by Kennedy King
“Come on, Galia,” Deidra muttered, more to herself than her unconscious captain. She hoisted Galia up onto her shoulder, to follow a route memorized from paper by pure adrenaline. “Come on. You’ve still got… so much to teach me.”
Everything was a bright haze. Bursts of light jumped across Deidra’s eyes. She couldn’t discriminate detonating panels of the Bangbox from the expanding white inferno of Ares’ core. She steered more from the strength of tremors through her shoes than anything she could see. Deidra hardly noticed the extra weight on her back. She only trotted on.
Heat swept over her from behind. The sensation of her feet lifting off the ground felt eerily more whimsical than frightening. Deidra rode the hot wind of an explosive shockwave. She held tight to Galia, even as the burst flung them in a twenty-foot-high arc. A different story started when Deidra touched down again. A story about two girls in trouble, scraping across hot rusted iron while a planet combusted around them. It might have ended when Galia rolled away and the Bangbox itself splintered at the seams, if not for Deidra.
She scrambled upright, even while their platform sunk into Ares’ dissolving crust. She stumbled from a tilting wall to a sheet of iron folding over itself, off the supports that held the whole maze together. She wasn’t entirely sure how she got Galia on her back in those few automatic seconds, but she was there. Deidra burst into a fast-action replay of the path she’d plotted on the map in her mind. She zipped around corners and hopped clear over ravines that split the rusted maze. Deidra didn’t stop when she reached a now open service tunnel to the Thruway. She didn’t stop even at the other end of that tunnel. Deidra stepped forward just like there was solid ground before her, and fell into the planet-deep free fall.
She almost relaxed, at least on a physical level. Deidra floated down with no need for body tension, except to keep Galia pinned to her back. Then she heard the crash above. Her eyes shot up. A few of the service tunnels let fly a plume of blinding white flame. Between them, seams in the sleek walls of the Thruway glowed the same. The planet core could be just on the other side of it. Deidra had no intention of finding out. She tried clicking her heels, to test the boots. Their undersides lit blue, but no invisible lift held her up like Galia had shown her. Remember, they won’t just blast you off anytime, Deidra heard her words fresh in her racing mind, You have to flip the jet-disks on with the switch on the heels.
It was then that Deidra felt fear for the first time since she and Galia had taken off in the Terra Eagle. Not for the unfathomable plummet of the Thruway. Not for the white hell expanding from the heart of Ares. It wasn’t fear towards the monstrous Daniel. Deidra felt fear only in knowing she had to let go of Galia, to switch her boots on.
“Don’t worry,” she whispered to the unconscious captain, “It’ll just be for a second.” Deidra sucked down wind. Nothing was harder about the final Olympia challenge than uncurling her fingers from Galia’s thighs. Deidra tucked her legs up instantly. Her fingers bolted straight for her boots. The switch flip lit the Thruway blue beneath her. Galia hadn’t drifted three inches when Deidra snagged her again.
With both their weights against it, it took her jet boots about ten seconds to stop their fall. In those ten seconds, Deidra watched the window to the service station pass by. She tilted her toes down to focus the jets under her feet. She and Galia rose to the level of the window. Deidra knew without looking by the glow around her that she couldn’t afford to linger. Ares’ core inferno burst through the walls behind them.
“Damnit, not yet!” Deidra screamed over the roaring heat. She and Galia flung forward through the glass. Deidra tucked Galia under her chest to shield her from the rain of crystal shards around them. They slid across the service station. Deidra’s mind almost retreated behind the thickening wall of fear around her brain. Then the station lit with the close-behind wave of unfurling white.
Deidra might have frozen on the spot if she didn’t know what was in the back storage of the room. The same thing that was in the back of every service station. Deidra hoisted Galia up under her arms. She dragged her to the lockers. She typed in the code that all Gold Standard employees had memorized. No servants could fly the vehicle inside like Deidra, though.
On the cameras outside the planet, it looked like a set game. The white flame of Ares’ end spouted from almost every tunnel on the crust now. Blazing white cracks had drawn themselves across more than half its surface. The audience hung their heads in reverence to the lost lovers, while Yuri floated towards the edge of the atmosphere. He lingered on the edge of his deck, the Olympia Gold Medal dangling by a ribbon over the collapsing world. Any second, he’d let it slip through his fingers, when the light was most blinding, to be smelted with the rest of Ares.
