Whole body aching like a broken tooth, I flopped over to them and half fell on, half tackled Warcry.
“You pissed it away!” Warcry bellowed, trying to twist out of my grip.
“Stop!” I snaked an arm around his throat to choke him out. He nailed me in the eye with an elbow. Not a hard one, but hard enough to rock my head back.
He managed to get a fistful of Rali’s bloody shirt. “You could’ve made it to Ketsu, you wasteful piece of trash! You were right there!”
Rali’s chuckle sounded like clicks in his throat now. “Guess I didn’t want to die yet.”
When Rali said that, all the fight went out of Warcry. The ginger went dead weight on me for a second, then shoved me off and crawled a few feet away to slump against the rock platform and burn in silence.
By my feet, Rali relaxed back in the dirt, a smile on his face, eyes still watering. Black blood ran from his nose and a split in his bottom lip.
I looked at the stands full of dead Dragons and Contrails. Hardly anyone was still moving out there.
I pulled up my knees and folded my arms over them, resting my face on my forearms. My head spun, and I felt this sucking hole of blackness in the pit of my stomach and the middle of my brain. I could feel Hungry Ghost in there, locked away in Jealous as the Grave. The Miasma he’d cultivated was just out of my reach, too.
Death cultivator will need Hungry Ghost again someday. His croaking voice sounded like it was coming from far away. This is why Death cultivator imprisoned rather than killed Hungry Ghost.
If I could figure out how, I’d kill us both right now, I told him.
Hungry Ghost started to say something, but the connection cut off. Biggerstaff’s suppression clamped down around my Spirit sea.
The catfish stepped into my line of sight and stood over me, holding his bloody shoulder together with one hand. The distiller lady appeared at his side, shoving what looked like a high-tier healing elixir into his dangling hand, and I had a flash of déjà vu back to the soaking room and the dead Ylef.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I muttered.
Just like all my other jokes, nobody laughed. That was good, though. I didn’t think I could stand to hear a sound like that in an arena full of bodies.
Biggerstaff gulped the healing elixir down, then shoved the empty bottle at the distiller. She took it, this time without saying a word about how much that was going to set him back.
“Get up.” The recruiter’s voice was calm and deadly.
What was the worst he could do, kill me? Probably not. Probably something more along the lines of torture me for a hundred years or something. But right then, I just couldn’t make myself care.
I got up, trying not to show how close to collapsing I was.
When my eyes locked on his, Biggerstaff recoiled. Just barely enough to notice. He hurried up and smoothed the fear away, but it was too late. I’d already seen it.
“Can you do that again?” he asked, trying to sound angry and in control. “Without accidentally killing most of your own people?”
As soon as he asked, I knew what the worst possible thing I could say was, the thing that would multiply his fear and completely justify it all at the same time. And since at that point, nothing mattered, I went ahead and said it.
“Accidentally?”
Fallout
THINGS KICKED INTO high gear after that. Biggerstaff yelled at the distiller to get something from her store called Total Lockdown, then started typing away on his HUD while he looked around the arena, trying to figure out who all was still alive.
Hooligans came and herded me, Warcry, and Rali into the locker room. Yoki was dead, so there weren’t any stone shackles this time, just the Spirit suppression.
When Biggerstaff tried to clamp down on Rali’s Spirit sea, that was when the catfish finally lost his cool.
“What happened?” Biggerstaff demanded. “You had the most powerful Spirit sea of anyone in the Heartchamber—more powerful than most Shoguns! Where is it?”
Rali dropped onto the locker room bench between Warcry and me.
“Oh, that?” Rali said it like he was talking about some old piece of trash he’d thrown out years ago. “That’s long gone.”
Biggerstaff’s mouth opened and closed a few times. Not like he was trying to nullify somebody’s Spirit, but like he’d been knocked speechless.
Warcry smirked. “Get what you pay for, don’t you?”
That made him and Rali both laugh. The sound ricocheted off the tiled locker room walls and battered against my brain. Part of me wanted to laugh, too, but the rest of me felt so far away that I couldn’t figure out how.
Messages blinked on my HUD. They were all from Kest, first wanting to know if we were okay and what happened and if the rumors about us starting a gang war with the Contrails were true.
Her lost arm flashed through my head. Rali’s lost Spirit sea. Who even knew where Warcry’s prosthetic was now? People around me kept losing pieces of themselves, and I was still sitting there whole.
The door to the market court swung open, and the distiller came into the locker room.
“This is it,” she said, handing Biggerstaff a shiny gold pill the size of a BB.
He looked at me. “For obvious reasons, we can’t transport you wide awake and aware until we can be certain of your cooperation. This will shut down every system in your body, putting you into a suspended state until we arrive at our destination and the antidote is administered.”
“You wot?” Warcry hiked himself up off the bench
