And now it swells in me
Smash all my defenses down
I’ll take this
I’ll let this fire consume me
~All that Remains, “Become the Catalyst”
Burn
Most people found their way to the Fortress on their own. They would sign up looking for fame, glory or money, to draw blood, to test themselves, to test God or Fate, to see how far they would come. There were myriad reasons why people would sign up for the Game, but those reasons were not Charlotte’s.
No, Charlotte Adams was one of the few that had actually been picked up by scouts.
It had been during the year that people had been complaining that the Games were starting to get dull – that the same contestants kept winning the games and all new blood got quickly disposed of. The people thought that the game was rigged, that perhaps Stender had some investments in a few of the players. There was a lot of malcontent in those days, and that worried everyone. Because of the Game could not please the people, what could?
They denied everything of course, but the management of the Game did try to make the whole contest more interesting. They had myriads of ways in which they could fuel feuds, add drama, play with the human psyche so the contest would become more bloody, more violent. And another of those actions they took was that they started scouting for participants, instead of letting the participants come to them.
Charlotte was a child of the streets, as so many were these days. She had grown up stealing and whoring and fighting and running for her life. As a survivor, she had quickly found which people were winners, and which ones were losers. She befriended the winners: even as young as age twelve she had gotten herself involved with criminals that run illegal betting stations concerning the Game – the kind where people would lose all their money in. She did her job, rigged the betting stakes like any other and nobody ever inquired about her age. She was pretty enough to catch the eye of an influential drug dealer and professional betting station saboteur Jonn Simmons, and from there on it had gone downhill. Before she knew it she was involved in gunfights pretty much every other week. Jonn taught her to shoot, but he also spent time with her, giving her attention, expensive presents, everything. For the first time in her life Charlotte walked around knowing she was pretty and taken care for. It made the rest seem irrelevant. This was just her life – any blood she would draw was… not real. Not interesting. She numbed out quickly. The first time she’d shot someone she had hyperventilated when she’d realized what she’d done, but she’d found soon enough that anyone else’s pain was not her problem. She would shoot to save herself, and Jonn. And once Jonn had taught her the basics, she found that she was a damn good shot. Nobody could touch her when she had a gun in her hands. She saved her own and Jonn’s ass a hundred times before someone managed to shoot Jonn in the head in one of those gunfights a few years later.
He bled to death within seconds, without even a chance to say goodbye.
It was then that something within Charlotte simply snapped. A seventeen year old girl, cradling a ten year older man in her arms, screaming while sitting in his blood. They were going /down/, she swore. They did. In a hail of bullets and gore and glory, they went down. She was just one girl with six bullets against five men with machine guns – and she didn’t even have to use the last bullet.
Tears were streaming down her face, her vision narrowed to her target, and with the bullets went all her hatred, all of her pain. Everything around her was crystal clear. She didn’t even breathe between shots. She just pulled the trigger, and moved, and pulled the trigger again, and again. Blood sprayed, men fell. Every shot was true. Every shot killed instantly. It did nothing to diminish her hatred and her irrational anger, but it felt good to let blood flow.
The next day she had been contacted by scouts.
She had thought one moment of Jonn’s business, now in tattered remains with him gone.
She had thought of the people who would be after her now – and one tantalizing moment she considered going after them, too.
And then they had told her about the glory and the kills she would make, and she had accepted.
That burning drive to hurt someone made everything else seem irrelevant.
Oh sure, in the beginning she’d been in the training centers, monitored by millions of viewers at home and the people from the assessment centers. In the beginning there were few opportunities to quench her blood thirst. They had watched her progress, her skill with her guns. They gave her a flak cannon, and with the yellow weapon in her hands she did even better. Decoy after decoy splattered under her cannon, and she relished the feeling.
She did well in the polls, as well – of course she did. People loved to see a chick kick ass and take names. Relatively speaking women would win as often as men did, if they were to compete against one another, but absolutely speaking females were rather rare in the game. The ones that /were/ in there, were the most vicious bitches out there.
Charlotte had found that quickly enough when some chick tried to kill her in the shower at some point, but she’d fought for her life often enough to slip out of the girl’s grasp and slam her with her head against the tiles. The camera’s hungrily drank in the images of Charlotte sitting down in the pool of blood as it washed away through the drain, laughing.
