Chương 136: Chapter 129

Cale"Why are you three looking at me like you're going to eat my soul?" I raised an eyebrow as I stepped into our living room and found the area annexed. Ellara had the projection thrown across the whole wall. Selene and Mara were folded onto the couch on either side of her, Selene with a cushion clutched to her chest, Mara with her arms crossed and murder in her posture. Rade had claimed the good chair and a bowl of something and looked up at me with the grave face of a man witnessing history.

"Sit down," Ellara said, without looking away from the wall.

"You're just in time. It's a rose night." I did not know what a rose night was. I was about to learn, against my will, and I would not recover. On the wall, a man in a very white jacket stood at the top of a marble staircase, backlit by a sunset that had clearly been negotiated in advance. He was handsome like a minted coin, symmetrical and worth about what pomp and circumstance grant a thing, as opposed to any real foundation or substance. But who was I to judge.

Below him, arranged down the steps in gowns, stood perhaps twenty women, all watching him with an intensity I associated with siege lines.

"Who is that," I said.

"Prince Ravel," Selene breathed, like the name was a sacrament.

"Third son of Corveth. He's looking for love."

"He's looking for it," Mara said, "with twenty-two women at once, on projection feed, in Elysia. Very romantic."

"What's Elysia," I said.

"That name sounds familiar."

"A whole plane, owned end to end by Maison Doré," Rade said.

"Basically a red-light district on empowering Pills. It runs for nothing but pleasure, one of the smallest Upper Planes in the Known Nexus, with a little of everything. Ocean, mountains, an amusement park, casinos, concert halls, districts you would not take your mother to, all of it built so the rich and the famous can be rich and famous at each other in comfort. Naturally they film the show there."

"He can only pick one of the women," Selene said.

"That's what makes it romantic."

"That's what makes it a bloodsport," Mara said. I studied the screen. Twenty-two women, one man, a sealed location, and a scarcity of the exact thing everyone had been gathered there to compete for. My professional assessment arrived before I could stop it.

"This is a psychological operation," I said. Rade pointed his spoon at me.

"Keep going." On the wall, the prince descended the stairs holding a single flower, and a hush fell that I have otherwise only heard before violence.

"Now he hands out the roses," Ellara said.

"If you get one, you stay. If you don't, you go home." I watched a woman receive a flower and dissolve into tears of relief, and I felt the chill of recognition.

"So the flower is a stay of execution."

"It's a rose, Cale. Must you make it sound so medieval?"

"It is a token that decides who survives the round. You are describing a culling with better lighting and more spectators." I leaned forward.

"How many does he remove a night?"

"... two or three," Ellara admitted.

"And the removed are taken away and not seen again."

"They get an exit interview," Rade offered.

"They get a what." The projection cut to a woman alone in a dim room, talking to no one.

"Who is she speaking to," I asked.

"The audience," Selene said.

"It's a confessional. She tells us how she really feels."

"Why would she do that?"

"She's emotional. I suspect it's part of their contract to be part of their show."

"This seems like a unique type of torture to me." On screen, a sharp-eyed brunette the other women plainly feared smiled at the empty air.

"I didn't come here to make friends," she said.

"I came here to win." Mara threw a cushion at the wall.

"I HATE her. Cale, tell him you hate her."

"I don't know her."

"She's the villain. Coralie," Selene said.

"She's manipulating everyone. Last week she stole Brenna's time with the prince and made her cry for an hour." I considered this.

"So she identified the real objective, isolated a rival, and applied pressure to knock her out of contention without ever raising a hand." I nodded slowly.

"She is the only competent person on that plane." The couch erupted. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"Cale, that is so mean.

""He's not wrong," Rade said over the noise.

"Coralie is running the cleanest game in the villa. Everyone else is playing for the prince. She's playing for the win. Different objective. Better odds."

"Do not encourage him," Ellara said. A horn sounded on screen. Everyone in the villa froze.

"Oh no," Selene whispered, thrilled.

"A bombshell." A new woman came down the staircase in a dress that had opinions, and every alliance on the plane recalculated in real time. The prince's mouth did something his handlers would not have signed off on.

"They drop a new contestant in partway through," Ellara said, "to shake things up."

"They inserted a fresh asset into a stable competitive environment to collapse the existing blocs and reset everyone's footing," I said.

"That is textbook disruption. Whoever built this has read about warfare."

"It's a dating show, Cale."

"It is a battle siege with cocktails." I sat back. The worst part was that I could not look away, and I understood exactly why, which was worse than not understanding.

"It works because they took everyone somewhere sealed and stripped their world down to one room and one prize, cut off from home, from context, from any way out," I said.

"Do that to a person and they will start to feel things the setting built for them, and call it their own heart. That is not romance. It is a contained environment producing a predictable result." I gestured at the prince, who was gazing meaningfully into the middle distance.

"He earned none of it. The plane did the work. He stood there being symmetrical." Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Selene sniffed.

"That is the most romantic thing you have ever said, and you meant it as an insult." Ellara was watching me with a look I could not place, somewhere between amusement and a much older kind of knowing.

"What," I said.

