In less than a second, Kest went from stunned to Cold Metal. The air temperature in the office plummeted. I hadn’t realized she could still do that now that she’d chosen a specialization, but her Spirit type was Malleable Metal, so I guess it made sense that she could fluctuate between the other types at will.

  She strode to stand at the exact center of the Electoral Council’s table, glaring at the wall over her absentee father’s head.

  “I’m here to register my champion for the electoral tournament, not chitchat,” she said.

  The older version of Rali winced. “You’re so much like your mother. All right then, let’s get this registration moving.” He looked down the left side of their semicircle. “Candidate Registrar?”

  The guy on the end tapped a screen set into the table.

  “Name of candidate applying for throneship?”

  Kest looked him in the eye when she gave him her name instead of staring past him.

  He entered it. “Council Chairman, Candidate Registrar finds no legal, ethical, or citizenship grounds on which to object to this here Selken’s candidacy. She was born outside our borders, but her lineage is faultless. Candidacy accepted.”

  “Noted by Council Chair,” Kest’s dad said. “Records?”

  The guy to his right nodded over his screen. “Entered into the official records, Chairman.”

  “Noted and proceeding.” The Chairman looked down the opposite side of the table. “Champion Registrar?”

  The woman on the opposite end said, “Name of candidate’s proposed champion?”

  “Warcry Thompson,” Kest said, pointedly addressing her to her face, too.

  The council members exchanged glances. One leaned over to show something on his HUD to his neighbor. They both shrugged.

  “I don’t think I heard you rightly, sugar,” the Champion Registrar drawled, leaning forward and cocking her ear toward Kest. “Surely you meant Grady Hake, the Cursed Death cultivator you arrived on Selk with?”

  “Hake’s our bodyguard,” Kest replied. “He won’t be competing in the tournament, he’ll be protecting us. Warcry Thompson, Burning Hatred cultivator and former IFC Championship winner, is my electoral champion.”

  “Forgive us, Miss Iye Skal,” another lady on the council said, “but the paparazzi have been speculating for the last two hours that the Death cultivator would be your champion. Frankly, all human Ten-levels being equal, a Mortal supertype seems like the obvious choice.”

  “It might to some people,” Kest said. “But I can assure you that all human Ten-levels are not equal and that no matter what the paparazzi says, the Burning Hatred cultivator is the fighter I’m registering.”

  “Well,” the Champion Registrar said condescendingly, “if that’s your champion, that’s your champion.”

  I’d never actually heard anybody titter before, but her remark caused a tittering fit among the council members. The Candidate Registrar did a full-on guffaw, but he hid it behind a painted fan. Only the Council Chairman, Kest’s dad, stayed serious.

  Warcry’s expression shifted to an ugly sneer. “Warcry Thompson of Qaspar-7, Madam Registrar. Make sure you spell it right. Me brand lawyer loves to file misprint grievances against tournament officials. He makes a right din out of it.”

  Chairman Iye Skal leveled an unimpressed glare at Warcry.

  “You haven’t had an official brand lawyer in six months, Mr. Thompson,” he said. “My Spirit type is Investigative Delving. Within five minutes of the paparazzi broadcasting you landing on Selk with my little girl, I had already dug up everything about you. Your recently expunged criminal record, that embarrassing dalliance you thought you buried, even that bloody tangle you and the Death cultivator here got up to in the Shinotochi system.”

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  The Chairman frowned at Kest. “I’m not here to pass judgment on the company you keep these days, kiddo—”

  “Good,” Kest breezed out, “because that’s none of the business of the slime who left my mom to die of a broken heart on a prison planet.”

  He went on like she hadn’t said anything. “Election tides wash up strange creatures, as the old saying goes. I’ll allow this for the duration of the tournament, but when that’s over, these hooligans are gone.”

  “I’m a universally emancipated adult,” Kest said. “But as an Investigative Delving Spirit, you’ll have already read all the paperwork and be well aware that you have no legal right on any Confederated Planet to allow or disallow me anything. Rali, either—I filed for him at the same time.”

  The Chairman’s eye lace thickened until it was so dark there was almost no white left. Kest’s did the same thing, but as her dad got hotter under the haori, she got colder. The air temp dropped another ten degrees. A couple council members pulled their black jackets tighter. I suppressed a shiver, and Warcry backed away from her a step.