She got through the assessment with ease, which didn’t surprise anyone. And then she entered the prelims. The prelims were fun. They were easy. It was all adrenaline and laughter and sometimes she would be bleeding, but then at the end there would always be the regeneration station with its golden energy to take care of that. The blood trails she left sometimes only added to the adrenaline and the intensity of the experience. She lived for the chase, she lived for the blood thirst. It made her laugh. She would laugh during the contests, sometimes hysterically.
People called it unnerving sometimes, and one guy shouted hysterically at her to stop it, or he’d rip her vocal cords out. In the end she’d shot him in the leg and he’d been screaming so loud that nobody could hear her laughing.
The good thing about winning the preliminaries was that it got you places. Parties, for example. At one such a party she’d met hotshot participant Donald Wellington, and she’d fallen hard for him. For the first time since Jonn there had been someone who made her heart beat a bit faster. Their affair was wild, torrid, completely dysfunctional, but they had been unable to stop falling in bed together. And who was she to complain? After a match they would be insane with blood fever and they would then call the other to get rid of all that excess adrenaline.
The assessments had told her that such a thing was rather normal for Game participants – it was one of top five release methods. Charlotte didn’t give a damn about that. If she needed release, she could call Donny. And he was the only one who understood, the only one who kept up with her.
As time went on however, as he kept winning, the edge went off him. What had made him so raw and dangerous in the beginning was fading. She could see it happen, could hear it in their exchanges. He didn’t hurt her so much anymore and didn’t understand that this was exactly what she wanted and how she wanted him. He didn’t call her anymore.
She eventually failed in the semi-finals. It was a close call; she had been knocked unconscious within arm’s reach of the regen point and in the end it had been someone else who was declared worthy of entering the Fortress. Jean Polanski was his name. It was small consolation that he was the one who eventually won the Tournament that year. “Sorry Charlotte,” Berntsson had told her, “better luck next time.”
She’d grit her teeth and had done so, upping her training schedule another notch. Donny didn’t call to commiserate, and neither did he return her voicemails. In the beginning she told herself that it was because he was so busy training for yet another tournament, but as time wore on and as the elimination rounds for the Christmas tournament started and he had still been silent, she knew it for a certainty. It didn’t come as all that much of a surprise when she was lounging around in a massage hall idly scrolling through some magazine webcasts that the paparazzi had spotted him with some dark-haired chick.
“Asshole,” she murmured at Donny, and then glared at the picture of the girl on the screen. She looked younger, and feeble, and naïve. She didn’t look intense at all. What would she want with Donny? What would he want with her? “Bitch,” she told the girl, and then rolled over to receive her massage.
She didn’t dwell on it for too long. Training and competing dominated her life. She had enough male attention at parties, but it was all meaningless. It didn’t give her the release that she craved, so the Game became even more intense for her. She maimed people, if she was given half the chance, in the arena of the prelims. Just to hear their cries, just to see the blood splatter. The regenerations usually patched them up completely again, but knowing she’d inflicted pain made her feel alive. It made her feel in control of the smoking ruins of her life. And most of all, it made the fire of revenge burn less fiercely.
She met Donny’s girlfriend when he won the Euroleague. The party was wild and rowdy, as these parties usually were, and the girl he’d brought with him looked decidedly out of place. She also looked vaguely familiar, and then remembered she’d seen her in the assessment center. A psychologist. Donny had his arm around the dark-haired girl in a possessive manner, and there was a world of tenderness in his eyes when he looked at the girl in a way he had never looked at Charlotte.
“Myrian,” Donny said with whiskey on his tongue, “I’d like you to meet Charlotte Adams. I’ve told you about her, I believe. Charlotte… this is Myrian Seltzer, my girlfriend.”
The girl looked a bit uncomfortable when she took in Charlotte. Was there recognition? Probably not. She looked impressed, though. Charlotte wondered idly what Donny had told his new girl about her. “Oh,” she said sweetly. “So you’re the girl Donny dumped me for?”
It went all a bit downhill after that. Charlotte was battling waves of irrational hatred and hissed at the girl that Donny had been /hers/ and that she’d get the girl for this. She didn’t know how yet, but she just wanted that naïve and weak girl to bleed, to know what pain was. She wanted her to burn. There was the urge to hurt the girl, stronger than she usually felt. The girl countered her threats with some form of dignity though, after which Charlotte had stalked away, seething.
