Page 51 of Blightfall

I looked around at the team. Gilaf and Alanik would need a translator pin to communicate, so they were out. That left Arturo, Nedd, and me. Of the three of us, Nedd was the best at putting people at ease, though I didn’t hear him volunteering, and if Arturo wanted to try, he wouldn’t have asked me.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.” I wanted to do it. I just didn’t want to let Arturo down. Hesitating as long as I had was probably already giving him more reason to doubt me. So I took a deep breath and walked down the stairs to the bottom of our section.

“Thanks for the tip,” I said as I approached the girl, waving my dustpan and then bending to sweep up the pile she’d collected. If I was going to try to get information out of her, helping her out wouldn’t hurt.

“No problem,” she said, passing me to continue sweeping the wide strip of floor.

“I’m Sadie,” I said. “Do you live around here?”

“Liba,” the girl said. “Over in the tank district.”

I guessed that was near the giant water tank on the city wall. “Do you work here a lot?”

“After most fights. My mum works at a fiber mill, and I pick up shifts there changing the bobbins, but this pays better. Unless someone’s out sick, then I can run a machine of my own. When that happens, I’ll sometimes miss a fight.”

That made sense, taking work where she could get it. “Do you like the work?” I asked.

Liba shrugged. “It’s work. Keeps food on the table.”

I hadn’t seen signs of great wealth in the city, but not a lot of poverty either. Most of the people looked like they’d had a meal recently, and I hadn’t spotted anyone sleeping on the street. But it was possible we hadn’t passed through the poor parts yet, or that one had to have a certain level of wealth to live here at all.

I looked out at the corpse of the scion. “Do we need to clean out there?”

“No,” Liba said. “They just leave the bodies as obstacles for the next battle. When there get to be too many, the lumberyard workers chop them up and thin them out.”

A gruesome way to treat bodies, even if they were the bodies of trees. But expressing horror about it might break my cover.

“Did you get to see the fight?” I asked.

She nodded. “It was a good one. I’ve never seen Dayan hold on so long. Was this your first tournament?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Seems like it was a good one, what with the End Times and all.”

“I know!” Liba said. “Can you believe it? It feels like the war has been going on forever. Hard to believe we might actually be preparing for the final battle.”

I wanted to ask who the enemy was, but I couldn’t sound like I arrived on the planet mere hours ago. “It’s kind of sad to think the games might be over when I only just saw my first one,” I said. “Does someone always ascend at the end of the fight?”

“Not always,” Liba said. “A lot of times, though. Timon had been working on it forever. It takes a long time to accrue enough points from severed branches.”

“Will he ever be back to fight here again?”

She shook her head. “No, he’s gone to Elysium now. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

I was pretty sure that was a rhetorical question. I was already treading the line of what was too obvious to ask, so I needed to come at it from a different angle. I bent to pick up another of Liba’s dust piles, trying to sound casual. “What do you think it’s like? Elysium?”

“Dangerous,” she said.

Huh. It didn’t seem like a huge honor to ascend to a dangerous place. Then again, it was an honor to be a pilot in the DDF, even though our life expectancies were not high, and this mission was serving as yet another reminder of why. “Do you think Timon will be okay there?”

“Who knows,” she said. “He’ll be fighting to protect humanity, which is noble, but it sounds a lot more deadly than training against scions.”

So they weren’t fighting scions in the war, then. This was finally the opening I needed. “What do you think Timon will be up against out there?”

Liba gave me a weird look. “What do you mean?”

Scud. I thought I’d angled that question carefully enough, but apparently I hadn’t. I didn’t want to stop pressing yet, though. Even if she found me suspicious, it was a far leap to assume I must be a visitor from another planet.

“They aren’t fighting scions, right?” I asked. “Do you think it’ll be different, fighting other enemies?”