The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  She raised her head and listened to the night around them. Frank heard it too: a clanking, as of keys jangling in the distance, but closing in. The guard was running towards them. Several guards, by the sound of it.

  “I’m sure they are coming for you,” Suzette said. “He knew you were here, no doubt. He forgets nothing, and he hears everything. Some say that’s why he is powerful. I think that is why he is cursed.”

  She walked down the path and over a small rise and disappeared.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE NEAREST TOURNAMENT EQUIPPED hospital that could treat Ellie Willmore was in Mexico City. The Chief of Staff was a gifted young vascular surgeon, Julio Pez. He ran a crack team of trauma specialists on the top floor of the Hospital de General Mexico where he’d treated the casualties of the Battle of Blood hand as well. Pez told them to prepare beds as soon as cameras caught Yves Noel stating that Silver would “see what the Mexicans have to say.” When more than one of these teams got together, there was usually a fallout.

  Four helicopters thumped in the air above General that day. Only one of them was Tournament Medical. He recognized two as press, which left one as a Gamer copter. Pez swore loudly under the down-pressed air on the rooftop. Soon the skies would be too clouded with Gamers for the medics to land. He stepped onto the landing pad and waved his arms in the air and the Tournament helicopter broke towards him, jockeying for position in the sky. Pez called the ground crew out as the chopper settled, whipping the air around him like a blender. The moment it touched down his crew ripped out of the holding area with a full rig, ducking low as the blades powered down. They transferred Ellie and the tubes connected to her to a rolling bed with practiced ease, like they were bringing a flag down for the night. Tom and Cy jumped out steps behind the bed, shoulder to shoulder. Pez stayed back a minute after the traffic was cleared to make sure none of the other choppers chanced a landing. Everyone was getting a little free these days, if you asked Julio Pez. Thankfully they hovered where they were. He turned around and jogged inside.

  ————

  Tom and Cy sat in a darkened hospital room. The monitor attached to Ellie’s heart beeped softly in rhythmic time, and it was the only sound in the room. Neither man had seen a full diode coma before and they were not prepared for it. Ellie looked more than asleep. She looked deeply asleep, unshakably asleep. Most disturbing was when Pez’s team brought her the adrenal to take her out of the coma. She shook briefly, as if shrugging off a chill, but never opened her eyes. She hadn’t moved since, and although Pez said that her resuscitation was in line with past “pops” the fact that she was so profoundly still disturbed both of them.

  Tom watched her chest rise and full under the paper thin hospital sheets. The movement was slight, enough that he had a small spike of panic after each exhale and before the next inhale. “You think she’d just wake up, you know? Open her eyes at least?”

  Cy shook his head. “This is her first full recovery. At Shawnee the medics caught her before she went under. Nobody knows how she’s gonna react.”

  “She’s strong,” Tom said, reassuring himself, “she’ll come back one hundred percent.”

  “In a couple months maybe. You remember what it was like. I couldn’t do anything right for weeks. I couldn’t even sleep.”

  Tom swallowed. He did remember. “Well then we wait. We go up against the Black House when she’s better.”

  Cy sniffed and looked through the slatted window at the gathering crowd on the street far below. The relentless press was already there. Broadcast lights shined upon the field reporters like they were Roman statues, gesturing behind them, pointing to the top floors. The police were busy establishing a perimeter, awash in red and blue. His phone buzzed in his pocket again. He pulled it out and set it to silent.

  “There is no ‘try again’ Tom. You know that. It was now or never. It’s never.”

  “The other teams followed us to the hospital, didn’t they? That’s something at least.”

  “Either out of respect or because they’re trying to plan their next move. That’s all. They aren’t our friends. They don’t owe us anything. We’re one draw away from fighting them in any given cycle. We are in this alone. We always were.”

  They slept in shifts, one of them always awake and by Ellie’s side. It was a dreary night, the air outside was hot and heavy but the room was cold and dry. Cy had placed his phone on a low plastic table by the bed and it blinked several times while he slept on the couch nearby. Eventually Tom grabbed it and he wasn’t surprised when the ID said Troya. He looked over at where Cy slept fitfully. He set the phone back down.

