The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  “We’re running. Guns out.” She turned to Cy and grabbed him by both shoulders. “Don’t shoot anybody, Cy. These are normal people, not a bunch of Auldbornes and Stokes and Tates.” She faced front again and took a deep breath. “Guns out though, all the same.”

  “They’re not gonna like that,” Tom said.

  “I don’t give a shit what they like, I’m not getting blindsided again like back home.” Ellie pulled a compact revolver from a shoulder holster under her jacket. Tom and Cy eased their guns out as well. The pitch on the platform did a somersault and ended another step higher. “Cy,” she said. “Get us to our next train.”

  Cy allowed a small smile and took one step forward, gun hand crooked above his head. With his other hand he swiped an invisible arc across the crowd out front. “Out of the way!” To his surprise, a small path opened before them. He looked back at his team and flicked the hood of his sweatshirt off his shaved head. “Try to keep up,” he said. Then he ran.

  The crowd wasn’t expecting the trio to bolt like they did. Perhaps a speech, maybe a confrontation, a small chance of a shooting, but not a sprint. The crowd broke and jumped out of the way as all three shot out towards the back stairs in a line, but they weren’t flummoxed for long. Ellie heard an eerie chanting behind her, either Bluuuueeee or Booooooo—she couldn’t tell which. She chanced a look back. The crowd had flipped: the rear was now the front, and they were rolling towards them. When she faced front again she saw a new stream of people rushing down the stairs from the streets above. Cy put on a burst of speed that Ellie and Tom barely matched as they ripped through the main platform, sprinting past shops and kiosks on the wave of a growing roar.

  They hit the stairs seconds ahead of the upstream crowd and leaped downwards two and three steps at a time. The concrete and the noise surrounded them like the tube of a crashing wave. They had either to stay their course or be swallowed by the sea. Cy pushed through an unfortunate group of dumbstruck tourists who paused on the stairs to sort out the commotion, sending them sprawling, children and all. If the chants ever were Blue to begin with, they were now Boo. They whipped around the corner like a single strip of weighted rope, out onto the subsurface platforms and Ellie’s spirits soared to see the International platform in the distance. Blocks of sour red street light filtered through the roof upon the gleaming Eurostar train waiting there, blinking at the ready.

  Her heart fell just as quickly when she saw that it was a protected platform, replete with security officials and a disembarkation line. The officials were in disarray, but were regrouping quickly.

  “Cy! Do something!” she screamed.

  Cy ran straight for the shortest line and screamed “Tournament!” over and over again, waving the people and the officials away. The two police officers closest to them both fumbled at their sidearm. One even managed to draw his weapon, but the combination of Cy barreling towards them and the wave of humanity on their heels gave him pause, then the officers were overrun. No one dared fire into the onslaught. They could only dive out of the way as Cy threaded through the counters with a series of stutter-steps, then took a hard left onto the platform proper. Ellie and Tom were a second slower. Ellie felt the grasping hands of the people behind her brushing her skin and plucking at her clothing.

  On the platform, the train sat.

  “Why aren’t people boarding?” Tom yelled, spitting to clear his throat. “They’ve stopped the train?”

  The checkpoint held the majority of the crowd back and bought the three a few moments grace.

  “It has to move!” Ellie huffed.

  Tom looked back. “They’re coming. And whether they mean to or not they’re gonna run us over if we don’t keep moving!”

  “They’ve grounded the train,” Cy said. He cupped the butt of his gun in his other hand and swung to aim at the crowd, but Ellie stopped him.

  “No, Cy! We can make them move. Get to the engine car!” Ellie yelled, running towards the front of the train.

  Cy sprinted past her, face dripping with sweat, teeth bared. He was ten strides ahead of Ellie and Tom when he reached the Conductor’s Cabin. He slid to a square stance and covered his face with the crook of his elbow and with one targeted shot blew the side window outwards and into a million glittering pieces that showered back over him like sharp rain in the moonlight. Ellie dimly registered a throaty scream that rose as one from the trailing crowd. She reached the gaping window just as Cy reached in and flicked it open from inside. At the fore of the cabin, the conductor cowered on the floor by the controls. Cy stepped inside the cab and put his gun into the man’s face. Tom closed the door behind them and engaged the lock again.

