"Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." — Michael Corleone.
The grey mist clung to Joel’s hand for three long seconds before the Tear made up its mind, and when the crystal finally spoke, its voice was flat and disinterested.
[Candidate recognized. Class assigned: Flesh-Guide. Rank: F.]
The sound rolled around the walls of the Antechamber and silence, and for a long moment not one of the ten thousand people in the galleries made a sound.
Joel lifted his palm off the crystal, and the grey mist released him reluctantly, thinning back into the milky depths of the stone.
He stood on the dais in the silence and flexed his numb fingers once, because of course they were numb, and of course the reading was garbage, because he had spent two days working out exactly why it would be.
The poison had marched in a neat line toward this single moment, and the Tear had simply read the wreckage and written it down.
’So that is the verdict,’ he thought. ’Alright. Now I get to watch what everyone does with it.’
The crowd answered before he could finish the thought. The laughter began somewhere high in the cheap seats, one bark of disbelief that cracked the silence open, and then it spread down through the galleries like wild fire, until the whole Antechamber was roaring, except that this roar had an entirely different texture than the one that had greeted Vance, because this one was soaked in mockery and relief.
"The golden boy went grey!" a man howled from the family galleries, and someone else screamed "the Carrow F-rank," and the phrase was becoming a chant by the time Joel reached the bottom step of the dais.
Up in the VIP gallery, Mayor Sterling rose from his seat, and the whole chamber watched him stand, because the Mayor’s reaction was the second half of the show.
He raised one ringed fist toward the candidate lines where Vance was still glowing in the afterglow of his red miracle.
"Citizens, the Spire tests us all!" the Mayor thundered through the mana horn, his voice greased with sympathy for nobody.
"Marcus and Elena Carrow gave this city their lives, and their son has given it his truth. But Caelmont does not mourn, because Caelmont has already seen its new star rise today, and all the promise I placed on the Carrow name, I now place, doubled, on the name of Aldrich Vance!"
The galleries answered with applause, because applause was cheaper than loyalty, and Joel stood in the middle of it and listened to his own political obituary read out to a cheering house.
Beside the Mayor, Proctor Harrison said nothing at all, but the recruiter tapped his rune-slate once and recorded something with the slow care of a man noting an irregularity rather than a failure.
Chloe came to him while the laughter was still rolling, and she came with an audience already gathering, which was the point.
Her face was arranged into an expression of gentle regret, the kind a woman wears when she returns a dress that no longer fits.
"Joel," she said quietly, while the nearby candidates hushed each other to listen. "We both know what this means.
My family has expectations, and I have ambitions, and I spent two years investing them in a projection that turned out to be a story."
She smoothed her teal skirt and glanced once toward where Vance stood. "I am sorry. Do not contact me again."
She said it cleanly and without cruelty, which was somehow worse, and then she walked the ten paces to Vance’s side and took her place there like a woman stepping into a better-lit room.
Joel watched her go, and he felt nothing move in his chest at all, because he had already written this scene in his head the night before with only the last names missing.
The herald called the next candidate, and the ceremony ground on, and Joel stood through the rest of the names while the crowd’s attention poured off him like water off a roof.
When the last candidate finally stepped down from the dais, the herald’s amplified voice rolled across the chamber one final time.
"Candidates of the seventeenth year, proceed through the western arch to the Induction Hall, where you will receive your candidate plates and your portal scheduling. Families and honored guests, the Spire thanks you and wishes you a safe return to the plaza."
The Induction Hall sat deeper inside the Spire than any spectator was ever allowed to go, and it had the atmosphere of a place where miracles were filed into ledgers.
It was a long chamber of the same breathing black stone, lit by pale veins in the walls, and it was divided into lanes by velvet ropes.
The A-rank and B-rank candidates were swept to the front, where clerks rose from their desks to meet them and recruiters waited beyond a guarded arch with contracts already in hand.
The middle ranks were processed at an ordinary pace, while the D-ranks through F-ranks were sent down to the far end, where the desks sat half-staffed and the clerks had the faces of people counting years until retirement.
Joel joined the last lane, and the clerk there barely looked up. A plain iron plate was stamped in front of him, and the letters sank into the metal with a small hiss.
[Candidate: Carrow, Joel. Class: Flesh-Guide (F). Track: Support.]
[Portal Access: First Stratum, probationary. Licensed escort mandatory.]
He read the last line twice and understood that he had just been locked out of the Spire entirely, because no escort service in Caelmont would waste a licensed guard on a Flesh-Guide, and the lockout was the least of his problems.
His plan for the evening was simple, and he rehearsed it while the lane shuffled forward. He would purge the heavy metal out of his body over the coming weeks, he would play the broken boy in public, and he would find a quiet way to earn credits while the people upstairs forgot he existed.
When his turn at the desk finally came, the clerk pulled his file and frowned at it.
"Carrow, the legacy annex," the man muttered, half to himself. "Your parents’ estate has an outstanding audit with the Spire, so I cannot clear your plate until the archivist signs off. Wait on the far bench. This may take a while."
Joel thanked him and carried the iron plate to the bench against the wall, and he sat down in the growing quiet.
