Chapter 146: The Masters Plan
Far from the roaring colosseum, in a room where sunlight had never been invited, the only glow came from a wall of floating monitors.
The largest screen showed Julie’s stream. On it, a man in black knelt at a boundary stone, bleeding from the head while sixty thousand people lost their collective minds, and a golden formation dissolved around him like dying sunlight.
The Master watched the replay for the fourth time.
"He beat a sealing artist," he said quietly, "with his hands."
Behind him, the room offered its usual chorus.
Hexi sat cross-legged on the floor in a nest of his own plucked hair, rocking gently, his eyes enormous and shining in the monitor light. "Did you see it, Master? Did you see? He played dead. He lay under the stones and thought and thought and thought." His fingers found a fresh strand and began to curl it. "What a brain. What a beautiful, beautiful brain. When the kill order opens again, I want it. I called it first. Everyone heard me call it."
"Nobody is arguing with you," Shadow mumbled from the corner, where she lay across two chairs like laundry. "Nobody ever argues with you. It’s not worth the noise."
Zayx said nothing. He stood with folded arms in his usual place, and on the screen’s fourth replay of the Phantom rising out of the rubble, his knuckles creaked.
The Master finally turned from the monitors.
"Enough about the hero." He crossed to the long steel table at the room’s center and laid his palm flat against it. Light bloomed under his hand, and a building assembled itself above the table in floating blue lines: a tower, familiar to every person in the room, and beneath the tower, deep beneath it, a series of stacked sublevels like the roots of a tooth.
The Hero Association headquarters.
Shadow opened one eye. Both eyes. She sat up, which for Shadow was equivalent to a scream.
"...Master. That’s the Association."
"It is."
"We’re breaking into the Association."
"We are."
Sniper, who had been smoking in the corner with the peaceful detachment of a man watching someone else’s house burn, slowly lowered his cigarette. "I want to say no before I hear the details. Can I do that? I’m saying no."
"You’ll want to hear the details," the Master said.
His fingers moved, and the blueprint turned, sinking through its own floors, down past the offices, past the training levels, past the archives, to the deepest sublevel of all, a floor rendered mostly in red, where a single small chamber sat isolated at the center of a web of corridors like a spider’s egg sac.
Inside the chamber, the blueprint marked one detail. A cot. A chair.
"Sublevel Nine," the Master said. "Containment Division. And in its innermost cell, the Association is keeping my specimen."
Hexi’s rocking stopped.
"...The impure," he breathed. "The little apocalypse. The girl who dreams monsters into meat." His face twisted into something that resembled a smile more than it actually was. "They took her from Denvi. The Phantom stole our field trip."
"He did," the Master said, with no anger in his voice at all, and everyone in the room knew that was when he was most dangerous. "And then the heroes did something very foolish. They locked a country-level catastrophe in a basement, wrote her name in a file, and moved on with their lives." He looked up at the frozen image of Nicholas on the main screen. "They keep their apocalypse in a drawer, and they sent everyone capable of stopping us to the other side of the world to play in a tournament."
The room went quiet as that landed.
Zayx spoke for the first time, slowly. "The convention."
"The convention," the Master confirmed. "Look at what the heroes have done for us. Phantom, abroad. Nectron, abroad. Vixen, abroad. Their supervisor, their director’s favorite manager, the top of three national rosters, all of them sitting in a colosseum on another continent, waving at cameras." He spread his hands over the glowing tower. "The strongest security system the Association owns is its people. Right now, the building is guarded by whoever was not good enough to be invited."
Sniper exhaled a long ribbon of smoke. "Okay. I hate that the details are good."
"There’s more." The Master’s fingers moved again, and the red sublevel expanded, corridors stretching wide. "Containment runs on rotations. I have the rotations." He did not say from where, and no one asked; the Master’s clerks and cowards were his own business. "Every shift change, Sublevel Nine runs on minimum staff for eleven minutes. And there is one day on the calendar when even the minimum will have their eyes somewhere else."
He looked at the main screen.
"The day of the Combat finals. When the Phantom fights the monk, every guard in that building will be watching a phone. The whole world watching one stage." His voice dropped, almost fond. "Two hundred million people staring at a single point of light. That is not an audience. That is a blindfold."
Hexi began to giggle, high and uneven, hugging his knees. "We rob the house while the whole family watches the wedding."
"Crude," the Master said. "Accurate."
Shadow raised her hand weakly. "Question. The last impure hunt, I lost my bear for an hour and a hero threw Zayx through a building." Zayx’s jaw flexed. "This one is inside a fortress. What’s different?"
"What’s different," the Master said, "is the girl."
He touched the small red chamber, and it expanded to fill the space above the table. Now they could see the notations along its walls. Dampening arrays. Sedation lines. And one detail that made even Sniper lean forward.
The cell contained no books.
"They learned exactly the wrong lesson from Denvi," the Master said softly. "Their scientists concluded that stories are her trigger. Fictions go in, apocalypses come out. So they took everything away. No books. No screens. No tales." He straightened, and the monitor light caught something in his eyes that his crew rarely saw and never enjoyed: genuine anticipation. "For months, they have kept a reader in an empty room. They believe they are containing her power."
His hand closed slowly into a fist around the tiny glowing cell.
"They are starving it. Boredom is a pressure, children. And pressure does not disappear because a wall is thick. Somewhere under that tower is a little girl who wants a story more than anything in this world."
Hexi’s giggling stopped. His eyes had gone very wide and very bright.
"...And we," he whispered, "will be the ones who bring her one."
"Assignments." The Master’s voice snapped flat and cold, the planning voice, and even Shadow sat up straight. "Shadow. The eleven minutes are yours. Every camera on Sublevel Nine sees darkness and nothing else."
"Fine," Shadow sighed. "But I’m napping the whole way there."
"Hexi. The minds on duty. Quietly. No brains leave the building."
"Not even one? A small one? A guard’s..."
"No."
Hexi deflated into his hair nest, muttering.
"Zayx. You are the wall. Anything that responds, you make certain it stops responding." The Master’s gaze sharpened. "And if by some madness the tournament ends early and he comes... you do not engage Phantom. You carry the girl and you run. Am I understood?"
Zayx’s jaw worked. The hatred sat plainly on his face, but after a long moment, discipline won. "...Understood."
Sniper raised his cigarette. "And me? Let me guess. I stay here. I like staying here. Staying here is my ability."
"You’re on the roof across from the tower," the Master said. "Overwatch. If anything wearing a cape approaches the perimeter, you make it reconsider."
"That sounds like stress."
"It sounds like sitting on a roof with a rifle. It is the closest thing to a nap I employ you for."
Sniper considered this. "...Acceptable."
Shadow glanced around the room, then back at the Master, and asked the question the whole crew was circling.
"And you?"
The Master turned back to his monitors. On the frozen screen, the Phantom’s bloody hand was raised to a roaring crowd, and across the arena, barely in frame, a mountain in saffron robes stood smiling at him.
"Denvi, I delegated," the Master said. "And a hero walked out of the smoke with my specimen in his hand." He watched the two figures on the screen, the hitman and the monk, the collision the entire planet was waiting for. "This one, I will not watch on a monitor."
He reached out and shut the screen off, dropping the room into darkness.
"This time, I am coming with you."
Deep beneath the Association tower, on Sublevel Nine, in a small clean room with no shelves, a girl sat on the edge of a cot with her knees drawn up, staring at a blank white wall the way other children stare out of windows.
Her lips moved, barely.
"...I want a new story."
And somewhere in the empty air of the sealed, silent, storyless cell, very faintly, something turned a page.