It came as a complete surprise when she ran into the girl a few months later, during the signups for the elimination rounds of the Euroleague. It was early morning, she had been sporting a nasty hangover from the night before. Her high heels hitting the floor were resonating as loud as thunderclaps, and she was feeling like crap. Still, clearance papers had to be filled in and picked up, so she entered the familiar lobby and found a familiar figure standing in the middle of it, hunched over a bag, obviously stowing in clearance papers. It was the last person she’d expected to be there, and in her confusion she blinked a few times before she could say anything. Myrian Seltzer. Who would have thought?
The girl looked up and a flash of irritation passed on her face. “Charlotte.”
She finally retrieved her voice. “You? What the /hell/ are you doing here?”
“Picking up my clearance papers,” was the Seltzer girl’s flat answer.
“Why?”
“Because I’ve been cleared for participation?”
“Sure, whatever.” Charlotte rolled her eyes and walked past, having a hard time believing what the girl just told her. Myrian Seltzer, psychologist… was entering the Arena? Yeah, right! From what she’d heard of the girl, Seltzer was a vegetarian and an animal lover, the kind of person that cried if you looked at an animal maliciously. And /she/ would be entering a human slaughterhouse? She wouldn’t last a minute. “As if you would participate. You don’t have the guts.”
Seltzer shrugged. “Then don’t believe me.” She paused for a moment. “When will you be participating?”
Charlotte looked over her shoulder at the other girl, while typing in the codes that would give her entrance to the information module. She pushed a lock of hair out of her face and grinned as insolently as she could. “I’m in the C Poule, entering the Fortress at 12 December, as far as I know. Why? Want to see how it’s done?”
“I just wanted to know whether I’d be up against you,” she said. “I guess we’ll meet up later down the line, then.”
Charlotte laughed. “It’ll be my pleasure to reduce you to a smear of blood on the wall.”
“Likewise,” the girl sneered, finished packing her bag, and stalked out.
Charlotte was left alone to punch in codes and fill in forms, wondering about what would be in store now. The option of being able to riddle Donny’s doe-eyed girlfriend full of holes was one that filled her with glee, but she wondered if the girl would even get that far. There were quite a few preliminaries, rounds to fight themselves through. Seltzer would be a beginner, whereas she had quite a bit of arena- and even Fortress- experience under her belt. And of course, Charlotte knew how to go for the kill. She didn’t think that the psychologist did.
The fact that Seltzer actually did pretty damn well in the arena made her angry. She watched the first game with interest, liquor and popcorn at hand, waiting in anticipation to see the girl be obliterated. She knew a few of the game participants of that prelim. Especially Jamie Gaulle was a good one, she’d make minced meat out of Seltzer. The battle was intense, and she noticed that she got drawn into the match whether she wanted to or not. Seltzer fought well for a newbie, and that filled her with irrational jealousy. She didn’t want Seltzer to succeed. She didn’t want Seltzer to be better than her. She absolutely refused to, so she fought harder, more intensely. Where people had called her a force to reckon before, they called her a fucking menace now. And that was good. The blood tasted sweeter now. The adrenaline had more of her to wash away, the thrill had more to conquer inside of her. She drew blood more often than most of them, but she had problems winning.
Still, she was one of the rising stars in the rookie league. She had everything she should wish for – enough money to live from, hot guys surrounding her, thrills aplenty… yet it was never enough. She wanted to hurt, she wanted to bleed. The frustration was killing her.
She won her match, deftly progressing to the next round, but to her chagrin Seltzer did that as well. And to add insult to injury, Seltzer also managed to do it without a single scratch on her body. The stats flashed on her screen accusingly. She quickly opened up her own statistics and found that Seltzer was indeed doing better than she was. “Goddammit!” Charlotte screamed, kicking over her liquor bottle, uncaring that it was ruining her expensive carpet. She stomped around in the livingroom, unable to channel her frustration and her anger, not wanting to destroy her own belongings. Yet she needed to destroy something, she needed to bleed… so she solved her situation by taking a pod to the town where she was born, with her guns at hand, and picked a fight. She had been taking stims and enhancers that night, so it all passed in a blur. Later she would not be able to recall what exactly she’d done, but the morning glory found her with crusted blood on her knuckles and nose, and she knew enough.
