if that’s the case, then she wishes they wouldn’t, not for the same reasons as August, but because she’s already fucking on it.

A flash of movement in her periphery breaks her train of thought. Calla swivels suddenly, just in time to see a kid duck behind a potted plant, like he didn’t expect her to look his way. His hand closes around one of the large plant trunks, sleeve slipping up and revealing a wristband.

Calla draws her sword.

“Wait, please, don’t!” the kid bellows. He emerges from behind the plant, arms above his head. His eyes are a dusty violet, the same as the flowers that grow by the Rubi Waterway. “You should at least wait until you get your wristband back.”

“What?” Calla pulls a face. She doesn’t have her mask on during meals, so it reaches the kid with full effect. “How much did you hear?”

The kid’s gaze flickers over to the tables, and then, making an almost visible effort to lower his voice, he says, “Enough to hear you address the speaker on the other end as August.”

Calla raises the sword higher, intent on making a strike and eliminating this potential leak. The kid throws his arms up again. Though his cheeks have a babyish roundness to them, his limbs are stick-thin with the mark of hunger.

“Wait, wait, wait! I know who took your wristband.”

Oh? Calla lowers her arm. While she’s hesitating, another waitress comes around the corner with a tray of food. The waitress pauses abruptly in her step when she sees Calla’s sword, mouth opening and closing as if she’s debating whether she ought to say something. A second later, she decides to charge right past and disappears down the stairs, the creak of each step echoing against the leaky walls. Calla makes up her mind.

“Come with me,” she says, waving the kid closer. Once he is within distance, she clamps a hand to the back of his neck and steers him down the stairs, too, toward a smaller seating area. He looks nervous that her sword is still out, but he makes no remark. Obediently, he lets her push him into a booth, and perks up when she signals for a waiter by the counter to order more food.

“What’s your name?” Calla asks, sliding her sword casually into the booth before she follows. At one of the other tables, there’s a teenager craning his neck at her, likely trying to gauge whether she’s a player of the games. She reaches for a napkin to wipe down the table, but the napkin itself is so dusty that she doubts it achieves much. When she tosses the wad away, she makes eye contact with the teenager and pretends to lurch in his direction. He stops craning and looks away quickly.

“I’m Eno,” the kid replies.

“And how old are you, Eno?”

Eno scrunches his nose. “Fifteen. Not sure about this body, though. I gave away my birth one. Didn’t like it much.”

Calla folds her hands on the table. It’s not uncommon for someone to abandon their birth body if there’s another vessel they want to take over permanently. Sometimes they’ll stumble onto one tossed on the streets. Sometimes two people decide to swap. Usually, though, long-term changes happen after purchasing a desirable vessel for a handsome price on the black market. On a much rarer occasion, there are those who feel so secure in their jumping abilities that they decide to permanently invade a body already occupied, staying doubled for so long that the weaker qi fades away, until only the invader’s qi remains and they are once again a single occupant.

No matter the method, it’s done persistently throughout San-Er for reasons great and small. If people don’t like the way they look. If their birth body binds them to a gender presentation that isn’t quite right. A person’s qi lasts about a hundred natural years, give or take a decade on either side; that’s a long while to spend in a miserable body. Those with the jumping gene can attempt to occupy new youthful bodies as they near the end of the line, but the gods haven’t offered anyone true immortality yet. Once someone’s qi reaches its end, it will fizzle away, just as someone with qi touched by illness won’t grow healthier, no matter how many good bodies they tear through. Rotting qi will eat a body from the inside out until the qi is gone.

Calla can’t guess Eno’s reason for ditching his birth body, and she doesn’t ask. The body that he wears looks younger than fifteen, though that could be Calla’s poor gauge of these things too. She’s twenty-three, and each year, everyone younger than her only looks more and more like a child. Out of habit, she scans the restaurant to see who is nearby and within view, not only to flag which patrons appear suspicious, but also to mark all of Eno’s possible exit routes if he were to jump.

“Do you only invade masculine bodies your age?” she asks casually.

Eno nods. Two options, then. When he reaches over and prods her arm, she catches a flash of his wristband, the screen flashing 51 . “This one’s pretty. Your birth body?”

