The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  He turned and walked slowly up the stairs, leaving the hallway behind him filled with the broken, the battered, and the dead.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  THE CORDON SURROUNDING THE school kept the crowds nearly one hundred yards back from the front doors of the Atrium. They heard a flurry of gunshots followed by silence as the police prepared to move in. Then, there was a single shot that had seemed heavier than the rest, more echoing. Greer Nichols had flinched at that one without really knowing why.

  The SWAT team broke into two squads to sweep the school from the front and back. Three helicopters circled the campus. One that Greer knew to be Tournament Medical had already landed. Minutes before, a particularly gutsy media helicopter landed on the rooftop of the school. The crowd murmured at that, and Greer thought it strange as well. Moments later, it soared back into the sky. Greer assumed that the pilot had been read the riot act and told to evacuate the airspace immediately.

  Parents had rushed to the scene, tearfully grabbing their children when they found them, screaming frantically for them when they didn’t. The parking lot beyond the cordon was a madhouse, a cacophony of cries and shouts. Greer recognized two sets of parents in particular: Diane and Mark Willmore, and Jean and Gerald Elrey. Their kids were still inside, but Greer feared they wouldn’t be among those evacuating in streams from the side exits. Greer watched as they frantically scanned the crowd. Now and again one of them walked about, rubbing his face or gripping her hair in her hands, but they always returned to each other, and to shocked silence.

  The crowd looked up at the sound of the Atrium doors opening. Two figures emerged, one heavily supporting the other. Greer cut his way to the front of the cordon and paused. He recognized Ellie right away, she hop-stepped her way forward, dragging her left leg behind her. The right side of her face was red, as if painted in motley. She had her arm around a man that Greer barely recognized. Ian Finn looked like an entirely different person. His left arm hung uselessly at his side, dripping red like a paintbrush. The ring of policemen sighted both of them instantly.

  “Wait! Hold!” Greer called out. “They’re with us!”

  Diane and Mark Willmore pressed forward, but were held back by the police. Diane began to weep and Mark screamed his daughter’s name. Ellie looked up, bewildered, as if they were forgotten childhood friends. Greer ducked under the cordon and ran to where they stood, alone in the middle of the parking lot. Without a word he stepped up to Ellie’s other side and helped prop her up. Ian grunted and swallowed heavily, pressing his arm harder against his side. His white undershirt was a bright red mess.

  “Talk to no one,” Greer instructed. “We’re moving to the medical helicopter in the back.”

  “Who are you?” Ellie asked, her head drooping.

  “Greer Nichols. Your administrator. Where are the others?”

  “They gunned them down. Inside.”

  “And Max?”

  “Dead.”

  “He’s not dead. We’ll bring him back.” Greer snapped to get the attention of the pilot and made a whirring motion over his head. They were almost at the cordon now, and a crowd waited, cell phones and cameras already out and snapping footage. The blades began a slow, chugging rotation.

  “You’re not bringing Max back this time,” Ian mumbled. “He’s gone.”

  Greer stopped mid-stride. Ellie nearly stumbled, but Ian caught her.

  “—What?”

  “Max killed Northern and Hix, and then Mazaryk killed him.”

  “No. That’s not...

  “Then Mazaryk and Auldborne and Tate all left together. Took the stairs to the upper floors.

  Greer remembered the media helicopter’s brief stopover. At least he’d thought it was a media helicopter. Apparently not.

  “They’re long gone, then” he said blankly. Greer’s brain flipped back to every conversation he’d ever had with Max, searching for any evidence of a murderer. Waves of memories crashed upon themselves in his mind. His thoughts were awash in white.

  “Your killer was under your own roof all this time,” Ian said, watching the blood drip from his fingers.

  “But that... he never gave any indication of... Greer’s face was slack.

  “He couldn’t have love, so he chose death.”

  Ian and Ellie shuffled forward and left Greer standing still, steps behind. He turned around to look at the school and brought his hand up to his head. When the tidal swell of media began to surge towards the two, he jogged in front of them once more, speaking quietly as he passed.

