Seduction

by Jaymin Eve

  A louder wave of murmuring swept through the arena, and several of the rows of waiting sols jumped to their feet, craning over and around each other to spot who the new contestant was. I didn’t bother looking—my attention was all on Aros. The mischief in his face had been chased away by annoyance, and he was staring our way, as though sharing his annoyance with us. It was nice of him to share and everything, but I had no damn idea what was happening. I apparently wasn’t a part of their team-effort secret plan.

  “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Yael muttered.

  He didn’t sound alarmed, but the other Abcurses had gone quiet, their attention on the sands.

  “What wasn’t supposed to happen?” I asked. “And actually … what was supposed to happen? You can tell me what’s going on. I’m great with secrets. I once didn’t tell Emmy that her dress was tucked into the back of her underwear for a whole sun-cycle. Okay—to be honest, I never told her. Mostly because I didn’t realise she wasn’t doing it on purpose. I thought it was a new fashion statement, the first one from Emmy that seemed fun in any way. Long story short, she got sent home from school with a warning for exposing herself.”

  I could feel the heat of four sets of eyes focussing on me, all giving me that look that I was growing used to by now. That here we go again look. I ignored them all to finish my story, because I wasn’t going to let them intimidate me out of it just yet.

  “My mother was the one in charge of punishing Emmy, and she—” I squinted at the form walking into the middle of the arena, toward Aros.

  “She what?” Coen prodded, almost begrudgingly.

  I squinted harder, even though I could see perfectly fine. I just … couldn’t actually believe what I was seeing. My eyes darted over the wild mess of blonde hair, and the familiar, stumbling walk. I couldn’t see the woman’s face … but I didn’t need to.

  “Your mother what?” Siret demanded.

  “My mother is about to battle a god of Seduction,” I found myself saying, my own tone sounding completely dull and emotionless. “She’s about to battle my god of Seduction. In a fight. With powers. Here. Now. She’s here. Now. In the arena. About to battle—”

  “Fuck,” Yael cursed. “Someone grab her before she—”

  I had no idea who he was talking about, because I was already slipping away from them. I intend to beat them to the arena. I intend to beat them to the arena. I intend to beat them to the—

  “Gods-dammit, Willa!” Siret shouted from behind me. “That’s not how it works!”

  I pumped my legs harder and gritted my teeth, focussing with everything I had, until the sunlight broke out across my forehead and the surface beneath my boots gave way to sand.

  I spun immediately, holding both of my hands up to the four gods appearing directly before me, murder in their eyes.

  “One more step and I’ll take my clothes off!” I warned them. “I’ll get naked and use it to cause Chaos everywhere and then I’ll steal my mother and … and kick Three in the ball—”

  “We’ll stay,” Coen cut across me. “Go and fetch your mother. It’s clearly what they want, otherwise they would have never brought her out here.”

  I nodded at him, and cast a quick glance to the others, just to make sure they weren’t going to fight me on the decision, before I spun and ran toward the vision from my not-so-distant past. Aros was staring from me, to my mother, and back again. Maybe he could see the resemblance, or maybe he was just reading the look of panic on my face. She had stopped moving toward him, but she wasn’t turning—she was focussed. I skidded to a stop right behind her, and reached out hesitantly. I was a little put-off at how still she had become, and the feeling only increased as she turned and I met her eyes. I could feel my stomach sinking, a heavy dread settling there, mixed with disbelief and hysteria. It edged up, working its way through my body.

  “Mum?” I squeaked out, the word catching on a sob.

  “That is not my name,” she replied, her voice formal and metallic-sounding. “I am called Donald.”

  “Mum?” I screeched, much louder this time.

  “My observation is that this Sacred One is broken,” she announced, turning to Aros and pointing at me. “Should I call for a healer?”

