The first-round bouts wrapped up on Day Two of the tournament, cutting the field down to sixty-four candidates. That night, the Electoral Council held a big shindig at one of the other luxury hotels in Pearl City. Supposedly, the party was to celebrate the fighters and candidates who’d made it through the first round, but mostly it was a tournament fundraiser, where the remaining contestants mingled with supporters and sponsors who’d bought tables at the party, some of them up to ten years beforehand.

  People in wild west style tuxes, formal kimonos, and hoop skirts milled around the ballroom chatting and drinking from fluted glasses. In the corner, a quartet played instruments that looked like a theremin had had a bunch of babies with an orchestra’s strings section. Their music probably had a real genre name like “Selken classical,” but to me it sounded like “werewolves in outer space.”

  From across the room, Mrs. Djin Ara’s Heavenly Contrails gave me the hairy eyeball as I followed Kest and Warcry around. Tatsu Shin Be tipped me a wink, killed his champagne, and held the empty flute on his palm. An invisible fist crushed the glass into a fine crystalline powder. He turned his hands over and dusted off his palms.

  I just shot him a smirk and kept walking. Even I wasn’t stupid enough to rise to the bait in a room swarming with dragonfly drones and CPA agents in dress uniforms. There were more ceremonial katanas and gleaming blasters than actual people in that ballroom.

  Now that I was looking for it, it was obvious which candidates had Big Five hooligans watching their back. Kest had the Dragons. The Quiet Storm had the Contrails. The Scarlet Titan had brought a security team of obvious Technols, one of which was the laser sword packing psycho Agent Eliona.

  A glamorous, picture show starlet candidate whose name I had to look up—Zhishon Xin Ivalya—and her fighter were being followed around by Holy Body Cult members. Apparently she was mondo famous. It blew Kest and Warcry away that I had no idea who she was.

  “Not from around here,” I reminded them. “Or from anywhere within a galaxy of around here.”

  “Still,” Kest said. “How have you not seen any her pictures?”

  “When do we have time to watch movies?”

  “I met her once at a charity fight,” Warcry said like he thought it wasn’t no thang but we should both realize it was. “Her man at the time was a fan—Jon Caro, from the No Time to Die Faster flicks. Lots of big names there, but Ivalya was the real deal. Proper class, all the way around.”

  I snorted. “Somebody’s got a celebrity crush.”

  “Cop on,” he sneered. “I know quality when I see it is all.”

  Ivalya definitely had the flawless face and proportions of an actress, but I was more interested in her security team. I’d probably seen Body Cult hooligans before on Van Diemann and just not realized it, but these guys stuck out like grizzlies in a dog park. They looked like they injected a mixture of bull shark testosterone and rabid rottweiler saliva directly into every muscle. Not to mention, every one of them had perfectly sculpted facial hair and clean, manicured nails.

  Maybe it made sense that they were backing a starlet who’d probably had a ton of work done to perfect her body, too.

  The Jianjiao candidate took me longer to spot. Even among the Big Five, Jianjiao were known for their stealth and underhandedness. I thought there was a pretty good chance it was the candidate whose security team included the only hooded bodyguard. When you weren’t looking directly at him, the hooded guy seemed to fade away. Not just from your sight, but from your memory, too.

  I upped Dead Reckoning and steered Kest and Warcry away from them.

  Right into our old buddy Director Chillion. Half a million pins and stars sparkled on his sharp dress uniform.

  “Mrs. Iye Skal, Death cultivator.” He stabilized his katana with one white-gloved hand and his ray gun with the other as he gave the half-bow of an acquaintance’s greeting, then he shook Warcry’s hand and gave him the introduction version. “Mr. Thompson! Excellent fight today. Gotta love the lure ’em and hook ’em approach.”

  Warcry nodded. “Learned it from an old training partner. Peiparr’s attack was built on frustrating his opponents. You get that a lot with dissipating affinities. The hotter they want you to get, the more you cool down and think, yeah? Slow down when they want you to speed up. Control the pace, and you control them.”