The hall emptied around him in slow stages. The rankers at the front left first with their recruiters, and then the middle lanes drained away through the side doors, and finally the clerks themselves began to close their desks as the shift bell rang, until the far end of the hall was nothing but dim light and velvet ropes and one bored archivist’s footsteps retreating somewhere into the archives behind the walls.
Faintly, through a hundred feet of stone, he could hear the celebration going on without him in the world outside.
He was alone, which meant he was finally unobserved, and some cold part of him noted that the Spire had done him a small favor, because a fallen orphan planning quietly in an empty hall attracted no attention at all.
That was when he heard the side door open.
He expected the archivist, but the footsteps that came down the lane were heavier than any clerk’s, and they walked with the rolling confidence of a boy who had never once doubted an audience, even an audience of one.
Joel knew the walk before he ever raised his head, and so he had his face arranged into something tired and defeated before Vance came around the velvet rope.
Vance had dressed himself in a champion’s ribbon since the ceremony, and a recruiter’s bronze token already hung at his collar.
Heat shimmered faintly around his hands, the afterimage of his red awakening, and his warm blue eyes were bright with something that had stopped pretending to be friendly.
"There he is," Vance said, spreading his arms in the empty hall. "The Flesh-Guide, all alone in the big dark Spire.
You know, Joel, I came down here to thank you personally, because I have been standing second to you since we were twelve, and it turns out all I ever had to do was wait for you to show everyone what you actually were."
"There is a celebration upstairs with your name on it," Joel said quietly, keeping his eyes on the boy’s hands. "You are missing it."
"Chloe is holding my seat," Vance said, and he grinned, and the warmth drained out of the grin all at once, like a lamp being carried out of a room. "She is efficient that way. You would know, I suppose, since she poured your tonic into your glass every single night for two months while you drank it like a good boy."
The words were quiet and pitched for Joel alone, and they were a confession wearing the mask of a taunt, and Joel sat very still on the bench while the last of his suspicions closed into certainty.
"The seals never even broke," Vance continued, almost admiringly. "Nobody ever had to touch the bottles, because the drops only ever needed to land in the glass.
You were supposed to wake up grey and spend your life hauling crates, and honestly, that was generous.
But you did not wilt the way a sensible boy would, and Chloe says you have been looking at her strangely since yesterday morning, and an F-rank Carrow with two working eyes and a grudge is a loose end, and my father taught me to always tidy loose ends."
Vance rolled his shoulders, and red light began to condense out of the heat around his right hand, forging itself slowly into a long blade of translucent crimson mana.
"They say nobody kills anybody inside the Spire," he said pleasantly. "But accidents happen to clumsy F-ranks sitting alone in empty halls, and I do not see a single witness on the benches."
Joel was already moving when the blade finished forming, because his mind had been running escape routes since the door opened, and every one of them had come back the same.
The archways were warded against candidates, the lanes were roped, and his body was months of poisoned nerves running on borrowed reflexes.
He got his arm partway up, and the crimson arc cut through the guard easily, opened him diagonally across the chest, and sent him off the bench and onto the stone floor before his legs understood what had happened.
The pain arrived a heartbeat later, enormous and white, and it did not kill him, which was the entire point of a blade like that in the hands of a boy who wanted a corpse rather than a duel.
Joel lay on the black stone with his blood leaving him in slow pulses that spread warm and wide beneath his shirt, and the cold crawled in from his fingertips.
Vance crouched beside him, watching him fade with a craftsman’s patience, and that was when the floor answered.
Pale sigils lit up in a ring around Joel’s body, and a voice that belonged to neither herald nor Mayor rolled out flat across the empty hall, and Vance scrambled backward off his heels.
[Safe zone breach detected. Lethal violence confirmed. Compromised candidate located.]
[Relocation protocol engaged.]
Vance stood over the glowing ring with the crimson blade still burning in his hand, and Joel watched the arithmetic happen on his face, watched the panic resolve into a slow grin as the boy realized what the Spire intended, because the great tower was not saving the dying F-rank at all, but was simply delivering him, opened and bleeding, into the hunting ground of the First Stratum, where nobody would ever need a witness or a story.
"Nice," Vance said, and the light climbed over Joel and swallowed the hall whole.
The sound drained out of the world, and in the enormous stillness that followed, a mechanical voice and a hue appeared in his vision
[Ding!]
[Near-death requirement met.]
[The Wheel of Fate System has successfully bound to the host.]
[+1 Fate Point awarded. Current balance: 1 Fate Point.]
A screen of pale blue light unfolded itself in front of his dimming eyes, and it hung there in the frozen rush of the teleport, glowing faintly, patient as a dealer waiting on a bet.
[System rule: Fate Points are earned by surviving lethal odds, and Fate Points may be spent at the Wheel of Fate.]
Joel stared at it while his heart stuttered and the corridor of light screamed past him, and he felt something surface in his chest that was not fear, because he had already died once in a folding chair, and the difference between that death and this one was that this time the table had dealt him a chip before the wheel stopped spinning.
’One point,’ he thought, through the white noise of a failing body, while the grey horizon of the Ash Barrens rushed up beneath him. ’You handed me one point on the worst odds of my life, in the one game where the house does not get to choose when I fold.’
Then the light let go, and Joel Carrow fell out of the sky toward the ash.