10. Humo

humō ~āre ~āuī ~ātum, tr.

1. to bury

I’m alone. It’s dark, like space. Panic. Don’t panic—clutch Mother’s pendant and move forward.

The steed’s insides smell sharp, battery acid and joint oil and that gentle citrus scent. The cockpit is bigger than I thought—the size of my scrap-metal apartment, maybe. The inherent marble smoothness of Ghostwinder is nowhere to be seen; metal juts in every direction in this steed, coarse and unfinished, with rust covering it all like dry red mold. It’s just as dusty as Moonlight’s End but more rotted, derelict—something still in the process of dying rather than a hopeless bleached skeleton.

The saddle waits in the center of the cockpit, gently pulsing. It’s a beacon of naked periwinkle and languidly floating silver whorls, no projection barrier encapsulating it. Strange…but this is an old model—maybe hard-light wasn’t invented yet. Gingerly, I reach one finger out and poke the surface, and while the gel ripple doesn’t surprise me, every silver whorl instantly condensing at my point of impact does.

“How am I supposed to get in?” I mutter.

“Press your way in.” I jump as Dravik answers over the cockpit’s intercom. “The nerve fluid’s surface gives with enough force.”

“Nerve fluid? Is that really what it’s called?”

He doesn’t answer. I press my whole hand to the saddle. Wherever I touch, the silver whorls gravitate like a cloud of flies following a scent. All of a sudden, something’s here. Watching me. It’s stronger than the first steed, so strong I can feel its gaze fixed on the back of my head even without being electrocuted inside the gel. The cockpit feels far too small. The air feels heavy, hard to breathe, like whatever’s here is directly on top of me.

“I—” I swallow. “I don’t need a rider’s suit?”

“Rider’s suits are for prolonged exposure; you’re simply rebooting it.”

Prolonged exposure. Exposure to what?

Without the burn of Father’s murder in my veins, I have room to hesitate…but what is hesitation if not a coward’s excuse? I press on the gel as hard as I can, and it gives in one fluid gasp, pulling my whole body into it with a viscous, inescapable gravity. My heart beats into my throat, soundless pressure packing into my ears, my skin, and the something is suddenly right here. It hovered over me before, but now it has its hands around my neck. My breathing goes shallow, the gel like invisible oxygen to my mouth and nose, and I’m too scared to turn my head—all I can see are the silver whorls whizzing by, swarming onto every inch of my exposed skin. Why is this steed so different? Or is this just how it feels without a suit?

“I’m going to run the reboot current through the nerve fluid now.” Dravik’s intercom voice is muffled. “You may feel a brief pain.”

It isn’t pain; it’s invasion—like water going up my nose the wrong way but in my mind. Like déjà vu but forced in from the outside, the watching thing goes inside me. It doesn’t prod gently like Ghostwinder did. This isn’t an open hand offered—it’s filling a void. It’s the dagger going into my collarbone, the vacuum of space imploding Father’s chest cavity when I vented him, the unstoppable nightmare of Mother’s death. It’s the men in the brothel without care, without mercy (stop), and I feel myself go rigid, eyelids jerking open and closed, and I start to see things: White light. Beams. They cut through black space like radiant bullets—stopping only when they smash against honeycomb projection shields. A hundred silver steeds fly into my vision, zipping around space like elegant wasps, leaving no plasma trails—shining new versions of the ancient bunker steed.

And then they turn to me.

A hundred giant needles turn and aim in my exact direction. Hunters looking for prey.

They’re coming for me.

A deep gut instinct stabs at me—I know those steeds are coming to kill me as readily as the assassin did. Dagger flash. Lance flash. They will end my existence. I roll, fall, spin in zero gravity, stars blurring. Worse than the fear of dying is a sharp, unrelenting fear screaming that I’m utterly alone. I know it. I don’t know why, or how, but I know all my friends are dead.

I am the last one left.

“—is complete. Can you hear me, Synali? The reboot is complete. You can come out of the saddle now.”

Dravik’s voice is the knife that cuts the cord—the images and fear vanish, and my body melts away from the grip of…whatever that was. I rip myself out of the saddle, panting. This thing is a steed? No. It’s a demon—a devil prying and prodding in my brain. I saw something in there…and it saw me. Without my permission.

I slam on the steed’s breastplate, and it opens, but not fast enough. I stalk off the gangplank toward Dravik.

“Why did it do that? Is that how every steed reboots?”

He doesn’t ask what I mean by “that”—which means he knows exactly what I’m talking about. He just says, “No.”

“Then why did you force me into that piece of shit?”

“Heavenbreaker,” Dravik says evenly. “Call it by its name.”

“I don’t care what its name is,” I spit.

“I’m not asking you to care. I’m asking you to fight. And every fighter must know the name of their sword. Heavenbreaker.”

