In the competitors’ pavilion, Jun leaned unsteadily against the nearest wooden post. He felt as stunned and disoriented as a bug violently shaken in a jar. He tried to focus himself and summon the calm he needed, but his mind kept returning to the stomach-churning image of Yin’s severed hand falling to the ground, and the look on Yin’s face in that moment.
It made him regret every jealous, unkind sentiment he’d ever harbored toward his old rival.
With a surge of determined anger, he pushed away from the post and straightened. Leopard’s sadistic smile, General Cobu’s heartless disregard, the Red Scarves and their bloodthirsty glee—it was all sickening. For years, he’d pictured the Guardian’s Tournament as a bright, shiny fantasy, a noble and thrilling celebration of martial arts. He hadn’t known of Old Man Zhang’s ruined leg. He hadn’t yet seen anyone maimed or killed for the enjoyment and profit of others. He hadn’t known that he would lose people he cared about.
Perhaps he should’ve walked away on that first day after the opening ceremony. But it was too late for that, and avenging Yin Yue had become one more reason to bring down Leopard.
If he got through Ghostface first.
Jun picked out a chain whip from the rack of flexible weapons presented to him—rope darts, nunchaku, three-sectional staves, meteor hammers. This weapon class suited Ghostface’s fluid, evasive style. The mysterious protest fighter was still nowhere to be seen. Would he appear for their match? Jun wasn’t sure what he hoped for. If Ghostface failed to show, then it meant the rumor the White Phoenix Guard had heard was most likely true—Ghostface, or the multiple conspirators who shared the role of Ghostface, was now in Cobu’s custody, and Jun would automatically go on to the final match against Leopard.
If the masked man did show up, then perhaps the emperor’s protection hadn’t been broken after all. But then Jun would have to fight and defeat a fellow student of Sifu Chang—the one remaining candidate who had as much reason to want to beat Leopard as he did.
When the time came, Jun entered the arena amid uncanny silence. Perhaps the spectators were still as shaken as he was by what they’d witnessed half an hour ago.
“Fighting for a spot in the championship final,” bellowed the announcer, his ruddy face flushed with excitement, “the youngest competitor in the tournament, the upstart phenom from Cheon, Li Jun, the Little Dragon!”
Jun came to a stop and waited. He could feel the weight of the crowd’s expectation on him, bearing down on all sides of the sloping grounds of Warrior’s Park, and from the emperor’s raised platform, the scrutiny of General Cobu, Guardian Yama, and the row of silent court officials. All of them waited in suspense with him.
Will he show?
A minute passed. Jun rolled out his shoulders, trying to stay loose and warm even though everything was sore. Even someone accustomed to the most rigorous martial arts training wasn’t meant to fight at peak level for three days in a row, with increasing intensity and accumulating damage along the way. Jun had heard stories of Guardians who were so badly injured from the tournament that they were secretly in constant pain afterward.
The arena announcer cleared his throat. Jun glanced up at the royal pavilion; General Cobu leaned back with a small, satisfied smile. “It seems,” the announcer said regretfully, “that the other competitor is not—”
“Wait.” A lone voice, clear and resonant.
Jun jerked his eyes away from watching Cobu and back to the other side of the arena. The crowd parted as Ghostface entered, looking the same as before: loose black trousers and tunic, and a white cloth mask covering his entire face with only the eyes showing beneath the stern topknot. In his right hand, swinging by his side, he carried a slingshot of cloth and rope, loaded with a heavy metal ball; in his left, he rolled another three metal shots.
Murmurs of relief and excitement rose up from all around Warrior’s Park. General Cobu leaned forward so abruptly that he nearly came off his chair. With effort, he settled back down, his mouth downturned in furious disbelief. Obviously, he hadn’t expected Ghostface to appear today.
“The last remaining contender, an audience favorite—the enigmatic, riveting mystery man straight out of legend—Ghostface!” bellowed the enthusiastic announcer.