Calla smiles, though the expression is wholly a warning as she moves her arm away. “… Yes.”

“Do you only invade feminine ones?” he asks in return.

“It doesn’t matter to me.” Calla gestures at the waiter again, catching his attention so he knows where to bring the food. “I don’t leave this body, though.”

Truth be told, she’s never felt like she aligns one specific way, but she enjoys femininity and how it looks on her. Calla is a woman in the same way that the sky is blue. She understands that it’s the easiest identifier to slap on and she doesn’t mind it, but in actuality, the sky is an incomprehensible void, and Calla, too, feels closer to a nebulous, inexact entity. Before she is anything else, Calla is just… Calla.

Eno blinks. “You don’t leave it, ever? Do you have the jumping gene?”

“Of course.”

“But you don’t jump? That’s dangerous for the games.”

It’s not just dangerous; it’s unheard of. No one would enroll with such a disadvantage—no one except Calla Tuoleimi, apparently.

“Yes, well”—Calla flicks her hair out of her face—“it is what it is.”

This is her body. It belongs to her. It is her more than any collective identity.

“You didn’t tell me your name,” Eno says when the waiter sets down two bowls before them. Eno peers inside to find wonton noodles, then digs in immediately.

“Chami,” Calla replies after a moment. She retrieves a pair of chopsticks from the dispenser and sticks it into her food. “So. How do you know who took my wristband?”

Eno’s eyes light up. For the briefest second, there’s hesitation in the posture of his shoulders, in the grip he has on his utensils. Though she says nothing, Calla makes note of it, tucking it away with the other tidbits in her mental inventory.

“I’m part of the Crescent Societies,” he says. “Well… a new initiate. They let us keep a portion of the earnings if we run enough—”

“The point, please,” Calla interrupts.

Eno clears his throat. “Right, right. The temples catch wind of which numbers are making which kills before the news broadcasts it. I heard through our network that Eighty-Six took Fifty-Seven’s wristband.” He looks Calla directly in the eye, as if to assure her he isn’t lying. “I gather there aren’t too many players who’ve lost their wristbands.”

Calla leans forward, jabbing at the wontons. Eighty-Six graced the newsreels prominently right after the Daqun, his kills putting him among the group that are fighting for second place below Calla. It’s not as if any of them can really upstage her when she’s cheating, but it’s still early days in the games.

“Who is Eighty-Six, then?” she asks.

“Oh, I know him. We’re friendly. His name is Anton Makusa.”

Calla’s hand stops, frozen over the chopsticks. She has never met Anton Makusa, but she knows the name. She heard it often during her delegation visits to San. He was a palace brat, August’s friend before Otta Avia caught the yaisu sickness. His parents were killed when he was young, but that wasn’t what made his reputation in San-Er. It was his notorious jumping, flouting the rules and exemplifying the hypocrisy of palace elites by receiving only light punishments each time he was caught.

“He uses one fake identity or another most of the time, though, so you didn’t hear it from me. I happened to snoop through his mail once. He lives near the Rubi Waterway, on San’s side,” Eno continues, not noticing Calla’s reaction to the name. “Do you know Big Well Street? Three floors up from the brothel.”

Calla leans back into the booth, mystified. She digs into her pocket for a cigarette. Strikes a match and lights it, taking one drag before tipping the ashes into her half-eaten bowl. Eno watches with explicit horror, aghast that she is wasting perfectly good food, but Calla’s attention has drifted elsewhere.

How did Anton Makusa end up living above a brothel, playing in the games?

“Why are you helping me?” Calla asks suddenly. She blows smoke onto the table, and Eno flinches, coughing. “I hope you realize that you’re allowing me to play again. One more contestant back in the ring.”

“You were leading the scoreboard,” he replies, “and you have some link to Prince August. I don’t think you’re out of the ring yet.”

“Officially speaking, I am.”

“But you’re going to get yourself back in. And if I do this now, you’ll help me later in the games, won’t you?”

Calla makes a thoughtful noise from the back of her throat. It comes out rough, sprinkled with gravel. It’s awfully bold of the kid to assume that she’s the type willing to repay a favor. “You know there can only be one victor.”

