Chapter 41 — What You Don't Show
The invitation came on a Tuesday, carried in by hand.
I was first in the club room that afternoon, so I was the one who answered the knock. A courier in a sharp jacket stood in the doorway, and his eyes moved once around the room, over the mismatched chairs and the launcher grips scattered across the table and Rantaro's poster taped up crooked on the wall. Whatever he'd pictured, this wasn't it.
He held out a stiff cream envelope with the club's name on the front.
"Compliments of Zac the Sunrise," he said. "He'd like your club at his event this weekend. All of you. Details inside." And then he was gone, back to whatever had dropped him here.
The rest of them arrived a minute later, loud before the door even opened.
"There was a limo outside." Valt came in sideways, Rantaro and Ken behind him. "An actual limo. Ryo, why was there a limo at our school."
"That's for you." I slid the envelope across the table.
He tore into it, Ken and Rantaro reading over each shoulder, and for a second all three of them went quiet, which never happened.
"Zac the Sunrise wants us at his festival," Valt breathed. "Us." Then his face changed. "He'll be there. Lui. A thing like this, the strongest blader in the country, he doesn't miss it."
"You don't know that," Rantaro said.
"I know it." Valt was already somewhere else. "So we train. All week, all of us, every day. I'm not walking in there flat."
Beus rose up on Ken's arm. "The captain has spoken," it boomed, and Keru popped up beside it. "Mostly right. Maybe right." Rantaro snorted.
"Count me in," I said, and picked up my bag. "But I'm training on my own from here out."
Valt's grin slipped. "Since when do you train alone?"
"Since now." I kept it easy. "You and Shu are going to Nationals. So's half this club. Which means the next time I see your launches, it might be across a stadium from me." I shrugged. "I'd rather you didn't have me figured out before then."
He chewed on that. He didn't like it, holding back was a language Valt didn't speak, but he trusted me, and that won out.
"Fine. But you show up this weekend and you stand with us."
"I'll be there," I said. "You have my word."
---
I found a park two stops past the school, a flat green with a dry fountain at the center and nobody in it on a weekday. The basin was the right shape, a shallow stone bowl that held a launch instead of throwing the Bey off into the grass. Not a stadium. Better. Empty.
I let Drago rip into the basin and watched.
The change still caught me off guard. There was no half-beat anymore, no gap between deciding a thing and Drago doing it. He moved when I moved. I thought *cut* and he was already cutting, like the order and the answer had folded into the same instant.
The rubber ring Ren had set low by the tip bit the stone and fed the spin back up into the body, and Drago held a line cleaner and longer than he ever had. It didn't feel like steering anymore. It felt like flexing a hand I'd had my whole life and only just learned the shape of.
Stronger, not louder. Ren had been right about that, the way he was right about most things he didn't bother to say twice.
I drilled the spin-steal against an angle I'd rigged to fake a right-spin attacker, watching the rubber grab and pull the spin across. Against right spin it drank. Against my own kind it would do nothing, and I knew that, the same way I knew it would do nothing against the one waiting at the end of all this. That wall was still standing. I wasn't knocking it down today. I was just sharpening everything around it.
I didn't notice the figure at the edge of the green until I'd packed up to go.
---
Shu had come to the park to be alone too.
He saw Ryo first, down by the fountain with a Bey loose in the basin, and he stopped on the path instead of calling out. Then he looked at the Bey, and went still.
He'd taken Eclipse Drago apart in his memory a dozen times since the District final. You didn't lose to a Bey without learning it by heart, and he knew exactly what it had looked like that day.
This was not that.
There was a band of rubber low near the tip that hadn't been there before. A small thing. Most people would have looked straight past it. Shu was not most people, and he understood at once what a ring in that position did to a spin on contact, the way it would reach into another Bey and pull. The Drago that beat him had won on pure control. This one had teeth.
And there was no daylight between the boy and the Bey. They turned as one thing. Shu had spent years grinding that same gap shut in himself, and he knew exactly how rare it was to close it all the way.
Ryo had closed it.
He could have walked down and asked. But if Ryo was keeping it quiet, he had a reason, and the reason was almost certainly the same stage Shu was walking toward himself. They'd find out what the other had when it counted, and not before.
He turned and went back the way he'd come, and said nothing to anyone, then or later.
---
We met at the station Saturday morning, and we were one short.
"Where's Ken?"
Valt's grin dimmed. "Ken's gone, man. His family moved out over the week, his dad's work, the whole travelling puppet thing. He came by Thursday to tell us himself." He rubbed his neck. "We always knew it might happen. Doesn't make it land any softer."
"I didn't get to say anything to him."
"He gets it, you've been off training. He made me promise we'd see him at Nationals." Valt tried to put the grin back and half managed it. "Said he's not done with us."
He believed it too. But on the train his eyes kept drifting to the window, and the brightness in his face had something underneath it. Valt carried things whether he wanted to or not.
Shu got on last, a nod for the group and nothing more. His eyes held on me a half-second longer than the others, and I told myself that was nothing.
The ride took us out past the edge of the city and into somewhere greener, the buildings thinning and then giving up entirely. Then the place rose up over the trees all at once, and Valt's face pressed to the glass.
You heard Zac's festival before you saw the gate. Music, a crowd, the bright unreal swell of a place built to make people feel like the day mattered. Lights strung up in daylight. A stadium dome catching the sun at the center of all of it.
Somewhere inside that crowd, the strongest blader in the country was standing among people who had no idea yet. And one of them was about to find out what we were.
"Okay," Valt breathed. "We're here."
We were here.