The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  “It wasn’t this, Eddie!” Frank exclaimed, holding his hands out.

  “You actually believe that you know my father’s wishes better than I do? I am his son!”

  Ellie flopped her hand out on the table and splayed her fingers and groaned weakly. Her breathing was lighter and faster, the telltale cadence of a diode coma.

  Frank saw it and became more frantic. “Think about it. It was the residue of war that got Dahlia killed in the first place. She was a victim of men blinded by the pursuit of power at any cost. Pollix wanted an organization that would contain war, not put it on a pedestal! Not make it above every law of man!”

  “Your father fought for peace, Eddie,” Lock said. “He fought against men like you.”

  Mazaryk’s gun hand shook slightly and then stilled and Lock knew that he hit a mark. Even so, Mazaryk was steeled, as if a metal plate slid shut and locked in place over whatever corner of his mind may have considered their words. They saw it in his eyes: all light had gone out of them.

  “I fight for peace, too,” Mazaryk insisted. “My father’s way was good. Better than mine. And nobody saw it. They deserted him, all but the original eight. He was a good man and he failed. I won’t make that same mistake.” Mazaryk centered his aim first upon Frank, who stared down the blackness, unflinching.

  Then came the gunshot, cracking like a web of lightning throughout the Red Room: Eddie Mazaryk staggered back. Eddie Mazaryk clutched at his own heart.

  Ellie still lay upon the table, but in one hand she now held Mazaryk’s original gun and a faint thread of smoke floated from the barrel. She pushed herself back to a sitting position, dragging the gun along the table with the sound of a slowly rolling marble. With one hand still holding herself she tried to stand and faltered, but Frank and Lock were there to hold her up.

  “There is no peace to be found here,” Ellie said, voice tight and quiet, but clear. She raised her aim and fired again, this time into Mazaryk’s stomach. He staggered back and the gun he’d brought out from under the round table clattered to the floor. “That’s why we are here,” she continued. “We can’t bring peace, and we can’t stop war. We only offer the Tournament. The game. We settle scores.” She watched Mazaryk, buckled over and bowed, his convictions and his aspirations slowly bleeding from him. “I’m sorry, Eddie,” she said, and she found that she meant it. “What you wanted, it was too much for any one person to have.”

  Eddie shook with quiet laughter that also could have been silent sobs, then he coughed violently. When he looked up at her his face was manic with a perverse delight. “You beat me,” he gurgled.

  “It’s over,” Ellie mumbled, as much to herself as to Mazaryk.

  “No one has ever beaten me. I’ve never even been shot before,” Mazaryk said, his voice strained, near snapping.

  “First time for everything.”

  “Are you going to kill me?” Eddie asked, childlike in his forthrightness. “I wouldn’t blame you.”

  The eagerness in his voice plucked at Ellie’s heart. These were the words of a boy who wanted desperately to hold his little sister again, who would do anything for one more day with his father. Ellie became heavier and heavier in the steadying grip of Frank and Lock.

  “You marked me once, Eddie. Remember? This scar on my face, that’s from you.”

  Eddie blanched, but he nodded and closed his eyes, prepared for her retribution. She pushed away from Frank and Lock and with the last of her strength she staggered towards him and grabbed him by the jacket and he was forced back against the mantle of the fireplace.

  “Here’s my mark for you,” she whispered, and she grabbed him by the neck with the hand she’d used to staunch her diode bleed and tilted his head up to expose his throat. She held him there and felt the numbness spread across her own stomach. She put her lips close to his ear.

  “See you next time, Eddie,” she whispered. Then she kissed him lightly on the forehead.

  She pushed off of him to stagger back a pace then shot him in the head. The effort and the kickback threw her into Frank’s arms and she leaned back upon him, her strength gone. Mazaryk collapsed forward, crumbling onto the ground in front of the fireplace, his head coming to rest underneath the table. His eyes closed and his breathing shifted as the coma overtook him.

  The Black House was defeated.

