Chapter 38 – Nothing Held Back
I slept in my old room and woke up early out of habit, the way I do now. I'd gotten in late the night before, late enough that Dad had already packed it in for the day, so we hadn't really talked yet. By the time I was up he was out in the workshop off the back of the house, where he always is. I could hear the little radio going and the sound of him picking at something small. I took Drago off the nightstand and went out to him.
He didn't look up right away. He had a busted handheld game open under the lamp, the guts of it spread out on the cloth, chasing one tiny screw with a driver too big for it.
"You're back," he said, still on the screw. "Win your mountain?"
"Drew it, mostly." I pulled the stool over and sat. "Xander says I'm stable now. I held a finisher together without taking his stadium down with it."
"Good." He got the screw and set it aside, then finally looked at me. "But you didn't come all the way home to tell me you're stable. You'd have told me that on the phone."
He was right. He usually is.
I took Drago out and set him on the cloth between us, in the light.
"There's a way of fighting I don't have an answer for," I said. "I watched somebody do a small version of it to Valt up on the mountain. You sit still and let the other guy throw everything he's got at you, then you hand it back. Coming at people with everything I've got is the best thing Drago and I do. Against someone built that way it's the worst thing we could do."
Ren picked Drago up and turned him over under the lamp, slow, the way he looks at anything he's fixing.
"And the wings," he said.
"And the wings." Of course he'd go straight there. "When they're open I'm faster than anyone. But they eat spin. Against most people I'm done before they are, so I win first. Against someone built to outlast me, I run dry and there's nothing left to win with."
He didn't say anything for a while. He set Drago spinning on the cloth with a flick of his fingers, low and slow, and watched the way he settled.
"You spin left," he said.
"Yes I am. What do you want to say with that?" I asked.
"Most of them spin right." He stopped Drago with one finger. "When two tops spin against each other, they fight at the contact point. Same direction, they slide off each other. Opposite directions, one can drag the spin right out of the other and take it for itself." He looked at me. "You've spent four years training and fighting on hitting Beys, but you never thought about trying spin steal. So that's what we're going to try and do today."
I knew the theory. I'd just never thought of it as something Drago could do, because Drago was built to hit, not to hold.
"Could he? Because I'm not sure where we'd put the rubber to make that work."
"Not the way he is." Ren was already up, going through the shallow drawers where he keeps the small stuff, the offcuts and the spares. He came back with a thin ring of rubber, black, no bigger than a washer. "Metal slides. Rubber grabs. Put rubber low, down where he makes contact when his spin drops and he settles in, and against a right-spin Bey it bites instead of sliding. It drags their spin into him." He set it down beside Drago. "Won't feel like much at full speed. It does its work later, when you're running out. Right when you've got nothing left," he said.
"Yes, that could work. Okay, let's try that."
We did it the way we built him the first time, four years ago, him talking me through it and letting my hands do the part I could do. He seated the ring himself, careful, because it had to sit true or it would throw the whole balance off. It took longer than I expected. He didn't rush it. He never does.
When it was done he handed Drago back to me, heavier at the tip, different in the hand. And the second my fingers closed around him the warmth came up, harder and faster than it ever had, and the workshop fell away.
He was there the way he always is, gold and deep crimson, taking up the whole of the space. But something about him had changed, and it took me a second to land on what. He wasn't coiled. Every other time I'd come in here he'd been wound up and ready, watching me to see what I'd ask of him. Now he just stood, his weight down through all four feet, and the gold of him had gone deeper, almost dark at the edges, like metal that had been through a real fire and come out the other side denser than before.
"You look different," I said. I'd been coming into this place since I was six, and I knew every line of him, and something had moved. "You always used to stand like you were half a second from throwing yourself at something. Now you're just here, like you've got all the time in the world. I've never seen you like this."
"So do you, in here. You can't see it from where you're standing, but it's there." His voice came up through the floor of the place more than through the air. "And it isn't the rubber. Your dad gave us a way to last against the ones who turn against us, and we'll use it. But that's a small thing. It went in your hand. This is the other thing."
"Then tell me what it is," I said. "Because when I picked you up off that cloth you pulled me in here harder than you ever have. That wasn't a piece of rubber doing that. That was something else, and you already know what it is."
