“Rey… would have told you to go have a drink for him,” Deidra tried. Galia humphed, her shoulders threatening to fold.
“Yeah, I know he would have… but screw what he says. I never listened to him before, so why start now?” Galia lied with a smile. Deidra had heard him counsel Galia more than once. He might have been the only person she listened to. “You go. Have a good time for both of us. I just need tonight. I’ll be better tomorrow. And the next day, even better.”
“Alright,” Deidra muttered. She got up to leave, but not before rushing to Galia’s side. Not before pressing their lips together, breathing her in. Deidra’s hand glided up Galia’s shirt, cupped around her breast. She grazed Galia’s nipple with her thumb, just lightly enough for it to tense into her firm palm. “I was going to do that on our date,” Deidra whispered and fell back.
“Mm- you were going to cop a feel in the Forge?” Galia laughed, impressed.
“And you still have so much to teach me,” Deidra winked. She turned and left before Galia’s perfect smile could turn somber. Before she could turn to her taxotrol bottle.
Alone, in the dark, Galia twisted off the lid. Six pills rattled around in the bottom. It was all she had left, after her overdose in the Thruway. Without Rey, they were her very last.
“I’ll… get you another,” said one of six dancing illusions of Clarabelle. Deidra couldn’t keep them straight anymore, with eight empty shots flipped on their heads before her. Or was it nine? Every time she tried to count them, she got lost.
At least Clarabelle understood. This was Deidra’s last chance to enjoy the simple pleasures she never would as a servant, if she didn’t win. Or as breathing human, if she didn’t survive the last event. The namesake of the competition - the Olympia itself. Deidra never wished more for company. She might know what to do, instead of drinking herself down a black pit of nihilism, if Galia were there. She hadn’t seen her in three hours, and already hope had been replaced with liquor in her gut. When the flash of a green exosuit appeared beside her, Deidra assumed it was another hallucination. Then that hallucination put its hand on her shoulder.
“That was a damn fool thing to do. Challenging that monster,” said the Terra Eagle. Deidra brushed away the arm she now felt was real.
“Yeah, well, it’s a damn fool thing to gamble yourself into a deathtrap. Guess it’s in my blood,” she spat, with all the gusto nine shots could give. The Terra Eagle went quiet for a while. Much as she missed Jonas, she couldn’t think of a reason to disagree. Her yellow scanner line ran up and down the daughter of her love, while the screen behind the bar played the latest statistics. It was Daniel’s 70 against the Dreamweaver’s 17, without an actual Dreamweaver, now.
“You’ve seen enough Olympias in your career to know what’s next,” said the Terra Eagle eventually.
“Boom!” Deidra acted out the final challenge with the hammer of two fists. Her glasses rattled on impact. Except, once one of the combatants destabilized the core of the planet by claiming the Gold Medal, Ares would do more than just rattle. Boom, was a perfect but understated description.
“How do you plan to outrun that, or Daniel, without a ship?” asked the Eagle, quietly, so as not to alert the man smirking quietly in the corner. He’d had his pinstriped suit patched back to perfection.
“I don’t know, Kayn!” Deidra blurted her true name, louder than she meant to, “I know that competing… is my only choice. Not just for me.” The Eagle looked away from her. Her yellow line became a dot that zipped around the room, in search of anything to
say, anything to help. “I know now, you didn’t kill my dad,” Deidra surprised her with, “It’s just too easy to blame you, when you blame yourself. That guy, Daniel… it was him. I… appreciate whatever it is you’re trying to do, help maybe? But you can’t. So… I’d like to be alone with the bottom of my bottle, please.”
“Maybe she can,” said Clarabelle. Where she soared in from, Deidra hadn’t the foggiest. “She has something you need, after all.”
“They won’t allow me to donate my ship to another crew, DeLuce,” the Terra Eagle countered.
“No, they won’t,” Clarabelle said, though she disappeared with a smirk that said it didn’t matter.
