The weigh-in was held in the Pearl City kokugikan that morning. Warcry and I came in through one of the upper entrances, so we got a good look at the layout. Like all the arenas I’d been to since dying, the seating wasn’t the flip-down kind you saw in American stadiums. The highest levels were standing room only. The medium and lower levels were tiers of rectangle sections surrounded by short railings to lean against. Each rectangle box had cushions to kneel or sit on.

  Right then, the seating sections were dead, nobody but a roving security team and a couple of janitors. Down below, the arena floor swarmed with activity. The scale had been set up in the center of the fight cage with a huge digital readout hanging overhead. Tournament officials called the fighters up one at a time, then bustled around them, recording weights and taking height and reach measurements. Paparazzi bots filmed every step of the process.

  Rows of folding chairs had been set up on the floor outside the cage for a select audience of big shots from across the planet, but only a few were sitting. Most of them mingled with the Electoral Council members, the candidates, and the fighters.

  Bodyguards and entourages drifted along with their candidates and champs like schools of suspicious fish, getting in everyone’s way and eyeing anyone who swam too close. A decent number of the bruisers wore suits—the blinking neon sign for I have a high-level affiliation. Apparently the Dragons and the Technols weren’t the only gangs in the Big Five who wanted Selk.

  I pegged Kest’s dad immediately. The Chairman was deep in conversation with another council member and a big-shot wearing a silver-studded gunbelt and a six-shooter on each hip. But not deep enough to miss me walking in. He looked so much like Rali. Especially his disapproval face.

  The Chairman glared ray gun holes in me the whole time Warcry and I came down the stairs and made our way up the aisle.

  Kest met us cage-side. For the weigh-in, she’d traded in her usual slag-burnt canvas skirt for a dark blue cheongsam with silver trim. Black lace covered her flesh arm, and her cinnabar arm matched the pattern. Even her hair was different, twisted up with some kind of seaweed-looking clip instead of divided into her buns.

  “Wow, you look…”

  “Completely impractical,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I know. But it’s traditional dress for these opening ceremonies.”

  “I was going to say ‘elegant.’ As soon as I thought of it, anyway.”

  She darted a micro-glance her dad’s way. “He’s here.”

  “Yeah, I felt him stabbing me with his eyes.”

  While we waited, Warcry and I recounted the morning’s excitement for Kest. She was half psyched to hear that her Knockback had worked better than intended, and half appalled that a candidate would dare to attack her fighter using a barber[].

  “Whoever did it probably has someone in every service industry in Pearl City,” Kest said.

  “We know who it was,” I reminded her. “Djin Ara.”

  “No, we know who that barber said it was. No one would be stupid enough to give a pawn like that their real name.”

  I scanned the crowd until I spotted Tatsu Shin Be, the guy Chibi had snitched on. I had looked him up on the tournament’s page on the way over. He was a lean, blue, demon-winged guy with a pair of curling ram’s horns. He had twelve professional Intergalactic fights under his belt and had even beaten the reigning IFC welterweight in a non-title bout, but Tatsu hadn’t managed to book any title fights yet.

  He was competing as the electoral champion for a graceful middle-aged Selken woman named Djin Ara Feren, who everybody called the Quiet Storm. Apparently, Djin Ara was the favorite for this election. Her mother, the previous monarch, had been the one who banished Kest’s grandparents. Not hard to figure out why she might want to disable the Iye Skal champion before the tournament even kicked off.

  Tatsu’s black gaze met mine briefly and I swear it sparkled. His lips quirked up. He tapped one ram’s horn in a smart aleck salute before turning back to his candidate.

  “Or maybe we reconsider this whole stealth assassin thing in favor of cockiness,” I told Kest, but halfway through, the PA system started yelling over me.

  “Now calling Warcry Thompson!” the announcer boomed. “Champion representing Candidate Iye Skal Irakest!”

  Cameras swung our way, and big shots craned their necks to get a better look.

