Piper Cross, an undercover spy, must relive her past as a child gladiator in order to bring the underground arena to justice.
*****
Growing up gladiator is brutal. The cells are cramped...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Spartacus and Crixus's performance was so swift and brutal that every fight thereafter felt like an anticlimax. I imagined myself turning to stone as pair after pair of gladiators fought for a place in the tournament, dressed in increasingly ridiculous costumes. It was only Christmas holidays spent watching movies with Sail that allowed me to recognise Neo and Trinity, Buzz Lightyear and Woody, followed by a discount Batman and Robin. I was less sure of the pot-bellied man slathered in green paint, who rode an armoured wolf with a donkey-eared helmet into the stadium, but they didn't last long against the draconian mutant that rose up to meet them. Such was the way for most of the fights; the Golden One often liked to start strong, then appealed to the bloodthirsty crowd by feeding fodder to the mutts.
Needless to say, I wasn't surprised when SpongeBob was swallowed by the sand and Patrick's limbs didn't grow back.
"Some starfish," grumbled a patron beside me.
Again, I turned my reaction inward, pushing my feelings deeper, pressing them smaller. Those are people, I wanted to say, but my lips stayed clamped as the fight reached its inevitable conclusion. Morality was a luxury for the safe, and though I'd moved up to the stands, my life was still very much on the line.
In the lulls between each match, my thoughts erred dangerously into the past. Roland had disappeared after the battle for Ridgeview Academy, presumably to make his own way in the world after years of being forced to look after Ivy Thatcher, the half-sister I bore no relation to. After a rocky start, she'd become a fast friend of mine at Ridgeview, and we'd battled her evil twin and megalomaniac father, somehow managing to stop a wicked plan centuries in the making. My mother escaped in the chaos, but I stood by my decision to save my friends over claiming vengeance that day.
Roland, however, had not chosen his family or his friends. Sandra Thatcher, the mother he shared with the twins, had always prioritised Roland's siblings. He'd come to resent them for it over time, a hatred that bubbled and spilled over to me when he learned of my existence — and my role in our father's death. That hateful jealousy was what led him to ally himself with my mother and Marcus King (Ivy's deranged father) in the first place, though I supposed I ought to afford him credit for turning on them when I revealed Corinne's hand in our father's death. The day I met the man was the day I faced him in the arena, a match she'd arranged to spite him for trying to get me out of the system.
Mortimer Fallon. Sometimes I thought about taking my father's last name, but I didn't know enough about the man to know if it would honour anyone.
Enough. I bit into my knuckle, enjoying the sharp flare of pain. It was my voice now, not my mother's, though the words echoed the vitriol she'd spewed into my mind for years. Focus on the task at hand.
It was possible that Roland was still vulnerable to Corinne's influence. If so, it meant she was close. Potentially close enough to touch.