It took the edge off her helpless anger, yet her determination only intensified. It paid off. The match would later be called legendary, and she would be called ‘Euroleague material’, amongst other nice terms like talented, gorgeous, and deadly. She was completely in the zone that day. Her reflexes were lightning quick, and she easily managed to pump one of her competitors full of hail before he could. “First blood!” Berntsson announced cheerfully, and it very nearly startled her – she had forgotten that she’d just entered the match, that the game had only just begun. She’d gotten up in this haze of bloodlust in the morning and already it felt like she’d been there forever. She drew second and third blood as well, and her voice became ragged, her laughter irregular. There was just so much blood and adrenaline out here. She was nigh burning with it.
In the end, there were two of them standing. Tei Yun and herself. Tei was a nice guy, when she’d met him outside the arena. Kind of hot too, despite the fact that she wasn’t really attracted to Asian men. He was pretty good with that rifle and he managed to nick her in the foot. The smell of flesh burning hit her at the same time that the excruciating pain did, but all she could do was laugh. She whirled around, crossed the distance between herself and the regen point, and climbed on the platform, Tei Yun hot on her heels. She hit the button, blurted out her name so the computer could start the scan and the procedure, stumbling, nearly falling over… and then looked straight into the face of the Asian man, as he raised his rocket launcher to shoot her straight off the platform. And it was the easiest thing to raise her gun and do that to him. She was just so much faster. Her movements felt like slow, nearly lazy to her, but when she saw the footage later all she could see was this lightning-quick blur. Tei Yun never had a chance.
She never heard Berntsson declare her the winner, because her ears were filled with the yellow energy of the regeneration point.
The media was all over her, the moment she exited the arena. She was still woozy with the regeneration, but she managed to appear happy and self-confident. Before the camera’s, she boasted of her skills, and how she would dominate each and every game until the Euroleague – and there victory would come as well. Her confidence was broadcasted into millions of livingrooms, but all she could think of was Donny and Myrian in one of those livingrooms.
/Take that, Seltzer,/ she thought, smiling at the camera’s. /Who is the golden girl, now?/
Not very surprisingly, the game managers didn’t put the two of them together in the semi finals. They claimed it was all an impartial draw, but it was a public secret that it wasn’t, of course. Both Charlotte and Myrian were supposed to live through the semi finals and face off in a dramatic fashion in the finals. And nobody protested, because in the end in their heart of hearts everybody wanted to see what would happen in the final. So did Charlotte. She fought her way through the semi-final with an iron determination that would be applauded later. It got her severely wounded in the shoulder and neck, though. Not a flawless victory, she thought, looking in the mirror at the scars that the regeneration point had not been able to fix because there was just too many skintissue missing. Not flawless, but bloody good enough. Her semi final had been the harder one; Myrian only had to face Jamie Gaulle as a worthy competitor, the rest were lucky upshots. Charlotte’s match had been filled with high-potentials, and she’d had to fight hard to make sure she’d get herself through.
Her fingers trailed over the bloated, senseless dead skin that made up the large scar in her neck. It started at her collarbone and made its way up to her ear. Rebounding flak. The shot had been right next to her head. She’d managed to whirl out of the way just in time for it to kill her instantly. The shot had technically missed her by a hand’s width, but the rebound from the flak hitting the wall had injured her severely. So now she’d be scarred forever.
Good thing that she’d managed to take out the bastard who did it to her, as well as that she had prize money enough to cover plastic surgery. It wouldn’t be exactly the same, but she’d be able to fix most of the mess. Now all that remained was Seltzer. And oh, was she wishing to take that girl out! She burned with desire to wipe the floor with her. It was obvious now that she was the better one of the two. Seltzer had performed above expectations, but part of it had been pure luck – easy competitors, the luck in the game – and Seltzer’s luck had to run out sometime. Sometime soon, Charlotte vowed. She’d make her own luck.
The night before the final she didn’t sleep at all. Her stims took long to take effect so she’d taken them early. Effect of this was that she was wired up all night long. Frustrated, she called one of her fuckbuddies to have a good time with him, but while it took the edge off her energy enough to sit still once in a while, it didn’t do much else. She was frustrated and jittery by 3 am, and ready to scrape herself off the walls by dawn. While the stims enhanced concentration and endurance, they also enhanced moods. During a match it was great to indulge in that bloodlust, but when she was cooped up in camera-guarded rooms in the Compound, that was perhaps not the best thing. She sat on her bed, rocking herself back and forth, trying to ignore the camera and the jitters. Before her mind’s eye she kept seeing Donny and Myrian together. She kept killing the both of them, too. In her head, she was killing a lot of people. The men who’d murdered Jonn, destroyed her life. She killed the scouts that had enlisted her in the game. But most of all, her fellow competitors. Last year’s Fortress winner, Jean Polanski. The one that had shot her down so close to the regen point, only to step over her unconscious body to claim the win. He’d be participating this year too, that son of a bitch. Charlotte spent the night wondering which one of them she’d like to kill first: Seltzer or Polanski. The urge to destroy was consuming her.