"You stopped keeping a door shut between us." He took a step closer and the ground took his weight without a sound. "All this time there was a piece of you held back. Even after the mountain. Even after you told me you trusted me. A last little bit you kept for yourself in case I wasn't enough when it counted. It's gone now. I felt it go the moment your dad pressed that ring in and you decided, all the way down, that whatever we are from here, we are it together or not at all."
He was right, and the worst part was I hadn't even known the door was there until he named it. I'd thought I'd handed him everything up on that mountain. I hadn't. I'd kept one key in my pocket the whole time, just in case, and I'd never once felt myself holding it.
"I didn't know I was doing that," I said. "I thought we were already all the way there. The whole climb, all of it, and I was still keeping something back from you without even knowing."
"And none of it touches Lui," I went on. "That's the one I keep landing on. And nothing we did this morning changes him. He turns the same way we do. There's nothing on him to pull. He's the wall, and I've been hauling him around since the mountain like he was already standing across the bowl from me."
"No. This didn't fix him, and it was never going to." The space pulsed slow and warm. "So stop carrying him. He's out there, we both know it. We'll find out what we're worth against him the day we're standing across from him, and not a launch sooner. I'm done being afraid of someone we haven't even faced yet, and I don't want you doing it either."
"You make it sound easy," I said. "He's the whole reason we came home instead of staying in those stands. How am I supposed to just set down someone I already know is coming for us?"
"Not forget. Set him down. There's a difference. You don't lose the weight. You just stop letting it stand on your chest."
"We're stronger than we were this morning," I said. "I can feel it sitting in my hands, and I know it isn't the rubber doing that. It's bigger than the rubber."
"Stronger, not meaner. Nothing about me got more dangerous today. We just stopped pulling against each other." The space had started to fade, but slower than it ever had, like neither of us was in a hurry to be out of it. "A blader and a Bey moving the same way with nothing held back beats a better Bey with a gap in it nearly every time. That's what your dad really built today, and he did it without touching the metal."
It cooled at the edges, and the last thing he said came quiet.
"Next time you launch me, you'll feel it. Don't be surprised. Just let it happen."
I came back to the workshop with Drago warm in my hand and Dad watching me from his stool, not surprised, because he's watched me go somewhere behind my eyes my whole life and never once asked me to explain it.
"You ready to try him?"
He set the old practice top going, the right-spin one, nothing special. I put Drago on the launcher.
It wasn't like any launch before it. Every other time there'd been a half-beat in it, a tiny gap between me deciding and Drago moving, the space where I'd think and he'd answer. The gap was gone. He came off the cord the same instant the thought formed, like the deciding and the doing had become one thing. He dropped in against the old top and didn't just outlast it. He took it apart, calm and sure, the rubber biting low and dragging the spin off it with the wings still shut, and the old top tipped over before it understood what was happening to it.
I picked Drago up. He was warm and steady, and the not-knowing I'd been hauling around since the mountain, the where-do-I-stand of it, was gone. It didn't come back. Not that morning, and not after.
Standing there in the workshop with the light coming through the dirty window, I knew something I hadn't known an hour before. If I launched against Xander now, the way Drago and I were, I'd beat him. Not easily. We weren't anywhere near where it got easy, and with him I don't think we ever would be. But I'd win. The spin-steal would bleed his Xcalibur dry the way the wings never could, and the rest of it, the part with no gap left in it, would do what the rubber couldn't. I didn't need to go and prove it. I just knew it, the way I knew the floor was under my feet.
Dad held his hand out and I gave Drago back, and he turned him over once, feeling the new weight in him, and nodded like a man signing off on his own work.
"He's more yours than he's ever been," he said, and put him back in my hand. "Go on. You got what you came for. Go watch your friends get theirs."
Valt called me twice over the next two days, yelling before I'd even said hello, through to the semis both times. Shu texted, just see you there. The early rounds came and went without me. I didn't mind missing them now. I'd gotten what I came home for, and it wasn't the kind of thing that happens in a stadium.
On the third morning Mom pushed a bag of food into my hands at the door that I hadn't asked for and wasn't going to turn down, and told me to go watch my friends win. I caught the early train back with Drago in his case, heavier at the tip, and something sat settled in my chest that hadn't been settled in a long time.
I wasn't carrying it anymore. I'd set it down, the way Drago told me to. For now I had two friends one win each from a final.