My fists clenched so tight, I left bruises on the screaming man I was shoving out of my way. No. Even in a city as famously cruel as the DFZ, this was too much. I didn’t care how much stronger the Gameskeeper was, I would never let him pay for his godhood upgrade with the lives of my two most important people. They were not cheap entertainment. Not things to be used and thrown away. They were mine—my treasures, my heart, my future—and I was going to save them. I was going to save them even if I had to bring this whole damn place down on top of me to do it, which was how I got my next idea.
“Idea” was too strong a word. I was too panicked and rushed to think of anything so coherent. This was more instincts acting in a line as I forced my way through the crowd, wiggling and elbowing and kicking out knees, whatever it took to get myself to the edge of the arena.
When I reached the short wall that separated the stands from the sandy circle below, I didn’t let myself hesitate. If I waited, doubt might creep in, and I didn’t have time for that. I didn’t have time for anything, so I just went for it, vaulting over the barrier the moment my hand touched the railing.
The fall to the bottom was a lot farther than I’d thought. It hadn’t looked that big from up in the stands, but now that I was hurtling down it, I realized the distance between the bottom tier of seats and the arena floor was closer to twenty feet than ten. If I’d been thinking, I would have grabbed some more ambient magic to cushion my fall. I hadn’t been, though, and ambient magic wasn’t the sort of thing you could just grab on the fly, leaving me with nothing but empty hands and kicking legs as I landed on the arena floor.
Holy crap, did it hurt. As I apparently had to keep relearning tonight, I was just a normal person. I wasn’t built to fall twenty feet onto sand-covered cement.
If I’d been less frantic, that probably would have been the end of the line. From the pain in my ribs and arm, I’d definitely broken something. But that’s the great thing about running on instinct: if it’s not stopping you, you don’t actually have to care. As soon as I realized I could still move, I was up and running again, charging across the arena floor—which was also much bigger than it had looked from up top—toward the blur that was my father and Nik.
Someone must have finally landed a hit while I’d been falling, because the first thing I noticed as I charged forward was the bright-red blood splattered on the sand in front of me. As I got closer, I saw it was my father’s. Yong’s formal suit was torn at the shoulder, and his sleeve was dark with blood. He was still moving faster than my eyes could follow, but his chest was heaving with effort, and his expression was grim. He was so focused on dodging Nik’s attacks, he didn’t even notice me until I grabbed him, wrapping myself around his body like an octopus.
“Opal?” he said, the look on his face transforming from grim concentration to confusion, then to naked terror. “What are you doing? Get out of here!”
He struggled against me as he spoke, trying to push my arms away. Trying and failing. All that supersonic dodging must have cost him even more than I’d realized, because he didn’t have the strength left to make me budge. Granted, I was a bit crazed at the moment, but it still should have been no contest. The fact that it was terrified me all over again, but not half as much as the shock I got when I turned to look at Nik.
When I’d come up with the half-baked idea to rush in, my decision had been based on a single supposition: that no matter how crazed they made him, Nik would never hurt me. I had no evidence of this, but I’d believed in it strongly enough to throw myself into the fray. Now that I was actually here—standing on the bloody sand under the glaring lights, clinging to my father like a crazed monkey in front of thousands of suddenly silent people—my adrenaline-fueled brain was finally catching up to the fact that I might have just done something terminally stupid, because the man staring me down wasn’t Nik at all.
He looked like Nik. He had Nik’s face and Nik’s hair, his scowl and his body. But aside from the obvious physical features, everything else was all wrong. He didn’t move like Nik, didn’t fight like him. Even the way he glared wasn’t right. It was Nik’s body no question, but the thing staring at me through his eyes wasn’t him, and while he had frozen when I’d grabbed my dad, I didn’t think it was recognition. He mostly looked confused, as if he didn’t understand where I’d come from.
“Opal,” my father said, keeping his voice to the low, calm tone best used for spooked animals. “You need to go.”
“I’m not leaving you,” I said angrily, keeping my eyes on Nik, who was still watching us warily.
