Chapter 73: The Council Gave My Garbage Class A Choice: Win Or Disappear

The notice went up on the Class Z board before anyone had finished breakfast.

Soren read it twice.

Because the man who signed it had come in person to watch it get nailed up.

Vasquez Sr. stood by the door with two Council aides and a posture that said he had cleared his morning to be here.

He wore grey.

He did not look at Soren once, which told Soren the whole thing was about him.

[DING! — Inter-Class Tournament posted. Prize: one year Council immunity. Penalty for last-place class: dissolution.]

The aide read it out anyway, because the point was to say it in the room.

"Class Z will justify its allocation in the inter-class tournament," the aide said. "Or the academy will recover the resources."

"Recover," Hansel said, near the back. "That means us."

"It means the room," the aide said. "And the funding and the slots and the names on the door."

Vasquez Sr. let that sit. Then he left, and the door he had paid an aide to talk in front of closed behind him.

◆◆◆◆

A countdown class was not what Soren read it as.

He read the date on the notice, the signature, the timing. The tournament was a tool.

Vasquez Sr. did not need a tournament to dissolve a class he funded.

He needed a tournament to dissolve it in public, with the academy watching, so the dissolution looked like a result instead of a decision.

That was the weak point.

A man who wants you erased quietly has all the power.

A man who wants you erased loudly has given you a stage, which means he has given you a way to not get erased.

Soren turned to the room.

"He wants us on the floor losing," he said. "So we win immunity instead."

"Immunity from what," Selah said. She was already against the wall, arms folded, frost not showing yet.

"From him." Soren tapped the line on the notice.

"One year. The Council can’t touch this class for a year. Which means the Bureau monitoring runs through Council channels, so for a year, nobody with a clipboard comes through that door."

"That’s a trade," he said. "He wants a show and we take the prize off the table he set up himself."

Hansel still looked like he wanted to be sick. The others looked at the floor. Derelict energy, the kind that loses before round one.

Soren did not give them a speech, he gave them numbers.

"Eight of us. One bracket. We don’t need to win the whole thing. We need to not finish last, and last place is a class that doesn’t field anyone." He looked at Hansel. "You field. You lose your first match in ninety seconds, that still beats forfeit so nobody forfeits."

"That’s the plan," Selah said. "Don’t be worst."

"That’s step one of the plan."

◆◆◆◆

Troy was in the registration hall when Soren went to file the class roster.

He was wearing a jacket that wasn’t from Class A and wasn’t his old one either. Different crest. They had moved him.

The Spectral Knight stood at his shoulder, half-formed, the way it always was when Troy wanted it seen.

"They put you in a real class," Soren said.

"They put me where I’m useful." Troy didn’t smile. "You look worse than last time."

"I’ve been busy."

"I heard." Troy’s eyes went to Soren’s right hand, to the scar that ran across the back of it, the one Selah’s ice managed but never erased. "That’s new."

Soren didn’t move the hand. Moving it would have been an answer.

"You’re entered against me eventually," Troy said. "Different classes, same bracket."

"The irony gets a lot of places."

Something passed between them that had been sitting unfinished since the sublevel, since the thing Troy had been promised and Soren had not delivered, since the deal that was still a deal because neither of them had called it off.

"You owe me a conversation," Troy said.

"I owe you a fight, apparently."

"Those might be the same thing." Troy turned. The Knight turned with him a half-beat late, which was wrong, because it had never lagged before.

"Win your early rounds. I want you intact when we get there."

◆◆◆◆

The girls reacted to the tournament the way they reacted to everything, which was to say, about him.

Yara was in the dorm when he got back, in the wolf shape, on top of the bed instead of under it. Clingy, then.

She didn’t speak through the bond right away.

She was running threats, he could feel it, the way her attention moved across the names he hadn’t even told her yet.

The big ones eat the small ones.

None of the small ones can eat you.

That leaves the big ones, and the big ones won’t be allowed near you, which means someone has arranged this to look fair.

"That’s what I think too," Soren said.

Then who do I get to remove?

"Nobody yet."

Selah was already at the desk reading the bracket rules with the focus she gave to things she pretended not to care about.

"Single elimination," she said. "Stupid. One bad match and you’re out."

"You sound interested."

"I’m just annoyed." Frost laced one knuckle, then stopped. She noticed and pulled it back into her hand.

Maren took it worse.

She’d come in without knocking, which she did now, and she stood in the middle of the room.

"They can’t dissolve us," she said. "Where would we go?"

"Other classes. Or out."

"I’m not going to another class." She said it was like a threat to the academy. "And neither are you, So we win."

Dani was the only one who didn’t talk about winning as she wasn’t from their class.

She sat in the doorway and read the room, which was what she did, and when she finally spoke it was quiet.

"They’re scared," she said. "All of them and you’re not. That’s the problem you have to manage."

"I know."

"They’ll either follow that or resent it." She tilted her head. "Make it the first one."

◆◆◆◆

That night Soren pulled up the bracket on the public board.

Eight classes.

Seeded matches. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

His name in the Class Z slot, first round against a name he didn’t recognize, from a class he’d never read about.

He waited for it.

He didn’t know he was waiting until nothing came.

There was no preview. No twenty-four-hour read of how the match went.

Nothing in the back of his skull telling him what the other tamer would open with, what beast they’d field, where the fight would turn.

The thing that had let him walk through every encounter knowing the ending was gone, had been gone since the cut, and he kept reaching for it out of habit and closing on nothing.

He looked at the name of his first opponent and felt the specific blank of not knowing a single thing about them.

For the first time since he’d arrived in this world, he was going to walk onto a floor blind.

He read the name one more time.

He’d take blind over the alternative.

Blind meant the script was dead, and a dead script meant nobody had already written him losing.

He closed the board.