  Ellie woke around eleven in the morning, almost twenty-four hours after she was hit. Tom could tell by her altered breathing pattern that she was coming around. He put down his third serving of hospital ice cream and motioned Cy over as she opened her eyes.

  “I guess that didn’t turn out so well,” she said weakly, then she threw up on herself and apologized. Without hesitating Tom grabbed a nearby towel and handed it to her while Cy rolled up her sheets and neatly set them aside and rang for Pez.

  “God. That’s kind of embarrassing,” she said, pulling down her hospital gown to cover her legs.

  “That’s nothing,” Tom said. “I pissed myself, too, when I first woke up after Shawnee.”

  Cy looked up at him. “You did?”

  “I never told either of you. Made Walcott swear not to either.” Tom shrugged.

  “Damn, man,” muttered Cy.

  Pez was at the door in moments. He gave a perfunctory knock before he and two assistants came in and moved straight to the bedside. Ellie was shivering and her breathing labored. Her porcelain complexion was blanched and approaching green. Cy and Tom stood aside and watched with concern as they worked.

  “Hello Ellie,” Pez said, his voice soft and practiced. “You are safe. You are in a secure Tournament facility in a hospital in Mexico City. You’ve been in a diode coma for just about a full day.”

  As Pez explained her injury and the diode contact point and what she might expect in terms of recovery. Ellie deflated with each word. She was struggling to fight back tears and Cy and Tom looked away. When Pez set about checking her monitoring equipment she spoke to them. “You both okay?”

  “A few scrapes and bruises, nothing bad.”

  “That’s something at least,” she said, and her eyes welled with tears again, tears of pain, but also of frustration. “The others? White? Silver?”

  “They’re nearby. They told me to notify them when you were up. Vega and Yves asked if they might see you before they left,” Cy said.

  “Before they left, huh?”

  Cy nodded.

  “Well, send them in then.”

  “Ellie, they can wait another day. You should rest.”

  “No. Let’s get this over with.”

  ————

  The Mexicans were the first to arrive. Ellie told them to wait for a moment at the door while she threw up quietly in a bed pan next to her. She took a breath and tried to judge how much time she’d bought herself until the nausea returned. She figured five minutes. She nodded, and Cy ushered them in.

  Diego Vega’s English was poor, and he was uncomfortable speaking it, so he stood silently at the foot of Ellie’s bed, holding his hat in his hands while Ortiz told her that they were going home. They just wanted to tell her themselves because they felt she deserved it.

  “I understand,” Ellie said. It took all the strength she could muster, but she sat up and looked Diego in the eye and felt a hollow victory when he looked away. Ortiz glanced between them and his shoulders slumped.

  “Look, Ellie—” he began, but Lilia Alvarez cut him off.

  “We’re going home,” she said simply. “We should never have opened that gate.” Ortiz held up a hand but Lilia spoke on. “We have family in that house.”

  “Miguel Junior,” Ellie said, nodding. Diego looked up at the sound of his nephew’s name. “It must be h
ard to see his scars. And to remember who put them there.” She winced as pain wrapped around her kidney like barbed wire. Vega’s mouth twitched as if he, too, felt a fraction of the pain. He nodded at Ortiz and put his hat on. Lilia was the first to leave, followed by Diego.

  Ortiz paused at the door. “I’m sorry.”

  He closed to door gently behind him and Ellie reached for the bedpan again, but Cy already had it in his hands and ready for her.

  The French were even quicker about it than the Mexicans.

  “Glad to see you came back to life,” Yves said, crossing his arms in front of him. “It’s never a sure thing these days.”

  “Just say your goodbye, Yves.”

  Dominique pouted, and Tristan scratched at his neck. Yves nodded. “You’re right, you know. We have little time.”