  Aros was at my side in a blink, his arms winding around me from behind, tucking me in against his chest. I wasn’t sure whether he was restraining me or comforting me. I was too busy trying to process what was standing in front of me, and what it meant. The announcer was speaking again, but the buzzing of panic was too loud in my ears to make out what the voice was saying. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a door opening at the base of the arena, beneath the god-box, and several bodies moving through onto the sands.

  “Willa …” Aros was whispering my name, his arms tightening around me.

  I still couldn’t focus properly. The woman before me wavered, and I could feel a tingling at the base of my skull, a darkness creeping into the edges of my vision.

  No! I couldn’t let the Chaos take over right now. I wrangled with my focus, trying to direct it back to my mother, but the swarm of bodies spilling into the arena was growing larger with every passing moment, until I was forced to turn and confront the scene. Tears were spilling into my vision but I swiped them away, and suddenly the bodies weren’t just bodies, but servers. And they weren’t just swarming, they were charging. Most of them were armed with weapons: not the rudimentary kind that you would expect them to have, but the fancy, ornate kind that you would expect the gods to have.

  I stumbled back a step and grabbed onto the arm of my mother—Donald—the server. She glanced to my hand on her arm, as though surprised, but then seemed to forget about me as the other Abcurses appeared, slowly forming a shield around us.

  “You need to get out of here!” Coen yelled over his shoulder. “The gods want to punish us, and they’ve finally figured out how. You need to leave—” He paused to wrestle an axe from the hands of a server that had tried to swing in the general direction of his torso. He threw the axe aside, raised his fist, and brought it crashing down on the server’s head. I watched as the poor man dropped immediately to the ground, and then as Coen took down another four of them.

  “You need to leave because these servers aren’t going to stop.” Yael was shouting this time, throwing aside a spear. “They’ll attack all the sols and dwellers at Blesswood until they can get to you. We can’t protect everyone here unless you’re already safe.”

  I considered arguing, but they were right about one thing. The others needed protection, and that included my mother and Emmy.

  “I’ll get carriages and pull them up outside the arena!” I grabbed my mother’s arm and pulled her toward the entrance of the arena, almost surprised to see that the path was clear ahead of me. The gods had thought that I would stay and fight … and they were partly right. I had every intention of coming back and fighting, but I needed to take care of Emmy first.

  “You need to obey me, right?” I asked my mother, pulling her up to the first row of seats at the very back of the arena.

  All of the students were staring, almost climbing over each other to see into the arena, but some had taken their attention away to watch my progress.

  “Yes, Sacred One. Of course. Anything you des—”

  “Good.” I pointed at the stand before us. “I need you to help evacuate all these people.”

  “Where should I evacuate them to, Sacred One?”

  “Back to their dorm rooms.”

  She nodded, and then began to walk off, shouting out orders to evacuate. I watched her for a click; I was frozen, unable to continue in my task. She was shouting, but her voice was still cold and ineffectual. It didn’t sound like my mother’s. And my mother certainly wouldn’t have been able to follow such a simple task without falling over herself or being bribed to do it in the first place.

  It’s still her, a voice tried to whisper in the back of my mind. You can’t think away the reality. That’s your mother. They�
��ve done something to her. She’s a server now. That means … that means … she must have …

  “Everyone needs to evacuate!” I yelled, as loudly as I could. I needed to drown out the voice of reason in my head. “Evacuate back to your dorm rooms! It’s for your own safety! Everyone please evacuate!”

  Only a few of the sols followed my order, but once people began to move from the stands, more followed their lead, and soon everyone was standing and shuffling toward the exits. After a few clicks, they started running, a panicked rush of noise swelling around me. I could see some of the servers climbing the walls on the other side of the arena, knives between their teeth as though they were specially-designed assassins sneaking into a building full of tokens. I had no idea what a group of servers would do with a building full of tokens, though. They would probably just end up cleaning them all and then stacking them neatly, before sneaking right back out the way they had come.