Quilliam’s sniffing is the only thing that breaks the furious silence, his withered hands holding a handkerchief to his nose. Dravik suddenly motions for his manservant to follow him up the bunker stairs. Quilliam hesitates, but the dog follows, tail wagging furiously.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I shout after him. “Dravik! Dravik, you owe me answers!”

“There are no ‘answer’ stipulations in your contract, Synali,” his fading voice reminds me. I see red—no, Rax-level crimson. Quilliam toddles up to me, a roll of gauze in his hand as he kneels and reaches for my dog-bitten heel.

“Please, miss. We must bandage your wound before it becomes infected—”

“Don’t touch me!” I shake him off. Quilliam won’t let up, reaching for my legs still. “I SAID DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!”

My kick catches his hand, and he recoils, giving me room at last to stride furiously down the walkway. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him cradle his knotted hand and, with slow trepidation, shuffle back up the bunker stairs. Good. That’s what you get for trying to touch me. For making a vicious girl like me a cake.

I turn and kick the railing over and over, hard enough to make my bones vibrate in pain. Damn that noble, and damn his fucking contracts! I need this machine. If I can ride it, it’ll mean power even the nobles have to respect. So, fine. If he wants to play strictly by the rules, I can do that. I can control myself. Dravik’s right—I don’t have to care for it, but I’ll at least use its name, if only so House Hauteclare can learn who’s taken them down.

“Heavenbreaker.”

It’s just metal and wires and early-War tech. It’s just a machine made to kill an enemy long gone. But for a moment, through the cracks in its breastplate, the silvery saddle seems to glow brighter at my voice.

It took me eight days to stop staring at the bloodstain in the shape of Mother on the apartment floor.

Twelve days to start eating solid food again. Fifteen days for my collarbone wound to heal enough to move, and thirty days to make a plan. Fifty-two to stalk a cleaner who worked at the tourney hall, sixty to get a job delivering milk formula to said cleaner. Seventy-eight days to study the tourney hall map and guard patrols. 132 days to convince Madam Beldeaux to pay me in tranquilizers instead of credits. 175 days to spike the cleaner’s milk formula and transfer his clearance to my vis and walk into the tourney hall like nothing was wrong when everything was.

It took me 175 days to fail in ruining my father.

It takes me 51 days to learn to ride Dravik’s strange, broken steed.

The hardest part isn’t the physical training of the first three weeks. It isn’t the hours of lifting heavy weights until the world spins and I vomit, or inhaling vitamins with names I can’t pronounce, nor is it the cold mornings spent running on the treadmill until my shins feel like they’ll splinter.

It’s the resting. I don’t see the point of it. After putting me through physical hell with a perfect smile, Dravik digitally locks every training room in the manse so I can’t use any equipment during my designated rests. Every hour is an hour the other riders of the Supernova Cup have already run through a million times over. Can’t stand it. If I can’t move, train, focus on something—even pain—the memories come crawling out of my cracks.

The robot-dog finds me staring at an old painting of a beautiful woman walking on Earth, in a place with more trees than sky. I can pick out the tiny metallic pings of its paws from across Moonlight’s End now, but my mind is drenched in blood and my own mistakes. Why did I survive and Mother didn’t? The assassin attacked both of us—I have the scar to prove it. I don’t remember surviving. I remember screaming, crying, being stabbed, that black hood and those ice eyes, but nothing else. The next thing I remember is staring at Mother’s bloodstain on the floor, a bandage around my collarbone, and my vis saying it was eight days later.

Who bandaged me? Why do I remember the after so well but not the during? Trauma, probably. I’m smart enough to understand that, but I don’t like the idea of trauma keeping my own memories from me. I don’t like the idea of anything I can’t control. I try to calm myself, try to reach back in my mind to that time, but…there’s nothing.

There’s a whine, and I feel the dog’s cold nose nudging my ankle. I look down—the bandage I wrapped around my heel after its bite peeks from my shoe, frayed from all the exercise and blood-dark. The dog’s sapphire eyes watch me unblinkingly, faint lights flickering in the blue depths as if its neurons are firing.

“Don’t worry.” I smile. “I don’t blame you. You were just protecting him, weren’t you? I was the same way with my mother.”

Soon, I run out of paintings to stare at. Scrawling through my vis only kills so much time. The frothing tourney fans keep databases on every last rider—past and present. I memorize as many riders’ faces as I can, study clips of their matches. They make this whole thing look effortless. I don’t understand how the legendary knights could’ve been any better—steeds these days are the noble-funded pinnacle of technology, and we’ve had four hundred years to perfect the act of riding itself.

Names blur, but frequent ones mean stronger riders. I look up Father.

“Vis,” I whisper. “Black out the picture.”

Father’s younger face on the holoscreen vanishes beneath a block of darkness.

Apparently, he was in the top five riders of his era. He rode Ghostwinder to countless victories and then to his two greatest achievements: winning the Supernova Cup of 3422 and 3432. Is that why Dravik thinks I can ride for his House—because my father was good at it? The thought makes my stomach churn.