  “Get to the helicopter, talk to no one. The world is watching.”

  When he hit the cordon he pushed a path through, his hands up. “Out of the way, please!” he bellowed. “They’re badly wounded and need immediate attention. Hold your questions! They will be answered in good time! A path! Please!”

  The police formed a barrier to either side and lifted the yellow caution tape for the two to pass beneath. Ellie looked at the crowd and saw some students she recognized; she sought her parents, but was blinded by a barrage of camera flashes. A steadying hand gripped her shoulder and led her through towards the rhythmic whine of the helicopter, now thumping loudly. She was lowered onto a gurney and strapped in place, then worked into the hull of the helicopter where her bed was locked.

  A Tournament medic gently raised the head of her bed so she could see out of the window before he began to swab her slashed face with a local anesthetic. Ellie was mesmerized by the flashes; dulled by the window tint, they glittered softly like sun upon snow.

  Ellie saw Tamara, dressed in fur boots and a skirt, her eyes red, hugging everyone nearby. Tamara paused, cried loudly, and made another round of hugs before she brought out her phone to snap pictures of everything around her. Ellie also saw Kelsey. She stood alone, arms slack at her sides. She stared quizzically at the helicopter. Ellie was surprised to find that she felt guilty, looking at her. As if she’d betrayed her. They had been outcasts together. Now they were outcasts alone.

  Ellie startled as Ian Finn was snapped and locked in place next to her. A second medic pulled a blood bag marked with his name from a cold storage locker and hung it above his arm, deftly found his vein with a gleaming needle and set to work swabbing him with iodine as the blood zipped down the line. The doors to the helicopter slammed shut and her stomach lurched as they lifted into the air.

  Ellie saw her parents below. Her father was screaming at a police woman, puffing his chest and gesturing wildly at himself. She couldn’t help but notice he wasn’t looking her way, only thumping himself and pointing angrily at the officer. Dianne, on the other hand, stared mutely at the helicopter as it rose. My poor mother, she thought. Forever silent. Things would be difficult for them. Strangely, Ellie felt no guilt in that respect. If he could, she was sure her father would be haranguing her for the ungodly inconvenience she was going to become to them and to their frozen world. Ellie felt a harrowing freedom as she lifted off, as if she was breaking through the snow globe they had carefully constructed around themselves. A great thaw was coming, and it would be painful.

  Finally, she saw Greer Nichols leading a group of heavily armed officers and three two-man medical teams back into the school. She thought she saw him pause and look up their way, his hand shading his brow, but soon he and everyone else on the ground had grown small, then disappeared.

  She faced forward and watched the medic stitch her up. She felt no pain, only numbness and a slight tugging. Her vision swam but she blinked it clear. When he paused in his work, she turned to her right and was surprised to find Ian Finn watching her with keen eyes of soft green. The anger seemed to have fled them and been replaced by the weary resignation of a man with no distractions left, forced to face his loss; team Green was down to two.

  “Welcome to the party,” he said hoarsely. “The fun never stops.”

  The moment before Max was shot replayed over and over again in her mind. The precise second when the insanity in his defiance became sa
dness, and when she thought for a heartbeat that he’d realized what he’d done. But in the end he’d clung to his delusions with his dying breath.

  Madness, all around her, barely contained. If she hoped to survive in this new world, and if she ever hoped one day to stand atop the mountain, she would need a touch of madness herself. In her hazy mind she pictured freedom and insanity as words stamped on two sides of the same flipping coin.

  Then she fell deeply asleep.

  Epilogue

  IN THE WITCHLIGHT DISTRICT of Los Angeles there is a city block lined with an array of second-hand stores. The street is popular with the LA fashion scene: men and women who pick the new shipments clean as soon as they arrive, right alongside a sizeable chunk of the city’s less well off. About halfway down Witchlight is a small, unassuming door with the word ‘Tattoos’ carefully stenciled above it in black. Few even notice the door, much less attempt to go inside, which is good, because it is always locked.