The Forge lifted from the planet, scorching a course for Greymoor through space. The Icebox melted. The Bangbox went up in a single plume of fire. The Jousting Grounds imploded, to be followed by the peak of every mountain over it. The Reverie Lake boiled like porridge forgotten on the stove. A massive orchid of white fire bloomed from the enormous mouth of the Thruway. Cybil’s mouth hung open to call the winner, but the words caught. A tiny black speck of pollen flicked out from the very center of the Thruway’s destructive flower. By the time reality caught up with the vibrant illusion, Cybil’s lips formed a wide grin. That orchid was really just fire. That black speck of pollen was just Deidra and Galia, riding the shockwave of Ares’ last burst.
Yuri had no idea what hit him. His first guess wouldn’t have been a hoverbike, stolen from the Thruway’s service station. Its guide bars imprinted the side of his cheek. Everything collapsed into a blur of motion, and scattered across the deck of his ship. Galia’s limp body slid all the way to the guard rail, and stayed. Deidra skidded to a stop beside her. She rolled out of the way of the hoverbike, which popped up over the rail and plunged back to Ares. Yuri dug the platform heel of his perfect dress shoes into his deck, and stood back up. The Olympia Gold Medal scuttled to the ground beside Deidra, but she knew better than to go for it now. Her rage condensed into a single, throat-ravaging scream as she lunged for it, and Yuri.
He kicked the Medal away and slid aside from the knuckles of her invisible gauntlet in one. Yuri’s counter, the drive of a knee, squeezed the air from Deidra’s gut. She stumbled back, then feigned a punch. Yuri didn’t twitch, but he did catch her boot when she snapped a kick at his face. Deidra swung up her other foot to click her heels. A kick of jet-disks singed Yuri’s hair, and separated the two again. Deidra charged again. This time, Yuri took the full force of her gauntlet. Again, he didn’t flinch. He stared through the condensed air around her knuckles, right into her eyes.
Yuri fired a kick that launched Deidra all the way to the railing of his ship. Her back bucked against it. The wind escaped her lungs, with no sign of return. Still, she composed herself from a heap on the deck. She forced herself to crawl, towards the Olympia Gold Medal that had slid close to Galia’s boot. When she could, Deidra even rose up on her knee. That was when Yuri got to her. Her fingers were forced to shrink back, inches from claiming it.
A whiff of fine leather snaked up her nose when the tip of his dress shoe zipped past her face. Deidra leaped. She snapped both arms around Yuri’s leg before he could bring it back. He tried in vain to shake her loose. Deidra only squeezed tighter. Yuri eventually tired of the game, and reached down for a fistful of her hair. Deidra hardly let out a cry, even as he lifted her. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Deidra gritted her teeth, even while her feet dangled, unable to touch the ground. Then she tensed every muscle in her thin core. She used them to swing forward, and turn her two feet into a battering ram. Deidra drove that ram into the center of Yuri’s chest. He dropped her.
For the first time in three Olympias, Yuri was surprised. He’d seen adrenaline do all kinds of things to all kinds of people. He’d never seen a girl Deidra’s size throw a strike that strong. He hadn’t fully registered it was her that’d caused him a modicum of actual pain
before she poised for a fight. A real one, with real stakes. There was so much more on the line than the tiny disk of multerium on the deck. Two candles - two lives - flickered against the strong wind named Yuri. The two came together to decide if the light would burn on with their fists.
Deidra ducked under a sideswipe. The crack of one invisible gauntlet knocked Yuri’s head into the strike of the other. It took him a second to refocus his vision on her. When he did, it was to fling a kick straight between her legs. The force of it lifted her an inch off the deck. The quake through her body squeezed the faintest whimper from her. She returned the favor in kind to Yuri with an identical strike, ahead of a flaring jet-boot. The sound that escaped him was a bit more than a whimper.