  “They’re going to come for us,” Dominique said, as if pointing out the sun in the sky.

  Yves turned and spoke to him, but also to Blue. “We’ll never take the knee. Our torch will stay dark. So they’re going to pick us off, instead, just like they tried to with Mexico, sending those German thugs. We need to prepare.”

  Dominique shook his head in disgust and silently walked out of the room. Tristan looked helplessly at Ellie and turned to catch up with him. Yves lingered a moment longer, but Ellie said nothing. There was nothing more for her to say.

  “See you around, Ellie,” Yves said, before leaving.

  Once more, there were only three.

  Chapter Nineteen

  FRANK AND LOCK SWEPT through the graveyard as fast as they dared in the dead of night. When they saw ten flashlights crest the hill behind them they shut their own off. They were less conspicuous in the enveloping dark, but they were forced to slow their pace from a sprint to a scramble.

  “It would not be good to get arrested out here for trespassing on dead people,” Frank whispered heavily between breaths. “I wouldn’t do well in a Russian prison.”

  Lock paused for half a beat and looked behind him. The lights had split up and fanned out, but were still moving towards them. “These aren’t police. They’re Mazaryk’s people. I don’t think they have any intention of arresting us.”

  Frank took heaving breaths and rubbed at his temple and the tight scar there, a constant reminder of the last time they had a run in with Mazaryk’s people.

  “Come on,” Lock said. “This way, fast and quiet.”

  They took off through the rows of headstones and markers, leaving Dahlia behind as they crossed the cemetery diagonally, sticking to the shadows cast by the trees and the largest of the statuary, stepping as lightly as possible, only the moonlight guiding them. They passed marble and stone monoliths, statues that seemed to take life in the passing shadows. Men with open arms, weeping women, beseeching angels. Stone tables and concrete crucifixes. Smaller graves, too, and then a field peppered with marble place markers where they were out in the open for too long.

  Lock thought he heard a shout of recognition in the distance.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Frank wheezed.

  “No. Just working on instinct,” Lock said, and Frank couldn’t help but hear the genuine fear in his voice. The graves, the last sister, the moonlight, the voices and the racing thump of blood through his veins all combined to give him the shakes. Lock was close to panicking and their pursuers were gaining. Both of them heard clipped shouting coming from the sides now as well as from the rear.

  “That way!” Lock urged. “I recognize the bend in that path. There’s a gate.”

  The two of them took off at a sprint, darkness be damned. Lock crested the bend first and skidded to a halt. Frank loped to a stop. Lock turned around and ran back down, shaking his head and holding his finger to his lips. They’d been circled. They bobbed around for a moment before Lock grabbed Frank’s shoulder and steered him off the path into the thick brush, squeezing through tightly packed graves and pushing through hedges, making far too much noise. At one point Frank became stuck between a brick wall and an unruly Fitzer bush. He was forced to push himself back out while Lock shot ahead.

  Frank cut right, aiming for the roundabout route, and he never saw the open grave.

  He stepped out into nothing and stifled a scream as he plummeted into inky black. He pitched forward and hit the ground hard on his chest, arms scrabbling. His lungs flattened. He couldn’t breathe. He struggled to calm the sucking reflex that rocked his sternum, like an engine rolling over and over again.

  “Frank!” Lock hissed. “Frank where the hell are you?”

  Frank heard the guttural yelling of the men closing in on them as precious air trickled back into him a whisper at a time. He saw a head poke over the edge and would have screamed if he could, but it was Lock.

  “Oh no,” he said. “Frank, are you kidding me?”

  “I’m sorry,” Frank croaked. “I didn’t see—”

  “We gotta get you out of here!”

  “No! Run, Lock. You gotta run! I’ll only slow you down!”

  “Shut up.” Lock whipped his head around, looking for anything that might help their cause. “I’m not leaving you.”

  The shouting was close enough now that they could make out individual syllables and the different pitches of several men. Lock turned his head, panning the area slowly, mind racing.

  “Lock! Get the hell out of here! What are you doing?”