  “Either you move this train,” Cy said, “or I do it for you.”

  The conductor blubbered and tried to dig into the ground, his stiff hat bent awkwardly on his head. Outside the crowd had bunched up against the platform. Fists hammered the side of the train and some sought for the lock. The crowd backed off when both Ellie and Tom aimed at them, but when they didn’t shoot the crowd was again emboldened, lurching forward and skipping back like dogs at a grounded wasp.

  “How about this?” Cy called out. He punched every green button on the console and jammed the toggle handle hard to the front. The train whined to life, then screamed, then lurched, then shuddered to a stop. Alarms sounded.

  “No!” screamed the conductor. “You’ll ruin it. You’ll ruin it.” He struggled to his feet and started correcting the console. The train staggered forward in a quick succession of skips but then steadied into an outbound creep. Screams filtered in through the open window and Ellie couldn’t help but look outside, expecting to see limbs torn and dangling from the train like bits of a dress caught in a car door. Instead she saw the crowd safely away from the yellow caution line at the edge of the platform, peppering the train with whatever was at hand: bottles and cans, scraps of food and packaging, even a few shoes bounced off the train with thumps and metallic tings. Tom pulled Ellie from the window as a bottle flew across the front windshield, spraying it down with soda.

  A wave of exhaustion overcame Ellie and she flopped down on the small back bench in the cab and let out a mighty breath through her nose. She leaned her head back against the rough fabric of the wall. Tom plunked himself down beside her, nearly pushing her off.

  “Well,” Tom said, his hands dropping to his knees. “What a charming town. Maybe one day I’ll get a chance to get peppered with shit and ripped to pieces at Big Ben, or Parliament.”

  Ellie put her gun away. “I’m sorry it had to be like this,” she told the conductor. He wouldn’t look at her, or at any of them. He gripped the controls like they were pegs high above the ground.

  “You know who we are, I assume,” Ellie said.

  “Yes,” said the conductor, staring forward. The shattered window was beginning to whine as the speed picked up. Cy slammed the inner door closed, but the whine remained.

  “We have no fight with you. All we want is to get to Paris. Do that for us and you’ll have a great story for the kids, and nobody’ll be any worse for the wear. Can you do that for us?”

  His nod was barely perceptible.

  “Good.”

  The rest of the journey was in the shrill darkness of the night, and then the deeper, hollow darkness of the tunnel under the English Channel. The broken window just beyond the cockpit door whistled like a banshee and the four of them spoke few words. For the first hour, Ellie expected to be stopped at any moment, to hear the power wind down and feel the train slow to a halt hundreds of feet below the water. Would she await the police and prison, or would she and her team chance it in the inky depths of the tunnel, nothing but concrete between them and the water for miles around? She watched the door behind them, expecting catastrophe at any moment, but catastrophe didn’t come. Tom read her fears on her face and smiled weakly.

  “Hey, if the Irish can take a plane, we can take a train.”

  “That was during a round, this is ... this is ju
st a Saturday night,” Ellie said.

  Tom clicked his teeth together. “Desperate times?” he offered.

  When they passed the halfway mark she knew they would see the journey through. Either Greer had somehow intervened or the world wanted to see what happened on the other side—or perhaps officialdom feared an encounter in a tube below the sea. Either way, they would end up in France. There was a tangible easing of tension and Ellie dropped her head, relaxing her shoulders. Cy, who sat himself on the floor with his gun dangling between his knees, looked up and nodded. Ellie smiled at him, and he almost smiled back. She patted him on the knee.

  “We keep moving forward,” Ellie said, and she wanted it to come out as reassuring, but it came out as amazement. Tom laughed.

