“You already are,” he said, the words so warm I could hear the smile in his voice. I was smiling back when I heard someone yelling in the background.
“Crap. I gotta go. I’ll do my part.”
“I’ll keep you updated,” I promised.
“Don’t,” he ordered, his voice tight. “If I’m actually going to act like an arena star, then I’m about to put myself deep in the Gameskeeper’s world. The less I know about what you’re planning, the less I’ll have to hide. I trust you to do your best, and if it works, I’ll see you on the other side.”
“See you soon,” I whispered, clutching the phone, but the connection had already gone dead. I hung on a moment longer out of sheer stubbornness, but eventually I let my arm drop, staring up at the golden glow of the city lights bouncing off the low night clouds until Dr. Kowalski came to drag me back to work.
Chapter 12
I’d thought Dr. Kowalski and the DFZ had worked me hard before, but the last two months were a vacation compared to the next five days. We trained every waking hour, including during mealtimes, which is how I learned to move magic and eat at the same time. I worked until my insides felt like goo, transferring huge amounts of magic from the DFZ to my dad, but also into a cornucopia of vegetables, circles, and across various magically charged areas of the DFZ.
Sometimes Dr. Kowalski and the city would take turns tossing me armfuls of power just to see if I could catch it. If I did, they’d make me hold all that magic until I thought I was going to burst. Other times they had me transfer power so fast I felt like a human wire. Some days I didn’t even know what I was doing. I just followed instructions and tried not to self-destruct as the magical load went up and up and up.
If I hadn’t had two months of brutal magical labor under my belt already, it would have broken me. Unlike everyone I was working with, I was only human. The only edge I had going was that I couldn’t have been more motivated. It was rare in life that you got a clear path to what you wanted, and I wanted to take down the Gameskeeper bad. If that meant learning to move godly amounts of magic without cracking, then I’d make myself an indestructible human pipeline.
I just hoped it would be enough. Contrary to what the kid shows preach, trying hard doesn’t always guarantee success, and the Gameskeeper wasn’t my only enemy. He was the god feasting on the crowd’s magic, but Kauffman was the man who made it possible. The last time I’d gone up against his spellwork in the Gnarls, I’d won by out-crazying him and nearly died. I couldn’t be that sloppy this time. Nik was counting on me. The DFZ was counting on me. I was counting on me.
For the first time in my life, I felt like I was doing something that mattered, something that would make a difference. I felt powerful, like I was in control of my own destiny. That was a heady feeling for someone who’d always lived in someone else’s shadow. I still wasn’t sure I could pull it off, but I was determined that, if I failed on Saturday, it would not be from lack of effort.
It helped that I wasn’t the only one working hard. The DFZ and Dr. Kowalski were right there with me, but the real shocker was my dad. Obviously he was more than happy to let me practice shoving magic into him. Given the size of the power I was moving, you’d think I’d have pumped him back to full in the first few days. But even dumping the DFZ’s magic into him as fast as I could, restoring the Great Yong felt like trying to fill the Great Lakes with a fire hose.
Watching all that power vanish into the void, I understood for the first time the true difference in scale between humans and everything else. I’d known my father was a powerful dragon, but I hadn’t known—couldn’t have known—just how much he’d lost until I tried to replace it. Looking back, I couldn’t believe he’d let me burn all that magic up with my stupid gold-market trick. I was also starting to worry that I’d never get his fire back to what it was. I was simply too small, and he’d been building his flames for two thousand years, plus whatever he’d eaten from his father. The best I could say was that at least he was no longer in danger of snuffing out.
But while I was getting bowled over by the harsh realities of our situation, my dad was more energized than ever. Not only did he stay right by my side through every grueling hour whether he was needed for the exercise or not, he even found time to go looking for White Snake in the bowels of the arena during the brief periods when I was allowed to sleep. Thanks to his smoke body, he was able to pass through guards, cameras, and walls unseen. Wards gave him more trouble, but he always wiggled through eventually.
In the end, the only barrier he couldn’t get past was the one surrounding White Snake herself. I thought that was perfectly reasonable—a dragon ward that didn’t stop dragons wouldn’t be much use, after all—but it seemed to bother him enormously. So much so that, on Friday morning, he asked the DFZ to give me thirty minutes off from training so we could talk about it.
“It just makes no sense,” he said as I collapsed on the floor of Dr. Kowalski’s living room.
“What about it doesn’t make sense?” I panted, too tired to even
