The mess hall in the mid-terrace barracks still had heat trapped in its walls from whatever had been cooked there before the dragon turned the quarry into a demolition site.
Someone had scavenged bowls of grain porridge and dried meat from a pantry that hadn’t burned, and for about eleven minutes, nobody was screaming at me to pull a rope or catch a falling body.
I sat on an overturned crate with my splinted knuckles wrapped around a bowl I had no intention of dropping, and I ate like the food might get repossessed.
Sivrel was three tables over, running his thumb along a diagram he’d scratched into the wood, still chasing patterns in how the beast dodged.
Tress had her boots off and was inspecting a blister with the concentration of a jeweler.
Nobody talked about the wing we’d broken twenty minutes before, because talking about a partial win felt like inviting the universe to take it back.
I pulled up my account instead.
It felt rude, honestly, checking my bank balance in the middle of a warzone mess hall, like counting money at a funeral, but the numbers don’t stop just because you have manners.
The prize pool had grown since I’d last looked, padded by validation bonuses from Vhaldrèche and whatever Odrance’s siege crews had managed to shore up, plus a modest bump the system labeled, with real corporate enthusiasm, Structural Denial Incentive — Kharvoss.
I scrolled down to the fine print I’d signed off on back when I still thought reading contracts was optional flavor text.
The clause was right where I remembered it, printed in that special shade of gray reserved for information nobody wants you to actually process: prize disbursement contingent on the contestant surviving to arena exit following full validation of all nine municipal objectives.
You walk out, or the number stays a number on a screen nobody but Vassago’s accountants ever gets to enjoy.
I stared at that figure a little longer than I probably should have, given that I was supposed to be resting an arm that already ached like it had been run through a taffy machine.
It was a genuinely obscene sum.
The kind of sum that used to make my coworkers go quiet during lunch breaks whenever the show was on in the break room and someone did the math out loud.
I could survive better than that guy, I used to say, mouth full of vending machine sandwich, watching some poor idiot get flattened by a collapsing bell tower in Namarre two seasons back.
Denna would laugh and say I couldn’t survive a Tuesday without three reminders on my phone.
Ruskin would put money on it, actual money, five credits at a time, because apparently watching people die on television wasn’t compelling enough without a wager attached.
I never told any of them I was going to apply.
I filled out the intake forms on my lunch break, in the same chair where I usually filed time sheets nobody read—and I didn’t feel brave doing it.
I felt like a man buying a lottery ticket who has done the math on the odds and decided the math doesn’t matter as much as the alternative, which was another thirty years of filing time sheets nobody read.
That was the truth of it, sitting there with porridge going cold in my hand.
I hadn’t come here to save anyone.
I’d come here because I wanted a home with a door that was actually mine, and because I wanted to hand in a resignation letter with exactly as many words as necessary and not one more.
Every civilian I’d hauled out of a collapsing corridor, every stretcher I’d steadied, that was all real, and I wasn’t going to cheapen it by pretending it didn’t matter to me.
But it wasn’t why I’d signed up.
I’d signed up out of greed, the kind of greed that doesn’t need a villain’s monologue to justify itself, just a landlord and a paycheck that never quite covered both rent and groceries in the same month.
“You always frown at your food like that, or is that a new thing?” Tress asked, not looking up from her blister.
“Bad math?”
“Motivating math.”
She grunted, which from Tress passed for warm conversation, and went back to her foot.
It was one of the hunters near the water barrel, a broad guy named Dosk, who’d been on the winch line with me during the harpoon run—who brought up the thing I’d been half-expecting someone to mention since the fall through the timber platform.
“You went somewhere, back on the ramp,” he said, not unkindly, more like he was reporting a weather pattern.
“Before the platform gave. You had that look. Eyes open, nobody home.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“Not what I mean.” He set his cup down.
“I’ve seen men blank out from shock. Seen it plenty, working the quarry lines before this show ever came calling. That’s not what you did. You picked the anchor point like you’d surveyed the whole platform an hour earlier. No hesitation. You let go of the tether the second the load shifted wrong instead of half a second after, which is when everybody else would’ve done it, myself included.” He shrugged, like the observation cost him nothing, though I could tell it had been sitting in him since it happened.
“Whoever’s driving when you’re gone is a hell of a lot more patient than you are. No offense.”
“None taken. I’m not patient at all. Ask anyone I’ve ever waited in line with.”
A woman beside him, one of the trap crew whose name I hadn’t caught, nodded along.
“It’s not just patient. It’s calm. Like the fear doesn’t reach wherever they’re standing.” She said it like she envied it a little, which I understood, because most days I envied it too.
Whoever took the wheel during Programming didn’t flinch, didn’t panic, didn’t waste a single motion arguing with the situation before acting on it.
I flinched plenty.
I was flinching right now, thinking about the shoulder that had been quietly filing a formal complaint against me since the wall gave way beneath us.
