Chapter 147
sailing from the island of the Wrath-boy. Calm. Crew asleep. Kompis on watch with Mingus, Rougeina on the rail sharpening blades.
floating faintly above his head as everyone's does when they look up, KOMPIS · K-III TESTED · #1,288, and it starts to flicker red.
across the deck: ROUGEINA · K-IV SHAPED · #777, flickering red at the same instant.
looking up at his plate, then across at her.
barking, lunging to Kompis, and his teeth close on empty hoodie. Both of them are gone from the deck, mid-sentence.
The Arena, built from two worst memories at once, stitched together down the middle like two halves of a torn painting:
On the left: a small northern village burning, Trisdel banners snapping, a house with its roof about to fall, a doorway, and a hand reaching out of it. Kompis's.
On the right: a misty black-sand beach at Gate City, the surf full of the reborn, and among them a soldier-woman of thirty-one walking out of the waves in the body of an old woman, stumbling, coughing, reaching for a little girl with crimson hair who is running toward her. Rougeina's.
The seam between the two halves glows white. And all around, in endless rows of stone seats rising into the dark: the dead they've killed.
Faces in grey: soldiers, agents, a bandit, a man in a Trisdel coat. The people Kompis shot, as a sniper for the Order, before he chose the crew. Dozens. Some he remembers. Some he doesn't.
staring up at them, pale.
Faces in grey, fewer but heavier: a warden-sergeant holding a child's drawing of a horse; a kind old man with a silver pen; a lidless man with blood tears; a woman in a crown braid wearing her own face; a man in goggles, wind-bitten; a slender man in three scarves holding a teacup; a sharp woman with a red pen stuck through her hair-knot; a stern woman in bronze spectacles with a measuring tape round her neck.
turning, eyes widening. He can see them: the people the whole world forgot.
looking up at her dead, the only audience in the world that knows her.
Torvik, lifting the child's horse drawing a little, like a wave. Rougeina's breath catches.
huge and cold over the double field, the Arbiter's letters:
THE CALLED ARE KOMPIS AND ROUGEINA.
THE MATCH DECIDES.
The seam between the two halves of the field opens like a mouth, and the burning village and the misty beach slide together, crushing toward each other. The space between Kompis and Rougeina shrinks, forcing them closer.
blades out, not raised, backing away as the field shoves her forward.
raising both hands empty, guns holstered, shouting at the sky:
a long pause, then colder:
A YIELD BEFORE A BLOW IS NOT A YIELD.
THE MATCH DECIDES.
The ground under them lurches, the burning village tilting into the beach, and Kompis and Rougeina are thrown into each other. Reflexes take over: her blade comes up as he falls toward her; his hand goes to Lilla Ulv as she comes at him.
freezing in mid-motion, a blade an inch from his throat and a pistol an inch from her ribs. Neither will finish it.
The Arena forces it. The field keeps throwing them at each other:
The burning roof of Kompis's memory comes down, and Rougeina Swaps them both out from under it, and lands in front of his Subtick shot. Kompis, in grey Subtick, lives the moment a thousand times and finds a version where he misses her. Barely.
The surf of her memory surges up the beach, and Kompis pulls her out of it with a Knot tied to her wrist, and the tug yanks her straight into his line of fire.
Every rescue is a near-kill. The Arena twists every kindness into an attack.
bleeding from the nose, gasping.
Swapping away, landing on the beach, looking at the old woman stumbling out of the surf, her mother, in the dying body.
seeing her distracted, seeing a falling burning beam above her head, and Subticking to save her, firing at the beam.
The beam explodes. Rougeina, startled, Swaps, reflex and training, toward the nearest thing in sight, and the nearest thing is Kompis.
She arrives where he was, blade first, reflex, and he's moving where she was, and the Arena folds the space between them, and her blade draws a line across his chest.
grazing Kompis's chest, over his heart. A thin line of red.
gasping, his heart stuttering, the golden pulse line along the panel border stopping for one beat.
her blade still in her hand, horror on her face, reaching for him—
Her own heart, ba—, stops. The same beat. The same instant. As if the blade had cut her.
Two figures collapsing at the same moment on the seam between a burning village and a misty beach, falling toward each other, a pirate's two best friends going down together under the eyes of everyone they've ever killed.
Two hands, his and hers, landing on the white seam, fingers an inch apart. Two hearts, stopped on the same beat.