Every time Warcry saw Councilman Iye Skal, it was a shock. The fat netskin looked so much like a middle-aged Rali that Warcry’s first instinct was to punch him in the shoulder and ask, “How about ya, big man?”

  The look on the Councilman’s face when he met Warcry and Kest on the steps of the CPA hub forestalled any notion of that rubbish.

  Kest halted at the foot of the stoop.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  The Councilman shook his head. “Let’s not do this out here, kiddo.”

  Warcry took a step back as the air temperature around her dropped from the early morning chill to winter on Caltep.

  “What,” she repeated, that icy fury belied by the waver in her voice, “happened?”

  But the Councilman had his own backbone of steel to draw on.

  “You don’t want to hear this out where anybody can see you, Irakest,” he told her gently. “Please, this one time, trust me.”

  The lace in her eyes thinned until it was nearly gone.

  “Where is he?” she whispered.

  The Councilman started toward her, arms open in an offer of comfort, but Kest scooted back a step. The man shot a pleading look at Warcry.

  “Come on, Stumpy.” Warcry caught her by the arm.

  He’d prepped his Ki-strength in case he had to wrestle the Metal head inside, but she felt disconcertingly weak in his grip. As if she might dribble through his fingers like water. He practically had to lift her up the steps.

  At the top, it must’ve hit Kest that she was visibly falling apart. She shook his hand off, straightened her back, and shoved through the doors herself.

  Relieved, Warcry ducked in after her.

  They made it to the desk pool before she spun around to face her old man.

  “Talk,” she snapped.

  Atta girl, Stumpy, Warcry thought, crossing his arms and posting up behind her. Get proper pissed. Keep yourself together.

  “He’s gone, kiddo,” Councilman Iye Skal said. “We think he’s dead.”

  From ‘gone,’ Kest was already shaking her head.

  Frowning, Councilman Iye Skal waved someone over.

  A harried-looking Selken in uniform wound his way through the desks to join them.

  “Interim Director Asquiro Ra has footage from surveillance drones in the area,” the Councilman said.

  The agent took off his hat, bowed, then ran his hand through thinning hair.

  “I’m sorry to break this to you like this, Miss Iye Skal—”

  “Spare me the social niceties,” Kest brushed him off. “Information only.”

  “The information I have isn’t pleasant,” Asquiro Ra said. “We lost several agents in a raid in the early tides of this morning. Including the man who was intended to become director here instead of me. You may have known that your, ah, the Death cultivator Grady Hake was acting as a special consultant for our hub. While he and the raid team hit the warehouse, my team took the hub from… hostiles who had…”

  “The Technols,” Kest said. “I know all of that. Get to the unpleasantness, Director.”

  “Interim Director. Anyway, and you’ll see it on the footage yourself, a Varanusko showed up. Kestu-rank. Big Five affiliation suspected. We’ll know for sure when our facial recognition finishes searching the IGT database.”

  Emperor Takeshi. Warcry braced himself for the news that Hake had been vaporized for daring to disobey a Ketsu. The Death cultivator might be savage when he had to be, but he wouldn’t survive one round with that beast.

  “This Varanusko destroyed the warehouse, then he and your boyfriend squared off. And then… this.” Asquiro Ra tapped his HUD, then held it out where they could see.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The footage darted and wobbled, due to the recorder buzzing around everywhere, but the grav and Takeshi showed up centerstage, plain as you like, the Emperor crouched beside the downed Death cultivator. Takeshi snagged a handful of blond hair, then wrenched Hake’s head back. The Spirit cloaking Hake had been using dissolved. Warcry had never actually seen Hake use his murder grab before because it was an internal attack, he’d only ever sensed it, but Hake’s attack on Takeshi’s life was so powerful that it was visible to the naked Ki-sight, a turquoise storm of Death Spirit pulsing with cursed black veins. It sent lens flares bouncing around the screen.

  The Emperor shrugged off the murder grab. Of course he did. The discrepancy in cultivation between an old Ketsu and a new Ten like Hake was insurmountable. A chasm the size of a bleeding galaxy.

  Warcry realized he was holding his breath, bracing himself to watch his lad snapped in half. He let out a whistling exhale through his nose, silently begging Hake to summon that scythe and cut his way free.

  Do something, grav! Don’t just lie there and die!

  All well and good for him to think, standing there safe in the CPA station. He wasn’t the one belly-down to a furious Ketsu without anybody backing him, was he.

  The screen went full-on white. When the picture faded back in, Takeshi threw an attack at something. Warcry couldn’t see what. Someone offscreen, maybe. Wasn’t enough, apparently, because he threw another that sent the dragonfly drone recording for a loop.