  There was a prolonged silence between the three left standing in the Red Room as each of them let events catch up with them. It was so foreign and unnatural to see Eddie Mazaryk on the ground that they stared at him for a time. Then Ellie’s head began to dip in hitches as if she was falling asleep, so Frank spoke to her.

  “I want to come clean here. I sort of thought you had a chance to win, okay? But to be honest, I thought we’d all be dead by now. So I’m not really sure what to do next.”

  “Me neither,” Lock admitted.

  Ellie smiled, her eyes closed, her weight upon Frank.

  “Take me to the window,” she whispered. Lock supported her under one shoulder while Frank grabbed her by the other and together the two men led her to the tall window of red glass on the left side of the fireplace. It was sectional, and Frank found a latch in the middle. He popped it open and swung the middle portion of the window outward. The clean light of a bright spring afternoon poured inside, chasing away the red darkness. They were overlooking the tens of thousands who gathered below, stretching beyond the park and into the streets, a sprinkled sea of colors as far as the eye could see. It took the crowd a moment to find her, she was so small against the face of the house, and the smoke from the now extinguished fire obscured her until the helicopters buffeted it away. There was an expectant silence when her presence became known, like the pause after a blinding flash of purple lightning, before the thunder comes.

  When she managed to raise her head and opened her eyes to behold them, the crowd crackled. When she balled her one good hand into a fist and raised it in victory, the thunder came.

  Epilogue

  IT TOOK THE GAMERS less than twenty-four hours to piece together the day’s battles using a combination of eyewitness accounts inside and outside of the house as well as video footage. In that time the administrators of the four teams that had constituted the Black House made formal concessions awarding the sixth Tournament cycle to Blue, the last team standing. Black was the first to concede, in a brief written statement signed by Eddie Mazaryk himself:

  Blue has won. The Black House is disbanded. The Tournament goes on.

  -E.M.

  The statement was accompanied by closed-circuit footage from the surveillance system within the Black House that showed the fight in the Red Room and in the surrounding hallways. The video immediately went viral.

  With Black’s concession made public all wagers were free to be paid. The world marveled as treasure of all kinds switched hands and then marveled further at rampant speculation that what was made public was only the iceberg’s slightest tip. Speculation that Blue might take over where Black left off, by uniting the eight original teams and policing the growth of the Tournament, was dismissed when the Council of Administrators, now free of any undue influence from the Black House, declared that any nation that wanted to field a team in the Tournament would be given the diode system and the opportunity to do so. The Council also stressed that any nation that took the opportunity was fair game when the pagers went off, no matter how prepared they were.

  Greer Nichols issued a statement on behalf of the convalescing Team Blue that said they would not accept the individual victory, and that the defeat of the Black House came at the hands of a temporary alliance between all four holdout teams. Ellie just happened to be the last one standing. Gamers agreed to an amendment in the rapidly growing Tournament lore that listed Blue as the victor. In their place they marked the sixth cycle as won by the Blue Alliance.

  China and Germany, still on the mend, were finally given the shots they so badly wanted, and were recognized as teams Jade and Amber, respectively. A flurry of s
election and training began as people around the world clamored for their own country’s representation. In the first week after the Battle of the Black House ten new teams were declared as works in progress, including India, Sweden, South Africa, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

  By far the most frequent topic of conversation across the Tournament sphere was Ellie Willmore herself. The world had seen her gunned down outside the Vega compound in Santa Maria, and yet less than two days later she spearheaded the attack on the Black House. There were three schools of thought here: The first was that she wasn’t hurt as badly as it looked. The second, held mostly by fans of Blue, was that she persisted through an abundance of grit knowing what was at stake. The third was that something had healed her. Greer Nichols and Team Blue were mum. Dr. Baxter Walcott wasn’t.