Eno sticks his nose into the air. “I still intend to give myself the best possible chance at winning. That victor could be me.”

Calla snorts. Eno deflates a little. “Okay, well”—he lifts his wristband and taps at the spot where the chip is inserted—“at least I can opt out at any time.”

At fifteen, some people haven’t even finished developing their jumping yet, never mind honed it enough to compete with a bunch of killers. Calla doesn’t like how casually he treats the matter, as if this is some playground adventure instead of a battle to the death.

“Why are you in the games anyway?” she asks. She douses her cigarette in her soup. “You may as well pull that chip now.”

“No,” Eno says immediately. He’s almost at the last scraps of his bowl, still digging away. “My mother is in deep debt. Sooner or later, I’ll be dead—if not by starvation, then by menial labor with no end. Might as well take the chance to make some cash.”

Of course. These stories are as commonplace as rats in the alleys, and yet Calla still finds herself flinching every time she hears one.

“That’s terrible.”

Eno shrugs. “What else am I supposed to do? Even the Crescent Societies are no help so far. I’m bound to inherit her collectors one way or another.”

She could try to imagine how a debt so large had piled up, but the possibilities are endless. Hospital bills, rent payments, bank loans for rash ideas that the people of San-Er chase to try to survive. Even if Eno hasn’t done anything on his own, it’s easy to be born into a dark hole of accounts and dues.

You shouldn’t have to do anything , Calla wants to tell him. No one should.

But she remains quiet. When Eno finishes his bowl, he offers a salute and slides out from the booth, going his own way. Calla lets him leave without a farewell, one arm propped on the table and the other running her fingers over her hair, slicking her bangs out of her eyes and letting her hot forehead breathe. It isn’t as though she expected San-Er to improve in the five years she spent hiding out. It isn’t as though she was under some delusion that things were changing while she trained in that cramped little room, studying palace and city maps, balancing knives on her fingers and swords on her shoulders. Yet somehow, she thought there might be some shift. That the Palace of Heavens going down would rally the people to demand more, would make them realize that something once deemed the heavens could fall. She thought their own princess committing the slaughter would spark something in the cities—or at the very least, lead people to ask why anyone needed to starve if their rulers could prevent it.

But every year before the games, the riots still disperse within minutes of forming. The complaints go quiet before they can pick up an echo. The average civilian decides it is better to keep their mouths shut than lose their lives in a futile fight.

A shriek outside the restaurant jolts Calla from her reverie. She retrieves her sword, smooths her hair back into place, and halfheartedly throws more coins onto the table. When she peers out the window onto the narrow alley outside, it’s so dark that she cannot discern anything, but the scream was high-pitched enough that she would bet it was a child’s call. Eno.

There’s a rusting metal ladder beside the window. Calla swings out and scrambles down a few rungs before jumping the rest of the way, landing hard. A rat scurries across her boot. She hurries forward, following the commotion and coming upon a brighter intersection.

Here, the buildings lean ever so slightly to the left, letting the sun’s rays sneak onto the pavement. It’s enough for Calla to clearly see the scene ahead, where another player is swinging an axe at Eno.

Eno ducks just in time, something clutched in his hands. When he brandishes his weapon of choice, it’s revealed to be a whip, which might be the most useless weapon someone could have acquired after the Daqun. There’s no space in these alleys to move a whip at maximum effect, to swing back and let the tail hit its victim with strength. Indeed, all he achieves is a pitiful hit, and then the axe is coming at him again, landing a fleshy strike on the side of his arm.

Calla’s eyes dart to the alley walls. She doesn’t see a surveillance camera nearby. This might be a blind spot.

“Ah!” Eno rolls and—to Calla’s surprise—is fast enough to collide with the other player’s leg, striking the back of the knee and taking her off-balance. The player lands flat on her back, but she remains within range of Eno, so Calla can already guess her next attack. Before the player can gear up, Calla starts to walk, hand braced against her hip. The walk turns to a stride, the stride to a dead sprint, and as the other player heaves her axe up from the ground, laser-focused on getting the blade into Eno’s back, Calla has slid onto her knees and drawn her sword, slicing the blade across the player’s neck and taking her head clean off.