  “Well, you sure did that,” Chillion said. “You just don’t see enough truly cerebral fighters these days.”

  Kest interrupted the fight-talk. “Does Agent Eliona’s presence with Ms. Kyriin Po mean that the CPA decided to back the Scarlet Titan for the throne?”

  The Director shifted his stance to meet the subject-change and grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing waiter.

  “I can’t control what every agent on staff does in their off-duty hours, Miss Iye Skal. This is a Confederated planet—everyone’s allowed to support whomever they wish. No, I’d say Eliona’s here on behalf of her other family.”

  “If I were you, I would hope so,” Kest said. “In case you missed it, there’s a conditional switch on that transfer I sent you.”

  He grinned. “Oh, I saw it. Rest assured, I am your humble servant until every one of those conditions is met.”

  “What a slimeball,” I muttered when he left us to shmooze the next target on his list.

  Chillion bowed over Ivalya’s hand, glove on glove, and kissed the backs of her fingers. She gave him a supernova-white smile in return.

  “Knows his cage strategies, though, don’t he,” Warcry said, watching the interaction play out.

  The crowd at the soiree was mostly middle-aged and up, wealthy Selken businesspeople and celebrities, but here and there groups of teenagers and younger people clumped together, the kids and relatives of whoever had been rich enough to buy a table at the party.

  A pair of twins about our age caught up to us later on in the evening. While their dad rehashed the matches of the day with Warcry, the girls came after me and Kest.

  They were half-Selken, half some other kind of alien I couldn’t identify, which gave them maroon skin in addition to the lacy network of black eye capillaries. Instead of ears, they had spiny translucent frills on either side of their heads. They were dressed exactly the same from their fancy hairstyles to the poofy skirts to their punk skater shoes.

  They also constantly traded off talking in the middle of sentences.

  “It’s so icy to see someone young—”

  “—enter the electoral tournament. The way our stepmom talked, we assumed this would be a total—”

  “—low-tide at the nursing home. But you’re, like, actually keeping it lava.”

  They struck me as the sort of twins who liked to switch places to see how many people they could trick. Hanging around them for more than a few minutes would be a lot. I was already tired of them.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Kest didn’t seem to mind them, though.

  “Thanks.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You’re actually the first people our age we’ve talked to since landing on Selk. You’re so… icy.”

  The twins giggled at her slang usage, but not in a mean way, just in an air-headed way.

  I hadn’t realized it until just that second, but since I’d been dropped in this universe, I hadn’t run into many other teenagers at all. Kest, Rali, and Warcry. Sedrick Nameless might have been one—I didn’t know, I’d never checked his stats. There hadn’t been many kids at all on Van Diemann, and I’d never met any who worked for the Eight-Legged Dragons.

  “Oh. My. Kelp. You should totally come to—”

  “—Kanerland Mall with us sometime! It’s so hit right now.”

  “Vastly hit. We’ll message you a scheduler.” Twin One turned to Twin Two. “Can you even imagine—”

  “—if we showed up with her and her Death cultivator steady?” Twin Two flapped her hands at Kest. “You have no idea! Our chums would—”

  “—completely barrel roll. You two are like the hittest tragedy in the hyperweb right now.”

  I blinked. “Uh, what?”

  “Tragedy?” Kest frowned.

  “Way tragic. It’s all over the waves how your dad totally wants to feed him to the Mer—”

  “—and how the CPA wants to dump him on Van Diemann forever.”

  “Everybody’s seen the clips of you two fighting those agents—”

  “—outside that diner to defend each other. Massively adorbs.”

  One of them smiled dreamily at me. “The way you gave up and let yourself be handcuffed so the CPA wouldn’t hurt her—”

  “—that was exceedingly star-crossed.”

