The explosion rolled across the arena in a wall of violet fire and pressurised black smoke. In the stands, Aemon and Tanaka grabbed the railing with both hands.
The shockwave rattled the announcer's booth. He caught himself on the microphone stand and looked at the clearing smoke with something between awe and professional obligation. "These Nyika fighters pack a serious punch!" The crowd split — half outrage at the destruction, half pure noise at the scale of it. Medical teams moved into the haze.
"Alright, settle down!" The announcer waved both hands at the stands. "The judges have reviewed the final moments. Here are your finalists!"
The holographic board lit up. Hawk. Lilly. Dez. Bee.
In the dirt, Moto pushed himself up on shaking arms. His ears rang. He already knew. The buzzer had sounded and the M had been on the other side of it.
"And lastly — and this is a first for a non-native competitor—"
He paused.
"—Moto!"
Moto stared at the board. M-O-T-O, glowing green in the final slot.
Hawk landed in front of him, wings folding, looking annoyed in the specific way of someone who has done something they didn't plan to. "Don't get excited," she said. "You got lucky."
From the tunnel mouth, Snake emerged with his hands in his pockets. He looked down at Moto with the flat indifference of someone who has already thought something through and stopped thinking about it. "See you in the finals, kid."
Moto blinked. He pieced it together — during the explosion, while Hangaika was stunned and the M was loose, Snake had sent a tattoo to signal Hawk, who'd swooped in and slapped the letter on the board before the buzzer.
He looked at Snake. "Thank you. But why are you calling me kid? We're the same age."
Snake turned and walked away. Hawk followed. No explanation offered.
The team poured onto the field. Aemon pulled Moto upright while Tanaka ran her hands over his arms checking for burns. "You absolute idiot," she said, relieved. "You nearly blew yourself up."
Moto grinned through the soot. "I made it though."
The finals were four days out. The group split into its natural rhythm.
Moto and Aemon trained with Lilly and Will every morning, the sessions getting longer and harder. Moto's defensive style was solidifying into something that felt less like a choice and more like a natural language — he let attacks come in and answered them from the other side of them. Aemon was learning to move without narrating every decision to Grillet first.
Meanwhile, Najo and Tanaka worked the problem of getting into Flora. Every approach met the same wall. They failed methodically and thoroughly.
They ended up on a park bench in the afternoon with a bag of roasted nuts and Tanaka's notebook open between them.
"If we can't go over the wall," she said, sketching lines, "maybe we go under. The sewage system predates the district separation."
Najo watched her work. She catalogued variables the way some people breathe — automatically, constantly, the analysis running underneath everything else. "You're terrifyingly smart," he said.
Tanaka smiled without looking up. "Coming from you, that means something."
She looked at him then. "You know, you've spent half this break talking about how strong Moto is getting."
"I need him to keep improving so there's a point in beating him," Najo said. "That's not a bromance."
"Sure."
"It's not."
"Mm-hm." She closed her notebook. "Sure."
Night in Sango. The bioluminescence outside was doing what it always did — the mushroom lamps pulsing blue-white, the vines lit from within, the city breathing in slow light.
Inside Snake's room, the atmosphere was different.
He sat in the corner where his instruments used to be, the space still carrying the shape of them. He hummed a low bassline. The snake tattoos on his arms moved in time, hiss-tsst, hiss-tsst — a trap beat built from living ink, sharp and rhythmic, filling the silence.
At the table, Blake sat with two friends. Wanted posters spread across the surface. Their own faces, printed and distributed.
"One of the guys from the West side died last night," Rocco said. His hands were shaking. "That means tomorrow there'll only be two of us left on the list."
Jax leaned back, feet up, wearing the specific calm of someone who has decided their own survival is inevitable. "He hasn't killed me yet. Probably saving me for last, since I'm the one who actually landed the punch." He looked at Blake and Rocco. "You were both there. Don't act like your hands are clean."
Blake's hand hit the table. "Don't speak about the boy like that, Jax. He died. That's on all of us."
Jax scoffed.
In the corner, the beat stopped.
Snake opened his eyes. He looked at Jax with the particular stillness of someone deciding not to do something they could easily do. He hated them. He hated that Blake was sitting at this table with idiots who had dragged him into a murder investigation, and he hated that he needed them alive for now, because Jeffery would keep working through the list until he reached his brother's name.
"We should stay together," Rocco stammered. "If the killer comes here we can—"
"Staying together just makes it easier to bury you all in one grave," Snake said.
Jax turned on him. "Who asked you?"
Snake looked at him for a long, level moment. Then he stood up and called for his brother. "We're late."
Blake hesitated, looking at Jax. Snake waited by the door, and didn't look at Jax again.