  When they surfaced near Coquelle the darkness of the night sky seemed nearly weightless compared to the concrete they’d been submerged within. They saw a line of light in the near distance which initially they took for a neighborhood but soon came to see as an adjacent roadway, clogged to near standstill by vans and cars. Almost all of them started up and followed as the train passed. Beyond them was the forest, an inky shade of undulating black that Ellie found oddly inviting. She doubted anyone would find them there. Her spirits sank as they entered Paris proper. When they slowed in approach to Gare du Nord station, they saw a crowd of thousands. Cy brushed himself off and flexed his gun hand, Tom rolled his shoulders.

  “Here we go again, eh?” he said.

  Ellie stepped to the fore. “Keep your heads. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  The train slid to a clicking stop and powered down. The doors hissed open. They blinked in the light of the station, and it took Ellie a moment to realize that there, right in front of her, stood the Noel triplets: Yves, Tristan and Dominique. All three were smiling widely up at them.

  Yves stepped forward and offered Ellie his hand. “Welcome to France, Mademoiselle.”

  Chapter Nine

  EDDIE MAZARYK STOOD AT the round table in the Red Room, his hands pressed flat upon the wood, his head dipped in thought. A log cracked loudly and fell into glowing ashes in the fireplace behind him. He was joined by Auldborne, Obata, and Crocifissa, the four captains in the Black House, spaced at intervals around the table. It was too large for four people and they felt the sparseness as if they dined in an empty restaurant. When Auldborne took a sip from his gin and tonic, it echoed.

  “I was happy to hear that the good people of London chased them out like the vermin that they are,” he said, holding up his drink and eyeing the condensation in the low firelight.

  “Chased them right to France,” Mazaryk said thoughtfully, head still bowed.

  “To three men who are almost, and I say this generously, almost as worthless as they are. You know as well as I that the Noels are barely competent at best.”

  “They have a sconce here nonetheless,” Mazaryk said. “And it remains unlit.”

  “And it can stay that way forever, for all that I care,” said Tessa Crocifissa, her English thick and halting. She swept her hair back behind her neck and fanned her face to cool herself. She mistrusted the French. She found them disconcertingly similar to herself in their mutual love of the status the Tournament provided, but she couldn’t understand their ambivalence. They seemed content. For Tessa, this was no time to be content. It was a time to reap and to gather and to prevent others from sowing in her place.

  “What does she want from them?” Mazaryk asked softly.

  “She needs their help,” Obata said flatly. “She is afraid.”

  “But I can help her,” Mazaryk said. “This house could be hers as well. The French are welcome here too.”

  “I’ll never understand why you want Blue,” said Auldborne. “They are hardly a team. The other holdouts, the Irish, the French, the Mexicans, they’re all too weak to make any difference.” In truth, Auldborne felt every team but his own and possibly Black to be superfluous to taking over the Tournament, but he let that lie.

  “We must be united,” Mazaryk insisted. “I and those that came before me owe it to the original eight teams, and those that came before them.”

  Obata cleared his throat. “I was contacted by my Administrator recently,” he said, voice darkening. Mazaryk turned to him and waited. Auldborne took another long, rattling sip.

  “He is growing ... concerned,” Obata said, picking his words carefully. “They wonder if there is a Team Red any longer, or if we are all simply the Black House.”

  Mazaryk nodded. “It’s an unfortunate name. No one team should color this place. It is simply a gathering place. The United Nations has The Hague, but that era is over. This is the new era. The Tournament era. And the Tournament has this house.”

  “I said as much. That we had formed a pact. One that would guarantee the core tenant of the Tournament in this time of upheaval. That of ultimate freedom and total immunity.”

  “Yes,” Mazaryk said, pressing his hand firmly upon the table. “Every team must pass through this house. They must understand what the original eight teams once knew, that this is the future of government, but only if it remains above the laws of men, and only if it remains true to itself.”

  Mazaryk pushed away from the table and moved over to the fire. He tapped a stray ember back into the fireplace with his shoe.