  Witchlight Tattoo is open by appointment only. The artist and sole proprietor, a thin pale man by the name of Arthur, refers to the establishment only as ‘the shop.’ In a city obsessed with ink, he is an urban legend. He cuts an odd figure: He’s six and half feet tall, almost completely hairless, and doesn’t sport a speck of ink. He also takes very few clients. In fact, in the past five years he has taken fewer than one hundred. Three of those were Johnny Northern, Nikkie Hix, and Max Haulden.

  Two weeks after the Shawnee Mission gunfight, Greer Nichols took Ellie, Tom, and Cy to Witchlight Tattoo. They had done little more than recover until that point, sitting within one of the “lost rooms” of UCLA Hospital, overseen by none other than Dr. Baxter Walcott himself. They had all sustained their first diode hits, and Greer would take no chances just yet with the new ward at St. Luke’s.

  The recovery was somber. Troya Parker had insisted on coming with them. Seeing her fiancé unresponsive on a gurney, his neck a swollen tube, had broken something inside of her. She stared at him in silence for days on end as the machines hissed and beeped in time. When he finally awoke, hers was the first face he saw, and he wept. He couldn’t focus on her for long, the pain was too much, but he kissed her with his eyes closed. Then he told her that he couldn’t marry her.

  She stood back and assessed him then, like one might a demented grandparent known to spout nonsense, but he’d opened his eyes again and they were clear, if watery, and his face seemed to melt with true sorrow. He told her how Mazaryk had thanked him, as he plucked him from the car and prodded him down the hallway that day. He thanked him for her. He said how useful she was. How useful she might be again.

  When Troya begged him to walk away from everything, he shook his head. “This isn’t like a doorway I’ve walked through and can backtrack out of again. This is a wall I’ve blown to dust, and can never rebuild. As long as it exists I need to be on this side of it.”

  “This is your funeral, Cy Bell,” Troya said, loud enough for Ellie and Tom to hear as they lay in beds of their own, and although she stood tall, Cy could tell she was shattered inside. She left without another word. Cy had hardly spoken since then. When he could walk, he moved to the window and gazed outside at the winter sky for hours, as if he might catch a glimpse of her somewhere, but she never returned.

  The three were still subdued as Greer led them through the faded door of Witchlight Tattoo and up the narrow set of creaking stairs there into an open loft. Ellie still couldn’t walk well, and her thigh had a bruise the size of a grapefruit. The right side of her face had a line of pressure bandages like a zipper from her cheek down to her chin. Cy was buried behind his hoodie, sunglasses still on. Tom, who had been shot twice, threw up twice on the way to Witchlight, leaning out of the car window. Ellie offered to postpone, but Tom wouldn’t hear of it. They hadn’t had much access to the outside world beyond two horribly awkward and lingering visits from both Ellie’s and Tom’s parents, and Tom wanted to know about the fallout of Shawnee as much as any of them.

  When they crested the stairs they found that the simple door belied an immaculate and open studio, with an enormous skylight that drenched the chair and inks and tools in natural California sunlight. As they came in, Arthur leaned against one wall watching an old television. He stood quickly with a mind to shut it off, but Greer stopped him.

  “It’s good for them to see,” Greer said. “Hello, Arthur. It’s been some time.”

  “Half a decade, I’d say.” Arthur’s voice was deep but light, and he smiled. “So these are they.”

  Greer nodded.

  “Bit younger than the other three, all things considered.”

  Greer raised an eyebrow at him. “Not from you, too.”

  Arthur laughed, low and rumbling. “I don’t mean to make light of your loss, friend. It was a tough day for me, too, when I realized that the ink I put on people lasts longer than they will. People die, Greer. It’s no great failure on your part.”

  Greer ushered the three in. “Well. Here they are. God willing you won’t be seeing another set any time soon.”

  “The best laid plans of mice and... Arthur muttered, smiling again. “Hello Ellie. Captain goes first.”

  “You know me,” Ellie said, stepping forward.