The blood paints a half-moon in the alley. There’s no light, no escape. If a body isn’t too damaged, the qi can jump, but death tends to be immediate with decapitation. Jumping requires sight and intent. Eyes pinned to a target—never mind what the target is doing, so long as they are within view. It’s rather difficult to achieve both factors if the brain isn’t functioning anymore.

In the stillness of the alley, Eno rocks against the wall, barely keeping upright while he catches his bearings. He clasps a hand over his left arm, blood seeping through his fingers.

“Thanks,” he breathes.

Calla wipes at her face, dotting at the moisture that’s gathered by her temple. She doesn’t know if it’s sweat or blood.

“Don’t worry about it.” She straightens to her feet, shaking the crimson off the blade of her sword. When that doesn’t work, she wipes the flat side on the cuff of her pants. “Think of this as a favor repaid.”

Eno’s mouth opens, but Calla is already flicking her hand at him in dismissal.

“Are you shooing me?” he asks.

“Go find another body,” Calla snaps. “If you bleed out, then what was that all for?”

In response, Eno flashes a wide grin, as though Calla just gave him a friendly parting gift instead of saving his damn life. Someone will take it sooner or later anyway if he remains in the games. But she’s glad it’s not by gruesome axe bludgeoning, at the very least.

“See you around!” Eno calls, scampering off.

“I hope not,” Calla mutters.

If the program restarts one more time, Anton might burn down this whole cybercafe.

“Come on,” he begs, smacking a hand to the machine’s side. The bulky plastic casing shudders, as does the drink sitting beside the computer mouse. Sulian, who owns the café, gets on his case every time he comes in and doesn’t buy food, even though the place’s primary source of revenue is how many hours its customers spend seated in front of a computer. Anton’s only compromise is a glass of whatever stale soft drink has been sitting in the refrigerator behind the counter.

“Hey.”

Anton startles. He barely refrains from drawing his knives, recognizing Sulian’s voice after a beat.

“Now, why would you creep up on me,” he says cheerily, “knowing I could slit your throat?”

Sulian folds his arms. His lanky frame looks like it could blow away with the wind, which Anton supposes is why he’s never seen the old man leave the café before. If he were ever to encounter Sulian at the markets one day, Anton would bowl over in shock.

“If you slit my throat, maybe I’ll get an insurance payout. Even if that’s only a fraction of the money you owe me,” Sulian says.

He’s practically yelling over the noise. This is the spot in San for a tech plug-in. Even those who can afford a personal computer come here to indulge in its ambience: the din of businessmen running their accounts and teenagers playing their multiplayer games. It’s near-impossible to secure a seat at the café without calling Sulian ahead of time, and too many who come in end up sleeping around their monitors, not wanting to leave for the night. Most mornings consist of Sulian tossing customers out if they look like they can barely function, their screens off and no longer counting billed minutes.

The old man clears his throat. “Are you ever going to pay the tab you’re racking up here?”

Anton takes a sip of his drink. That’s right. He hasn’t actually paid for his time in months.

“I will,” he promises. It doesn’t sound convincing even to his own ear. “Soon.”

“Didn’t you walk away from the Daqun with the most coins?” Sulian continues with a raised eyebrow. “I watch the reels, you know.”

Anton grumbles under his breath. It’s his own fault for letting Sulian glimpse the number on his wristband earlier, but of all the weird old men to trust in San-Er, Sulian is high on the list.

“Yes, but I don’t have them anymore.”

Sulian sighs, giving up. He returns to the kitchen, retrieving used plates and dirtied napkins from the three other customers along Anton’s row. They barely notice, too enamored with their screens, which are actually moving instead of freezing on a blue panel as Anton’s has.

The café is chaotic—and loud—enough for Anton to blend in unseen, but he also chose this computer on purpose. The three seated to his left would get in the way of an incoming pursuer, and the café’s back exit is only two paces to his right, leading into a labyrinthine set of back corridors. It’s too early for another location ping, since they tend to go off once every day, but he won’t be taken unaware.