Jun’s mind raced as Ghostface approached, that blank white mask unnerving in its expressionlessness. Whichever one of them won would have to face Leopard in the afternoon. Jun didn’t want to lose, but becoming Guardian was no longer his main goal. It was more important that Cobu’s pit fighter not win. A pitched battle between Jun and Ghostface would leave the winner too exhausted and injured to defeat Leopard.
Was there a way, Jun wondered, for the two of them to work together? Did Ghostface know what had happened to Chang? Had he been in contact with Ren? If only Jun had had the chance to speak with the masked fighter ahead of time. He pressed fist to palm and bent into a respectful bow, fixing his gaze on the white-masked face of his opponent. We’re on the same side, he tried to communicate with his eyes.
Ghostface stared back at him steadily, the covered face impossible to read. Very slowly, he nodded, even as he began swinging the heavy ball in his slingshot in faster circles.
Jun frowned; there was something strange about Ghostface. This isn’t the same man from yesterday. He was slighter, had a different gait and narrower shoulders than the person who’d fought yesterday. Jun was sure of it. This was yet another different Ghostface.
The announcer raised the mallet to strike the gong. “Let the match begin!”
“Wait!” Ghostface raised an arm high into the air. The other kept the slingshot going in a steady whirl at his side. “I’m not Ghostface. Ghostface is only a name. An idea. A hero who appears when needed, to stand up for the people and to stand against the corrupt and unjust.”
General Cobu’s scowl was a frightening mask of his own. His soldiers shifted forward, their hands on the hilts of their swords, ready to act at their commander’s signal. The vast audience was silent. The only thing Jun could hear was his own heart, pounding in his ears with panicked realization. That voice! Why would she—
Ren yanked off the white mask. She pulled off the band securing her topknot and let her long hair fall. She raised her chin and gazed at Jun with warmth and apology in her eyes, but before he could say a thing, she turned her back and spoke to the audience, dropping the deepened stage voice she’d used a moment earlier in favor of her own, loud and clear.
“Ghostface came to the Guardian’s Tournament because the future of all Longhan is threatened by greed and ambition. One man would corrupt the tournament to raise himself up and to stoke the flames of war between the children of Dragon in the West and the East.” She pointed to the emperor’s pavilion. “General Cobu and his Red Scarves will lead the country to ruin.”
“Arrest that woman,” General Cobu ordered. A dozen of his soldiers rushed forward.
“Stop,” countermanded the high, wheezy voice of Emperor Tandu. Everyone on the platform glanced over at the emperor in astonishment. “Let her speak.”
“Your Excellency,” Cobu sputtered, “this woman is disrupting your—”
“I love Ghostface’s stories,” the emperor declared. “I want to listen.”
The emperor was the divine Son of Dragon and publicly disobeying his unequivocal command would be treason. General Cobu bowed his head, vibrating with suppressed fury.
“I am the daughter of the flutist Blindman Chang,” Ren shouted. “Yesterday, he was arrested by soldiers of General Cobu’s Sixth Division. He was violently seized without cause or trial, for being a member of the Silent Flute Society. Ghostface, the fighter you were all hoping to see today, disappeared on the same night, despite the emperor’s protection afforded to all Guardian candidates. So today, I am Ghostface. If we’re to save our country from the villain and scoundrel you see sitting on that stage next to the emperor, we must all be Ghostface!”
Ren loosed the metal ball she’d been spinning in the slingshot as effortlessly as she kept her silk scarves in the air onstage. Jun flinched, but the shot was not aimed at him. The ball flew out of the arena with unerring accuracy toward the emperor’s platform, straight for General Cobu.
Soldiers leapt forward to protect the emperor and the general, placing themselves in the path of the speeding projectile and throwing up their shields. The metal ball crashed into the wall of shields and exploded with a shocking bang as a cloud of dense black smoke filled the royal pavilion. The emperor, General Cobu, Guardian Yama, all the court officials, the soldiers, and the stand with the Scroll of Heaven disappeared from view amid shrieks of alarm and confusion.
“Ren!” Jun ran for her. “What are you doing?”