"Nothing." She tipped her head at the wall.

"It's just interesting. You have described a beautiful place, full of impressive women, all competing over one oblivious man and you think it's insane."

"It is insane."

"Sure." She turned back to the show and let it sit, and Selene made a small sound into her cushion, and Mara grinned up at the ceiling, and Rade discovered his bowl was suddenly fascinating. I did not understand what had just happened at my own table. I filed it under things to examine later and never did.

"Put the next one on," I said. Ellara smirked.

"I thought it was insane."

"It is. Put it on." I settled deeper into the couch.

"I need to know whether Coralie wins." For research purposes, I watched two more episodes. By the end of the second I had arrived at a conclusion that annoyed me with its simplicity. Dating was not the ordeal everyone insisted it was. Proximity, conversation, the occasional application of physical affection. That was the whole mechanism. Put two people near each other, let them talk, let them touch, and the rest assembled itself.

Laid out plainly it made a great deal of sense, which was somehow more irritating than if it had been complicated. I understood politics. I grasped the arranged kind of marriage, the sort negotiated between houses with a ledger open on the table, where affection was a line item nobody expected to collect on. I had simply never stood on the personal end of any of it. No one had ever wanted to marry me. Recent events had started to argue otherwise, which I chose not to examine.

When it came to matrimony, the Ghost of the Wastes was not the first name that came to anyone's mind. Out there everyone was reasonably sure I was some ancient horror in a hood, a century and a half of mutated features and weathered hands, a body count with no face attached. A man that old does not get asked to dinner. He gets avoided, or hired, or shot at. He fights in wars. He wades into wild Rifts. He does not field marriage proposals or dating requests.

The notion that the Ghost of the Wastes might be a person young enough to be baffled by a reality projection broadcast would have struck most of the known planes as heresy. I suspect that sooner or later people are going to start piecing it together. My identity, that is. The situation was frail. I was realizing that more and more. That fragility was part of why I had told old King Cassian of Vera who I was. I cannot be everywhere at once.

Few people can go pound for pound with me on a battlefield, and I know it, but that is exactly the problem. If Ellara or Gran were somewhere I was not, and one of my enemies reached them because I had been too stubborn to trust anyone with the truth, I would never forgive myself. And I would never forgive the one who touched them. If someone tried, I'd burned their world down to the foundations. Which, yes. The mass-destruction reflex. I should probably see someone about that. Anyway.

Back to the courting-and-weddings question. I am not a stranger to the marriage custom. I had attended a few weddings, in my capacity as a rumor, invited to stand at the back by people who wanted to be able to say afterward that the Ghost had come. There had been one, three years ago. The daughter of an Exarch, which is what the Orthodox Church calls the men who sit one step below the truly frightening ones.

She was styled a saintess, and a princess besides, though she had no saintly power worth the word and the title was mostly ornament. She was, however, a sincere and enthusiastic admirer of the Ghost of the Wastes, and she had decided, with the full weight of a young woman accustomed to being indulged, that she could not possibly be married without him in attendance. My first inclination was to decline. Then the Exarch offered me a deal I could not refuse.

It had nothing to do with the wedding and everything to do with relief supplies for a region in the Southern Bloc that had been hit hard. I am wealthy. I did not have the transport or the logistics to move aid on that scale. The Exarch promised, without hesitation, that if I stood at his daughter's wedding, the supplies would go. The right thing for the wrong reason. So I went. It seemed rude not to.

She was marrying a Cinderlord out of the Southern Bloc, one of the ruling faithful of the Emberthrone, a match arranged to lash two large and mutually suspicious religious powers a little closer together. She had, from what I could see, met the man twice before the ceremony and knew almost nothing about him past his title and his usefulness. Which, oddly, I understood. Not the romance of it, there was none, but the shape of it.

People have been spending their children on politics for as long as there have been children to spend and someone across a border willing to pay for them. Sometimes the girl drew a kind husband and a soft life. Sometimes she drew the reverse. You were blessed or cursed by the accident of your birth and the quality of the stranger it purchased, and no one thought to consult you on either. That, I understood. Arranged marriage had a cold logic, but a logic. This other thing had one too. I could see it now.

The courting, the dating, the roses and the confessionals and the pacing Ellara had drilled into me, it was the same trade underneath. Affection for affection, presence for presence, run without the ledger and with the ending left honestly open. Which made it either more honest than the arranged kind or more foolish, and I had not settled which. That left the only question that actually mattered, the one nobody had thought to answer for me. Was I dating Siobhan Morrigan?

Or was I going on a date with Siobhan Morrigan? These were not, I had gathered across three hours of research, the same thing. One was a state of being. The other was a single event. Confusing them, per the tearful confessional testimony of a contestant named Brenna, was precisely how a person got "blindsided." I did not know which one I was doing. I was fairly certain Siobhan knew. I was fairly certain Ellara knew. I appeared to be the only party to my own romantic life operating without the briefing.

On the wall, Prince Ravel squared up to make another catastrophic decision, and I accepted the shape of my evening. I had a great deal more research to do before tomorrow. It was going to be a long night.