“The Gameskeeper will see you,” he announced, his face so relieved he looked close to tears.
My father nodded as if this were the only possible outcome, but I had to fight not to drop my jaw. Of all the ways this could have gone, the idea that the Gameskeeper would just see us—no traps, no stalling, no gotchas—had barely made the list. Even if he wasn’t actually busy, making us sit in a waiting room for half an hour would have been the minimum acceptable power move. My dad would have made him wait for days if the situation had been reversed. But apparently the Gameskeeper didn’t play that way, or maybe he actually did want to see my dad, because when the guard opened the door the rest of the way, there he was.
I hadn’t gotten a good look at him during the fight, but what I had seen had been so unremarkable that I’d assumed it must be a front. There was just no way that the Gameskeeper—the richest man in the Underground, owner of the world’s largest blood sport arena—was actually the plain-faced, middle-aged man I’d seen waving placidly to the cheering crowd. Assuming we actually managed to get to him, I’d expected full gangster: flashy suit, tiger on a chain, suited thugs with sunglasses, that sort of thing. But the man sitting at the desk in front of us was the same one I’d seen last night, and now as then, he looked entirely, almost aggressively, average.
He was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, no longer young but not yet old. His face was perfectly symmetrical with no memorable faults, but so plain that it could never be called handsome. His hair was short and peppered with gray, but no matter how much I stared, I couldn’t tell if it was black or just dark brown. Even his race was ambiguous. You could have told me he was a mix of anything, and I probably would have believed you. He was so nondescript, so unremarkable, I was having trouble keeping my eyes from wandering off him to the rest of the office, which was far more interesting.
The room was much larger than the narrow security door had suggested. I’d expected a broom closet, but the reality was roughly twelve by twelve feet with a high ceiling. The only light came from an old-style green shaded lamp on the Gameskeeper’s equally old-fashioned wooden desk. These plus the chair the Gameskeeper was sitting on were the only actual furniture in the room. The rest of the space was taken up by hundreds of flat LCD screens mounted to the walls showing security footage from all over the arena, parts of Rentfree, and several other areas in the Underground.
The only wall of the office that wasn’t filled with screens was the one directly behind the Gameskeeper, which was taken up by a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over the empty arena. This must be his skybox, I realized with a start. We were inside the glass VIP box where I’d seen him waving to the crowd last night.
Considering how obsessed he clearly was with fighting, the fact that the Gameskeeper worked out of his box seat didn’t surprise me. I was more astounded by his setup. Spartan aesthetics were one thing, but what kind of boss watched his own security cameras? That was next-level paranoid. Or, at least, that was what I assumed. When the Gameskeeper stood up to greet us, though, the absolute lack of fear in his eyes threw me for yet another loop. Even if it was just a front, anyone capable of acting like having a dragon walk into your office unexpectedly was nothing to get worked up about was someone to be taken seriously.
“Well, well,” the Gameskeeper said, nodding to my father with a placid smile. “The famous Dragon of Korea. It seems rumors of your death have been greatly exaggerated. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
His words were perfectly polite, the exact sort of inoffensive greeting you’d expect from a professional, but I still took an involuntary step back. His plain face might look boring and nonthreatening, but his voice was anything but. Hearing it, my first thought was dragon. We’d already suspected that might be the case, and while I’d never met one who’d be caught dead with a face that plain, their human shapes were just masks at the end of the day. Most dragons chose to be handsome because they were vain and because humans were drawn to pretty things, but a boring mask could also be useful if you were trying to hide.
But while all of that made perfect sense, I rejected the idea as soon as it popped into my head. The Gameskeeper’s voice was deep and resonant and terrifying in a similar way to my father’s, but the power rolling off him wasn’t sharp like a dragon’s, nor did he smell of smoke. Now that I was all the way inside, the only thing I could smell was blood.
I planted my feet as a wave of nausea rolled over me. The air in the office was even more saturated with the strange magic than the hallway outside. It pulsed like a heartbeat, thrumming in my ears until I could almost hear the screaming from the stands my eyes could clearly see were empty through the window. The sensory disconnect was so disorienting, I had to look down at my feet to keep steady, which was how I saw that the spellwork from the hallway continued in here.
No, not continued. Culminated. The lines that had run straight outside started to curve the moment they crossed the security door’s threshold, twisting into a spiral that ended beneath the Gameskeeper’s chair as if he were a spider sitting in the middle of a giant, arena-sized web.
Not a comforting thing to realize about the man you were standing in front of, but it