The hours crawled by, until the moment came to gear up. She dressed simply, a padded vest and camo jeans that gave her enough space to move comfortably in. That had to be enough. She clicked her creditcounter on her belt, stocked up on ammo, checked her flak cannon, tied her chestnut hair out of her face… and that was it, then. Her preparations were much like last time she’d entered the Fortress. This time however… this time it would be different. There were some damned skilled participants this time, and she would rather die than lose again. She’d never forget the way the world /lurched/ as she fell over. The last thing she saw was a yellow glow, and Polanski’s face, smirking down on her. And then it all went black and she woke up while a team of medics was working on her. She had been pretty heavily wounded, enough to give Polanski the win. The Fortress was all about the last one /standing/ after all, and Polanski had been standing… as she hadn’t.
Finally it was time for the announcements and the draw. She watched the stats fly over her screen. Seltzer and Polanski – they were tipped as winners, and so was she. The media was all excited about what they thought would be the best Fortress showdown so far… which was something they thought every year. Charlotte rolled her eyes at that and just cut through the crap, fishing whatever information she had not gathered yet from between the lines. Polanski was still cheered by the media. He had built himself a fanbase that was quite impressive, but his stats weren’t as good as they were last year. Less kills to his name, one win was pure luck. He had fumbled completely by unning out of ammo – he had just hid and waited for the rest to kill each other before he took out the winner with his last two bullets. He had been much more on the ball last year, Charlotte thought, thinking of how dangerous he’d been. The media thought the same for a large part, but the fanservice demanded that they spend a lot of time loving him as well. Fans meant income, and income made the Corporation what it was today. The stats said more, though. Seltzer was improving herself, the stats showed. She was also tipped for her cleverness in stress situations, and her superior reflexes. Alright, Charlotte could deal with speed and creativity. Depending on stats alone Seltzer should be able to take out Polanski and Charlotte both, but what she didn’t have was experience. The Fortress was so much more of a madhouse than the arena’s ever were. There was so much more insanity, so much more frantic bloodshed. She wondered if the psychologist was able to deal with that. Both Charlotte and Polanski had been immersed in the Fortress’ violent atmosphere before, so the media thought that they definitely stood a chance.
Charlotte’s hands clenched around her flak cannon. So much for forecasts. So much for Seltzer’s reflexes and Polanski’s dumb luck. She would make her own luck, dammit.
And perhaps she was lucky. She was the sixth to enter the Fortress, thirty minutes into the Game. Polanski was right behind her, but Myrian had a bad draw, she was eleventh. It took Charlotte a long time to run into Myrian. First she had her showdown with Polanski, a mere hour after she’d entered the Fortress. She’d been in a less crowded part, and had avoided most of the battles so far, until he happened to enter the room that she’d been checking out. She had been slow; allowing Polanski to get dangerously close with that rocket launcher of his. She jumped and rolled behind cover just in time, while the rest of the room seemed to go down in flames.
“Nearly got you again, Adams!” Polanski shouted. “How about a rerun of last year, love?”
Charlotte sat with her back against the low wall that covered her, refilling her ammo. Laughter bubbled on her lips. “I thought about turning the tables this time. You know, me obliterating you, winning, that kind of stuff.”
Now he sounded as if he had found cover as well, his voice came from a different direction. “I didn’t get to fuck you last year, though. Thought about it back then, when you were lying unconscious, but the win was somewhat more important. Perhaps now I’ll do your corpse. What do you think about that?”
She turned around, still laughing. “You’re a sick fuck, Polanski. I think the world is a better place without you.”
“I think I like you better when you don’t think,” he retorted, before once again the room erupted in a eardrum-piercing explosion.
