“What the hell?” I blurted, staring at the knife that one of them had picked up.
It wasn’t the fact that he was holding a knife that had caused the reaction. It was the knife itself: longer than my forearm, with a serrated edge and a black leather handle. It looked like something you might use to saw through tree branches. Or dwellers.
“Never seen a synch before, dirt-dweller?” the boy attached to the other end of the knife asked.
I flicked my eyes up to his face. He was tall, even for a sol, but he didn’t have the muscled strength of my Abcurses; his was more streamlined, a toned and corded body that moved with grace. I knew that he moved with grace, because he was super graceful as he slid upward of ten knives into various holsters attached to his body. When he was done, he pulled his shoulder-length black hair from his face with a band, and then stalked to the short staircase in the middle of the room, staring upwards.
“You’re going to trip over something and stab yourself in the ass, Aedan,” the other boy grunted, still at the table.
Aedan looked back over his shoulder, flashing a short smile. There wasn’t any humour in the movement. He didn’t reply with words, just smiled that smile and went right back to staring up the stairs. The other boy—Johnny, I assumed—was still picking through the weapons. He had a crossbow in his hands now, and was inspecting a few of the different sorts of bolts laid out on the table.
“You picking anything up?” he asked Siret, ignoring me completely. “I don’t think there are any knives left.”
I glanced back to Aedan, a smile kicking up the corners of my mouth. That was actually pretty smart. Stealing all the knives so that he couldn’t get stabbed by anyone.
“I don’t need anything,” Siret replied, his tone still sharp with anger.
“Two clicks,” a voice announced, coming from the stairs where Aedan waited.
We all watched as a dweller rushed past Aedan in a long, white robe. He was holding a scroll—probably the schedule of sols who’d be called to the arena. “But first …” he glanced at me, “there’s someone who wants to speak with you.”
“Is it Rau?” I shot back, not even missing a beat.
“Rau?” he parroted, obviously not even considering that I might be talking about the god Rau. “No, it’s …”
He didn’t need to finish his sentence, because Atti was already pushing past him.
“Willa.” He skirted around Aedan and stopped before me. “You okay? I tried to get Heath—that’s the interim head of the committee—to excuse you from this event, but apparently the schedule of fights came directly from the gods.”
“It’s okay,” I told him, managing to pull my hand out of Siret’s. I moved to the table and Atti followed, watching as I started picking up crossbow bolts.
Johnny was also watching, pausing in his inspection of an axe. He was shorter and stockier than Aedan, definitely able to wield a short-range weapon. I approached him and touched the axe. He narrowed his eyes but handed it off to me to inspect. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to inspect it. I wanted to keep it. I tucked it under my arm and went back to collecting crossbow bolts. Somewhere behind me, a low chuckle escaped Siret. He knew exactly what I was doing.
“One click,” the white-robed dweller announced, spurring Johnny back into action.
He managed to get a handful of the crossbow bolts before I could collect them all, and there had been another axe at the other end of the table … but at least I tried. We all moved to the stairs, and Atti remained, buzzing by my side as though Emmy might actually remove his head if I managed to get myself hurt.
“Go and tell her to stop worrying,” I told him. “I’m going to be fine.”
“She’s going to die,” Aedan corrected, from the front of our procession. “Even if she survives this round, the gods clearly want her dead. Why else would they toss her into a sol fight?”
“Time to go,” the white-robed dweller interrupted.
He didn’t need to give us further instruction, apparently, because Aedan and Johnny were already sprinting up the stairs. I followed behind with Siret—who had taken my stash of weapons from me and dumped them back down at the bottom of the stairwell. He forced me to stay behind him as we got to the top, and I peered out from around his side, looking right down the centre of the obstacle course.
Aedan had run straight into the first part—a section of flat ground riddled with covered holes only an inch or so apart. There were giant pikes popping up from the holes at completely random intervals. Aedan seemed to have figured out a pattern already, which meant that he was ridiculously smart; he was skipping through with ease, avoiding all the right holes at all the right times. Johnny had a few near-misses, but he managed to get through without being skewered, and then it was our turn. Annoyingly, Aedan and Johnny weren’t continuing on to the next part. They had paused, and were turning to watch us. I thought that they were just curious, or sadistic. They wanted to know what Dweller-on-a-Stick looked like—but then I noticed the gate that was blocking their progress. So this wasn’t a race. Yet.
“You ready?” Siret asked, his hands on my hips, his breath against my ear.
“No,” I replied.
“Good.”
One click, I had been standing there, and the next, I was crashing into another body. Two bodies. I scrambled to my feet as a slew of curses reached my ears. I was on the ground after having been tossed at Aedan and Johnny from all the way across the other side of the spike-pit. What the hell? Unfortunately for them, they had broken my fall. I spun as they jumped to their feet, and all of us watched Siret sprint across the honeycomb floor.
“What the hell was that?” Johnny asked, shoving against my shoulder, sending me into Siret’s chest just as he reached the other side. “We’re not here to help you keep the stupid dweller alive!”
“No?” Siret whipped me behind his back, his tone conversational. “You’d rather die right here, right now, instead?”
The two stared at each other, but eventually Siret must have dropped some of the nice act, because Johnny started to shift from foot to foot wearily.
“Nothing to say?” Siret asked, taking a step away from me. A step toward Johnny.
“We’ll help,” Aedan quickly interjected, pulling Johnny back from the confrontation. “Let’s go. The gate is open.”
Sure enough, the gate that had blocked them before was now gone. There was another flat section spread out before us, but there weren’t any visible obstacles.
“Who wants to go first?” Aedan asked, just as something popped into being, directly in front of us.
“Jeffrey!” I squeaked, pointing at the Topian server.
Everyone turned to stare at me, including Jeffrey.
“My name is Vintage,” she said, staring at me. “I do not know what Jeffrey is, Dirty One.”
“Dirty One?” I choked on a laugh. “I was Sacred—”