In the distance the group heard a roaring engine coming their way. They could hear it downshift and then brake heavily as it made turns around the outer development and a flock of sleeping birds exploded out of a tree. All of them checked their weapons and braced themselves; not a word was passed between them, although Diego spat on the dirt and muttered a string of the wickedest Spanish Ellie had ever heard as he chambered a diode in his gun.
A Suburban that Ellie recognized blew into view, scattering the press again as it braked a hundred feet behind the cordon and slid to rest in a shower of dirt ten feet back. Ellie squinted in the low light from behind her shaking gun.
“Wait!” She lowered her gun and looked to her sides. “Hold! Don’t shoot!”
Yves Noel jumped smiling from the driver’s side as Tristan popped out across from him and Dominique from a rear window. Yves held out his arms.
“What the fuck?” he yelled, accent emphasizing the wrong syllables. He held up a bright pink pager. “I figure you had something to do with this. You having a party without us? You crazy?”
“I thought you left,” Ellie said, pressing the smile from her face.
“This one,” Yves said, knocking his head back towards Dominique, “he’s in love with you. He says to wait. Wait. Something is coming. Now the pager goes off, he won’t shut up. He thinks he’s magic.”
Dominique held out his hands and shrugged.
They stopped in front of them, all eleven now at the gates. Tristan looked at Ellie and cocked his head.
“Why aren’t you sick?” he asked.
“Guess I got lucky where I was hit. Not as bad as it looked.”
The triplets stared at her and Ellie watched them as easily as she could. She knew if she looked away she would bring more questions. The French remembered what they had seen when the Germans attacked. So did Vega's team. They had seen her gutshot and on the ground less than a day ago.
“Seems...” Yves spun his hand in the air, looking for the word, “convenient. You are here, and they are here.” He pointed at Ian and Pyper. “Then this buzzes in my pocket. And we have twenty-four hours.”
“Mazaryk is behind this, Yves. Not me. And you know it. Everyone here just wants to see this through.”
Yves nodded vigorously. “I believe it. But he wants you.”
“He wants all of us. He wants our countries and our homes. And he’s going to have them, unless we do something right now.”
Ortiz held up his hand and gestured at the cameras bumping up against the cordon with a ravenous silence, like koi at a feeding.
“Inside,” he said, leading the way.
Once the door was shut behind them, and all were crowded into the Vega foyer, Pyper turned to Ellie. “Am I hearing you right? You want to go after him in Russia?”
“It’s all or nothing.”
There was a subtle exhale among the group, a grumbling as each weighed her words. Ellie thought about running towards the Black House. She thought of how it would feel if she was cut down in the park, hundreds of feet before the torches. About the cold, numb punch of the diode and the drowning that followed, and about how she would be killing herself with each hit and never feel it, like a junkie gone native. But she looked around and was heartened. She had the French and all their insanity. She saw Diego nod with a minute dip of his brim. She saw her own striker and sweeper, constant as the air she breathed. She saw Pyper already lost in thought, visualizing their approach, and then she saw Ian, and Ian’s face softened when she caught his eye and she thought he came close to smiling at her.
She had her alliance. Now she needed a plan. She held up a hand and they all turned to her. “So how are we going to bring down the House?”
In the silence, they were all looking to her.
Chapter Twenty-Three
WHEN FRANK WAS ABLE to poke his head over the top of the grave he smiled as the sun hit his sweaty face, the first warmth he’d felt in many hours. He threw his arms over the edge and scraped at the grass, the ledge of the grave cornered snugly into his armpits. He braced himself and then jumped as high as he was able from his mound of dirt. He pulled at the grass from above and scrambled with his short legs on the walls below and felt himself gaining purchase. He flopped, twisted, rolled, and then he was up and over and on his back in the morning sun, panting and grinning. He gave himself a weak fist pump from the ground and then let his hand flop down while he caught his breath.