There’s a sudden noise, and Anton swivels his gaze back to the computer. Nothing on the screen has changed. The noise is from his belt, where his pager hangs.

Your bill for the next month has been posted.

Anton unclips the pager and throws it at full force onto the table. The loud bang of plastic striking laminate doesn’t bring him much satisfaction, though it stirs the laughter of teenagers behind him. He prefers Sulian’s assumptions about his frivolous spending in casinos and brothels over this, the actual truth. That the hospital swallows every cent he manages to scrounge up, then spits its acid reflux back at him with more bills.

The screen finally unfreezes. Anton shuffles his chair closer, waiting for the modem under the table to stop whining. When he pulls up the browser, he keys in a stolen identity number to access the archived newsreels—good old Cedar Yanshu, the man living one floor above Anton’s actual apartment who never checks his accounts and doesn’t have the memory to refute Anton’s activity under his identity—and navigates to the archives from the night of the Daqun.

Line by line, the page begins to load. Anton’s eyes swivel to the side of the keyboard, where he has set the wristband out in the open. A few other café patrons have eyed the object curiously, trying to determine if it is indeed a wristband from the games or only a convincing replica. He’ll bear the risk of attention to keep it within sight, needing to catch the moment it blinks out. If it blinks out.

He doesn’t know why he didn’t toss it as soon as he escaped Fifty-Seven. But he held on to it, and now he has far more questions than answers. He expected the wristband to shut off earlier today—even if Fifty-Seven typed in her identity number just before their fight at the market, twenty-four hours elapsed more than an hour ago.

Yet the wristband remains active, the 57 flashing each time he taps the screen. It even started whining when Anton’s did to signal a nearby player, and he had to press a button quickly to shut it up before shoving the whole strap into his pocket. He could pull the chip out and deactivate it himself, but that feels like cheating. Especially when it’s supposed to blink out on its own.

Who is this player? Skipping the Daqun, wristband active without its daily identity check. The requirement of a check-in is the main safeguard against random civilians stealing wristbands from dead players and cheating their way into the games. The palace would never allow for it.

So why is Fifty-Seven’s still going? Is it a fluke? Is she a spy from within the palace? Perhaps King Kasa has no intention of paying a victor this year and put in a plant that he’ll help to win.

Anton sifts through the digital archive, clicking recent files at random in search for the clip he saw. It takes a lot of loading and buffering, but eventually the server pulls up a video in a familiar weapons shop. The footage is as he remembers. Fifty-Seven, plunging her sword in, then yanking it out with an eerie smoothness. He doesn’t know what exactly has captivated him so thoroughly. It’s the same rapture he had when engaged in battle with her: she is never still enough for him to make out a clear detail, but the energy that bristles from her every move overwhelms him.

“Are you watching the Er massacre footage?”

For the second time that afternoon, Anton almost draws his knives on an innocent bystander.

“Felo,” he says as he glances over his shoulder. Felo is too young to be jumping bodies, but even if he could, his pale-red eyes are so distinct that he would be recognized from any distance. It sometimes looks as though he has no irises, only permanently dried, irritated eye whites. “Hasn’t anyone taught you not to sneak up on people?”

“I didn’t think anyone could sneak up on you.”

“Usually not,” Anton grumbles. He’s been so focused on watching the front for intruders that he forgot the people who know their way around can use the back entrance too. Felo is always hanging out at the café, coding games on the computers with his friends.

Felo shakes his head, as if chiding Anton in disappointment. Anton flicks the boy in the head.

“Why would I be watching the Er massacre?”

“That was my question to you,” Felo retorts. “They have it everywhere if you just ask. Most video shops will throw it in free with a porn order. You don’t need to waste money logging on to the internet.”

Anton braces a hand against the back of his chair, turning fully now. “What the fuck are you doing watching porn? Aren’t you thirteen?”

Felo crosses his arms. “Aren’t you eighteen?”

“No! I’m twenty-five.”

“Oh.” Felo looks him up and down, unfolding his arms sheepishly. “You act younger.”

Anton rubs his eye. “I’m going to try my very best not to take that as an insult. Go to school , Felo.”