  I turned to the barrier behind me and placed my hands against it, leaning over a little to see the wall beneath. Sure enough, the servers had started to swarm there as well. They still looked so cold, so inhuman, but there was something frightening about them now. A being created for the sole purpose of blindly following the orders of the narcissistic gods really shouldn’t have been allowed to handle knives. There were two right beneath me: one of them had a wicked-looking spear that he poked up in my direction, while the other had what used to be a spear, but was now a broken-off, wooden staff. She must have lost the pointy end in the fighting down below.

  I swiped out haphazardly for the spear that was still intact, but one of the sols behind me knocked into my back, sending me further over the barrier than I had intended to lean, and I was so busy scrambling for balance that I simply grabbed onto the only thing my fingers could reach, and yanked it back up over the barrier with me. There was a little resistance at first—the server was having enough trouble as it was trying to climb the wall—but they eventually gave up their war with the spear and I jumped back from the barrier. I spun around, turned the spear in my hands, and aimed the pointy end at the hand that had just slapped against the surface of the barrier. A face soon followed: female, expressionless, bald.

  “You have taken my designated Order Stick,” she told me.

  “Your Order-what-now?” I replied, glancing down at the tip of the spear. It was the broken one. Of course it was a broken one. It looked like a splintered broom-handle.

  The server pulled her torso over the barrier, and then swung herself up, swinging her legs around and dropping to her feet in front of me.

  “Order,” she said, making a stabbing motion as though she still held the spear. “Order. Order. Order. It is an Order Stick.”

  “Ohh …” I drew out the word, trying to tell myself that I wasn’t stalling.

  I really didn’t want to hurt any of the servers, even though it looked like the Abcurses were taking them down by the dozen in the arena. It wasn’t the servers’ fault. The gods were using them to punish … us? The Abcurses? Me? Every gods-dammed being in Blesswood?

  “What do you call those?” I asked, using my broken spear to point at the axe that had just appeared over the top of the barrier, a server’s hand gripping it as he lifted himself up.

  “Those are the Silencing Sticks, Sacred One.”

  And then I realised that she wasn’t trying to attack me just as much as I wasn’t trying to attack her. I watched in confusion as the server with the axe cleared the barrier, looked right at me, and then jumped up over the first row of seats without so much as pausing. Two more armed servers cleared the barrier, and still nobody attacked me. I watched the man with the spear land next to the female server whose weapon I had stolen, and I wondered if we had somehow gotten all of this wrong. Maybe this wasn’t what it looked like. Maybe they weren’t trying to hurt us. Maybe they were trying to escape—

  “Oh my gods!” I yelled, as the man with the spear reached around me, stabbing one of the sols running past right through the shoulder. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Order,” the woman-server reminded me, making another imaginary stabbing motion.

  “Stop!” I made a grab for the man’s spear, surprised when he easily released it to me. “No more order! Stop it!”

  The sol was clutching his shoulder, trying to stem the bleeding while he stumbled away from us as quickly as he could move. He wasn’t going to fight the servers. Maybe there were too many of them, or maybe the look of utter horror in his eyes was because he thought the gods were angry at him, too. Hell, maybe the gods were angry at him. I had no idea what was happening. I only knew that the servers apparently weren’t attacking me—just everyone else.

  “We need you to come with us now, Sacred One.” The woman-server reached for me, but I scooted back quickly, stumbling over the seat behind me before jumping up and over into the next row.

  “Ah, sorry, Order Lady. I can’t right now. I need to do some things. Maybe later, okay?”

  “The Creator has requested you be brought to him,” she insisted, her voice rising in some semblance of panic. It was a little off, though, as if she didn’t actually feel the panic that she displayed.

  “The Creator can just … like … create another time for us to meet then.” I waved at the server and then took off, following the wave of sols to the edge of the arena seating.

  The server that used to be my mother was standing outside the entrance to the arena, calmly instructing people to evacuate, even though they rushed past her—clearly already intent on evacuating the hell out of there. I grabbed her arm as I ran past, and pulled her after me.

  It was time for a little family reunion.