Charlotte’s wall shuddered against impact, but held firmly, thank god. And now she knew where his voice was coming from: it was the right corner of the room, near the window. She raced through her memory of the room and remembered an alcove there. That was where he had to be. The sounds were just right, and so was the angle of his rockets, by the way. She shifted position somewhat and readied herself to shoot. “I think we agree on that one, Polanski,” she said sweetly, still laughing.
She only rose a little bit, enough to get him into shooting range. It was a half-second, in the midst of smoke, rubble, and falling debris. She saw him crystal clear and had him on her crosslines. She pulled the trigger and dove back behind cover again as the world exploded around her. Another rocket, crossing the distance quicker than Polanski could go down. It impacted on the wall behind Charlotte and she had to cover herself against falling chunks and pieces of the room. When she rose, Polanski was lying in a pool of blood and taking a few last shuddering breaths, blood frothing on his lips. His throat was hardly recognizable as such anymore; the tender flesh had been ripped apart by her flak bullets. Charlotte looked down on his lifeless body and laughed delightedly. “Fuck you too, Jean,” she said, kicking against the limp form.
“The bodies are piling up, ladies and gentlemen,” Stender’s familiar voice resounded from the speakers. He was announcing this game himself, leaving the prelims to Berntsson. The Fortress was /his/ game. “Jean Polanski has just left us.” He chuckled. “I’m glad you find it amusing, Charlotte.”
Charlotte turned towards the camera’s and shot a brilliant smile, winking at the viewers at home. “You know me, I’m just easily amused.”
Stender’s voice lowered a bit now, becoming more teasing. “Would it amuse you to know that Myrian Seltzer is good for two kills by now already, then?”
“No.”
“Thought so,” Stender said. He sounded pleased with himself. “By all means, go tell her!”
This meant war. Charlotte gripped her cannon tighter and began her search. She moved methodically from room to room, searching out the places were confrontations were happening. She would wait them out and kill the winner, was the plan. It only worked twice, however.
She managed to get three kills on her name when she found herself in one of the top rooms, surprising Myrian in a similar manner as Polanski had surprised her, only three hours ago by that point. It was the beginning of the fourth hour in the Game. Charlotte’s skin was crusted with a mixture of dust, sweat and blood. Not all of it was her own. She was scratched in a myriad places (why did she have to run into not one, but /two/ rocket launcher bearing participants this game? Never mind the bloody flak monkey), but all her wounds were minor. She was shuddering with adrenaline overload, forgetting to breathe evenly. The stims were putting her on an edge she’d never achieved before. She was walking around in a world of hyper-awareness. Colours were brighter, scents were more penetrating. Every scratch on her body she felt. It was exhilarating. She was laughing the whole time, unable to stop. This was her best game ever.
And here was Myrian Seltzer. Donny’s new girl.
“Seltzer!” she shouted, as the dark-haired girl turned around and her eyes widened in surprise. “Die!” she added, her finger pulling the trigger. She braced herself against the recoil, but it felt as if everything moved in slow motion. She saw the bullets ricochet through the air that seperated them. Those few handfuls of feet between them. Seltzer tried to get out of the way, but she’d been finishing off someone, herself. She’d been distracted, and thus she was too late.
Seltzer went down in a rain of blood.
Bullets buried themselves in her back, in her spine, puncturing tissue and organs that shouldn’t be punctured. It was a mighty blow, and Donny’s girlfriend fell under the weight of it.
It was all over in the blink of an eye. Seltzer slammed against the ground, her gun spiraled out of her reach, and the nearest regen point might as well be on the moon for how far away it was. There was no way Seltzer could reach it with a shattered spine. She had only minutes to live – even an idiot could see it.
Charlotte laughed, and she heard gunfire in the hallway, so she left. She indulged in a firefight, which was exhilarating enough, but the two people she was involved with took each other out, so there was no game left for her.
Then the announcement came. “Three participants left. Hiro Tagisaki, Charlotte Adams, and the heavily wounded Myrian Seltzer,” Stender reported. “Charlotte, dear, I thought you’d work harder to finish the job.”
Her heart froze in her chest. “I will,” she promised, and sprinted down the hallway. Later, she could not remember how she found her way back in that room again. But suddenly she was standing amidst glass shards and smears of blood on the floor, and she was looking at the Seltzer girl, who had somehow managed to get herself to the balcony and was balancing on top of it, precariously. Creativity in emergency situations, the stats had not been lying. If she wouldn’t detest the girl so much, she might even start to admire her.