“I hate school.” Felo leans closer to the screen now, squinting at the footage. It’s zoomed in and heavily pixelated, cutting off most of the weapons shop and focused only on Fifty-Seven. “Never mind, it’s not the massacre. That’s my bad. I’ve watched the footage too many times. I thought it looked familiar.”

He steps back, then somehow perfectly mimics Fifty-Seven’s sword maneuver—right down to the brief snap of his elbow before ducking to avoid the brunt of the imaginary blood spray. Anton blinks, shocked, but Felo’s attention has already been caught by something else, and he hurries off, skirting around the tables.

The Er massacre. At the time it happened, Anton had already washed his hands of San’s royal family. Exiled onto the streets with his birth body confiscated by the palace, he had heard the news from the television, same as everyone else. He still remembers the body he’d been invading at the time, a musician living in Er, his whole apartment going into lockdown when the broadcasters spoke of Princess Calla Tuoleimi going rogue, taking a sword to her parents and strewing their guts across the throne room. The footage, he has heard, is a cult hit among the Crescent Societies and their criminals. Most of them admire the princess.

Anton runs a new search in the browser. He never met the other city’s princess—always out of the palace by chance whenever there was a diplomatic visit from Er—though he knew August thought highly of her. He never sought out the footage after the incident either; the networks found it too inappropriate to show on the broadcasts. If they had played it—and only during the late-night segments when people were using their television screens for light against the heavy night—they would have censored it according to King Kasa’s wishes.

King Kasa, however, cannot control underground or virtual distribution. When the first frame fills the screen, Anton knows that this must be the uncensored version.

Because it’s bad .

Er’s throne room had been decorated with lavish details and gold trimmings. Creatures of legend lined the two thrones, a jade statue set between the chairs and silk curtains hanging directly behind. The footage is from a security camera placed in the uppermost corner of the throne room, so when the princess marches in, the angle makes her look impossibly fast, arm raised immediately, blade in hand.

One of the guards that had been standing out of frame rushes in. The princess moves rapidly, cutting through him and turning to face the three others. Anton pauses here. He clicks into Fifty-Seven’s footage again, rewinds and replays it, and Felo is absolutely right: the maneuver is near-identical. The way her arm arcs, the way her body moves.

Anton switches back to the Er massacre. As soon as the guards are down, the princess walks toward her parents. There are no more than two words exchanged. The king of Er holds his hands out, mouth open to say something. Calla isn’t listening. She has already lopped off his head, her blade striking clean.

Anton is not squeamish by any means, but he blanches nonetheless. It’s not the gore that he is bothered by. It’s the ease with which she made the cut. He might sound like a hypocrite when he was killing only some few hours ago… except those were strangers. Mere hurdles in his way toward victory. The princess of Er swings at her own parents with the very same indifference. As the footage continues, her mother’s head comes clean off too, landing by Calla’s feet. There hadn’t been any chance for the king and queen to consider jumping in a last-ditch effort to escape. Calla had been sure to slaughter all the others in the room first.

The video is nearing its final few seconds. On-screen, Calla simply stands there, covered in blood, surveying the bodies on the floor, the walls dashed with red. For months after the incident, there were mutterings that perhaps the princess had been jumped and occupied, that it was an intruder who had committed the crime. But Kasa’s palace guard had chased Calla Tuoleimi out to the wall where she’d tried to flee, and the guard who’d fired the crossbow arrow that had landed between her eyes claimed that they’d undeniably been royal yellow. At the funeral—held separately from her parents’—Calla had been condemned as a treasonous renegade, not an innocent caught up in an invasion.

The footage cuts off. Slowly, Anton pulls up the other page, frozen on Fifty-Seven, putting it side by side with this still of Calla Tuoleimi. He zooms in on Fifty-Seven’s eyes, that feline stare. The color doesn’t show very well on grainy surveillance footage, but he remembers enough from their encounter to recall a flash of yellow.

If there was any doubt before, there is none now. Calla Tuoleimi is Number Fifty-Seven, and very much alive.

“Oh, Princess,” he says. “We’re about to make something very interesting of the games.”