I didn’t have a good answer for them, not one I was ready to hand out over lukewarm porridge.
The passenger wasn’t a topic I discussed with strangers, mostly because I didn’t fully understand whatever was happening to me yet, and partly because the arena had ears everywhere and I doubted Vassago or her producers needed a reason to get creative with either of us.
“Maybe I’m just better under pressure than I give myself credit for,” I said instead, which got a snort out of Dosk that told me exactly how much he believed it.
The conversation would have gone further—I could feel it building toward the kind of questions I really didn’t want to field in a room full of people I’d known for less than a day.
But the arena, ever considerate, decided to spare me the trouble.
The impact came from below, through the floor first and the walls half a second later, a sound like the building had swallowed a boulder and was trying to figure out how to digest it.
Bowls jumped off the tables.
Somewhere down the corridor, a support beam let out a groan that no beam should ever make while people are still standing under it.
“That’s not a wall falling,” Sivrel said, already on his feet, already moving toward the doorway with the particular speed of a man who has learned exactly how much time a sound like that buys you.
“That’s a body falling.”
The lull, it turned out, had been a courtesy extended by nobody. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
The dragon didn’t observe meal breaks.
Grounded and furious and dragging a wing that no longer answered its instructions properly, it had come down through the lower dormitory terrace like a wrecking ball with opinions, and the tier just below us was now shedding rubble in sheets down the incline that connected the mess hall to the residential stack.
We got there in under a minute, which still turned out to be a minute too slow for whoever had been sleeping on the second floor of the dormitory block when the wall came in.
What greeted us was a slope of shattered masonry and splintered bed frames, angled down toward the lower terrace at a grade steep enough that anything without a firm grip was going to keep sliding until it hit something solid, and that something solid in this case was a support column with a very unforgiving corner.
Two civilians had a wounded man on a makeshift stretcher, an improvised door with rope handles, and they were losing the fight against the incline.
The stretcher had already picked up speed once, sliding a body-length before one of them managed to dig a heel in and arrest it, and I could see in their faces they weren’t going to manage a second save.
The wounded man wasn’t conscious enough to help himself and was going to end up meeting that column at the worst possible angle if somebody didn’t intervene within seconds.
I didn’t have rope.
I didn’t have a good angle.
What I had was Dead Grip, freshly unlocked: four seconds of absolute adherence and a full minute of recovery I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of testing under real load.
I planted my boot against a chunk of fallen wall, grabbed the trailing rope handle of the stretcher with my bad hand, and activated it.
The grip took instantly, my fingers locking around that rope like they’d been welded there, no slip, no give, exactly as advertised.
What the reward crate’s cheerful little description hadn’t bothered mentioning was that the grip only handled the hand.
Everything above the wrist was still just me, my shoulder, my elbow, my ordinary human joints that had made no such contract with the arena, and all of it was suddenly asked to absorb the full sliding weight of a grown man and a wooden door with nothing between the load and my socket except tendon and bad luck.
The stretcher lurched to a stop, and my shoulder screamed in a language that didn’t need translation.
Something in there shifted a fraction farther than joints are supposed to shift, a hot, grinding pull that traveled straight down into my ribs.
I could feel the socket working itself loose, degree by degree, the tendons stretching like they were trying to negotiate a separate deal with gravity that didn’t involve me.
Four seconds is a long time when your arm is trying to leave your body.
I released the grip half a second before the timer would have done it for me, because I could feel exactly how close I was to something that no orthopedic budget on this show was going to fix in time for the next city.
The moment my fingers let go, my whole arm dropped like a sack of wet sand, and the stretcher, still moving but slower now, coasted the last few feet into the waiting hands of the two bearers, who grabbed the rope handles and finally got proper footing on a flatter stretch of rubble.
“Got it,” one of them called out, breathless, dragging the wounded man clear of the column.
“We’ve got him.”
I sat down where I was standing, mostly because my legs seemed like a reasonable place to put my weight and my shoulder had opinions about staying upright much longer.
A screen on the nearest surviving wall panel flickered to life, because of course it did, because nothing in this arena gets to hurt in private.
Vassago: “Nice save! Real edge-of-your-seat stuff, viewers loved the slow-motion replay we’re already cutting for the highlight reel. Speaking of which, that shoulder of yours is doing something I’m contractually required to describe as ‘suboptimal.’ Good news: our sponsors at Ferrovane Orthopedic are offering a limited-time surgical package, forty percent off standard rates, terms and conditions apply, one condition being that you still have to be holding on to the limb when you walk through those exit gates for the discount to process. No limb, no discount. Think it over!”
I didn’t answer her.
I just sat there on the rubble, cradling an arm that had done exactly what I’d asked of it and was now billing me for the privilege, and watched the two bearers carry the wounded man toward whatever passed for an aid station on this terrace.