  “The most star-crossed. Everyone our age devours everything—”

  “—that Fated Love writes about you two. It’s going to be so heart-wrenching—”

  “—egregiously heart-wrenching when one of you dies or gets transported.”

  I didn’t tell them that Kest couldn’t die nowadays. They probably would’ve turned that into something about how tragic it would be for her when I finally bit it. Besides, I was kind of hoping they would run out of things to say if no one encouraged them.

  They didn’t. But they did finally leave when their dad did.

  I blew out a huge breath.

  Warcry nodded at me. “How about ya, grav?”

  “I feel like I just got run over by twin trains in pink skater shoes.”

  “I like them.” Kest messed around on her HUD screen, answering the scheduling thing the twins had sent her. “I’m going to the mall with them tomorrow evening after the bout.”

  “I’m washing my hair then,” I told her.

  “You’ll need to tail Warcry, anyway.” She pointed from herself to him. “Invincible. Not invincible.”

  “Icy,” I said, nodding. “Egregiously icy.”

  Eventually, the waiters brought out tables, chairs, and buffets of finger foods. While we loaded up plates and found our assigned table, the theremin-string quartet packed up.

  A deejay took the quartet’s place, setting up his speaker stacks and equipment in the corner. The fancy ballroom floor auto-flipped its parquet tiles over one by one to reveal a light-up dance floor.

  “It’s a local gossip page,” Kest said, ignoring her food to show me a screenful of anime characters holding their dying girlfriends or boyfriends in the rain. “Fated Love. They keep track of all the celebrity couples on Selk. Especially the ones most likely to get torn apart by circumstance or one rip the other’s heart out.”

  I gulped down the bite I’d just taken. “Cheerful.”

  The chandelier dimmed and blacklights started flashing. Kest’s HUD screen illuminated her face as she swiped around the site.

  “Apparently, it’s popular in the fourteen to forty-eight age bracket. Look, we’re Star-Crossed Couple of the Week.”

  Someone had animated the footage of Kest kissing me on the dock and that fight with Eliona and Agent Roboto outside the diner. There was even an anime of me yelling at Rav and Chairman Iye Skal outside the CPA hub, with little ashamed scribble clouds over their heads.

  Even the comment-text looked overly emotional. Speculation on the page was going crazy about whether the meat roach gangster or the Selken good-girl would kick the bucket first. One theory gaining traction said that my heart of gold would demand I leave Kest so she wouldn’t get caught up in my life of crime. Then, obviously, I would get gunned down in some outer planet hit, and her name would be the last word on my lips.

  “If I had a heart of gold, I’d give it to you to sell,” I told Kest.

  “I’d get us top credit for it,” she said, scrolling. “Gold prices are through the ionosphere on Selk right now. I wonder who runs this page. I don’t remember seeing anybody but CPA drones filming us outside the hub.”

  Thumping, cranking music blasted out of the speakers. All the icy kids and even a few adults got out on the dance floor, the tiles flashing wherever they stepped. Kest smiled at the sound, her eye-lace pulsing in time with the music.

  “Sewer punk? What a throwback.” She shoved her chair out and stood up, already swaying to the beat. “Do you want to dance, Hake?”

  Back on Earth, there had been school dances and youth group dances, but I’d never gone to one. If I had, I wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. There was no way I was getting out there and taking my first shot at cutting a rug in front of everybody.

  “Sorry, I don’t dance.” I felt kind of bad for turning her down when she looked so eager, so I threw Warcry under the bus. “But maybe the former IFC champ wants to.”

  I expected him to tell me to dunk my head in a toilet.

  Warcry snorted. “’Course ya don’t dance. No wonder your balance and footwork is rubbish. All right then, Stumpy. Let’s have at it.”

  They squeezed onto the dance floor between thrashing bodies in formal wear.