/Is she trying to kill herself?/ Charlotte wondered idly. There was nothing under that balcony, just the river. /Or is she trying to escape me for the hell of it?/
As if in a dream she cocked her flak cannon at the other girl. “Dammit,” she said. “Will you just die already?” She pulled the trigger once again.
Myrian heard her, noticed her. And this time, the girl was faster than Charlotte’s bullets. She pushed herself off the balcony and disappeared from view.
Charlotte ran over to check, but all she heard was a loud splash, indicating that Seltzer had met with the water surface of the river. That was also when she noticed that on the shore of that same river was a regeneration point. Myrian had been gambling the life-threathening drop in hopes she’d land on the regen point. Instead, she’d aimed wrongly and ended up in the water, probably because Charlotte had distracted her.
Tagisaki was on the other side of the building, she’d been told earlier, so she had time enough to check that Seltzer didn’t come up anymore. Charlotte’s hands clenched around the blood-stained railing as she waited, but eventually Stender had a report to make. He must have seen the flatline on his screens. “Myrian Seltzer has pushed herself into her own death, graciously caused by Charlotte Adams. Charlotte, Hiro, it’s up to you two now. Good luck.”
Charlotte lingered on the balcony for a few moments, intently watching the river below. Was it over now? Had she done it? Myrian Seltzer had been proven to be the loser Charlotte wanted her to be. Still, even though Stender claimed that it was Charlotte’s kill and she would be credited with it financially, she didn’t feel like it was. The girl had pushed herself to her death, her luck had run out as she’d missed her aimed goal. That was it. If she had been more lucky as she’d been during the rest of the tournament, then she would have lived, and they would have gotten to duke things out after all.
She trailed her fingers over the bloodied railing, lost in thoughts. She felt cheated, somehow. Cheated out of her triumph, cheated out of her kill. Moments passed while she stared at the river, until she suddenly realized that Stender was watching her, that the world was watching her, drinking in the images of her staring at the water, wondering what the hell she was doing-
What the hell was she doing? Tagasaki could be very well building an ambush while she stood here, musing! “Goddammit,” Charlotte growled. She took up her cannon and left the balcony, running through the hallways, listening for sounds of her adversary.
Tagasaki was a lucky guy. He came out of nowhere, out of the war-bombed areas in eastern Asia. He’d signed up this year, worked his way decently through the preliminaries. Nobody had tipped him as a winner, he was an average player. Still, stranger things had happened in the Fortress. People were unpredictable, and over the years the viewers at home had seen stories of bloodlust and rivalry, but also of suicide and self-sacrifice. Millions of viewers had watched May Lesters die because she was trying to save her dying rival’s life, for example. It was just one of the dozens of examples of erratic human behaviour in the circumstances of extreme duress. It was why the Game was so popular, after all. Surprise winners were not a strange thing.
Charlotte intended to be a predicted winner. She stalked through hallways with practiced quiet steps, listening and looking for any indication of a Tagasaki ambush anywhere. Her breath was ragged, her boost of adrenaline and stim-induced rage was wearing off. She was beginning to tire; it was time to end it.
It still took her the better part of two hours to locate him. She found Tagasaki near the entrance, cowering behind a corner where he could overlook a makeshift courtyard. Why he thought she’d approach from there was beyond her. He was standing there, expensive ion painter in hand, looking around the corner intently, waiting for her.
Pitiful. He never even heard her approach.
She shot a glance at the camera’s and the livingrooms watching her and rolled her eyes to indicate his ineptitude. And then she simply shot him.
Tagasaki’s body jerked and twitched on the impact of the bullets, before the ion painter dropped from his lifeless hands and he sagged to the floor.
“Well, that’s a fucking anti-climax,” Charlotte muttered, as she watched Tagasaki exhale for the last time. The Asian boy went still.
“Winner of the annual Fortress Game of 2304, with a respectable amount of five kills, Charlotte Adams!” Stender announced. “Congratulations, girl. Will we see you in the Euroleague next year?”
She smiled only faintly. “Probably,” was all she could say. Suddenly she couldn’t laugh anymore, now that it was over. She was so bloody, utterly tired. She sat down on the ground and pulled up her knees, resting her head on them. “Are you guys going to pick me up soon?” she asked. She closed her eyes, breathing the scent of human waste that permeated the whole Fortress. She wondered absently how /old/ that smell was – feces and blood and sweat and fear, no matter how often they cleaned it, they’d always be able to smell it. It would never go away. Unlike battlefields that got overgrown by weeds, the Fortress was infused with a new dose every year again and again.
