The Carnelian Fox Read online

  “How are you this badass? It’s really not fair.”

  “The actual champs make me look like a little kid,” he said with a shrug. “But it’s all about playing to your team’s strengths. You don’t always need great type coverage, or raw power. A lot of Primes overlook what the right enhancements can do for their Gems, don’t just go for whatever’s easiest or cheapest.”

  “Yeah, I should invest in them for my team, we haven’t got any yet. Will I get the same one as you if we win? It’s a venom enhancer, right?”

  “There’s a choice of three, I’d say take the power upgrade for Finn – yeah, sometimes it is about strength. He already hits hard and accurate, be nice to seal the deal before something can hit him back. Or there’s a defence one but I don’t recommend that except for building a stalling tactic. The venom enhancer won’t do anything for you, unless you’re planning on getting a corrosive or plant Gem soon?”

  “The more you get to know me, the more you’ll understand how little I actually plan,” I murmured. I grabbed one of the plastic cups of water set out on the counter for the Primes taking part.

  We each laid our capsules in a box embedded in the wall, a Praetor machine. It fully rested and healed any Gem placed inside within five minutes.

  “So, who do you think we’ll face in the final?” Eli asked. I was still trying to figure him out. Was he making conversation? Testing my forethought or knowledge? Was there even a small part of him that considered that I had something to contribute to this partnership? I’d spent a lot of my life feeling less capable than other people. And the gap had never been larger. Even when I’d been in the Sebastian Capshaw’s house, I’d never seen his Gems, never watched him train. There was just me and Callum and we were the same level, at least as Primes.

  “I think the couple would have done it, the two girls looked way more nervous, like they knew they were getting out of their depth. Kinda like the expression that’s been all over my face the entire time.”

  “You’ve been great. Hey, you know I appreciate this, don’t you, Sam? You weren’t sure about entering and I guess I owe you an apology for pushing you…”

  “No, you’re right,” I cut in. “I needed this. So did Finn, I mean look at him now. The thing is… When I did my first challenge I didn’t want to go alone. I don’t know if I’d ever have enough courage to do this for myself. But I will, now I’ve been through it once.”

  “Maybe one day we’ll get to face off,” he said.

  “Damn, I hope not.”

  When we walked back out for the finals, my suspicion that the couple had won proved true. They were in their late twenties and very much in love, wrapped round each other and sharing gooey looks. Good, they weren’t one hundred percent focused on the fight. Any advantage is a bonus.

  I took my place next to Eli, raising my eyebrow at him as the couple dissolved into a passionate kiss. He rolled his eyes and poised his fingertips above his chosen capsules.

  “We’re onto our final match of the evening, folks!” I flinched at the boom of the announcer. They had those damn speakers way too loud. “And this battle is a little different. For this round, all three of each contestant’s Gems will be on the field at once. We’re having ourselves a good ol’ fashioned free for all!”

  A muted cheer flooded the small part of the area that our competition occupied. There weren’t that many fans, gaps showed between most of the few sections we had allocated to our performance. Seemed like the people here enjoyed our matches so far though.

  My lungs expanded tentatively as I let a breath trickle in. All three of mine out, that meant the other team could target them and pick them off. And I’d have to be alert enough to give orders to them all at once.

  “Summon your Gems!” the announcer screamed. He must have looked idiotic in his little booth, yelling into a bloody microphone like that.

  I summoned my boys. Eli’s joined them.

  “Wow. When I said bulk…”

  “You assumed a stag would have more than a centipede?” Eli’s smug face irritated me. Why did all his team have to be so cool?

  I swore Neive wasn’t a bug. She couldn’t be. Her actual body tapered to a touch slimmer than V’s, not by much, but that thing stretched on for days. You could have used her as a school bus. Dozens of legs undulated along her side. The plates of her back were grey, thicker than concrete slabs, covered over by a dense moss that grew from between each section. The head seemed too compact with a neat set of mandibles and a pair of glorious, sweeping antennae that drifted in the air.

  “Gargantuan?” I whispered.

  “Not quite. Top end of large, and very, very toxic. About to get more so.”