  Walcott’s services and expertise were suddenly in high demand. He refused to administer the diode system to any of the new teams, a symbolic gesture at this point, but he did state he would dedicate his life to patching up the “poor fools” who were “entrapped” by the “absurd allure” of this “insane global obsession.” During an interview the following week on one of the Tournament networks a flustered Baxter Walcott dropped the news that he’d administered a dose of what he called a “vascular steroid” to Ellie to facilitate her recovery because of the pressing need for her coalition to go forth and stop Eddie Mazaryk from turning “what was already a bad idea into something immeasurably worse.” He said he would make the steroid available to all Tournament doctors to use at their discretion, but noted that while it might help alleviate certain dire injuries, it exponentially exacerbated others, and if administered, “practically guaranteed the death of the patient in the near term, if exposed to further diode trauma.” He added: “You might as well save me the trouble and put a bullet in your brain right now.”

  The interview set off a firestorm of guesswork as to who had already taken the steroid and who might in the future, and a raging debate as to whether or not it was worth it. Baxter Walcott soon withdrew from the public eye and only issued statements and agreed to interviews by and through his official spokesperson: Sarah Walcott. With her at his side, his appearances and articles were equally as informative but notably less hysterical.

  At the Vega compound, Team White was coalescing in relative peace. Federal and State officials, as well as several prominent television personalities and celebrities, made public pleas to give Diego and his team time and space to heal and return stronger than ever, for the greater glory of Mexico. So far it was working. Three weeks after the Battle of the Black House, however, there was a knock upon the gate. Diego himself opened the front door. He wore thick sunglasses against the sunlight that still nauseated him and his hair was thinner. He scratched awkwardly at his exposed head but he looked otherwise stable, dressed in his trusty boots and jeans. When he saw who attended to him he buzzed the gate open and slowly limped out onto his porch, taking each step with great care.

  Frank and Lock walked through the gate and up the driveway to where Diego had eased himself into his favorite rocking chair, since returned to the porch. Frank stood sheepishly in front of him for several moments and Diego looked at him, puzzled.

  “Go on, Frank,” Lock urged.

  “Right. Uh. Hello. I am Frank Youngsmith I have been assigned to carry this package to you as a duly appointed courier under the auspices of the Council of Administrators for the Tournament sign here please.”

  “Slow down, Frank.”

  “Sorry. Please sign here to acknowledge that you have received the package and then I will need a thumbprint endorsement—”

  “Frank, he doesn’t speak English.”

  “Oh, uhm. Hola. Me llamo Frank Youngsmith—”

  “Give me this,” Lock said, snatching the package. “Hi Diego. Nice work at the Black House. This is from Blue.” He handed the package to Diego, who shook briefly with quiet laughter.

  Frank unzipped a fanny pack that hung low around his ample waist and took his own, brand new handheld from within.

  “Press here,” Frank said proudly, holding the pad out to him. Diego thumbed it and when it beeped Frank beamed. Diego thanked them both and opened the box. Inside was his hat, refashioned and mended and steam cleaned. Diego set it on his head, confirmed its fit, and then leaned back in his chair. He closed his eyes and smiled as he rocked.

  “Adios, Diego,” Frank said.

  Diego tipped his hat to them and could hear them bickering like two old men as they walked away:

  “Okay Frank, first thing, you’re not taking a census. You’re delivering a package. You can lighten up a little.”

  “Are you seriously telling me to lighten up? You?”

  Two days later they showed up at the Chat D’argent in Paris where the Noel triplets gamely recovered. The three refused to be moved despite the crowds, and insisted that the low humming sound of all the money they were making below them was the trick to a speedy recovery. Their delivery was a prototype keychain of the Roman numeral three, set in stamped iron. The mark of Blue. A signed photograph of Cy, Tom, and Ellie standing mysteriously in a blue gloaming accompanied the keychain. Yves laughed until he came close to vomiting and then tossed it in the trash. Dominique would later retrieve it under cover of night.

  Pyper Hurley healed herself in the Tournament wing of Cork University Hospital in Ireland. She was there for twenty-two days, and on the twenty-third day she disappeared. The next day Green Admin issued a statement on her behalf that said she was doing well and living with her family far from the Tournament’s reach where she had finally found a measure of peace. She was resigning her captaincy effective immediately. She’d been proud to serve, but the team she knew was gone, and it was time for Ireland to move on with a trio better suited to the new era.

