64. Quia

quia, conj.

1. because

Maidenprayer is a Cruiser-class A453-181—the same new model as Sevrith’s Everseer, just a different weight class; the same extra ankle jets, the same exhaust vents on its throat…but not the same speed as his.

I reach terminus first.

We near the grav-gen in a flash of blue. She’s staying wide, my lance tracking right at her in a Poisson maneuver. No matter which way she dodges, if she continues her forward momentum, I have her pinned in laterally at every degree.

Impact.

The cry between steeds bleats strong, the brief spark of light searing brighter than I’ve ever seen it. My lance catches something solid, something real, and then breaks through. Heavenbreaker peels off into the rise, and my blistering eyes scour the scoreboard: Red, 1. Blue, 0. I got her, but it was so much louder and brighter than usual. I tilt my chin up, chin down, until the fluid in my ears knows direction again and my stomach stops rolling nausea. Crystal laughter comes from the princess’s holoscreen.

“No, silly—not like that. Try again!”

Giggling when I’ve scored a point—is she that confident?

We round the rise’s bend, and I see her hands still limp around the lance, unready. Any other rider would be sizing me up, positioning and repositioning accordingly as the rise ends, but not her. This isn’t a match to her; it’s some kind of game—like brother, like sister.

Heavenbreaker peels a black-syrup voice from my mind: “no openings, so you’ll have to create your own.” It’s irritating how right the voice is, how true to life it is—how easily it straightens my thoughts.

unhelpful.

“helpful,” Heavenbreaker argues with me petulantly. “he was helpful.”

We wrung all helpfulness out of him, and now he’s gone forever. focus. She comes in faster this time; Poisson maneuver won’t work. I need something that goes vertical, too—something manifold. Euclid. Euclid if I can play it close. I’m faster, but I can’t rush her over the tilt until I know what she’s doing.

The lurch of the descent begins. My skin pulls from my skull, and the princess suddenly shrieks, “No, no, no! I told you, Synali! No more boring stuff allowed!”

Comms cut. The grav-gen draws us together like moths to flame, hot and fast, spit and breath forced down my throat. Her lavender grows bigger, closer, all her jets engaged at once and blazing bright in pastel plasma, and I’ve lost sight of her lance. Drag my eyes up, down, around…there! A smear of silver floats far behind her. She dropped it. She dropped her weapon—and then I realize it; she’s the princess—the entire Station is her weapon. Her very blood is her weapon.

The cry hits my ears, but the light doesn’t snapshot around the cockpit—it glows. Like slow motion, I watch the white light I’ve seen so many times on impact gather in Maidenprayer’s helmet, right where a mouth might be, condensing into a single ball of shivering light.

And then it explodes.

White, everywhere. I can’t see anything, and I thrust the lance blindly—something like a red-hot knife drags across my chest, leaving char and smoke. Blink, blink harder, and my vision clears to the sight of the cockpit wall ahead of me glowing orange-red. Superheated. The rise floats us away from each other, the commentators’ voices reconnecting.

“—seems Her Highness is using unorthodox methods, Bero! She’s hit Synali with something, but I’m not sure it was her lance!”

“Well skin my teeth and call me a molerat—I’ve never seen something like this before, Gress! Did Her Highness somehow direct the impact light to damage Heavenbreaker? Is that even possible? And more importantly—is that a point or not?”

Leyda’s holoscreen pops up, her lavender helmet shining as she giggles. “Isn’t it cool, Synali? J doesn’t know I figured out how to do this yet. It’s so much fun!”

The burn lingers on my chest, making it hard to breathe. “What did you do?”

She shrugs. “I dunno. It felt right.”

The descent comes, but the scoreboard never updates. Red, 1. Blue, 0. They’re not counting it as a point, but Leyda doesn’t seem bothered. She doesn’t summon her lance back into her hand; it just floats at the edge of the arena. She’s not here to win. She’s here to play.

“Here we go!” the princess chirps just before the descent cuts our comms. I hold my lance up—if she does the light again, I won’t be able to see enough to hit. If she hits me again on the chest where the metal is already soft, it might break through. I’ll get decanted again.

“remember,” Heavenbreaker says. I can’t respond, too focused on holding my lance strong and steady, squinting and waiting for the light again. Maidenprayer draws close, my body pulled into the impact once more, and I wait until the cry resounds—thrust. If I thrust early, I’ll hit her, I’m sure—

The white light condenses in her helmet faster than before, then blasts out. It catches my lance mid-thrust, melting the metal down to nothing but liquid silver that rapidly cools in space. And that’s the moment I understand.

“this is how we fight,” Heavenbreaker chimes.

We. The reboot memory. The falling, spinning in space, and the white light like lasers shot back at the steeds. The enemy razed Earth in laserfire. The lasers are how they fight, and inside the steeds, on the tilt…it feels like fighting to them—so they make that light.

“I can hear it now!” Leyda’s comms crackle on. “I can hear you talking to your steed! It’s so cute!”

The commenters and the thunderous crowd and Leyda’s joy all fall away as my brain spirals; I can’t hit her if I can’t see her. Neither of us will get a point, and overtime will just keep going and going and going. It’ll be like Sevrith but slower and more agonizing. She’ll keep making the lasers, softening Heavenbreaker’s metal over and over until we disintegrate. Decanting’s not the problem—it’s the fact there won’t be anything to decant back into if Heavenbreaker is a pile of molten slag.

I can’t let this drag on. But how do I end it? I can’t get anywhere close to her and still hope to hit—she makes the blistering light within melee range. A black-and-yellow tiger flashes in my memory—Helmann—and even further back, Rax when he destroyed the dummy. I can see the motions of it, the way both of them moved. It won’t be as graceful or as powerful, but…

“They are not toys, Leyda,” I say. Her image in the holoscreen goes still. “They are alive. All of them. Every single spiral you see in the saddle is someone. You don’t get to toy with them just because it makes you happy.”

I can hear the frown in her voice. “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my father.”

I laugh once, and then I don’t stop. Can’t stop. My laughter fills the saddle, delirious, the rise turning gently into the descent. She sounds like me talking to Dravik. Like me talking to a father I’ve never had. A taste of my own medicine. I laugh until I feel the tears, hot and wet, and the spirals in the saddle rise up to poke at them curiously.

“I know,” I manage. “But I’m going to teach you something he never will.”

I throw my hand out and summon another lance from Heavenbreaker’s palm. The descent rips through me, pulling us into each other. Maidenprayer’s laser spot glows brighter earlier—Leyda’s anger obvious. Breathe. Remember the strength of Rax’s arm, the curve of his graceful fingers, the way he walks like smoke over water. He’s gone. But it was nice, playing pretend with him.

I fight the g-forces with everything I have, every muscle in my body condensed and focused on my right arm as I pull it back, lance squeezed hard in my fist. My posture begs to crumple, to flow, the gravity too much to bear against. The lance handle is too flimsy, the lancepoint bobbing wildly, so I choke it farther up, where the base flares. Finally, it’s enough grip to aim steady.

The laser gathers in Maidenprayer’s helmet, bright enough for squinting. I may still miss. The lance could hit her breastplate where her saddle is and kill her like Helmann killed that referee, and killing a princess would be the true end for me.

The me who fought Yatrice would miss. But the me of now will not.

throw.

We snap our wrist forward, and the silver lance slingshots through the air, faster than Helmann’s thanks to gravity and more accurate thanks to Rax. I’ve learned—from him, from both of them, from every rider I’ve ever faced.

that is what it means to ride.

The silver lancepoint slips between Maidenprayer’s empty arms and sinks deep into the left-side tasset, piercing the swan sigil there clean through.