He pushed his way out of the undergrowth and back to where he could see the main path. The cemetery looked different in the morning light. Nobody was in sight, which Frank thought strange, since both the cemetery and the convent that overlooked it were tourist spots. There was a tense, expectant quality in the air, like the first moments when a speaker settles behind the podium. He walked down the path in what he hoped was the general direction from which he’d come in his panicked run, and after a few minutes was rewarded with the sight of Dahlia’s grave down the hill. From there he could orient himself to get to an exit.
The statue of Death’s embrace seemed smaller in the daylight, less foreboding. He felt a swelling gratitude towards Dahlia, for helping him understand her brother and the Tournament he was trying to build—for giving him pieces of the puzzle, and, in a roundabout way, for trapping him here, in the ground with her, and forcing him to think. He had no doubt that he was the only person who understood the depth of Eddie Mazaryk’s madness, how it stemmed from love and grief, and how this Tournament was his tribute to his father, just as his father had tried to make his own Tournament a tribute to Dahlia. He saw that the candle in the hollow had blown out overnight, and he picked up the booklet of matches that Suzette left and relit it. When he stepped back he heard the helicopters.
At first he thought they were coming for him, which he wasn’t entirely opposed to, since there was a chance he’d be brought to the Black House, where Lock had likely been taken. When they blew by overhead and banked off towards the center of the city, and when he noticed more floating about on the horizon like black hummingbirds, he knew that a lever had been pulled and the wheels were in motion.
Today was a day for fighting.
Frank knew that Lock was a fighter, and that he was still alive, somewhere. Blue and the other holdouts would fight as long as possible, even if they knew they’d lose. And Frank had come to realize something over the past months. There was a reason he wasn’t sitting in front of his desk, filing his life away. There was a reason he wasn’t staring blankly at the ceiling of his duplex in the middle of the night, dreading his alarm. There was a reason that he’d been brought in by Greer, that he’d been thrown in with Lock, that he was standing here today as perhaps the only man on Earth who possessed the truth.
He was a fighter, too. And it was time he fought for his friend.
————
Goran Brander moved Lock from the Red Room to the north tower of the Black House. He was his usual, unnervingly friendly self as he led him, his massive hand firmly gripped around Lock’s entire bicep.
“We’re gathering the teams in the Red Room and thought it best you were moved, while you continue to think about our offer.”
“There’s nothing to think about, Brander. I could never work for the Black House.”
Brander nodded as if listening to a mental patient. “I think you’ll change your mind,” he said assuredly. “Exciting, isn’t it? This is the big day! I feel like it’s a holiday. Perhaps it will become one, in time.”
The north tower overlooked the entirety of the park in front of the Black House and Lock could see thousands of people pouring in from all sides, and thousands more already there. It was mid-morning and the world had learned of the countdown. He knew that Gamers and press and curious tourists would be flooding all of Moscow now, filling the streets and parks like groundwater seeping up from a thaw, all in the hopes of catching a glimpse of what was to come.
“I can see why he wanted you here. You’ll have an excellent view,” said Brand
er. “And he wants you to have this—it’s his own pager. He knows the timing of everything anyway.”
Brander set the pager down on a small table by the window and led Lock to a wingback chair in front of it.
“See you later, Lock.” The simple truth behind his voice, Brander’s unshakable belief that he would, in fact, be the one to lead Lock back down to his reckoning after the war was over, pushed Lock down to sitting with the weight of a lead vest. He heard the door behind him lock securely with a slide and click. He looked at the pager: just over six hours.
————
At the Chula Vista docks south of San Diego a projector screen was erected as soon as the countdown to the Draw was made public. It showed a massive digital clock spinning down the time to the tenth of a second. It was just after three in the morning, but the crowd had never been bigger. The shops were all open and the street carts were selling up and down the docks. A group of entrepreneurial fans had been able to rezone a square patch of land on the far side of the wooden docks and adjacent to the infamous loading building where the Battle on the Docks had taken place. They turned it into what they called a “burn station” that catered to a growing sect of Gamers who wanted to visit the site of every major battle in Tournament history. These pilgrims carried walking sticks with them around the globe, and at each burn station a unique logo was seared into the wood to prove that they’d been there. Many Gamers considered a complete stick to be the ultimate symbol of fandom. The line to the Battle on the Docks burn station was as long as a city block and the scent of charred wood wafted over it. Occasionally, a cheer for Blue would roll down the line like a wave, like when the digital display broke the three hour mark.