Ren ignored him, her mouth a grim, fierce line as she filled and loosed her slingshot again and again. Two more metal balls went sailing out of the arena. One hit the ground in front of Leopard’s tent, engulfing the structure and the soldiers outside it with another expanding ball of black smoke. The next ball went into the nearest cluster of Cobu’s red scarf–wearing supporters. In every direction, people ran from the spreading noxious smoke clouds, pressing hands or shirts to their faces. Some collapsed to the ground, gasping and coughing, faces red and eyes watering.
Furious Red Scarves surged forward, hurling verbal abuse at Ren and looking as if they would tear her limb from limb. They didn’t get far; a mass of Ghostface’s supporters and Silent Flute Society loyalists crashed into them like a counter tide. Arena attendants, White Phoenix Guards, and Sixth Division soldiers scrambled futilely to try to force the maddened factions apart as fists, rocks, and random items began to fly. The sloping lawn surrounding the arena roiled with noise and movement as ordinary spectators fled the violence, smoke, and screaming.
Jun grabbed Ren by the arm, stopping the spin of her slingshot. She turned to him with a smile that was steely and humorless. “You stayed to fight. I knew you would.”
“Why are you here?” he cried above the commotion. She’d said she would take refuge with the Silent Flute Society, that they would keep her safe. That had been yet another lie. She’d kept him in the dark again, and his bewilderment and anger was eclipsed only by dread at the sight of soldiers plowing toward them. “We need to get out of here.”
She shot him the briefest glance of withering skepticism. “I have to get out of here. You have a championship match to fight.” Before he could get in another word, she clamped her free hand on his wrist, twisted his arm into an S lock, and kicked him in the chest. Jun lost his grip and bent over, coughing.
“You wouldn’t want to be seen as an ally of Ghostface,” she told him. “See you back home, Little Dragon.” With a swift yank, she pulled the Ghostface mask back over her head and sprinted away from him into the cloud of smoke at the arena’s edge, her slingshot whirring.
“Stop that woman! She attacked the emperor and deserves death!” General Cobu had descended from the pavilion, holding his signature red scarf over his nose and mouth. His eyes were bloodshot and his beard quivered as he bellowed for his soldiers. “Seize anyone who aids her!”
Behind him, the first cloud of smoke was starting to dissipate from the platform. Court officials were stumbling away, wheezing into handkerchiefs and into the sleeves of their black robes. Royal guards hurried the emperor away in his covered litter, racing for the safety of the Pearl. Guardian Yama, looking more annoyed than alarmed, followed after, carrying the Scroll.
Ghostface loosed her final shot into the path ahead of herself, sending everyone in her way fleeing as the fire powder went off in another sharp bang and a cloud of smoke erupted on the hillside, drifting on the wind down the slope toward the arena. “Ren!” Jun tried to follow but managed only a few steps before the smoke hit him. Instantly his eyes and throat began to burn. He staggered back into the arena and found he had nowhere else to go; in every other direction, people were still clashing in support of Cobu or Ghostface, as if a madness had overtaken them.
Ren nimbly dodged two soldiers, dove into a forward roll under the cloud of smoke, and vanished from sight. Soldiers raced to cut off her escape, surrounding the bridge off the Island, but Ren did not emerge from the smoke. When the cloud cleared, Ghostface was nowhere to be seen. Cobu yelled at his soldiers to search under the bridge, along the banks of the lake, everywhere.
A harried but diligent arena attendant had the wherewithal to strike the gong. The ringing sound didn’t stop all the fighting or the commotion, but it did cause people to look over at where Jun still stood, alone.
“Ghostface has forfeited the match!” the announcer declared, his flamboyant hat askew on his sweaty brow, valiantly trying to make it seem as if the tournament were still going on normally. “Henceforth, having threatened the personal safety of his exalted and divine Imperial Highness, Emperor Tandu, the woman posing as Ghostface is declared a traitor and dangerous political radical to be arrested and executed on sight, per the orders of General Cobu.” The announcer coughed, frantically waving away a remaining wisp of smoke. “The final match to decide the Guardian of the Scroll of Heaven will be between Leopard and Li Jun, after … ah, a short break!”