  Warcry shook his head in awe. The bleeding force behind those blows.

  Yet half a tick later, Takeshi flew across the street like someone had blasted him out of a cannon. He crashed into a brick wall, and dropped, unconscious. Smacked down like a weakling who’d never made it out of Sho.

  And then the grav did get up.

  Looked like he was arguing with somebody, but there wasn’t anyone there. Hake summoned his scythe, and invisible hell broke loose. The grav fought like mad against the empty night. If Warcry didn’t know better, he’d say Hake was outnumbered. That invisible something—or somethings—cracked him down again and again, but every time he got back up. His reserves were severely depleted, but he threw what Spirit attacks he could. Infuriatingly, he never went for the murder grab.

  In just over a minute that felt like an hour to Warcry and must’ve felt like aeons to Hake, the grav was fighting on his knees. He was done in. He couldn’t get up, but he wouldn’t quit. His hands fell open, the scythe disappearing, taking that skeletal form with it. Hake’s blood rained on the concrete, life dripping out of him.

  Snarling in a last-ditch burst of exertion, the grav launched himself into a tackle.

  Warcry never got to see if Hake managed to take his invisible opponent down. Another white-out blanked the screen.

  This time, when the light faded, the street lay empty except for a small odd-shaped object that the drone buzzed down to get a close-up on. It was a HUD.

  The silence held out for a beat. Ugly, shocked silence.

  Asquiro Ra broke it. He squeezed past the Councilman to grab an evidence bag off a nearby desk.

  “We retrieved this from the scene.” He came back and held it out. “Can either of you identify this?”

  Looked as if Kest recognized it immediately. It took Warcry a moment longer to place the worn leather band and the cracked screen under the dried blood.

  She wasn’t answering, so he did.

  “It’s the grav’s rubbish Winchester. That the same one from the footage?”

  The interim director nodded solemnly. “We’re looking into questioning the Varanusko, but it seems he fled the scene when he regained consciousness.” Asquiro Ra glanced at Kest, then cleared his throat. “We haven’t recovered the Death cultivator’s body. But we’ve got our ocean team and surface team on the lookout. That’s the most common… Gangs on Selk tend to dispose of their kills in that manner.”

  “No!” Kest’s shout made them and half the agents in the desk pool flinch. “He’s not dead!”

  “Kiddo…” Councilman Iye Skal reached for her.

  Once again, she backpedaled out of his reach.

  “Death’s Embrace,” she snapped.

  A tattoo script appeared in her cinnabar palm, summoned from within her space ring. It depicted a skeleton lying beside a grave shrine. She held it up and shook it at her dad like that proved something.

  “Hake can’t be dead,” she insisted. “I had this made for him. I was going to ask him to marry me after the tournament. It’s got an eternal love script, and tattoos look so good on him, and he likes them better than jewelry and we have the perfect blood types for each other and—” Kest’s voice broke. She slapped a hand over her mouth.

  Warcry cursed under his breath as the Metal Head’s dam finally broke. Tears dripped silently off her chin, and her short Selken frame shook.

  Awkwardly, he patted her shoulder.

  It took Kest a moment to get herself under control again. Sniffling, she started messing around on her HUD.

  “I won’t accept it. Not until I see his body myself.”

  The sudden shift in her Spirit sent a chill racing down Warcry’s spine.

  “What’re you doing, Stumpy?”

  “You saw the same footage I did,” she said, swiping wildly about her screen. “Takeshi knows something. He saw something there in the street. He tried to attack it.”

  “Don’t do anything mad,” Warcry warned her. “Take some time and think through—”

  “The timestamp on that recording was over four hours ago. Hake doesn’t have time.” She stabbed her screen, and Warcry saw Message Sent pop up.

  It could’ve been sent to the grav. Kest was off her head enough just then to do it. She could’ve done.

  But Warcry knew she hadn’t.

  “What the bollix was that?”

  “A ransom note,” she said. “Takeshi is going to tell us everything he knows and he’s going to do it before the championship match tonight, or the Dragons aren’t getting their inner planet—the Technols are.”

  As the implications sunk in, Warcry swallowed back a throatful of sick.

  Not because the Emperor was sure to proper destroy them the second he saw that message, but because Kest meant losing intentionally. Since Warcry would die before he took a dive, that meant forfeiting. Step into the cage and kneel. Listen to the crowd scream their fury and dismay. Feel the forfeit mark stain his books for all history. Watch the promoters turn cold shoulders from now until he died. No one wanted a coward on their fight card.

  Slowly, he started to nod.

  “Warcry Thompson’s never had a forfeit loss before,” he said, mouth stretching into a painful smirk. “It’ll go down a bleedin’ storm.”

  That was what lads meant.