————
Shawnee Mission High School in Cheyenne, Wyoming, which had been closed since the Battle of Shawnee, had just reopened. The wing in which Max Haulden was killed had been cleaned and refurbished. The door upon which he was shot was replaced and the linoleum scrubbed of all blood, the library sculpture was replaced and the carpet around it industrially cleaned. The plan was to reopen the wing along with the rest of the school, but when too many Gamers willfully trespassed on the property to the point that the school administrators had a hard time differentiating the students from the fans, they closed that wing and walled it off with a wide sheet of plywood.
Nonetheless, people kept arriving, and in a matter of days the plywood was a wall of graffiti in dozens of different languages and colors. The city was in the process of assigning more police to the school and in the middle of a heated debate as to whether or not Shawnee Mission High should be closed entirely. Two days ago a burn station showed up across the street from the back lot, close to the tree where Max Haulden and Greer Nichols had first set eyes upon Ellie. Despite the early hour, much of the student body gathered around the burn station, setting up laptops and hotspots to follow the action. Ellie’s old acquaintance Kelsey, in her lime green coat, and Tamara, the girl who had caused her such grief at the time, were among the students who laughed and joked and swapped stories of TJ Elrey and Ellie Willmore as if they were all the best of life-long friends. They broke into a spontaneous rendition of the school song as the countdown hit the two hour mark.
————
At the Vega compound in Santa Maria, the Gamers and the press were confused. They’d seen all of the teams along with Ellie go through the gate and into the main house many hours ago and watched vigilantly for any activity, splitting their attention between the countdown coverage on the Tournament networks and the compound itself. At one point, several darkened SUVs circled the compound and parked on the edge of the fence, but nobody emerged from them and they still sat there. Eventually the crowd lost interest, assuming a police presence was gearing up to keep order for the Draw.
A short time later the gate opened and out walked Diego’s brother Miguel, and with him was his son Miguel Jr., the young boy who was assaulted by Alex Auldborne, whose blood had marked the front of the door. The press flocked to him. He had never before made an appearance, although he was well known. His hostage experience in the Battle of Blood Hand incited a wave of emotion and debate about the cost of competition that still reverberated.
Miguel Jr. was a remarkably forthcoming young man, and not at all self-conscious of the tiny scars that feathered his face like veins on a flower. The photographers ate him up as he mugged for them, and they loved his father, too, as Miguel stood solidly by his boy with one hand on his shoulder and occasionally pointed out certain things or people in the crowd and explained them to him. All eyes were on the two of them, and even the Blood Hand burn station cleared out to see the boy. When Miguel Jr. laughed at something his father said, the crowd laughed along with him. This went on for ten minutes, and then Miguel tapped on his son’s shoulder and nodded towards the house. Miguel Jr. waved goodbye to everyone and everyone waved back, many people even cheered, and Miguel Jr. jumped up and down in joy.
When the countdown crossed the one hour mark an excited bubble of sound bounced around the crowd at Santa Maria. All eyes turned expectantly to the compound, but nothing happened. The Gamers questioned one another. Surely the teams would be starting to make a move by now?
If anyone noticed that the darkened SUVs had all disappeared, they said nothing.
————
In the Red Room of the Black House the teams from Russia, England, Italy, and Japan were gathered. Twelve men and women in all, arranged around the massive wooden table, some with drinks, others on the phone talking softly with their administrators. The pressure was mounting and all voices were low. The gathering crowd outside sounded like the deep hum of a furnace. A battery of televisions had been brought in by the staff and each was turned to a Tournament network on mute. Most of the screens showed the standard Draw slate. It had many empty slots for numbers and letters, like a timetable at a train station. There was a podium there, too, similar to the one Greer Nichols had used to announce the last Tournament Draw as Master of Ceremonies. The podium stood empty now. This time, the Draw would announce itself.