  I shook my head and took in how tiny my group looked stood with Eli’s. Even Finn’s new growth meant nothing next to Neive.

  Okay, I should focus on our opponents. An elephant grabbed my eye first, huge tusks sprouting from its face. A crane and a panther flanked it. One bulk and two swift attackers, a good strategy. Compared to them, the other team was an odd combination - all candy types. Was the woman a show Prime? Did her boyfriend drag her here and carry her too? Not that the owl, horse, and lemur didn’t ooze competence. There was just an extreme amount of pink sparkles.

  I scanned as many as I could before the announcer told us to start. Yep, all fully evolved with a smattering of stat upgrades. I was screwed before I started. A glance to my partner didn’t ease my nerves. He took it all in, concentrating on planning.

  I hadn’t been friends with Eli for too long by then. Maybe I would have had more confidence going in if I’d have known what was happening in his head. Or perhaps I’d have never gone along with the contest in the first place.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Think you can tie the big guy up for me?” Eli asked. “And get Dew on the panther. If it phases out, we won’t be able to see it coming, it’s what I’d do if I had Lyle. I’ll put Zeke on the candies and Kira can make sure the birds won’t drop any sky attacks.”

  “On it,” I said.

  The other team yelled their commands. It was hard to hear them from so far away on the other side of the field with the cheers and commentators filling my ears to bursting.

  “Finn, Sev, slow that elephant down. Dew, light up that shadow panther, do not let him out of sight, okay?”

  I wondered at the wisdom of setting my frost and flame types onto one target, what if their attacks cancelled each other out? I roved the rest of the field trying to come up with a better solution. Dew was on point, he closed in on the cat and launched his glowing crystals to stick into its fur as it faded from sight. The clusters of bright rocks picked out the panther’s outline as it slunk around the edge of the battlefield.

  “Dew, hit it with a light beam!” I shouted. I knew in this area I could at least contribute something. That thing might be way stronger than my wolf, but I had a type advantage here.

  Pink beams fired from Dew’s mouth, chasing the panther and knocking it to the sand.

  “Get the trackers off!” The guy across from us jumped on the spot as he commanded his team. “Penelope, help him!”

  The crane swooped in, beak stretched out to scoop the crystals, but Kira was there first, colliding with the bird mid-air so they both spun to the ground. Penelope let off a hiss of flash freeze, coating Kira’s wing in a chunk of frost, then pecked at her face.

  Zeke engaged the three candy types, flickering between them and snapping in his shock attacks. His blades clicked open, dripping with grey goo. An odour of sizzling hair filled the arena as his corrosive power ripped into the nearest foe. The horse spun and kicked out at Zeke with its hind legs, smashing the delicate mantis through the air. Then the trio moved to close in, the lemur’s fur melting with a streak of clinging corrosion. Until Neive’s colossal torso blocked the way.

  The horse and lemur skidded to a halt and the owl darted up to avoid a stream of smoking acid squirted from Neive’s jaw. Vines crawled from her shoulder plates, chasing the
two grounded candy types with barbed tips that sought to tangle their limbs. Zeke blitzed up between Neive’s antennae and scanned the sky, his triangular head bobbing with bird-like twitches.

  Finn and Sev were doing a fantastic job. My mink skittered between the four pillars of the elephant’s legs, blasting each knee with his frost beams and staying clear of the stomps of retaliation. Finn, gloriously maned Finn, goaded the beast forward by running just beyond its grasping trunk and slamming it on the tip of the sensitive organ with lava bolts. I couldn’t stop watching that beautiful Gem, how could he be mine?

  A second brought disaster. A pale blur flew under the elephant.

  “Sev!” I shouted. “Finn, help him!”

  But it was too late, the crane tore up into the sky and dropped a little bundle of white fur. I snapped my head to Kira, but her wing dragged through the sand, still weighed down by a block of ice she smashed her fangs into over and again. She wasn’t going to make it.

  I slammed my fingertip into Sev’s capsule, recalling him before the floor crushed him. Damn. Why did one of mine have to go down first?

  “Finn, melt that crap.” I pointed to the downed bat. Sev’s freeze attacks had been my main stalling tactic for the elephant, anyway.