  Warcry danced like a dude fighting for his life. He attacked every move, headbutting the air, throwing elbows and knees every which way, and pumping his fists. Apparently the ladies loved that. By the first chorus, one of the twins from earlier was matching his energy beat for beat. More girls watched from nearby, ready to swoop in on him for the next song.

  Kest, though… The second she started dancing, she had all my attention. I wouldn’t have guessed someone so Metal could move like that.

  Chairman Iye Skal took Kest’s empty seat.

  “I assumed all you violent types danced,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “For my daughter to realize what a danger you are. For you to realize it’s in her best interest if you cut ties and leave her be. In short, dissolution of this relationship before she gets hurt worse than she already has been.”

  I leaned back in my chair and glared across the dance floor.

  The Chairman scowled.

  “Have you considered what will happen if she gets elected monarch of this planet?” He leaned forward, his belly bumping the table back a couple inches, and braced his elbows on the white-clothed top. “Do you think she’ll be allowed to keep you on as a consort? Not just a Death cultivator, not just a prison planet hooligan, but a human? You’re a timebomb with a faulty clock, and she thinks you’re a pet.”

  “Weird, I’ve been hearing that Death cultivators are all psycho serial killers who murder everyone around them since I found out I had a Mortal affinity, but I’ve never hurt any of my friends.”

  “Where’s my son?”

  “Probably still wandering around the jungle on Shinotochi-Sarca.”

  “Wandering around it, or rotting in it?”

  “Rali was my best friend,” I snapped. “We had an argument and split the party, but that doesn’t mean I would kill him. Rali’s an awesome guy, he’s just kind of naive. Both your kids are great. Maybe you should try hanging out with them sometime.”

  Chairman Iye Skal studied me, the patterns in his eyes darkening like thunderheads cooking up a storm.

  “What are you, Death cultivator—twelve, thirteen universal years old?”

  “Almost fifteen universal years, seventeen on Selk.” And sixteen on Earth, not that I needed to keep track of that anymore.

  He shrugged. “Twelve, fifteen, seventeen. Either way you’re too young to have any idea what you’re talking about. You haven’t even had time to glimpse reality, let alone be a part of it.”

  “What is it with people telling me that I’m too young to know what I’m talking about whenever they want me to say ‘good job’ for ditching their kids? Kest and Rali had to get tough and survive on their own surrounded by criminals. It’s a sucky way to grow up, and it’s because of you.”

  “I swallowed my pride for them,” he snarled, angry black lace infusing his meaty cheeks and giving him a haggard look. “I came back to a planet that had cast me out. I groveled and debased myself and retracted every piece of evidence I’d found against a corrupt regime, put myself through hell and betrayed everything I knew was true, all so I could make a home and a future for my children. Until you’ve sacrificed your last shred of dignity for someone you love, you keep your feeding hole closed, gang trash.”

  “That’s completely unsound,” Kest said.

  The Chairman and I both flinched. With the dim lighting and loud music, she had snuck up on us. She stood on the opposite side of the table, arms crossed and glaring at her dad.

  “We could’ve had a home and a future anywhere,” she said. “Even on Van Diemann. All Rali and I wanted was you and Mom. We didn’t care about anything else.”

  The Chairman sighed. “Kiddo, your mom and I… That was never going to work out.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not discussing family business here, Irakest.”

  “You were discussing it with Hake two seconds ago.”

  “Oi, grav!” Warcry waltzed into the tension-barrier surrounding our table. Sensing all was not icy, he glanced from me to Kest to Chairman Iye Skal. He shifted his weight, then nodded at me. “Just got a message that can’t wait, and I need backup in case it’s an ambush.”

  I looked at Kest.

  “I’m staying right here,” she said, glaring Freezing Metal at her dad, “until some Investigative Delving cultivator explains his actions in a rational manner.”

  I got up and squeezed between the tables to her.

  “Do you want me to stay, too?”

  Kest shook her head. “If anything happens to Warcry, we’re out of the tournament. Go be a bodyguard. This is a father-daughter fight.”

  e