  Warcry ate up the attention, flexing and scowling as he shrugged off his fighter’s robe. He stalked up the cage’s steps into the ring in his grappling shorts, muscles jumping under his skin.

  It seemed unlikely that anyone would attack him in front of all those cameras, but I stuck close and kept Miasma cycling anyway to deter anybody who might be thinking about it. Most of the other fighters had eight or ten guys in their entourage, but Warcry just had me. I didn’t want to take any chances of leaving him unguarded.

  The bots swarmed Warcry while he knelt, pressed his fists to his sides, and bowed to the judges. After that, it was scale, measuring tapes, and talking to officials. Then the bots got a bunch of action poses of Warcry in front of the tournament sponsor banners, with and without his flames on.

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  The paparazzi yelled questions at him while they snapped their promo shots.

  “How does it feel to step back into an IFL-recognized cage?”

  “What have you been doing to keep away the ring rust?”

  “Care to comment on your incarceration?”

  “Any chance we’ll see the Roundhouse on Fire in your first match?”

  “How did Prison League Fighting compare to IFL-sanctioned bouts?”

  “Did you see your old rival Sam-ben-Garcia’s fight last night? What do you think his odds are of winning Fight Month King of the Ring?”

  Unlike Kest, Warcry ignored all of them. He was already in full-on warrior mode.

  Then his weigh-in was done. Pretty anti-climactic.

  “Okay,” Kest said when we got back to her, “now we mingle until the opening ceremonies.”

  “Charm the money, court the promoters.” Warcry nodded, tying his robe. “Same as any other tourney.”

  “These are the elite of the elite. Pillars of Selken industry, economic leaders, and dignitaries. Do not embarrass me.”

  “I know how to act around VIPs, Stumpy. Been doing it me whole life, ain’t I? Ma Thompson dragged her little scag to every fancy soiree in the Qaspar system, and I didn’t shame the family name ’til I decided to.”

  I lost the thread of the conversation as we started to mingle. Bodyguarding two people on the move was more complicated than just standing around. I shoved Dead Reckoning out until it enveloped them both and kept my head on a swivel.

  Gleurah was easy to pick out, head and shoulders taller than anybody else in the room. The Scarlet Titan flowed along beside the orca, mesmerizing the bigshots and answering paparazzi questions in her sweet southern lady drawl.

  The champions in the crowd ranged from ’roided out sharks to tall slender Ylefs to a huge bipedal tiger. There was even one spacemoth. I put mental money on him being the first guy snapped in half.

  As we wandered through the crowd, something hit me that I hadn’t realized before.

  I leaned closer to Kest. “Are all Selken monarchs women?”

  “There have been a couple male monarchs since the organization of the Selken government, but yeah, they’re mostly female.” She returned the bow of a passing candidate without stopping. “It’s a cultural thing.”

  As we wandered around, bigshots stopped Kest and Warcry to strike up conversations. It was against tournament rules for bribes, gifts, and promises of favors to exchange hands between the candidates and their supporters, but it was common for the bigshots to give gifts to the fighters they liked. One white-haired Selken with a net worth in the billions gifted Warcry two-hundred-year-old bottle of sake in a lacquer and gold leaf box. Another, a lady who owned most of the real estate in Selk’s northern hemisphere, gave him a portable humidor containing an ancient refining elixir worth ten times the most I’d ever had in my USL account.

  Turned out Takeshi-ketsu had been right about Warcry’s established fanbase. The gifts kept coming—cultivator pills and elixirs, a folded steel tonto that Kest thought was amazing because it was made with traditional Selken forging techniques, a HUD band imbued with a Potency construct, a mer-silk yukata, a set of brass knuckles decorated with seed pearls, and a pair of ruby-studded silver-trimmed geta.

  A kokugikan staff servant almost surprised me into a Death Metal bash when he suddenly popped up and offered to put Warcry’s loot in a holding zone until after the opening ceremonies. He had to make three trips to get it all.

