Chapter 22: Kai Was Probably Clicking Confused

The jumbotron didn’t catch it. The elders didn’t notice it. The holograms kept floating above the sand, thirty feet tall, glowing with the names of princesses who had spent their lives being seen.

Below them, in the dark, in the second row of slaves, in the space between the light and the sand, a girl with no name and no portrait and no wolf and four bombs in her brain stood with her fist over her heart and one thousand women standing with her and the distance between what the crowd saw and what actually happened was the distance between a ceremony and a revolution.

"Category Three. Lycanthropic Resonance," an elder announced.

Translation: Step right up and show us your wolf. Great system. Beautiful system. Completely useless if you were wearing silver and your wolf was dead, in which case it meant jack shit. Every slave got an automatic zero.

The princesses dominated the top of the board because Alpha blood.

Nova wasn’t paying attention. She was wondering if Kai Starborne had spotted her without her cloak yet. Her cuffs had been fucked with by a man in a mask who may or may not have disabled the shock. She was running that theory on vibes.

If Kai had spotted her, there was no question he would be hitting that shock button repeatedly at the current moment. She wouldn’t be able to hear the click with the crowd. Funny? Yes, he probably would get angry too.

Playing dead was a waste of a good spine. There was no version where she walked out unsold. She was fucked on her back. She was fucked on her feet. At least on her feet, she might piss off Kai Starborne.

"Category Four. Reproductive Viability," the elder called.

Translation: Fertility. A category that worshipped facial symmetry, ratios, weight, hormones, biomarkers, and other things that no woman had full control over. Physicians did it in a lab. Silver murdered the scores.

Generally, the higher the bloodline, the higher the score.

The leaderboard started at the bottom and climbed. And, shocker, the slave numbers populated the lowest ranks in clusters so thick the jumbotron could barely keep up. Zero to the tenth percentile. Exhibit A for silver-as-a-lifestyle.

The top fifty loaded and the crowd’s attention sharpened.

Celeste Starborne. Forty-seventh.

Starborne blew a gasket as a group sport. Fists and drinks in the air like the number had been a dare. It wasn’t top ten, which was a bit surprising. Still good enough to make the building remember her number.

But, without question, Celeste Starborne scoring forty-seventh in a category where she expected top ten was producing a shitstorm behind her jumbotron smile that Nova didn’t need to see to know was category five.

The top thirty started rolling. The Solarbeam princess landed at twenty-eight and her section responded with a cheer loud enough to rattle the columns. Their Alpha stood from his seat and the gesture said everything his mouth didn’t.

The top twenty began.

She knew because the hologram scoreboard in the sand stopped moving. Then the crowd caught her focus.

"Seven-seven-oh-nine."

She didn’t believe it at first. Not until it echoed multiple times.

She stayed in the warrior position with the rest of the slaves, hands clasped behind her back, facing forward, and showed zero emotions for it.

Top twenty in Reproductive Viability meant she had outscored eighty percent of the free women in this arena. Omegas. Warriors’ daughters. Two princesses. Women with functioning wolves and clean bloodwork and hormonal systems that hadn’t been marinating in silver since childhood.

It was almost funny. She was frankly surprised. She was also indifferent. The two existed side by side in her chest like roommates who had agreed to share space and never speak to each other.

Nova realized the crowd was probably wondering which of the slaves that registration number even belonged to. Hell, if she only saw four digit registration numbers and no hologram images, she wouldn’t know either. They probably couldn’t have picked her out of a lineup with a map.

"Final Category. Intelligence."

The names started. Nova was mildly curious whether "offended half the room" counted as a rules violation.

If Starborne was working on getting her scores struck, this was the category with the ammunition to justify it.

The leaderboard loaded from the bottom. Slave numbers first. Then omegas. Then ranked contestants climbing one by one as the crowd tracked the names with the intensity of gamblers watching a race they had money on.

After a few minutes, the holograms in the sand slowed, then stayed, which meant they were almost finished. The top ten was a royal lineup as expected. Each time a new hologram appeared, their packs went berserk. When they hit the top three, every sound in the arena compressed into a single frequency of anticipation.

Nova faced forward and did not look at the scores or the holograms on the sand. Celeste was top three. The Emberclaw princess was second.

THUM.

Louder than before. One thousand silver-cuffed, stone-faced, spine-straight women saluted a girl with no name and no portrait and no wolf and the sound they made was louder than every princess entrance combined.

But this time, every slave held their fist there waiting for Nova. Refusing to drop them until she answered. Nobody spoke. Everybody knew. Just a formation-holding, fuck-the-system army.

The arena fell silent. Zero chance they missed that one.

Nova saluted them back, fist to chest. One person. No sound to speak of. But they felt it the way you feel a match strike in a dark room.

DRUMP.

Every slave fist dropped at the same time and reclasped behind their backs, Nova included.

Spines straight. Eyes forward. Every posture was textbook. If a master walked through right now, he’d see a thousand slaves in perfect formation and think his money was well spent. He’d have no idea that ten seconds ago, every single one of them had committed an act of solidarity.

Whatever happened next, whether the bombs went off or the scores got struck or Kai found her or the masked man came back, she was standing in the middle of a thousand women who had chosen her, and she had chosen them back, and she would carry that in her chest long after the silver ate everything else.