He answered with a backhand of cosmic proportions. There were some in the audience who still claim to have heard it themselves, through space rather than the screens projecting the brawl. Deidra fell sideways. The only way she could think to salvage her stance was to use the recoil. She turned fully around, bringing a jet-powered boot with her. She felt the ribs splinter against her foot. Deidra also felt them pop right back into place on their own, before Yuri grabbed her leg. With two arms, he flipped her completely over, backward. Deidra came down on her stomach. Yuri’s shoe came down a second later. It dented the deck, where Deidra rolled away from a second ahead of death. She used the last of the fuel in her jet boots to sweep the ground. Yuri’s foot slipped, and he fell flat across from her.
Both combatants clambered upright at once. Deidra found Yuri’s face full of surprise. The kind of surprise made it the most frightening face she’d ever laid eyes on. He wasn’t afraid that she’d actually managed to hurt him. He was thrilled. Deidra put the face out of her mind the best way she could think: with a ball of knuckles in an invisible gauntlet. Yuri strafed side to side, around every consecutive punch. Deidra tried another low kick, but her boots sputtered fumes in place of propulsion. Yuri caught it and threw it away easily. He elected to bring his forehead down for the counterattack, which left his hands free. While Deidra’s vision blurred under the impact from the meteor of Yuri’s skull, he grabbed her shoulders.
Deidra flailed with everything she had left. That turned out to be just enough - Yuri released her for just a second, to readjust his grip. In that second, Deidra clamped her teeth down on his arm. He shouted more from surprise than pain, though Deidra did fall back with blood dripping from her lips. She flung again, only to have her fist seized in the air by Yuri’s. He had a different look in his eye now, when Deidra dared look into them. Now they said, enough.
“You don’t even know what you’re fighting. You don’t even know what I am,” Yuri mused. Deidra pressed against him, hard enough for her own heels to slide back a step.
“What you are?” she heaved, “I know that in all my years as a servant I never heard Koslav talk to someone like that. Like he was a human being.” Deidra worked her knuckles like a pumping machine: back-punch-back-punch-back-punch. Yuri took each one like a steel wall. When he’d had enough, he brushed her fist away, and put his own beneath her chin. The blow lifted Deidra’s feet from the deck. She heard the crunch of enamel, distantly, as if in a dream. Her back hit the deck.
“We do… peculiar things, for family,” said Yuri.
“Fam…” Deidra echoed. Her voice stopped against her will, under the heel of Yuri’s shoe. He pressed just enough to open the gates of light behind Deidra’s struggling eyelashes. He gave her the full experience of passing, the luxury of savoring every sensation.
The hopelessness. The rage at losing hope. The denial. The acceptance. The peace. But Deidra had a foothold in the world named Galia. She pulled back on it hard enough to get a foot up. She jabbed it into Yuri’s ankle. The jets knocked him off his feet. Deidra drew in one gasp, deep enough to breathe all her nerves back to life. She spent it on a single statement. The one weapon she had against Yuri. Knowledge. There was never another combatant who paid as much attention to the monuments in the Prelude than Deidra. Koslav had started the Olympia for his brother, she remembered.
“You’re his bro-”
Fingers like steel clamped around Deidra’s throat. They sealed her airway as easily as an envelope. She couldn’t even grunt as Yuri held her aloft, to the spectators and stars. Deidra’s legs kicked against her will, though she couldn’t get her arms to rise. Her face went red, then purple.
“PUT HER DOWN!” boomed the voice of a demon. It was no surprise - by all rights, Galia had no lungs to speak of. They had shriveled and split at several seams. What she forced from her lips was not air, but her very will made manifest. Her eyes were still shut. As far as she knew, she was still dreaming. She hated this dream, though, and it wasn’t going to end like this, if she had a say. “I’LL TELL THEM ALL YOUR NAME!”
“Go ahead and try,” Yuri dared, “You’re hardly conscious. You don’t even know where you are.”
“YOUR NAME… IS… YURI GO-”
“That’s enough. We have a winner,” Galia was interrupted by the voice of another, very different demon. At the first sound of it, Yuri’s fingers loosened. Koslav Gold stepped onto the deck from his personal stealth cab. “I said, that’s enough, Daniel,” he repeated, for the cameras all around them. “The ship crossed outside Ares’ atmosphere. The games are over.” Deidra’s body flopped onto the deck. The faintest wheeze rose from her chest.
