Chapter 37 – Old Faces
The first thing Valt did when we got back into the city was march us all to the ramen place by the school. A week of mountain food, he said, had nearly killed him, and he wasn't going home until he'd fixed it.
"I dreamed about this," he said through a full mouth, two minutes into his first bowl. "On the ridge. Xander's screaming at me to run faster and I'm just picturing pork broth."
"You said that on the ridge too." Rantaro had his cheek flat on the table next to his bowl, soaking up the heat off it. "Out loud. For an hour. While I was trying not to die."
"He has one dream." Keru popped up over the edge of the table in Ken's hand. Beus rose beside him, slow and solemn. "It is a noble dream. It is also the only one he has ever had."
"Okay, you all ate it too." Valt pointed his chopsticks around the table like he'd just proved something.
"Nobody's arguing with you." I stole the last piece of egg off the side of his bowl while he was busy talking, and for the sound he made you'd think I'd taken a finger. It was good to be crammed in a warm booth with them after a week of cold launches and Xander's whistle.
Shu was the only one not in it, and he wasn't wrung out like Rantaro either. He'd gone somewhere behind his eyes, the way he does when something's coming.
"You're already on the blocks," I said.
He didn't pretend otherwise. "We register today. The draw goes up tonight." He set his chopsticks across his bowl. "I want to know who's in mine before I try to sleep."
The desk was set up in the BeyMall lobby, the same floor where I'd won the District. Walking in without a Bey to register felt like showing up to a party the morning after it ended.
Valt signed first and pressed so hard he nearly went through the form. Shu signed under him in one clean line. The woman behind the desk looked up at me and waited.
"He's not signing," Valt jumped in, proud as anything. "He won the District. He's already through to Nationals, he doesn't have to do any of this."
She nodded and slid the forms back, already looking past us to the next kids in line.
That was supposed to feel good. Mostly it just itched. The two of them were about to spend a week bleeding for a seat I already had in my pocket, and there was nothing for me to do but stand there and hold the bags. I'd earned my place. I just had nowhere to put the part of me that wanted to be earning it again.
"Well. The District champion graces us."
Wakiya Murasaki, arms folded, chin up, exactly how I'd last seen him with his Wyvron lying dead in the bowl and mine still turning.
"Wakiya. Good to see the loss didn't slow you down."
"Two to nothing." He bit the number off. "I've replayed it every day since. Came up with about six things I'd do differently." His eyes cut to the forms. "Pity you're not entered. I'd have enjoyed showing you all six."
"Shu might be in your block," I said. "He'll give you the chance, and he's meaner about it than I am."
Wakiya looked Shu over like a price tag, then walked off without another word, which is how he ends every conversation, the second he's decided it's done.
"Still mad," Valt said, delighted.
"Still good, though," Shu said, watching him go. "He's been training angry. That makes people sharp or it makes them stupid. He didn't look stupid."
Then Valt stopped talking, which basically never happens, so I followed his eyes.
Over by the wall, off on his own, a guy stood with his back to the brick. Dark clothes, black hair shoved up under a red band, a couple of little skull charms hanging off him. He wasn't talking to anyone. He wasn't even looking at the room, just at a patch of floor in front of his shoes.
"Daigo," Valt said, and then he was already moving, crossing the lobby the way Valt crosses any gap, like the person on the far side is going to be glad about it.
I caught up a step behind him.
"Since when are you back?" Valt was grinning at him. "You just vanished, nobody knew where you went, and now you're in the bracket, you're in MY block, that's..."
"We're not at the club anymore." Daigo said it flat, without lifting his voice, and somehow that landed harder than a shout would have. "This isn't a reunion. We're both here to win, and one of us goes home early. That's the whole of it."
Valt's grin hung a beat too long, the way it does right before he works out whether something hurt.
"Yeah," he said. "Course. Just good to see you."
Daigo's eyes slid off him and over the rest of us and caught on me for a second. Whatever he was checking for, he didn't find it, and he looked away.
I'd been watching him the whole time, because that's what I do now. The entire time Valt was talking, Daigo had held himself dead still, and from the outside it read as not caring. It wasn't. I don't always get to know things about people. Every so often I do, and this one I had. The cold wasn't empty, it was a lid, screwed down hard over something, and it had been down a long while. He was scared of something and braced for it, and he'd taught himself to wear that as nothing. I didn't know what it was. It wasn't mine to know. I put it away with the rest.
"Come on." I got Valt by the shoulder and steered him back toward the floor before he could try again. He came, but he kept glancing back.
"He didn't used to be like that," he said, quiet.
"People change when something happens to them," I said. "And it's usually not nothing."
The draw went up that evening. Two blocks, opposite ends of the bracket, both of them a real climb. Wakiya had landed in Shu's. Daigo was in Valt's.
Valt was too wound up to stand still in front of the board. Shu read it once, top to bottom, and went home to sleep on it. I stood there with my friends' names lit up and no line for mine, and the itch came back worse than before. Nothing I did in those stands over the next few days was going to matter. The early rounds weren't mine to fight, and I'd watched enough of Valt and Shu to know how they ended.
But there was one thing I could do something about, and I'd hauled it the whole way down the mountain. A problem no stadium was going to hand me the answer to. And one person had built Drago out of spare parts and a six-year-old's idea, and might still see something in him that I couldn't.
"I'm going home for a few days," I told Valt.
"Home? Now? You'll miss the prelims!"
"You'll win them without me in the seats." I shut Drago's case. "I'll be back for the part that's hard. Win your block, Valt. I want to be there when you fight for it."
The train out was almost empty. The city gave way to fields and the light went orange across them, and for one hour I didn't think about wings or the one I couldn't beat.
It was dark by the time I came through the door, and the house smelled like the soup Mom always has going. She was out of the kitchen before I had my shoes off, hands on my shoulders, holding me back at arm's length like she was counting my pieces.
"Look at you. Taller. And too thin. What was that man feeding you up there?"
"Rice, mostly. a lot of Rice."