  He raced across the ground towards Kira, but the crane was coming in for round two.

  “Finn, one-eighty!”

  He executed a perfect flip, adding a roaring stream of lava. Powerful and scorching and continuous. Such a big boy now.

  The crane took the dead on shot to the face, bowling it over to crash to the floor, hissing as its frost coating melted under the fox’s strike. The guy recalled it. He recalled his Gem. Because mine had defeated it. Oh my life, was there ever a better feeling than this?

  I swear every blood vessel in my body sang. The adrenaline was so high, I lost track of what I was doing or thinking, not that that isn’t my normal state. But man, I could have done anything in that moment; fought that gargantuan single-handed, asked out Sebastian Capshaw, flipped off the president. And I wanted to do them all.

  “Focus, Sam.” Eli’s calm voice bugged the crap out of me, couldn’t he see how awesome this was?

  I didn’t even notice what happened to Dew. I just heard his yelp and saw him downed. Was it that panther? Or maybe the elephant that no one was accounting for. But something had hurt my Gem because I wasn’t concentrating.

  “Come on Dew! Get up!”

  “Recall him,” Eli said.

  “No,” I begged, “He can do this, he’s tough enough.”

  “He’s limping on his left paw, he’s too slow to keep up, Sam. You need to know when backing off helps the strategy.”

  I watched the wolf try to climb to his feet, limping over his damaged foreleg. He was up.

  “And what, exactly, is the strategy?”

  “This.” Eli’s voice dipped low, and he flicked a thumbs-up to his Gems.

  As Finn finished breathing gentle flames over Kira’s wing to remove the rest of the ice, she snatched him up and leapt into the air. Zeke hunkered down on Neive’s head, tucking himself down as small as he would go. Then Neive erupted. The moss coating her plates ran to a sticky, murky, almost liquid, and the centipede spun. She clamped her jaws on her tail and rotated as fast as her trillions of legs would take her, flinging the slime across the battlefield. It settled on the floor and spattered over the elephant’s flank. It struck the lemur and ploughed it into another heap of the corrosive moss, her Prime pulled her out. The near-invisible panther yowled in protest, and it flickered out of its shadow form as it concentrated on avoiding any more of the acidic goop. I retrieved Dew before he got coated in the crap too.

  Meanwhile, the owl darted for Kira, head-butting her in the stomach from below. She dropped a couple of feet but regained her momentum as Finn blasted at the owl from his precarious position in the bat’s talons.

  Neive halted her toxic deluge, planting herself in the centre of the sludge to regain her balance. Zeke took over. He bombed through the goop straight for the reeling elephant, I guess the poison didn’t affect other corrosives, and slashed down with his sizzling blades. It did its best to fight back, slamming its trunk and tusks at the much nimbler foe. But nothing could touch the mantis as he struck multiple times a second, each a chip away from the huge, tanky Gem’s health. Not until his Prime recalled him and the panther emerged from behind, ready to pounce. The cat’s claws sank into the bug’s body, pinning Zeke to the ground. I spotted a pulse of dark energy around each puncture.

  “Whoa,” Eli said, slamming Zeke’s capsule. “We’ll have less of that. No life drains today, thank you.”

  The panther still flickered, struggling to recede to the shadows. Eli had pulled Zeke out before it could heal itself up very far. I guess sometimes it was better to remove your Gem from the fight. The girl must have agreed, she withdrew her horse as its legs fell out from beneath it and it kicked with soul wrenching jerks in the poisonous muck.

  We were three to two. No way was that cat and owl taking down the behemoth that was Neive. The couple weren’t embracing and giggling now, they were talking animatedly. The girl shook her head, and they both spoke over each other.

  “They should pull out,” Eli said, “Give them a sec to think about it and they’ll quit.”

  “That was kind of overkill,” I murmured at the steaming heaps. “And you want her to be more toxic because...?”

  “Because it’s possible.” Eli smiled down at me, then inclined his head towards our opponents. They recalled their last two Gems and bowed our way. We’d won. We’d actually won!

  “Congratulations,” Eli leant over to whisper and took my hand to raise it like a full-on champion.