It was the first ever Olympia Gold to end with silence. Every spectator sat on the edge of their seat, mouths agape, as every camera showed the same image. Galia, as she drifted back to slumber. Her weak fingers unfurled from around the Olympia Gold Medal. Cybil had to look away from his microphone to clear his throat before he could call it.
“The Dreamweaver wins. Galia Hattel and Deidra Benier are this year’s Olympia Gold Medalists.” The two weren’t awake to enjoy it. Koslav urged his assistants across the deck for them, while Ares imploded into blinding whiteness below.
Epilogue
It was the oddest way to awaken, for Galia. Her eyes blinked open, on a white ceiling. She was unsure about everything: where she was, if she was alive or dead, if anything that had just happened was real. Now that it was all so abruptly gone, it certainly seemed like a fantastic dream. She tested her body, one limb at a time. Arms, legs, toes - it all worked. What was more, it worked painlessly. Galia laughed; a free and smooth sound for the first time in years. Then she tried to sit up. A strap across her chest kept her down, on a wheeled table. She tried to undo the strap, but her wrists were bound too. Only her head had some limited movement. She was in a green paper robe.
“De… Deidra?” Galia tested her voice.
“I’m here,” Deidra answered almost instantly. The sound came from directly in front of her, where Galia couldn’t lift her head to see. She plopped her head back into a pillow, a long sigh escaping her smile.
“I can’t believe you carried me all the way…” Galia marveled. Truth was, now that the shock and instinct had time to course their way out of her veins, neither could Deidra.
“Yeah. Well… I expect you to pay it back in full,” she tried to play it tough, but she was tired. She had little strength left for games. Besides, the Olympia was over. “I… I thought nothing could scare me anymore… until you wouldn’t get up…” Deidra’s bottom lip quivered. A warm bead of water squeezed from Galia’s eye. It trickled down the side of her face, to her pillow.
“Shh, it’s alright now,” Galia found herself saying. Both girls quieted when a sliding door opened, somewhere in the room.
The clack of footsteps signified they had company of two. Before they knew it, their tables rolled right from the room. Galia squinted to protect herself from the bright lights, through a white ceiling. A hospital, she realized. The wheels of their gurneys were the only sound in the otherwise vacant wing. The nurses turned Galia and Deidra through another sliding door, where they undid their restraints, then left. Free to move, Galia sat up, only to find a thin man in a suit. He waited patiently at a
small table, fingers folded. In such a setting, he looked oddly like what he was, a frail old man. It was hard to see him, just then, as the intergalactic tycoon who owned rights to the Olympia Gold.
“I trust you two are feeling better,” Koslav smiled, and extended a hand to the chairs. Galia and Deidra sat across from him.
“You treated us?” Galia marveled. Now that she could move them, she couldn’t stop flexing her painless fingers.
“I got you back to standard human working condition. I’ve found combatants forget what that feels like, over the course of the Olympia,” smiled Koslav. With that slight smirk on his lips, Galia could see how he and Yuri were related. “I don’t want to mislead you. Galia, you are still very ill. The only reason you feel nothing is that you have more painkillers in you than blood right now.”
“Oh,” Galia breathed a single note of defeat. Yet still, Koslav smiled.
“Though, you’ll find the means to seek treatment is rather within your grasp now,” he said. His old hand crept across the table, sliding something. When it retreated, a gold disk shimmered between them.
“Why? When we know your secret?” Deidra posed. Even in her hospital gown, she felt twice as bold now as she ever did. Koslav only chuckled, so much so that a tiny drop of drivel escaped his lips. He dabbed it with a handkerchief from his suit pocket.
“Good cinematography,” Koslav explained, “Whether or not you meant to… you picked an excellent spot to make your hopeless last stand. Perfect lighting. Plenty of cameras. Crisp audio with no resonance, out in the void. You did win the Olympia, by all proper standards, and everyone saw. I couldn’t well have you both go missing after that. Every private eye in the system would smell foul play.” The way he laughed it out, so subdued, like their lives were really just a minor inconvenience, gave Galia violent chills. They dissipated a bit when he added, “Not to say I want to end this love story so soon after its inception. The way you two fought for one another out there… let’s just say this was the first Olympia in years that I found myself rooting for someone other than my brother.”