Chapter 25: Loopholes Look Better In Moonlight

If she could make it by dawn, it would be a miracle. Today had already produced several. What’s one more?

Starborne standing down meant those two offers had hit a number that made him polite. The drones every ten feet also probably helped with that decision. Sabotage or interference would be a suicide mission for anyone.

Livestream was still going, cameras the size of water droplets scattering the trail like holy water. Very sacred, indeed.

But none of that mattered. Because Nova had a puzzle in front of her that she was going to figure out. That puzzle was twenty miles with no map.

She started with a jog. The kind of pace that said I am going to be doing this for a very long time.

The trees closed around her and the arena lights disappeared behind the canopy and for the first time in hours, the noise stopped.

The longer she ran, the clearer her head got. The anxiety that had been squatting in her chest since three in the morning was quieter now, muffled by the rhythm of her shoes hitting packed earth and her breathing finding a pattern her body knew even if she hadn’t done it before.

All that pent-up frustration had somewhere to go for the first time today, and it went into the ground with every step.

Even if she didn’t make it, even if she was eliminated at the fire, even if dawn came and she was still ten miles out and Starborne’s guards were waiting with a transport back to the cigar room, this run through the forest was more freedom than she had felt in her entire life. She had never done this. Never been allowed.

She glanced up at the moon once as she ran. Full and bright and hanging over the canopy like it had cleared its schedule for her. She prayed silently to the Goddess, something she hadn’t done in a long time.

Whoever buys me. If they would let me do this every once in a while, I could live with the other stuff. Or I would try to. Unless it is the sniffer or the leather finger. In that case, I could not live with it and I would like to formally request a different owner or a swift death, whichever is more convenient for your schedule.

The prayer was not traditional. The Goddess would have to take it up with management.

Around mile two, she saw a figure standing in the middle of the trail.

Nova stopped. Her breathing was loud in the silence and her heart rate climbed from exercise to survival in under a second. The figure was in human form. Female. Standing still with her arms crossed and her weight on one hip like she’d been waiting long enough to get comfortable.

Moonlight hit her face and Nova recognized her immediately.

The princess of the Emberclaw Pack. Third place in endurance. Sister to Maverick Emberclaw, the Alpha who offered to double his bid earlier and the reason why Starborne was probably allowing Nova to run at all.

Slave protocol instinct took over. Nova bowed immediately.

"Oh, absolutely not. Get up." The princess closed the distance in three strides and grabbed Nova’s arm, pulling her upright. "I knew it. I knew they’d let you through. Oh wow, you are really pretty. Not that you weren’t earlier but you had a cloak over you so I couldn’t see—"

The compliment arrived without warning and continued to machine-gun out of Maria’s mouth. Nova blinked. This woman was so aggressively friendly that Nova’s fight-or-flight system didn’t know which department to route it to.

She needed a second to reconcile the fact that she had lumped every princess in the Celeste bucket and Maria had just blown up the bucket. Not every princess was the same.

"—but anyways, I’m Maria. What is your real name? We don’t have slaves in Emberclaw. My grandad got rid of those, so consider me ignorant. But I am going to need something to call you that doesn’t sound like a barcode."

"My name?" Nova repeated, because the question was so simple and so unexpected that her brain treated it like a trick.

"Yes. Do you not have one? If you don’t, I’m calling you Silver. I already named you, actually. So it’s settled, Silver it is." She paused, considered it, then nodded at her own suggestion. "It’s dangerous and kind of pretty, which is honestly the vibe you’ve been giving all day."

"N-nova," Nova answered before she got permanently renamed. "Princess, aren’t you worried about getting there on time?"

"Oh, right." Maria snapped her fingers like she’d just remembered that the twenty-mile run through sacred forest was happening and she was part of it. "So here is the plan. You are going to get on my back and ride my wolf. There is no rule against it."

Nova stared at her.

"The rules prohibit external help," Maria continued, holding up a finger like she was reading from a legal brief she had memorized specifically for this conversation. "External means from outside the run. I am inside the run. I am a draftee. Two draftees helping each other is cooperation, and cooperation is not prohibited because whoever wrote the rules clearly did not think women would help one another and I think that is hilarious because I am about to."

"You are going to what?" Nova managed, because hearing it once hadn’t been enough for her brain to accept the download.

"I am going to get you to that fire." Maria said it like the sentence was obvious and the confusion was optional. "You don’t have a wolf. That is not your fault. If they are going to eliminate you, let the Goddess do it at the flame where it counts. I am not going to let twenty miles of forest and a biology problem be the reason a girl who dropped a 99.9 in silver doesn’t get her shot."