  “You too! You were so good. I can’t believe how great that was. So, when’s the next one?”

  We got to stand on a podium and everything. The couple were next to us in second place, the pair of girls we hadn’t faced took the third spot. I got a cute little plaque, almost as impressive as a trophy but easier to carry, and an e-version that showed up on my info when people scanned my eBand. Oh crap, now challenge masters would think I was competent…

  I went with Eli’s advice on the prize and fitted the attack increase into one of Finn’s upgrade slots. He’d hit even harder now. I didn’t quite trust the crazy glee on his face when he selected the venom enhancer for Neive. I don’t know how anything would ever stand up to that team.

  Battles looked different on TV, more graceful, way more dodging and pinpoint attacks. Maybe they tried to make it look more exciting for viewers? Or perhaps it was always that gritty and you could only tell when you experienced the full range of scents and that kick of adrenaline. Either way, I was hungry for more and desperate to be strong enough to kick Eli’s ass.

  “I think I will fight you one day,” I told him as we exited the stadium and went to sit on a bench to wait for Lucy to emerge.

  “Ah, you mean you’ll lose to me one day.” He smiled and zipped up his hoodie, then settled his hands in the pockets. He looked so small and lost like that, almost delicate. It was impossible to guess at the power at that boy’s fingertips.

  “I’ll probably lose to you a million times, but I will beat you one day. I promise.”

  “Know what? I hope you do, because then I doubt there’ll be a doubles team out there that could stop us.”

  I measured his words. Was he trying to say he wanted to work with me more often? Or was he being polite? I had so far to go until that point, would he even remember who I was by then?

  “What are you doing until then?” I wanted to kick myself for asking, now I sounded desperate. “More search and rescue?”

  “I only do that a few months a year, I train and improve the rest of the time. Look out for upgrades I want, hunt down some good challenges. Respond to any SOS’ from crazy girls wandering in the deep, dark woods at night-time. Huh, that makes me sound creepy.”

  “Well, I’ll take creepy over a giant arachnid trying to feed me
to their babies any day.” I hope he knew how grateful I really was. I’ve never been that great at sharing my thoughts, but I reckon getting Neive’s special upgrade went at least partway to the debt I owed him.

  “Can I get you a coffee or something? While you wait for Lucy, I mean,” Eli said, standing up. There was a little café behind us that was miraculously still open. This was one of those twenty-four-hour cities.

  “I’d love a hot chocolate. Maybe a doughnut?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” He gave me a preoccupied smile and wandered towards the coffee shop. Yep, I still didn’t have a clue about that guy.

  And even when it got to where I thought I’d figured him out I doubt I ever truly did.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “That went rather well for you.” Lucy plonked herself down on the bench next to me. Well, Lucy didn’t plonk. More like lowered herself with elegance.

  “Yeah, I can’t wait to come see you in a show,” I replied.

  Her face scrunched; eyes wary.

  “Not even joking, sarcastic, ironic, or anything. I realised how amazing that felt and if you have something that important to you then I want to be there for it.”

  “That is quite kind of you.” Lucy gathered her hands into her lap and stared at them, tapping her toes on the floor.

  “You’ll get there.” I laid a hand on her shoulder. “What happened the first time was an accident, you’ll smash the next challenges. And no one can stop you reaching the top.”

  “I believe I’ll get there, Sam. Just seeing what you and Eli have accomplished already makes me despise drifting behind. Even all those other pairs today… Agreed, they aren’t in my field, but there will be many people that have risen to that level. And they’ll all outdo me.”

  “For now, maybe. Fact is everyone there was better than me, but it was still so much fun. Probably because I had a ridiculously strong teammate carrying me… But the bits I contributed felt incredible, you’ll appreciate the little wins until you get the big ones. Like when Finn evolved, I was like ‘wow!’ and him taking down that mature Gem on his own. If you could experience what that was like, you wouldn’t be sad right now. Look forward to what you’ll do in the future. We get to do cool stuff, Lucy, really cool stuff. Not sit in an office or serve coffee like those guys over there. We get to train Gems and drink the coffee!”