She wasn’t the only one who looked like they’d seen a ghost as I passed through the room. Not a single person other than Eric would look me in the eye, and most of the guests averted their faces if I looked in their direction. One of the women even curtsied to me, an awkward display that had me biting back laughter. Who did these people think I was?
Eric flopped down in his throne and picked up the heavy, ornate belt lying across its right arm. He presented it to me with both hands, displaying the International Battle Federation logo that surrounded a cluster of diamonds in its center. “They haven’t engraved my name on it yet, but I wanted to keep it around for tonight. Hard to believe it’s real.”
I wanted to grab Eric by the shoulders and scream that none of this was real. If dragging him out of that dressing room and back to the Umbral Forge would have fixed anything, that’s exactly what I would have done. But trying to jolt him out of this delusion wouldn’t solve anything. Eric would just dig his heels in harder if I slapped him across the face with reality. Getting Eric to come with me would take some finesse.
“It is crazy,” I said. “But you’ve earned this. I never met anybody who worked harder for what they wanted. You wanna take a walk? I think I’m starting to freak out your guests.”
Eric slung the belt over his shoulder as he clambered down from his throne. “Come with me. I’ve got a better idea.”
He waved to the adoring fans as we headed toward a rear exit from the dressing room. The lovely young ladies cooed and batted their eyes at him, all while avoiding any glances in my direction. Eric chuckled to himself as we left all that behind and clapped his hand against my back.
“You know they all paid to get back to the dressing room?” Eric asked. “A lot of money. To see me.”
Eric regaled me with tales of his high-flying lifestyle. Less than three years after he’d graduated from the School of Swords and Serpents, he’d finished a mandatory tour of service with the Guardian Corps and then jumped into the ring with a regional Battle Federation. His flashy fighting style and good looks had made him a crowd favorite, while his brutal skills and ruthless training regimen had proved too much for one opponent after another. At twenty-four, Eric was now the youngest International Battle Federation champion in history.
“Of course,” he said, “I couldn’t have done it without you. Here’s the car.”
A sleek Striking Dragon luxury roadster drifted to a stop in front of us as Eric and I stepped into the arena’s parking garage. Its jinsei-powered engine purred like a sleeping tiger, and coils of sacred energy held it inches above the garage’s concrete floor. Both doors slid open to reveal an interior that looked cramped, but proved far more comfortable than it appeared. The doors sealed behind us, and an instrument panel littered with meters and gauges that would’ve looked at home in a jet fighter sprang to life across the dash. Eric tapped a blue icon, and the car lifted higher off the ground. The safety harness settled around my torso and waist, and we took off like a shot.
The car wound its way through the city I recognized as Los Angeles. I’d been here once before during the Five Dragons Challenge as a champion, but things had looked much different then. For starters, there hadn’t been enormous police towers jutting up from the center of intersections, their cameras scanning the crowds below. We also didn’t have dragons soaring through the smog-choked skies, or obsidian golems interrogating people under the garish neon lights that blazed from the windows of tattoo parlors and restaurants.
And there certainly hadn’t been pictures of an older me glowering from digital billboards clinging to the sides of high-rises. The fifty-foot-tall version of me seemed both sinister and grief-stricken, a man who’d done things he regretted for reasons he’d thought were right. It was all too easy to see how I could end up that way if I wasn’t very careful how I proceeded.
“See?” Eric said as the car glided down the streets. “You look way younger in person than you do up there.”
The hesitation in my friend’s voice gave me the opening I’d been waiting for. If he could see such an obvious difference between the face on that billboard and the one in the car next to him, maybe he understood that something wasn’t right. I turned slightly in my seat to look at him, then launched into my argument.
“Because that’s not me,” I said. “I mean, it is, I guess, but it’s not me right now.”
Eric laughed and drummed his fingernails across the car’s dash. “Still talking in circles, I see. Did you notice the interior? Pure basilisk hide. Soft as butter and tough as nails.”
“Eric,” I said sternly, “I’m not talking in circles. I look different from the billboards because that’s me in the future. All of this is a future that hasn’t happened yet. You know that, right?”
Bars of amber light cut across Eric’s face as the car shot past streetlamps. The shadows that fell over his eyes couldn’t hide the doubt he felt, though. “Don’t rain on my parade, Jace. Come on, man. Let’s just have a good time. Or you can get out of the car right now.”
As my friend’s anger grew, an intense pressure built inside the car, an unseen balloon inflating between us that threatened to shove me out of Eric’s car.
And out of his vision.
“Relax,” I said in the calmest voice I could manage. “You’re right. Let’s enjoy the