  “Everyone knows you. And you, and you,” he added, pointing at Cy and Tom. He gestured with his head back towards the buzzing television.

  Ellie limped around him and hopped up on the chair to watch. Cy moved to one side of her and Tom came to the other.

  “This is one of two full-time Tournament channels that have cropped up in the past few weeks,” Greer said. “American channels, anyway. There is one in the United Kingdom as well, and three others in greater Europe. Asia has four.”

  Ellie sat back, hand over her mouth.

  “They’re featuring the three of you, right now. They had live footage of Ellie and Ian leaving the school. Didn’t take them long to find out everything about her from there, nor to find who was still inside.” Greer nodded at Tom and Cy. “It’s perfect entertainment. Half of the world is furious at what happened at Shawnee, and the other half is horrified, especially as more and more details about the Tournament come to light. But everyone is thrilled, and thrills sell.”

  Arthur glanced at Greer, waiting.

  “That’s not all.” Greer stepped to the set and popped the channel over to another Tournament station, but this one had a different cover story. It featured footage of an enormous old mansion in the middle of Moscow, and eight sconces that sat above an archway there. Four of those sconces were lit.

  “They call this place the ‘Black House.’ It’s where Eddie Mazaryk drew his line in the sand. If you’re with him, you walk to the gates and declare your allegiance to him, then he lights up one of the eight sconces there. There are four lit, so far. One for Black, then one for Gold and one for Red—”

  The television cut to a recorded clip of an exterior shot of the mansion and the park around it.

  “—This was the most recent lighting. It happened three days after Shawnee. I believe you’re familiar with them?”

  Ellie’s gaze hardened as she watched three figures cut a swath through the crowd towards the front gate. The woman she knew only from photographs, but Auldborne she recognized instantly. He had the same calm stride, almost a swagger, and the same condescending half-smile upon his face, all the more menacing for his bruises and cuts. Tate lumbered behind him, looking not at all like a man who had been shot clean through the shoulder. A block of ice settled in her stomach at the sight of them, and she could feel the anger like waves of heat coming from both Cy and Tom on either side.

  “Why aren’t they arresting them,” Ellie said flatly.

  “Believe me, we have lodged a complaint—”

  “Lodged a complaint? He terrorized a high school!”

  “Yes he did, in the course of a Tournament cycle. He falls under the same immunity all players do. Arrest him, and you’ve thrown the first rock in a neighborhood of glass houses. And one
of them is your own.”

  “He can’t be allowed to just... Ellie trailed off, absorbed in the program.

  “Brander met them like old friends,” Greer said, nodding at the scene unfolding. When Auldborne reached the front gates, he didn’t even need a key. Brander was in the shadows behind, already waiting, and he opened the big gate and ushered Team Grey inside with a flourish.

  “The crowd didn’t know how to take the English at first. Their part in Shawnee was known the world over inside of a day. You could even hear jeers when they appeared at the park, but when Brander gave them Black’s blessing, the place erupted in cheers again.”

  Ellie watched as the front gate closed and the four players passed under the archway and out of sight. A moment later the fourth sconce burst into flames, fanning the crowd into a blaze of their own.

  “Are you kidding me with this?” croaked Tom, wincing. “They’re really going for the gothic revival thing, aren’t they? Are they sending the crowd after us with pitchforks?”

  “You jest,” Greer said. “But don’t underestimate the pride people have found in their teams. Pride they never knew they had, in some cases.”

  “Four teams,” Ellie said. “He has four teams on his side now, including his own.”

  “The good news is this was a little over two weeks ago, and since then, nobody else has shown up.”

  As they watched, the program cut away from the Black House and to an overlay of the globe, complete with crisscrossing lines like flight paths. The original eight countries were highlighted, as well as four others, although these additions had question marks over them. They were Germany, China, India, and Brazil. At the bottom of the screen a rolling ticker appeared that scrolled numbers and names.

  “What’s all this? New teams?”

  “Unconfirmed. Speculation and rumor. I can say that they have no place at the Council as of yet.”