The archive wing was still smoking behind us when the ground shook hard enough to rattle teeth.
I didn’t need a notification to tell me what that meant.
Only one thing in this city moved with that kind of weight and that kind of confidence, and he’d apparently decided the fire in his records room was worth showing up for in person.
“Palace gate,” Mavra said, already moving.
“He’s coming out.”
We hit the plaza at a dead run and found it already full of people who had no business being in the same square without a shared radio channel.
Two other clusters of contestants were pressing in from different streets, weapons up, shouting orders that made sense to exactly nobody but the person shouting them.
One team was screaming for a flanking maneuver that would have put a friendly directly in another team’s crossfire.
A woman near the fountain was calling for everyone to fall back at the same time a man twenty feet from her was calling for everyone to hold the line.
Somewhere in the noise, a zombie guard took advantage of the confusion and nearly took an arm off a contestant who’d been listening to the wrong voice.
There were three separate strike teams, archives, and plans that had never once been together.
Vassago’s little viewer poll from a few hours ago suddenly made a horrible kind of sense.
Nobody had coordinated this because nobody was supposed to.
The show didn’t organize competitors.
It just dropped them into the same room and let the ratings sort themselves out.
King Orsane walked out of his own front gate like a man arriving fashionably late to his own execution, except he clearly hadn’t gotten the memo about the execution part.
He had a woman by the collar, a civilian, dragged half off her feet, and a signet ring the size of a real problem glowing gold on his hand.
Six guards flanked him in a loose wedge, blades already wet from whatever they’d walked through to get here.
“He’s going to bond her,” Mavra said.
“Right here. In front of everyone. He doesn’t even care if we see it.”
“Why would he care? He thinks the ring still works.” I’d read the same ledger page she had.
Direct contact, no relay required, the seal did the same job the archives used to do remotely.
He didn’t know we’d already gutted the part of his immortality that ran on paperwork.
He was about to find out the hard way that the remaining half of his insurance policy was standing in a plaza full of people who wanted him dead.
Mavra’s canister was already in her hand, thumb on the seal like she was counting down a fuse in her head.
“I need contact. Skin, metal, doesn’t matter, I just need him close enough to pull the property before he closes the bond.”
“Then I need a door nobody else can walk through.” I looked at the choke point between two collapsed market stalls, the only clean lane between the plaza and the guards.
Wide enough for one person going in her direction, narrow enough that anything coming the other way had to funnel through it single file.
Perfect place to die slowly if I did this wrong.
I didn’t have time to argue myself into a better plan, so I committed to the bad one.
“Eighteen seconds,” I said out loud, mostly for my own benefit, since the only audience that mattered was already listening whether I spoke or not.
“Hold this gap. Nobody through. And I don’t chase him if he runs. I don’t care what he does once he’s out of the lane, I hold the lane.”
That last part mattered more than the rest of it put together.
The second things went bad for him, every instinct he had would tell him to bolt for the nearest exit and let his guards die covering it.
If my body’s automatic setting saw a fleeing target and decided to give chase, I’d drag myself straight out of the one spot where I was actually useful and straight into six blades that didn’t need an invitation.
I gave the order and went dark.
Guard charge, direct line, no deviation.
Shoulder assessed at forty percent capacity, unsuitable for a standard block.
Anchored the left hand against the stone pillar at the choke point’s left edge instead of bracing the body.
Redirected the guard’s blade into the pillar face, absorbed the impact through stone rather than bone.
Released the hold at the eleven-second mark, before load transfer reached the joint.
Shoulder remains intact.
You’re welcome.
I came back to myself with my arm still ringing from a hit that had landed somewhere other than where it should have, and a guard on the ground in front of me with a sword buried an inch into rock instead of into my chest.
Behind him, three more were backing off, unsure what they’d just watched a stone pillar do to their comrade’s blade.
The gap held.
That was the whole job, and it had held.
Past the guards, Mavra had made her contact.
She had one hand locked on Orsane’s wrist and the canister pressed flat against the ring itself, and her face had gone the particular shade of gray-white it got whenever she was pulling a property she had no interest in keeping.
The gold of the seal dulled as I watched, the hard, mirror-bright surface losing its edge, going soft at the corners like wax left too close to a stove.
Orsane felt it before he understood it.
He tried to close his fist around the ring and it simply gave, the metal folding under his own grip instead of holding its shape.