This was how they found her, sitting quietly in that hallway, only a handful of feet away from Tagasaki’s lifeless body, contemplating the Fortress and her own bloodlust, her own burning desire to add to that smell.
There was a party that night, one that was hosted by her sponsors. She was supposed to celebrate her victory, after she’d slept, taken a new dose of stimulators and cleaned herself up. Trying to ignore a fatigue that seemed bone-deep, Charlotte stood under the scalding hot water of the shower and wondered why she didn’t feel like celebrating. Both Polanski and Seltzer were dead. Why wasn’t she happier? Why did she feel so empty? Was it because now she had lost her goal? Was it because Seltzer had technically died of her own accord? What the hell was wrong with her?
Annoyed with herself, Charlotte dressed herself in the slinky little golden dress that she’d picked out so much earlier. Golden to celebrate her victory, she’d thought then. She regarded herself in the mirror while she applied her make-up and thought it was baggy around her. She didn’t fill out that dress as when she’d bought it. When had she lost so much weight?
She still knew her way with make-up, though. Soon enough her skin was glowing with artificial health, and her hair was styled in lazy ringlets. Some eye-makeup finished it off. She shot herself a practiced smile in the mirror and decided it would have to make do. If she’d keep things to herself, no one would have to know that she was not in the mood for partying.
The party, however, was surprisingly nice. There were nice people everywhere, and everybody was giving her attention. Despite herself, she managed to forget the disappointment over Seltzer’s end, and basked in the glow of her victory. This was nearly as splendid as Donny’s victory party had been, she thought at some point, and laughed at that. There were all kinds of spiked amber-coloured drinks that tasted deliciously. In combination with the stims and the mood-enhancers she’d taken, it created the most delightful buzz in her head.
She was immersed in a sea of faces, and all of them were smiling. All of them were loving her, congratulating her. /I could get used to this,/ she thought, intoxicated on the feeling of victory. She had never felt this good before, never mind if she was drugged up to feel like this. She wanted it to last forever.
Suddenly there was also this guy; a League participant. He was a sniper, quiet and tall and attractive. There was an edge of danger to him, so Charlotte instantly took a liking to him. “You were like magic out there,” he whispered in her ear. His breath tickled her neck. “I fell a bit in love with you tonight.”
From there on, it was the most logical thing in the world that she kissed him, that he buried his hands in her hair and pulled her tightly against him. This late on the evening everybody was minding their own business. Some camera’s flashed, but Charlotte didn’t care about that. They just took off to the toilets, fully intending on some wild sex right there and then. She was worked up beyond relief all of a sudden. All of the tension needed to get out, and he was here and available and delicious.
They fell through the bathroom doors, kissing and groping, against the tiled wall, in the unromantic white light of the bathroom.
Post battle fever, that had been a while. The last time she’d been able to release with another League participant was…
Charlotte opened her eyes and stared into the barrel of a gun. “Donny,” she whispered to the last person she’d expected to see here.
Her sniper lover abruptly let go of her and nodded at the Euroleague champion before he exited the room. He didn’t even look back at her, wiping his mouth from their contact. The door closed shut behind him with a horribly final sound. She was alone with Donny Wellington in the bathroom.
Donny looked… messed up. Anxious. Smoldering. Yet still that wasn’t the most important thing about him, he also had an expertly aimed gun at her face. “You killed my girlfriend.”
Charlotte tried to back against the wall, throwing up her hands in surrender. Her eyes flicked through the room, frantically looking for a way out, yet there was none. Donny had her pinned, and he seemed completely lost. Angrier than she’d ever seen him, more dangerous than he’d ever been. “It was the Fortress,” she breathed, “kill or be killed. You /know/ that. It’s the way it goes.”
“I was going to propose to her, goddammit,” Donny said. His voice sounded strong and unwavering and completely, utterly insane. His dark eyes were unfocused and wet with unshed tears. He was living by the grace of his determination to do this, his will to confront her. That much was obvious. “We would have /married/. And you took her from me.”
“Donny, I…”
“No,” Donny Wellington said, ticking the safety off his gun. He looked completely reckless, completely uncaring about the consequences.
He looked ready to /kill/. “Prepare to die.”