  Fifteen

  I found Emmy just outside the back entrance to the dorms. She was standing on top of a bench, slightly off to the side from where the crowd was pushing each other to get into the building, craning her neck in an attempt to examine their faces. Maybe she was looking for me, or maybe she was looking for one of her boyfriends.

  “Will!” she called out, catching sight of my face as I separated from the rush and drew toward her. “Holy shit, is that—”

  “Donald,” I interrupted. “Why don’t you introduce yourself to your other daughter.”

  “Greetings, peasant-dweller,” my mother said pleasantly. “My name is Donald. I am the personal server to Staviti, our great and humble Creator. The Father of our Realm. The Benevolent. The Wise. The first and final Creator—”

  “T-that … is t-that …” Emmy seemed unsteady, barely able to balance on the bench that she was standing on, and the image of grief tearing across her face fissured a crack through the hasty wall that I had constructed to hold my own grief at bay.

  I could feel it trickling through my brain then, like cold water, numbing me to the panic that surrounded us and leaking from my eyes.

  “Yeah,” I croaked, before clearing my throat and blinking a few times to clear my vision. I needed to get a grip. I couldn’t break down yet. Not yet. It wasn’t the time. “The gods are pissed. They’ve sent an army of servers into the arena—I don’t even know how. It’s like they opened some kind of doorway from Topia directly onto the sands. The guys are still fighting; we tried to evacuate everyone.”

  “You need to leave,” she cautioned immediately, pulling herself together in the same way that I had. “The Abcurses, too. These sols are terrified—I heard some of them saying that they were being punished, and that the gods had sent their ancestors down to discipline them for something.”

  “For what?” I asked, frustrated. “This is too far, even for the gods.”

  “They’re going to blame it on the dwellers,” Emmy predicted, shaking her head.

  She still hadn’t taken her eyes off my mother, and I could see a tear slipping down her cheek un-checked, but she had reeled in the majority of her grief. “They’re going to say that they couldn’t keep the dwellers in line, and that the gods are punishing them for all the uprisings and disobedience. I know it.”


  “You’re right.” I gripped my mother’s arm, pulling her into my side. “But why would they really do this? Just because The Abcurses broke their rule not to kill anyone?”

  “Well it was their only rule,” Emmy reasoned. “And from what you’ve told me, those boys have spent their time in Topia and Minatsol doing whatever they like. They aren’t punishable. Even in exile, they didn’t follow the rules. Stav—the guy in charge—” she quickly corrected herself, casting a quick look at the sols pushing into the building. “He can’t kill them, he can’t take away their powers—despite the pretend threat that he can—he can’t do anything to them because they’re the only beings in that world that he didn’t create.”

  “Not the only ones,” I corrected, thinking of the panteras. “But you have a point. So this is him being tired of not being able to punish them?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “This is him finding a way, finally, to get to them.”

  I frowned, looking at our mother, who stood obediently by my side, calmly watching our exchange. Staviti had left her hair. She still looked almost exactly the same—the only difference being the absence of life that had once flopped half-heartedly in her eyes, and the emotion that had once twisted her features was gone. He had wanted me to recognise her.

  “He’s going to punish me, instead of them,” I surmised.

  “Exactly. And it’s a double win, because hurting you hurts them. Come on.” Emmy grabbed my arm in typical bossy-girl fashion, forcing me to form a clumsy chain, with our mother dragged along at the end.

  We rounded the side of the building and started moving back toward the arena, though she swerved off to the side before we could get to the gates again. There was a bullsen-pen around the backside of the arena, with an attached stable and a feeding bay. Emmy released me once we got to the stables, disappearing inside and appearing again a moment later with a harried-looking dweller in tow. He wasn’t a young dweller, and I had begun to notice that most of the older dwellers were given jobs within the academy … but outside the actual academy walls. They preferred to have the younger dwellers inside, serving the blessed-sols-who-apparently-didn’t-like-wrinkles.