Deidra was busy reorienting her dizzy eyes after glancing back and forth between them, when a crisp clink rang throughout the Forge. A single note, so distinct in its frequency and resonance, that it silenced the whole bar. Deidra fumbled in vain to turn her stool several times before the Eagle did it for her. When Deidra saw the source of the noise, she arched her back over the bar. She scuffed her boots on the floor, she tipped her stool, anything to get away from the man in the center of the bar. The Eagle discreetly tilted her back upright before anyone could notice. The long, high note softened but continued to ring, from the gold-rimmed, crystal glass of Koslav Gold himself. He handed his solid gold spoon to an assistant with the third nicest suit in the room, with Daniel in the running. He pinched his glass in two fingers to stop the note, then raised it to the crowd.
“A toast. To Daniel. To Galia Hattel and Deidra Benier,” Koslav’s thin voice projected surprisingly well over the crowd of spectators. It helped that every last one of them held in their breath. “To one of the most unconventional Olympia Gold competitions… even I have ever seen. And, to those we lost in it.” With this, he raised his glass and tilted it back.
“To those we lost!” the Forge resounded. To ninety percent of the bar, that meant their favorite crew. Someone they put money on, or just a body they liked to watch on screen. To the other ten, the ones like Deidra, the Terra Eagle, Clarabelle - it meant someone they loved. A best friend. A brother. A lover.
“To those… we lost,” the three smoldered. Deidra clenched two fists and stumbled up from her stool. She would have charged just then, and been incinerated by the barrier Koslav’s golden tie projected around him, had the Eagle not grabbed her arm. Just the radiant heat from it kept at least a foot of open space around him as he wandered the crowd, yet left him comfortably cool.
“Now. This next round is my favorite… symbolic of all things in our Universe. Eternal and finite at once. All things must end, like this wonderful planet my designers have wrought will tomorrow. In fire. Then, from its ash and wreckage, Ares will be reborn anew. Again it will end. Again it will be born. Just so like we are, in the perfect cosmic machine… But I haven’t come to stop your festivities. I’ve come to join them!” Koslav cheered, and the Forge followed suit. The commotion rumbled back to half of its previous volume. “If you’d like a word, speak to my assistant. Otherwise, raise a glass to Ares’ final night!”
Deidra was more interested in a knife than a word with Koslav. Every time she thought she might see his assistant about it, the Terra Eagle was there to stop her. Clarabelle kept glasses coming her way, between trips to the kitchen. She was cooking up something besides more soup, Deidra knew, she just couldn’t figure what. She was too deep in the bottle even to figure that her tasteless shots were only water. A brief moment of lucidity did come over her, however, when she spotted someone she knew leave the Forge just a second before Koslav. A pinstripe grey suit with a black tie, then a glossy silver one with a gold tie. The strangest thing about it was how Koslav slipped away, without his assistant. Two suits… the lingering liquor puddle in her brain refused to accept it was a coincidence. Deidra made a break for it.
“Deidra, wait!” the Eagle hissed, but her arm missed the girl by an inch this time. Deidra poked her head through the door of the Forge. I knew it! Koslav and Daniel’s jackets flickered around the corner of the bar. Later, she would appreciate the sheer happenstance that what she “knew” turned out to be something. For now, Deidra did her best drunken tiptoe to the side of the Forge. She dared not peek out at them from behind the dumpster that offered her cover. She only closed her eyes and listened.
“Come to scold me?” said a voice she didn’t recognize. It had strange, almost inhuman sharpness to it.
“I should do more than scold you. This was not part of our arrangement,” said Koslav. Only then did Deidra realize she’d never heard Daniel speak. Not until now.
“Neither was a team of vengeful servants!” he countered in that sharp tongue-whip.
“I never thought… they would risk what little freedom they had to look forward to,” Koslav admitted, “But I couldn’t refuse them entry. That might have sparked disobedience. I don’t need a rebellion of my debtors. But… that has nothing to do with your participation! You should never have taken any bonuses, let alone three! What were you thinking, putting yourself in the spotlight like that? Discretion. That’s how we make this work.” Deidra inched closer to the edge of her dumpster to listen closer.
“Koslav… I don’t get a chance to let it out much. You know that. You know that every day is hard for me. The Olympia… is supposed to be the one thing that isn’t hard for me,” said Daniel.