  “Do you know what young Miss Willmore said to me? Before I left her at Shawnee? She said I was no better than that weak fool Max Haulden. As if in putting him down I’d crossed a line. Ian Finn said that the Council would hang me for what I did, and yet here I stand. They are naïve. They do not understand that I, and now we, are the new Council. We govern ourselves. We answer to ourselves. They will be made to see that there is no line. There must be no line, anywhere. If there is, we become slaves to the line, and answerable to the line. We no longer fight for ourselves. We are no longer free.”

  Obata creased his forehead, but looked down and said nothing.

  “All this talk of freedom and lines,” Auldborne said, waving his glass in the air. It was plucked from his hand by a waiting footman. “Far too philosophical. Here’s why we sit around this table. Because we were first. The Tournament was born through us. We alone know it. People ought to remember their place.”

  A hint of amusement crossed Mazaryk’s face in the flickering shadows. His colleague at the helm of Team Grey was as blunt in many ways as he was refined in others, but Mazaryk knew his value; a bat can ring a bell just as truly as a delicate swish of the hand. His words lingered in the air along with the swishing of ice in his glass.

  “You still doubt me, Obata, I know this,” Mazaryk said, but his voice was light. “Even you, Tessa, still harbor lingering doubts. You both see the vision or you wouldn’t be here. But you doubt the method. You wonder if I can bring it all around.” He sat in his chair with a creak of leather, then looked at each around the table in turn. “I will show you what happens to teams that forget what this Tournament means, like our holdouts. And what happens to teams like the Chinese, who even now maneuver behind our backs, who never understood what it meant to be in the Tournament in the first place.” He smiled benevolently. “Then you will understand why there can be no path to freedom but through us. No Tournament but through this house.”

  Chapter Ten

  IAN WATCHED THE MONITOR above his head with slack fascination, as if it weren’t a live stream of himself, as if his picture on the screen might move of its own accord. He made an attempt to push his hair back but his curls again flattened themselves on his forehead. He pushed back more forcefully, holding them behind his head for a minute. They fell back anyway. He let his hands flop to his waist and licked his lip where it always split when he was dehydrated. Other men might try to make themselves more presentable seeing their father for the first time in nearly a year. But other men weren’t Ian Finn, and other men’s fathers weren’t Peter Finn.

  When your dad has been in jail most of your cogent life, it’s easier to start thinking of him as a cog in the ch
urning wheel of the state and less as a member of your family. When he’s been jailed for domestic terrorism it’s especially tempting to think of him as a cog, rather than your dad. The more distance between the two of you, the better.

  Peter Finn was kept in level two solitary confinement, isolated from other inmates, but was allowed one visitor for fifteen minutes every month. Other than that he showered alone, he exercised for one hour daily in a partitioned yard, and he ate alone. For entertainment he wrote essays with a fat piece of graphite on topics ranging from Catholicism and republicanism to the effects of confinement on mental acuity, for better and for worse. There was a small black and white television in his cell as well, bolted to the ceiling, that showed a series of nature videos on a loop. Peter hadn’t turned it on in years.

  That’s what happens when you blow up a mail truck and then barricade yourself in a Belfast post office. It doesn’t matter in the eyes of the law, or of pretty much anybody, whether or not you thought the mail truck was empty. It doesn’t matter if the country was going through The Troubles. If you do something like that you either end up dead or in jail for the rest of your life. You miss every birthday your son can remember. You force your family to face down whispers and stares, and eventually to move away. And that’s what you do to the family of the man you didn’t kill.

  For Ian, it was more than “troubling.”

  What was also more than troubling was his father’s attitude. He wasn’t openly proud: he was far too intelligent to show such callous disregard for his crimes, but he expressed no remorse. It was as if Peter thought that getting locked up forever at the age of thirty-two was something everyone did. You went to school, got married, had a child, and then for your cause went to prison—forever. The few times Ian had visited him, he got this uncanny feeling that his father was slightly shocked to find that his son wasn’t yet in prison himself. Like Ian was late for it.