Chapter 9: Terms and Conditions

(True-but-unseen account)

If you were hoping Arthur would take one look at a glowing red warning label and do the sensible thing, Dear Reader, I regret to inform you that sensible had already left the building several Chapters ago and was not coming back for this one either.

"You’re staring," Hadjer said. Not unkind. Just tired, the specific tired of someone used to being furniture.

She was easy to overlook on purpose, Arthur was starting to realize. Dark hair pulled forward like a curtain, knees drawn up to make herself smaller than she was, a satchel at her hip stuffed with what looked like dried leaves and bent stems. The kind of girl who’d learned to take up exactly as much space as nobody would notice.

"Sorry. The, uh..." He gestured at the air where only he could see it. "...System says you’re poisoned."

But she was so out of it that she didn’t even catch what he said, or dismiss it as weird. One look, and you could tell she had other things on her mind.

"It’s fine."

"Well, you look like death. It is not fine, that is the opposite of fine—"

Somewhere in the middle of that sentence, he stopped. Maybe saying that to the first girl who had ever clicked with his hormones was a bad idea. He used to make fun of characters who simped too hard, and now he was living that shame.

"It’s fine."

She said it too fast, and then, mid-word on something else, she flinched. Small and private, like biting down on a tooth that bit back first.

He had heard that word before, from his mother, every time his father did something stupid. Women, for some reason, couldn’t simply say what was wrong.

He sat down anyway. Not next to her. A respectful gap, the kind twelve-year-olds invent when they don’t yet have a word for what they’re feeling and don’t want anyone to notice they’re feeling it.

The tree above them barely filtered the light, and the bench was cold enough that he could feel it through his uniform. It was the kind of bench nobody chose on purpose. It was the kind of bench you ended up on.

"The Gift Administrator said you had the same problem I did," he said. "Dragon. No discount."

"What’s a discount?" Something almost fond crossed her face. "I asked if I could buy coins with real money, but they refuse every time. I even tried to buy the Dragon Gift with money directly, before all this, and that never worked. Sometimes I feel like she never listens."

"Coins?"

"Coins." She picked at a thread on her sleeve. "You need a team for the good quests. I don’t exactly get picked."

"Why not?"

"Ask them." Flat. Final. A door with the word CLOSED painted on both sides.

He didn’t ask them. He asked her again, differently, because that’s a trick that works on adults and occasionally on very tired ten-year-olds.

"Was it always like this, or—"

"There was someone." The words came out before she’d apparently decided to let them. "He said he could fix the coin thing. He said—"

She spoke like someone with something she desperately wanted to let out.

Her whole body seized like a fist closing around a nerve.

Oh, Arthur thought, with the specific dread of a boy who has read entirely too many books about the wrong kind of contract. Oh, I know this one.

A promise can be a kindness or a leash. The trick, Dear Reader, is that from the inside they feel identical, right up until you try to walk away.

"Don’t finish that sentence," he said, fast, watching her jaw work against something invisible. "Whatever it is, don’t. It’s hurting you."

"I have to—"

Another seize, worse this time, her hand flying to her own throat like she could hold the words in by force. Her knuckles had gone white around nothing at all.

He’d read about this. Not researched. Read, in the specific unserious way a kid reads everything, filed under fiction, cross-referenced under things that turn out to be real the moment you meet someone with the actual symptoms. A mark that eats the sentence before it leaves you. A price paid in silence instead of coin.

A voice gets sold before it’s missed...

some silence isn’t chosen. It’s a fist.

"Okay." He held up both hands, the universal twelve-year-old gesture for I have decided something and you don’t get a vote. "Don’t tell me what happened. Show me what you signed."

Relief hit her face so hard it looked like pain wearing a different coat.

"That’s..." A breath, as if the sentence were allowed to exist now that it wasn’t about what happened. "That’s actually a great idea."

She reached into her bag.

He hit her.

Not hard. Well, hard enough. A clean, apologetic sort of punch that caught her jaw before her fingers had finished closing around the paper, and dropped her sideways off the bench in one motion. She didn’t even get a sound out. He caught the contract on the way down, mostly out of reflex, and was entirely surprised she’d been carrying the thing on her bag like a live grenade with a hair trigger.

If the mark hurts her every time she reaches for it, he reasoned, in the split-second, deeply questionable logic of someone who has just punched a girl he likes, better it happens to someone the mark doesn’t own.

He would examine, later, whether that logic held up. He would also admit, later, that it was maybe forty percent logic and sixty percent she’s cute and this seemed like the kind of thing a hero does in the books. He was not, historically, a boy who let a shaky ratio stop him from doing anything.

The page in his hands was blank.

Every line of it. Not faded. Empty, the specific, deliberate empty of something built to open only for the right eyes. Whoever wrote this had thought it through. That was, against every instinct he had, a little bit fun.

Well, they might have made countermeasures for a shining white knight. But what about a shining white ghost?

In that moment, Arthur left his body. It slumped forward against the tree, breathing on its own, the way it always did when the tenant stepped out. It was a good thing she’d collapsed in an isolated spot; he would have to talk to her about it some other day.