  “As your father, I’m telling you,” the Chairman snapped, stabbing the tabletop with his finger for emphasis, “this will not end well. Either when your gangbanger boyfriend there drops you for some tawdry gangster moll, kills you for the Miasma, or when a squad of rival Big Five hooligans cut him down. Or hell, he could do what every human does, age and die while you’ve still got a hundred more years to live. If you think you can come crying to me after all that—”

  “Metal never goes crying to anyone,” Kest said, her voice dropping to Nitrogen-Frozen Metal on the Verge of Shattering. “It’s the unyielding element. Unlike some Investigative Delving Spirits in the room, I’ve never crawled back to anyone and begged for a place in the regime that betrayed my wife’s family and imprisoned them as traitors.”

  She glared at him. “Has my champion been noted by the Chair?”

  The Chairman scowled.

  “Noted,” he gritted out. “Records?”

  “Recorded, Council Chair,” the Records guy said, shrinking away from the venom in the bigger man’s voice.

  “Noted and proceeding.”

  A beat passed.

  “Orelith,” the Chairman snapped.

  The lady to his left flinched.

  “Oh, yes, yes. Apologies, Chairman. Candidate and Champion Affairs sending information now.” She tapped her HUD. “In this packet, please find the schedules for ceremonies and activities, the bracket which will be filled by the close of registration tomorrow, directions to the kokugikan, dress codes and regulations, tournament-approved distillers and healers, and the requisite waivers. Complete and submit all wavers before low tide. These schedules are under private lock and not for disclosing to any member of the press or the general public. If you have any questions, refer to the Contacts section.”

  Kest checked the packet on her SignalSong, then closed out of it. She smiled brightly at everyone but her dad. The cold in the room turned off like somebody had flipped a switch.

  “Thank you, fellow citizens.” Kest pressed her real and cinnabar palms together and bowed over them. “I look forward to serving Selk alongside you.”

  Then she whirled around. Warcry and I had to jump to the side before she plowed us over on her way out the door.

  By the time we caught up to her, she was already jogging down the stairs.

  With his prosthetic, running up and down steps wasn’t Warcry’s strong suit. I pulled ahead of him and caught up to her.

  “Kest, wait.” I grabbed her cinnabar hand to stop her. “Are you all right?”

  Her eye lace shifted like boiling black clouds. “If he thinks he can just reappear in my life and start telling me what to do… Augh!”

  “Dads, right?” I said, because I didn’t know how to make her feel better.

  She chewed on her bottom lip. “I knew he’d be on-planet somewhere. I thought I was better prepared. I wasn’t going to let him get to me, but when he started talking about you like that, I just lost it. That was a blunder. Now he knows he can get to me through you.”

  Her dad had freaked me out for a second there when he dropped the bomb that he knew I was in a gang and dating his daughter. Did he know about the ring, too? I’d have to ask Warcry how hard it was to dig up all the stuff the Chairman had found out about him.

  If the Chairman knew, it wouldn’t be a huge deal. At worst, I’d have to propose to Kest before her dad hijacked the news and used it against her somehow, the way he had tried to make it sound like I was just looking for an excuse to dump Kest.

  “You know I’d never ditch you for someone else, right?” I came down a couple steps lower than hers so we’d be eye-to-eye. “I’d die first.”

  She squeezed my hand. “I know, Hake. Of course I know.” A smile broke through. “You’re not the disloyal type. Just look at how attached you are to that broken-down Winchester.”

  “You mean this totally awesome, pre-loved Winchester that I didn’t even have to break in.”

  Kest snorted. “If you’re shooting for a romantic metaphor, I don’t think that one is saying what you think it’s saying. At least, I hope it’s not.”

  “Yeah, that one got away from me.”

  Warcry caught up to us.

  “Reel it in, you two. You’re aggravating me gag reflex.”

  “This is why you don’t have a girlfriend,” Kest shot back, but her eye lace had finally gone back to normal.

  The three of us started down the steps again, this time at a more chill pace.

  “We’re going to have to get used to all this, you know?” Kest said. “During Selk’s electoral tournaments, your rivals don’t just try to physically assassinate you and your champions, they try to assassinate your character, too.”

  Warcry smirked. “Somehow I don’t see the Scarlet Titan being as nice about it as your dear old dad, Stumpy. That bloody bird’ll smile to our faces while she stabs us in the back.”

  “She can try.” I shrugged. “But if anybody should know about shivving their enemies, it’s the prison planet escapees.”