“Ten seconds,” Mavra shouted, teeth gritted, voice climbing.
“That’s all I’ve got before it snaps back!”
Nobody needed a second invitation.
A rebel citizen who’d been fighting with a kitchen cleaver for lack of anything better swung it into the softened gold and it dented like clay.
Another contestant, one from a team I didn’t recognize and would never learn the name of, brought the flat of an axe down on it twice, and on the third hit the ring split clean down the middle and stayed split.
Mavra let go and staggered back, cradling the canister against her chest like it had cost her something on the way in, which it probably had.
Orsane looked down at his own hand and made a sound I hadn’t expected from a man who’d spent an entire reign treating other people’s deaths as a renewable resource.
It wasn’t rage.
It was the sound of someone realizing, all at once, that the bill had finally come due and there was no one left standing behind him to pay it.
He was mortal, the same as every other body bleeding out in that plaza.
What happened next didn’t take long, and I’m not going to dress it up as anything more dignified than it was.
Two contestants finished the job before he’d finished falling.
A woman from the crowd, someone’s mother or sister or nobody I’d ever be able to name, spat on the ground next to the body and walked away without looking back at it once.
Nobody cheered.
Nobody should have expected anyone to.
The plaza went quiet.
Vassago’s voice arrived a beat later, cutting through the silence with the enthusiasm of someone who’d been waiting backstage for her cue.
“Ladies, gentlemen, and surviving thralls, Vhaldrèche is officially validated! Give yourselves a round of applause, or at minimum a moment of respectful silence for the poor set designers who are never getting that throne room deposit back.” A pause, exactly long enough to feel deliberate.
“I will say, on behalf of the network, that we are personally disappointed King Orsane didn’t come with an auto-respawn clause. Do you have any idea what a recurring boss monarch does for season-over-season engagement? Someone in legal is going to be very upset about this. Someone in ratings is going to be even more upset. Anyway! Contribution credits are posting now, Programming has been reviewed for balance purposes and upgraded to Level 2, your new execution cap is 30 seconds, don’t spend it all in one place, and the gate to Eshkar is open for business.”
I checked the number out of habit more than curiosity.
Thirty seconds was almost double what I’d had walking in here, and I knew exactly whose ledger that upgrade should have been credited to, even if the network would never print her name on it.
I didn’t say anything out loud.
There wasn’t anyone in the plaza who’d have understood what I was thanking, and some things you just log and move past, the same way I’d log the shoulder the pilot had spared and the pillar she’d used instead of my bones.
Around us, the city kept being what it had been for the last several hours: a ruin.
Buildings the fire had gotten to stood open to the sky, black-edged and smoking at the seams.
The dead lay where they’d dropped, guards and citizens both, none of them getting up again now that the man who’d kept some of them walking was in pieces on the cobblestones.
A gate at the far end of the plaza had unlocked itself with the kind of soft mechanical finality that told you it wasn’t going to change its mind, an archway that hadn’t been there an hour ago, leading somewhere with a name I recognized from mission briefings and hadn’t yet had the pleasure of visiting in person: Eshkar.
Mavra sat down hard on a piece of fallen masonry and didn’t say anything for a while.
Her canister was capped and quiet, the borrowed hardness presumably gone wherever borrowed properties went once their ten seconds ran out.
She looked like someone who’d just finished a shift twice as long as she’d been paid for, which, financially speaking, was exactly what had happened.
“You good?” I asked, because it needed asking even if the answer was obvious.
“I’ll live.” She flexed the hand that had held the ring, testing it like she expected it to still be soft.
“Which is more than I can say for half this plaza.”
I didn’t have a clever response to that, so I didn’t try to make one.
My bracelet buzzed before I could decide what to say next, the telemetry readout flashing a swap warning in the corner of my vision.
Five seconds, the usual courtesy the show extended to people about to have their location yanked out from under them.
I looked at Mavra, who was already reading the same warning off her own gear, and neither of us bothered pretending it was going to wait for a proper goodbye.
“Zekh,” I said, reading the incoming name off the exchange log.
“Odrance. Guess I’m off to see how the other half of this show is falling apart.”
“Send him my way if he’s got anyone still standing.” Mavra didn’t get up.
She didn’t look like she planned to for another few minutes.
“Someone’s got to walk these people toward that gate.”
The countdown hit zero, and the plaza, the smoke, the broken gold ring still lying in two pieces on the stones, all of it dropped away from me at once.