The only good thing I could say about the experience was that at least there was no hassle getting my actual ticket. The lady at the window didn’t even check my ID. I just told her my name and she handed me a bright-red strip of paper with a barcode on it and told me to head on in. When I finally made it out of the crush of the ticketing area, though, I realized “heading on in” was going to be a lot harder than it sounded.
“Whoa,” I said, tilting my head back.
Looking down from the bridge, I’d known the arena was big, but it was hard to appreciate how big until I was standing in front of it. I’d assumed it would be the size of a normal sports dome, but the Gameskeeper’s Arena was actually bigger than any stadium I’d seen. Not only was it ridiculously tall, its white-domed center was surrounded by a fat ring of external buildings that appeared to house an entire miniature-Rentfree’s worth of restaurants, clubs, bars, strip parlors, VR arenas, smoking dens, overpriced clothing shops, and anything else you could sell to a trapped audience in the mood to spend.
There were certainly enough customers. As soon as I got out of the ticketing area, I was shuffled into a new line of people waiting to go through the massive wall of doors that ringed the arena’s bottom floor. At least this line moved much faster than the first, mostly because no one was checking bags or scanning tickets to prevent fraud. The doorman didn’t even scan my barcode. He just ripped my ticket in half and waved me inside, shouting over my head for the group behind me to step up.
Eager to get out of the way before I was trampled to death by blood sports enthusiasts, I ran forward. When my foot crossed the threshold of the door into the actual arena, though, something hit me in the face, stopping me cold. It happened so suddenly, my father actually floated several feet ahead before he realized I was no longer beneath him.
“What is it?” he asked, floating back.
“Yeah, what’s going on?” Sibyl said in my ear. “Your heart rate just went into overdrive.”
I didn’t reply, mostly because I didn’t know. I had no idea how to describe what I was feeling, but the moment I’d stepped into the arena, something had shifted. Something wrong, but not with me. It was the city.
I hadn’t left the DFZ since I’d become a priestess. I certainly wasn’t outside it now, but there was something about magic in this place that didn’t feel right. The normally chaotic city magic was gone, replaced by something harsh and jagged and not at all friendly. Whatever it was, though, I was clearly the only one who noticed. The rest of the crowd didn’t even pause when they stepped through the doors. If anything, they sped up, hurrying excitedly toward the neon-lit maze of bars, food stands, and souvenir shops I could vaguely make out through the haze of wrongness.
You feel it too, huh? the DFZ said. I thought you would.
I jumped a foot. After being silent all day, the god suddenly sounded as if she were right behind me. “Where have you been?” I demanded, too discombobulated to remember to think the question instead of speaking out loud. “And what do you mean ‘I feel it too’?”
I have a theory, the spirit replied, ignoring my first question. But I don’t want to color your perception. Just pay attention and know that I am with you. I may not be able to do much, but you are not alone.
Between her, my AI, and the smoke ghost of my father, I wasn’t worried about that, but the rest of what she said definitely put me on edge. “Why wouldn’t you be able to do much?” I asked, slightly panicked. “This is your city, isn’t it?”
There’s a lot of things who call me home, the DFZ said cryptically. Some are stronger than others, but you haven’t been noticed yet, so everything should be fine. Just keep swimming. I’ll tell you if the water gets too deep.
That was not comforting, but it was pointless to keep arguing. No wonder my god had been so happy to let me skip work. I was apparently her submarine into some deep shit. There was nothing I could do except keep going, though, because like hell was I missing Nik’s fight. I just hoped we hadn’t wandered into some unknown dragon’s den. Dealing with the DFZ was bad enough. If I had to worry about my dad, too, I was going to worry myself to pieces.
“It’s not a dragon,” my father assured me when I mentioned this. “Or, at least, if it is a dragon, he’s exceedingly good at hiding himself. He would have to be good to run a place like this under the Peacemaker’s nose, of course, but I don’t think there’s another dragon here.”
“You want to bet on that?” I asked as the crowd carried us forward. “Because you just made a pretty good argument for why this could be a dragon’s lair and we wouldn’t notice.”
“I don’t smell a dragon,” Yong said stubbornly.
“You have no nose,” I reminded him.
“Scenting dragons has nothing to do with a physical organ,” my father explained. “It’s about power. I can feel other dragons just as they can feel me. The perception just happens to manifest as scent. It doesn’t have to do with the actual olfactory sensors. But weak as I might presently be, there’s no way I wouldn’t know if we were walking into someone’s lair.”
“Unless they’re hiding like you said.”
Yong furrowed his smoky eyebrows at me. “Why are you so determined to believe the worst? It’s not like you.”
“Just trying to justify my sense of impending doom,” I said, clutching my spellworked poncho tight around my body