I flip quickly to House Hauteclare’s current rider, and my breath catches. The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen stares up at me from the screen, her hair a sleek waterfall of chestnut and her eyes gold as sunlight, marred only slightly by surgery scars. Mirelle Ashadi-Hauteclare. She looks nothing like me; her neck is graceful and her face is a soft, symmetrical oval with flawless skin, her nose an imperious line down to rosebud lips. No wonder Rax was all over me when I pretended to be her—she’s gorgeous. She’s my age, but she’s a thoroughbred noble. I don’t know how she’s related to me; a cousin, perhaps, or I might be her aunt. It appears she’s good at riding Ghostwinder—good enough that she graduated from the academy a year early and people strategically bow out of facing her.

No matter how I’m related to her, no matter how pretty she is…she is the enemy.

Finally, I click on Rax Istra-Velrayd.

It’s hard to avoid him on the database—he’s mentioned a dozen times. As much as I hate it, his impact on the riding scene seems impossible to ignore; he was considered a child prodigy at the academy, riding in his first qualifier when he was nine. The average age for a rider’s first qualifier is sixteen. At twelve, he won his first proper tourney in House Velrayd’s crimson steed, Sunscreamer, and he hasn’t stopped since. At fifteen, he faced off against Father—a two-time Supernova Cup champion—in a friendly round of sparring, and the match was declared a draw.

He is a threat.

He is unbearably handsome.

I refuse to look at his picture head-on, but my eyes catch flashes of platinum hair, dark quirked brows, broad lips, and redwood eyes glittering wickedly with their own permanent joke, and before the hairs on the back of my heated neck can rise all the way, I jerk my vis shut.

I don’t need to know what he looks like to beat him.

I jump to my feet—I’m done waiting. If the rooms are locked, I’ll run the halls.

This works until the air my lungs struggle to puff out starts to taste like mint. The lightheadedness is instant, my limbs jelly and my eyelids flickering…and then I’m groggily coming to sideways—with my head on a small pillow someone’s placed between me and the cold marble floor. The robot-dog stares at me from a distance, unmoving, as if it’s keeping…watch?

I check my vis—three hours have passed. Three hours? My mouth still tastes like mint, and my body is slept-wrong sore, and my first thought is Dravik. I struggle to my feet and stagger to the weight room; he’s there waiting for me as per our usual schedule, wiping down the steel of a bench. He smiles happily when he sees me.

“Ah, you’re awake. I thought the sleeping gas would keep you under longer.”

“Gas?” I grit out. “You knocked me out with gas?”

“Unwillingly, you understand. You are an asset. Without proper rest, you risk injury, and any injury will delay my timeline by a significant amount.”

I see red again, resisting the urge to knock over a rack of weights. “Your timeline? I could’ve cracked my head on the goddamn floor!”

“And yet it seems you did not.” Dravik claps his hands in a clear bid to change the subject. “The thigh muscles are responsible for a great majority of balance within the saddle. Let’s begin with a set of twenty squats and work our way up from there.”

I want to argue, to scream, to destroy something to get him to take me seriously, but the calendar screen in the weight room looms huge and blue: six weeks left until the Supernova Cup. I can control myself. There’s no time for anger, only execution.

“You won’t gas me again,” I say.

“That remains to be seen,” he agrees. “If you adhere to the rules of rest.”

I put a finger in his placid face. “If I do something that compromises ‘the timeline,’ you’ll tell me. Vis me, like a normal person. No more brute-forcing.”

His pale brows rise. “Will you continue to brute-force your training?”

I go quiet.

“I’ve spent nine years pondering over each step of this process, Synali—almost half your life. You need not trust me as a person, but I implore you to trust the plan. If I say rest, you must rest.”

“It’s pointless,” I snap.

“Your health and well-being may be pointless to you,” he says, “but they are very valuable to me. You have value to me.”

Something deep in my chest feels like it cracks. Dravik’s eyes go soft again.

“Would you truly listen if I vis’d you my concerns?”

“I’d—” I swallow. “No. But I can try.”

He hands me a weight with a smile. “Let us try together, then.”

I grind out my sets. For every rep Dravik considers “successful,” he taps his silver cane on the floor, the ticking like the hands of some unbearable clock. Sweat pours from every inch of my face. This isn’t our first session, but it’s the first time he tries to physically correct me. I startle when I feel his guiding hand around the top of my arm and the brothel fear roars up like an oil fire. I jerk away violently, the weight clenched in my fist like a weapon.

“Don’t try it.”

It’s the first time I’ve seen his face surprised. “I would never, Synali.”

“They always say that.”

The room seethes in quiet dust and withered grass waving outside the windows. When Dravik smiles again, it’s a grim, dark-steel blade of a thing, but its edge is not aimed at me.

“I suppose they do. My apologies.”