  Finally, the last fighter—Peiparr, that huge bipedal tiger—completed his weigh-in. Everybody cleared out of the ring while maintenance bots took down the weigh-in equipment and sat up a table draped with velvet.

  On top, they sat a sparkling jeweled tiara on a satin pillow.

  While Selk’s anthem played, the candidates filed into the ring to stand before the crown. Every lady in the parade had designs rolling up and down their arms and whatever amount of leg their cheongsams showed.

  According to Kest, that was supposed to be a nod to the planet’s tribal past, back when Selkens wore nothing but the lace. The dresses were to remind everyone how quickly Selk had absorbed civilization and advanced it to the benefit of the rest of the inner planets.

  I got that it was supposed to represent all that history stuff, but the whole thing came off feeling kind of like some beauty contest. Especially when the paparazzi bots started commenting on who had designed the dresses for the wealthiest and most famous candidates.

  The fighters, bodyguards, entourages, and bigshots stood outside looking in while the Chairman of the Electoral Council read off the ancient Articles of Selken Monarchy.

  A blue ram’s horn appeared in my peripheral vision.

  “I’m Tatsu Shin Be of Daimoyed,” he introduced himself, then sized me up with a sidelong look. “You’re shorter than I expected, Death cultivator.”

  Said the guy wearing cowboy boots with a one-inch heel.

  “I get that a lot. Usually right before I tear the life point out of somebody.”

  Tatsu chuckled. “You know, my friends were quite disappointed to hear that you wouldn’t be among my opponents. Why aren’t you entering the tournament instead of the Burning Hatred cultivator?”

  “Warcry’s the better cage fighter. It’s not even close.”

  Compression squeezed me from all sides. Not overwhelming like the pressure from a Ketsu’s presence. This was more like someone testing for weak spots. Not an attack, just an assessment.

  Tatsu turned his attention back to the cage, and the testing squeeze disappeared.

  “For the best that you’re not entering,” he said. “If we’d come up against one another, my friends would have wanted me to take you out. Something about a Dragon starting a gang war by burying an entire outpost of my friends in the Boglands of Van Diemann.”

  That was when I realized that all the suit-wearing guys in his entourage had wings. Heavenly Contrails.

  “What do the Contrails want with Selk?” I asked. “All its cities are underwater.”

  Tatsu snorted. “What do the Dragons want with Selk? It’s civilized.”

  I didn’t have a smart comeback for that one.

  He shrugged and his demon wings mimicked the motion faintly. “It’s such a nice little planet, with such a lot of influence over the galaxy. Hope the Dragons are ready to lose it and then the gang war.”

  “If I were a ghost ranked fighter, I wouldn’t make threats my buddies can’t back up,” I told him. “An army of Contrails couldn’t stop me in the Boglands, and an army of Technols couldn’t stop me on Sarca.”

  “Don’t play with Daimoyed fire, Death roach, you might get burned.” He grinned, baring yellowed fangs. “Or more accurately, broken.”

  Crushing compression rushed back in, targeting my ribs on the knife-scar side.

  The Lunar Scythe responded immediately. It rippled underneath my skin and muscle, flowing painfully across my skeleton to reinforce the chipped bone and its surrounding ribs before they could snap.

  Tatsu’s cocky grin faltered. He hadn’t been expecting that.

  I laughed. “I can’t wait to see you try that on Warcry. Aim for his prosthetic.”

  “Everything’s got a breaking point, Death roach. If I really wanted to damage you, nothing could save you.”

  “Everyone’s got a last breath, too,” I said, sticking my hands in my pockets. “Ask your Van Diemann buddies.”

  Up in the cage, Kest shot me a frown, probably wondering why this blue guy was glaring at me like he wanted to headbutt me with those horns. I smiled to let her know everything was fine.

  “I wasn’t kidding when I said Warcry was the better cage fighter,” I told Tatsu. “That’s why the Dragons sent him. But I’m the better killer. That’s why they sent me.”

  e