Ten minutes before the draw, Auldborne walked to the corner bar to pour himself a drink. He remained standing and seemed lost as he contemplated the red window above him. Christina Stoke and Draden Tate watched him carefully. The Italians leaned back heavily in their chairs and closed their eyes and appeared to be sleeping, although each was intensely alert. Obata and the Japanese eyed each other occasionally, as if conducting a conversation with each other in their heads. Mazaryk stood by the fire, in easy, soft conversation with Ales Radomir and Goran Brander.
At one minute, complete silence fell over the room as each turned to the screens and watched the seconds tick off. Five... four... three... two... one...
With little fanfare the Draw slate on the screen started spinning through letters in sequence and the world held its breath. One by one the letters clicked into place, four lines that read thusly:
Blue (USA) vs. The Black House
Green (Ireland) vs. The Black House
White (Mexico) vs. The Black House
Silver (France) vs. The Black House
A raucous cheer went up from the masses outside the walls, building in pitch with each color matched to the Black House.
Eddie Mazaryk nodded in approval. “They are coming,” he smiled.
Chapter Twenty-Four
MOSCOW WAS BRIGHT AND sunny, but it was bitterly cold, the type of spring cold-snap that kills any fledgling buds and reminds people how dark the winter had been, and how dark it might be again. It was the first day of the sixth cycle of the Tournament, a cycle that the competition had never before seen, nor would ever see again.
The Black House wasn’t moving, and so the world knew any challengers must come to them. Every part of the city was crowded, the airports jammed, public transportation was swamped and hours behind schedule. Cars were mired in the humanity that crossed the lanes and the parks and treated many of the city’s roads like sidewalks. There was exci
tement in the air but also fear, and the two mixed with crackling intensity, like high voltage lines that hummed over everyone’s head. Locals and tourists alike were advised to stay indoors, advice that was roundly ignored.
The city was blanketed in live feeds and the internet traffic repeatedly brought down banks of servers globally. The cellular networks over the city had ground to a halt. Every television was turned to the Tournament networks as wagers poured in. The networks tallied total cash amounts and depicted them as rising bar graphs for each team matched against the Black House. The numbers were already past the millions mark and well into billions, to the point where the amount of zeros behind the numbers ceased to shock. The crowds delighted in the more unconventional wagers: a prized racehorse, a silver chest, a music box cipher, a valuable burial plot, organ transplants, holy relics, a set of dueling pistols, a curious map, a rare chemical compound, each a piece with its own history or legend, each perfect fodder for an on-air expose that killed time before the action. Mostly, though, the discussion was on the political wager each team was required to make, and what each wager meant.
If any of the teams beat the Black House, Mazaryk would dissolve the alliance he had built and all it stood for. On the other hand, every team that the Black House defeated would take its seat next to Mazaryk and acknowledge the Black House as the seat of global government, higher than the United Nations, higher than the European Union, higher than any existing organization, agreement, or treaty. The Tournament would become the new global court, and the Black House would preside over it from on high.
What was most interesting about the structure of the Draw— the press and the Gamers were abuzz—was that any one team could beat the Black House and win, but the Black House had to defeat every holdout team to win. Many speculated that this lopsided structure was part of the reason the administrations of the holdouts agreed to the wager. Others maintained that Mazaryk wouldn’t have it any other way. In his eyes, everything short of complete victory was a failure. There was a widespread rumor that Eddie Mazaryk himself had written the structure of the Draw. Most of the analysts believed the battles to be wildly lopsided in favor of the Black House anyway: Blue wasn’t at full strength, Green was playing a woman down, White still acted shaken and conservative since their defeat at Blood Hand, and the French were the jokesters of the Tournament; the color commentary, not any real threat. Meanwhile the Black House was at full strength. They had passion in the Italians, calculating strength in the Japanese, a harrowing dose of cruelty in the English, and, of course, Team Black, past champions, who seemed all but untouchable. The networks talked themselves in circles over who had the advantage, but most settled on the Black House.
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