“It sounds good when you put it like that,” I said. “Just one problem.”
My dad looked at me curiously, and I sighed. “White Snake hates us, remember? If we set her free, the first thing she’s going to do is try to kill us. We also don’t know her situation. Even after we let her out and she burns us to a crisp, she still might go up and fight Nik anyway to satisfy whatever deal she’s made with the Gameskeeper. Or maybe she’ll just do it out of spite. I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“It’s absolutely something she would do if she had the chance,” my dad agreed. “But there’s something you must understand about my sister: before she is a dragon, she is a coward. She hates me as much as I hate her, but her first loyalty is to herself. I’m sure her need for revenge burns as bright as ever, but if she’s as trapped as I think she is, then there’s nothing she’d take—not even a chance to kill me—over her own freedom.”
I bit my lip. “You sure about that?”
“Positive,” Yong said, drawing himself up to his full height. “Trust me. If we give her the chance, she’ll run. She always does.”
He would know, I supposed, but I still didn’t like it. I could see my dad’s logic, but freeing a dragon who’d just been trying to kill us was reckless even by my low standards. It also didn’t help that this was the one dragon we absolutely couldn’t bluff. There’d be no tricking White Snake into thinking my father wasn’t a shell of his former self because she was the one who’d made him that way.
Even if by some miracle she didn’t immediately try to eat us, I wasn’t sure this plan would actually make a difference in the long run. Sure Nik wouldn’t have to fight a dragon next weekend, but I was certain the Gameskeeper could find something else equally horrible to kill him at a later date. Meanwhile, White Snake would be free to plot against us, and the arena would keep selling tickets and growing in popularity, just as it always had.
Thinking about that made me feel defeated all over again. No matter what we did, the Gameskeeper was always a step ahead. It didn’t even matter if my dad’s plan worked. The crowd would cheer just as hard watching Nik get eaten by a yeti or a cockatrice or a polar bear. And while I felt a lot better about his chances versus any of those, the end would be the same. The Gameskeeper had made it clear that Nik wasn’t going to survive his final fight, because this wasn’t about the fight at all. It was about the drama. That’s why the people had booed Nik’s actual victory and cheered his pointless rage: they were there to see a bloody show, not an actual struggle. God of champions my ass. The Gameskeeper was a god of pandering. So long as he gave the people what they wanted, they’d scream his name until the whole city sank into the cesspit he was—
I stopped, eyes flying wide. That was it!
“What is it?” the DFZ asked, looking painfully confused. “Sorry, your thoughts are too crazy for me to—”
“We’re focused on the wrong thing,” I said over her, too excited to care that she’d been digging through my mind again. “Going for White Snake is our best plan yet, but even if we pull it off perfectly, it won’t ultimately change anything. The Gameskeeper will just find something else to whip people up about, and the cycle will continue. But! But but but! If we don’t do anything, if we stay away and let him hype this thing to the sky like he’s planning, we’ll give him enough rope to hang himself.”
“I’m sorry,” the DFZ said, scratching Dr. Kowalski’s curly gray hair. “I can read your mind and I’m still not following. How does letting the Gameskeeper get what he wants help us?”
“Because we won’t actually give it to him,” I replied, grinning like a mad woman. “What makes the Gameskeeper powerful?”
“The roar of the crowd,” my father said.
I nodded. “Exactly. And crowds are famously fickle, which is why the Gameskeeper has to put on crazier and crazier spectacles to keep them coming back. Spectacles like a dragon. Doesn’t get bigger than that, right? But imagine what would happen if all those people actually showed up. If the arena was crammed to bursting with millions watching at home. Imagine if everything the Gameskeeper wished for that night came true, and then, when the lights came up and the doors opened, there was no dragon.”
“That’s what I said,” my father grumbled.
“No, you just wanted to free her. I’m talking about timing. They haven’t even announced the fight yet. If we followed your plan and busted White Snake out tomorrow, the Gameskeeper would just find something else for Nik to fight, and no one would ever know what they’d missed. But if we wait until the last possible second—I’m talking minutes before White Snake is due to go on—the Gameskeeper won’t have anything to put on in her place. All those people he worked so hard to pack into the arena, the masses who bought the tickets and fought the crowds and maybe even flew in from other countries to see the fight of the century will be left staring at an empty stage, and they’ll hate him for it.”
By the time I finished, the DFZ’s orange eyes were shining as bright as stars. “You’re going to make him look like a cheat! That’s perfect. Everyone hates a cheat!”
“I’m going to make him look worse than that,” I promised. “The Gameskeeper’s entire shtick is based around presenting himself as a god of