  Ellie spent most of her own recovery analyzing footage of Ian and Auldborne’s fight and their fall from the window. Every angle showed the same thing: The two, clasped together, fell into the crowd, were violently swarmed like sugar on an ant hill, and when Tournament Medical finally cut through the fray, only Auldborne remained. He was splayed out on the grass, unconscious, but not dead. The medics eventually revived him, but they could not restore him. His back was broken at the t12 vertebrate and he was confined to a wheelchair, most likely for life. But he wasn’t diminished. One month to the day after the Battle of the Black House he made an appearance in his chair, a gleaming silver and scarlet contraption wheeled by an assistant. He was stately and calm in an immaculate suit with a tartan blanket covering his legs. He had his revolver in his lap and Draden Tate and Christina Stoke at his side. He stated that if anyone had a problem with his continued leadership of Grey, by all means, they should challenge him.

  After a lengthy silence, he called for Ian Finn’s head.

  Of Ian Finn, there was no trace. No Tournament hospital claimed him as a patient, and no morgue held him as a body. Ellie and Greer, along with legions of Gamers, searched through hours of footage in vain. Greer even contacted Father Darby, Green’s administrator, but Darby was unreachable. Finn’s mother was unaccounted for, and his father was silent from his cell. Still, Ellie pushed Greer to use all resources at his disposal. Greer was able to track down the Tournament Medical ground crew that first responded to Alex Auldborne, but they could only confirm that the section around the fall was like a war zone, and that by the time they fought their way through, Auldborne was alone. Curiously, though, one medic reported that two adrenal shots were missing from his cache back at the ambulance.

  Ellie searched on. In online Tournament forums there were posts from Gamers who swore they were right there where Ian had fallen and many of them attested to a similar scene: A small cadre of men had swarmed the two bodies before the rest of the crowd, as if they were prepared for it. Then all hell broke loose. There was brawling and smoke and flashes of light and the helicopters made a deafening roar, and then Ian was gone. One post in particular struck Ellie: A man claiming an eyewitness account said
that before he’d been knocked over in the melee he saw men rush in as well, and he claimed that all of them wore the same golden pin on their collars. After being badgered for more details, he admitted that he could have been mistaken, and soon after the post was deleted.

  Once they were mobile again, Ellie moved her team back to Wyoming where they began plans to refurbish their house by the Cheyenne Plaza, across from the floodplain. Cy moved in to an adjacent property with Troya so that they could find some peace if they wanted to, although they spent most of their time in the main house with Ellie and Tom. Their first guests were Ellie’s parents, Dianne and Mark Willmore, who seemingly aged a decade in three months. They were mostly polite. Mark made a crass comment about the presumptive size of the property and Dianne sniffed at the couch in the living room, but they brought over a bottle of wine, and even if they didn’t stay for a drink, Ellie counted it as a spectacular first step.

  Tom proposed a team rule that they go out and walk the Plaza once a week at the same designated time, after the fashion of the Noel triplets. At first, it was a mob scene. The three had hardly made it off of their property when they were mobbed by fans and press. Ellie felt that old fear and her feet stuck fast, but Tom urged her on with some small pressure to her back, and with Cy cutting a slim path they managed to get nearly fifteen feet in three hours of signing, posing, and glad-handing. Afterwards they were so exhausted they went to bed without dinner and slept through breakfast. Soon enough, though, the mayhem became manageable and the crowd came to understand that they had their one day of the week. Also, once the three began to wear their weapons openly, in a holster with their hands at the ready, the crowd pressed less.

  Only once in the ensuing months did Blue run into trouble. They were walking the plaza on their weekly routine, waving and signing autographs and shaking hands, when they came upon three men in fatigues who had pushed clear a small square of the street. Cy pointed them out to Ellie, who stopped, took a deep breath, and rested her hand on her holstered gun.