  “It’s too late,” Lock said, his voice strangely calm. He looked down at Frank from over the lip of earth. “Pollix, Frank. Pollix and Dahlia. War and peace. They’re the key to what makes Eddie tick. You gotta use it somehow. You’re better at this than I am. Figure out what it all means and get to Blue.”

  “What? We’ll tell them together!”

  “Be quiet. I’ll draw them away.”

  “What are you doing? Lock, I swear to God—”

  Lock put his finger to his lips.

  “Goodbye buddy. Good luck.”

  Frank reached out to him as if he could snatch the man and still him, but Lock disappeared and all he could do was try to breathe to slow his heart rate, which he was sure was ringing throughout the entire cemetery.

  The rustling and the yelling redoubled and Frank knew Lock had been spotted. It sounded like great dogs were crashing through the surrounding undergrowth and he shoved himself to the shadowed end of the grave, pressing himself up against the dirt wall. He could just make out their words.

  “Don’t move! I said don’t move!”

  “All right,” said Lock. “Okay, okay.”

  “Where is the other?”

  Lock was silent. Frank heard a wet smacking sound and then another rustling crash. A groan.

  “Answer!”

  “We split up. I don’t know where he is. Hopefully miles away.”

  “Get up.” More rustling. Then someone barked some Russian and it sounded like several men ran out in different directions. One came close to the grave, then paused for one terrible moment, then receded.

  “Where are you taking me?” Lock asked, his voice noticeably weaker.

  “He wants to see you. He has some parting words.”

  Then the sound of a man being pulled away, his shoes stumbling and dragging along the dirt and grass. Frank saw the beam of a flashlight sweep across his view of the black sky above. Then there was a terrible quiet.

  Frank didn’t dare move, even long after they were gone. He found he had tears in his eyes. He stayed huddled in a ball, shivering against the hard earth until his legs began to go numb. Only then did he stand. He could reach the lip, even reach a hand span over the lip, but he could not pull himself out of the grave. He tried twice and fell twice. The second time he well and truly cried and he bit his knuckles to stay silent. He slid down the dirt wall and sat on the ground.

  God, if this is your way of telling me I need to lose weight, I get it. I got it. Now I could really use some help here.

  The cold of the night air mixed with the damp soil to mist the grave. The stars twinkle
d through the fog and he rested his head back for a moment to look at them. He thought about Dahlia, buried a stroll away. He looked at the dirt to his right and left as if there were a passageway there, or a tin can telephone network for the dead to speak to each other. He, Dahlia, and Pollix could have a nice long chat, just the three of them. He was sure he would like both of them. In another time, in another life, they might have been friends. He pictured Pollix like Eddie Mazaryk, only older and a tad grayer, and with a smile. A true smile. Not the smile that Eddie sometimes wore, the smile of knowing you’d beaten a man. A man who hugged his daughter with his head bowed every day would have smiled a lot. At least until she started wasting away before his eyes.

  How Pollix had continued on in his work after seeing Dahlia fade from him, Frank couldn’t imagine. But he did continue. He worked towards his dream of the Tournament. He fought for change in Dahlia’s name, for a world in which no one would again lose a little girl to war. An audacious goal: lofty didn’t begin to describe it. No doubt Pollix was aware of the stares and the backroom comments and the statesmen shaking their heads, but he fought on.

  And he failed.

  And all the while, always watching, silent in the background, was his son, just a boy himself. What would that do to a kid? Frank mused. Suzette’s words rolled repeatedly across his mind: He loved our father as much as our father loved Dahlia.

  He loved Pollix enough to pick up where he had left off. Enough to build a new Tournament, as a monument to him. But not the Tournament as Pollix had dreamed it, the Tournament as Eddie envisioned it: a twisted, totalitarian version, starting with the eight teams that hadn’t betrayed his father. The truth came upon Frank with a bracing cold gust of wind that roiled the grave: Eddie Mazaryk was building a monument to his father that his father would have rejected.