Then he used Possession on her.

It felt the way it always did. Like putting on someone else’s coat while it was still warm, sleeves too long, everything a half-size off. Except this time, underneath the coat, there was a locked drawer, and he had her hands to open it with.

He slipped into her memories and read the contract through her own eyes.

It was twenty pages long, with a lot of conditions. It was a game called The Game of Life.

Rule number one of the Game of Life: you don’t talk about the Game of Life. Rule number two: you don’t talk about the Game of Life.

Whoever wrote this was a bit dramatic, but he got the reference. His father had made him watch the movie. Good movie.

The rest of the pages explained the game, and Hadjer was in Stage One. It was simple. There were two participants, with 2,000 coins each. Each player could use any means to take the other’s coins, as long as it didn’t involve violence.

At the end of the month, a collector would come and take 2,000 coins from each of them. Anyone who couldn’t pay would be taken on as an employee.

It said employee. But once you read the conditions, it was a scam. They had to work every day until they died, with no limit on working hours. They were handed a job and had to finish it no matter what, or they’d be punished. Pretty much slavery.

That explained the no-violence rule. Why ruin the merchandise? And the job could be anything they wanted, which was simply creepy.

Next, he searched further back, to see how she’d ended up here at all.

The good news, if you could call it that, was that the Game had paired her with someone she already trusted. An old friend named Lyra.

Arthur got a good look at her through Hadjer’s memory of that first meeting, and he understood immediately why nobody would have suspected her. Lyra was small and quick-eyed, the kind of girl who smiled a half-second before she’d finished deciding to, like the smile had a head start on the rest of her. She kept fidgeting with the strap of a bag that looked two sizes too practical for an Academy cadet. The bag of someone used to carrying more than her share.

Lyra told her they’d been tricked. At first glance, all you had to do to avoid losing was give the coins back. But that was wrong, she said. What if this evil organization hired someone to steal them, making each girl think the other had done it? Then, when neither of them could pay, they’d get two fresh employees.

Hadjer looked at Lyra the way you look at someone you’ve already decided to believe. She was one of the smartest girls in class. People had bullied her for being poor and wearing used clothes, and Hadjer was the only one who defended her, so they’d grown really close.

They only split up after they came to the Academy. But that wasn’t Hadjer’s fault. It was her passive, which poisoned and decayed anything that got too near her, and no house wanted a teammate who wilted their supply crates by accident.

She trusted Lyra anyway, so she asked what they should do. They could use her father’s safe, since her house was pretty secure, but Lyra said no. They would definitely figure that out, and they probably already had someone inside. Too predictable.

Instead, Lyra said, she could use her active ability, Vault. She had never told Hadjer about it before, but it was the ability she’d awakened after that ghost incident.

Hadjer was in awe. She hadn’t known Lyra had awakened such a great ability. With it, nobody could take the coins, and Lyra even showed her its effect. A small, private folding of space that swallowed whatever she put into it and gave nothing back until she chose to.

Hadjer trusted her even more after that. She handed over the coins she’d been hiding in her bag, and for one clean, stupid moment, she felt safe.

Lyra was shocked that Hadjer had been carrying something like that around. She took the coins fast, put them in her own bag, and said she’d call when the game was over to give them back.

The next day, Hadjer remembered that Lyra didn’t text back anymore. She must have gotten a new phone number, so Hadjer went to ask for it in person.

That was when she saw her, in a quiet corner of the Star house courtyard, sunlight doing nothing to make the moment feel less cold. Lyra was playing with a magical pet, and Hadjer had no idea how she’d gotten one. They were expensive. She felt a bad feeling settle low in her stomach before her mind had even caught up to why.

The pet was a serpent that kept changing color, coiled loose and glittering around Lyra’s wrist like something bought, not earned.

Lyra grabbed it, scowling. "Why did I get a serpent that changes color? What a waste of 2,000 coins. I hate this pet."

Then she smirked. "Well, good thing they were that naive Hadjer’s coins and not mine. I always hated her. Let’s see her rich family get out of this one."

Hadjer was shocked. She confronted her, and all Lyra did was laugh.

She was devastated. She even begged her to give it back and get the coins back, and all she did was close the door on her face.

She woke up confused about what had happened.

"Did I fall? Was that dumb of me?"

"You fell," he agreed, in the tone of a boy who has never told a convincing lie in his life and is not about to start now that it counts. "Put that contract back in your bag before it kills you. I’ll help you with your little liar problem."

She was surprised, wondering how he could possibly know. He told her not to overthink it.

For a second she almost hoped. Then she said it was impossible. The coins were already spent, Gift Administration didn’t do refunds, and she couldn’t even explain to him what happened without risking death.

Arthur looked at her.

"I have no idea what you’re talking about," he said. "Your coins are still with that shifty serpent liar, and I’m getting them back."

For a moment, Hadjer smiled. It was a small thing, cracked at the edges, like a muscle that had forgotten how. But it was there, and it was real, and it was the first thing all afternoon that hadn’t cost her anything.

TO BE CONTINUED...