Starfall (Starflight #2)(85)
Why weren’t they clapping?
“Our very own Wolf has made it to the championship round!” called the MC. “Now one final battle will determine tonight’s winner!”
One final battle?
Kane glanced around. There was no one to fight.
Two Redshirts appeared at the base of the stairs, holding a man between them who was so weak he couldn’t support his own head. One side of his bodysuit was scorched, the other side crusted in blood. When the Redshirts reached the platform, they carried the man to center stage and dropped him there. Then he rolled onto his back, and Kane saw his face.
It was Cutter. Or what was left of him.
“Now for the final task,” the master of ceremonies said in a dark tone Kane knew was intended for him. “Finish your opponent.”
Kane couldn’t move. He stared at Cutter and noticed two fingers were missing from his right hand. Fresh blood pooled beneath his thighs, but in a slow trickle that indicated how much he’d already lost. This man was broken. Even for the perverts in the stands, what enjoyment could they gain from a fight as unfair as this?
“Let’s give our champion some encouragement,” the MC said. A chant rose from the crowd, low at first, but quickly gaining momentum until their shouts of “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” rang in Kane’s ears.
He forced his feet across the planks until he reached Cutter. When he knelt beside the man, Cutter watched him beneath swollen lids. “Go ahead, kid.” His breaths were wet and labored. “Make it quick, okay?”
Kane licked his lips. He didn’t feel the same bloodlust that had fueled him on the beach earlier that day. Cutter hadn’t done anything wrong. He didn’t deserve to die.
“It’s all right,” he added. “I don’t want to do this again.”
But neither did Kane.
As he knelt on the platform, surrounded by hundreds of people chanting his name, he realized there was only one way to leave the arena and never come back. In that moment, he knew what he had to do. He gripped the blade protruding from his shoulder and yanked it free.
The stands went wild because they misinterpreted his intentions. He grinned at them. He looked forward to robbing them of their winnings. Slowly, he tipped back his head to expose his carotid artery. Cheers turned to gasps, but by then it was too late. Kane slid the steel across his throat, and the Wolf forfeited the game.
The wind blew from the north that day, so Cassia fastened a gas mask over her face before exiting the shuttle. The walk from her landing pad to the research center was short enough that she could hold her breath, but Gage believed the drug, which he’d nicknamed Mist, could enter the body through the eyes as well as the lungs. His theory explained why all but twenty of her soldiers were in withdrawal, despite having worn smaller masks over their noses and mouths during outdoor drills.
She waited for the second set of interior doors to seal behind her before removing the mask and making her way to the chemistry lab to find Gage. She hoped he’d made a breakthrough last night, otherwise she might as well crash her shuttle into Marius’s palace and save him the trouble of killing her.
She found Gage bent over a small boxy machine on the counter, one eye pressed against the scope. Though he couldn’t possibly see her through the curtain of shaggy black hair around his face, he muttered, “Morning, Highness.”
“How’d you know it was me?”
“Your footsteps are daintier than the average chemist’s. By the way, you have a great team here. They could use an atom splitter, though. It’d make the work easier.”
“Any progress?”
“Surprisingly, yes,” he told her, still peering through the scope. “Addiction’s a hard disease to treat. It changes brain function—right down to the chemical makeup—and it’s nearly impossible to reverse. The good news is, because Mist is synthetic, I was able to create a nanoparticle to seek out that drug’s particular pathway in the brain’s reward center and deaden it.” He reached out blindly for a vial of milky fluid, then held it up. “Once I inject this into your addicts, it’ll kill the Mist pathway and mute the drug’s effects.”
“So we’re going to cure them by causing brain damage?”
He lifted his head, grinning. “It sounds less impressive when you put it that way.”
“But wait,” she said as something occurred to her. “Why are some people immune? Like the farmer who lives with Kane’s mom, and some of the tent city refugees. They spent a lot of time outside, and they never showed symptoms.”
“I wouldn’t call it immunity,” Gage explained. “Some people are more resistant than others when it comes to forming chemical dependency.”
“Okay, so if the good news is we can treat it, what’s the bad?”
“It takes time to neutralize the pathways.”
“How much time?”
“I won’t know until I test it, but I’m guessing two weeks.”
She couldn’t wait that long. “Can my men fight while the injection is working?”
He lifted a shoulder. “Your soldiers will suffer withdrawals while their pathways are deconstructing. The symptoms won’t be as severe as they are now, but I wouldn’t trust anyone that cranky to wield a pistol.”
Cassia chewed the inside of her cheek. She’d already stalled Marius for as long as she dared. At this point, her only hope was to raise a civilian militia. She didn’t have money to pay anyone, but she could offer property ownership to those who volunteered to fight. However, that left her with the issue of training civilians for battle, and for that, she needed time and military leadership.