“She’s …” Emmy hesitated, and my heart sank. “She’s doing the best that she can. The burns were extensive and the healers don’t believe that the fire was normal in nature. They’re a bit stumped on how to heal her.”
Nope, the fire was not normal at all. It was from my stupid powers. I needed to help her, I had to figure out a way. Maybe the Abcurses would know what to do. I was distracted then as Emmy’s eyes went very wide; she looked up over my head. Swinging around I found a wall of muscled gods surrounding us.
“Hey, Abcurses,” Emmy said, recovering from her shock quickly. “For a click there I thought Willa was here on her own. Guess I should have known better.”
She didn’t sound resentful, exactly, but there was a slight undertone there. When her gaze came back to meet mine, I raised one eyebrow.
I thought she was going to shrug my questioning look off, but then she let out a long sigh. “I’m just not sure how many more ‘god’ situations I can handle. I sometimes wish my best friend could just be Willa again. On occasion. Not Willa and her gods.”
Willa and her gods. I liked the sound of that, though it hurt my heart to hear the sadness in Emmy’s tone. I understood: we’d been a team for a long time, and now the dynamics had changed. The new members on my team were certainly not the sort she expected … or wanted. It was complicated. Emmy had only ever wanted a normal life, to be the best dweller she could be. To serve the gods and make the rest of us look like lazy morons.
I’d gone and screwed that up by dragging her into this.
“I’m sorry.” I hugged her quickly again. “But at least I can be away from them now, no need for the stone anymore. So … there’s that. We can have some family time, just the two of us.”
Emmy was the one now with the raised eyebrow and confused expression. “You can be away from them now? What happened?”
Right … I had forgotten that she didn’t know I was dead. My eyes quickly darted across the Abcurses, hoping that one of them would jump in and tell her what had happened. Emmy was not going to take it well—of that I had no doubt. My pleading expression was met with a range of grins, some lazy, others smirking, but not one of them looked like they were going to save me from Emmy.
I couldn’t really blame them. My best friend was scary. Even for powerful gods.
Five
Just as I took a deep breath, preparing myself for what was to come, a god walked across the stage, stopping in the centre and staring out across the masses. His robes were almost the exact colour of the walls behind him, which should have caused him to blend in.
Only Cyrus would never blend in, no matter what he wore.
“What the hell is Cyrus doing here?” Emmy asked. “He’s the worst of you all, always in my business, touching my things.”
I knew better than anyone how much she hated it when you moved her stuff around. Or lost it. Or traded it to the tavern owner in the hopes that he’d kick your mum out of his establishment for two nights.
“Staviti told him that this was his to oversee,” Aros explained. “He wasn’t exactly happy about the order.”
“ATTENTION!” the Neutral god bellowed, making me jump almost out of my skin. I brought my hands to my ears and glared toward the stage.
It seemed as though half of the other gathered bodies had displayed a similar reaction to me, because one of the dwellers was being helped from the floor, and Cyrus was wearing the smallest hint of a smirk.
“You’re all here because you were chosen,” he announced, a sharpness to his tone that hinted at impatience. He was still projecting his voice far too loudly. “And I’m here because I’m clearly being punished for something. As you were told when you received the invitation to attend Champions Peak, each sol here is decidedly the most powerful of their particular ability, and they are being given an opportunity to train with a god sharing that same ability. WHAT THIS MEANS—” his voice broke out into a shout again because some of the sols had started excitedly murmuring. “What this means,” he repeated impatiently, clearing his throat, “is that each sol will be working with a god. Every sun-cycle. For the remainder of this life cycle. At the end of the life cycle, every single sol at Champions Peak will be sacrificed to the will of the gods—those who have proven themselves worthy will ascend to Topia. Those remaining …” he glanced around as the unease began to stir through the gathered bodies again. “Well, they’ll just be dead.”
Someone started freaking out then, and I glanced over the heads to what seemed to be a small crowd pushing in on a female. She was flailing about, as though trying to escape, and she kept shouting something about not wanting to die. Cyrus audibly sighed, the sound carrying over the platform through whatever means he had been using to amplify his voice. He raised his hand, an exasperated look on his face that was clear even from where I was standing. The crowd suddenly sprang away from the girl and she lifted into the air. Her freak-out got even worse then. She started screaming—not in a pained way, but in an I’m floating and I don’t know why kind of way—until Cyrus flicked his hand to the side and her body jerked rapidly over the heads of the other sols, flying right off the side of the platform as though she’d been a bug crawling on his robes.
I blinked in horror at the spot where she had disappeared, hearing the sound of her screams getting further and further away until they suddenly stopped. Cut-off. Because Cyrus had thrown her off the gods-dammed mountain.
“And you can consider that an early sacrifice. She could have been a god, but instead, she’s going to wash away, unclaimed, a useless waste just because she couldn’t keep her shit together.” His voice boomed over the platform again, setting my teeth on edge. “My name is Cyrus, and I’ll be running this Academy. Don’t annoy me. Don’t get in my way, and don’t throw any tantrums unless you want your blood to paint the rocks at the base of this mountain. Any questions?”
“Maybe you should tell them where they will be sleeping,” a dry voice answered, projected as strongly as Cyrus’s voice had been. I wondered if all gods had that ability, or just the bossy ones.
The speaker was a woman, red hair cascading over one shoulder, braided along the other side. She was wearing shimmery silver robes and her mouth was hooked up into an amused grin.
“Right.” Cyrus was downright scowling now. “You’ll be sleeping in special rooms set into the sides of the mountain. You will have a single dweller assigned to your needs for the life-cycle—they will be kept in your lodgings unless you push them out. Be warned, however, that if you kill your dweller, it will not be replaced. Any other questions?”
He enunciated that last part almost as a dare, and I was pretty sure that nobody was brave enough to ask any more questions, until the silver-robed woman spoke up again.
“Maybe you should tell them how to get there,” she suggested, crossing her arms over her chest, her smile growing. She clearly wanted to die.
Cyrus seemed to agree. His eyes narrowed on her for a click, like he was committing her face to memory, and then he turned to the sols—who were now all too frightened to move, speak, or breathe.
“Figure it out for yourselves,” he snapped. “As soon as the sun rises, your training will begin. You will return to this platform to meet with your trainer—it is up to them to punish you if you are late, and believe me, they will. This is as much a waste of their time as it is mine.” And with those words, he turned and stalked away.