The shard struck the tile with a small, sharp sound. A bright little punctuation mark. The kind that tells you something irreversible has just finished happening.
Nyx looked up at him. The blood on her face had already started drying at the edges, darkening from red toward rust along her hairline, streaking down her jaw, tangling itself in the loose strands of platinum hair that never seemed to stay where gravity suggested they should.
The man lay open at her feet, chrome arms thrown wide like someone who had dramatically surrendered to gravity. From the ruined gap at his neck, the pool kept spreading across the cracked terracotta, finding the grooves in the tile.
She tilted her head slightly, studying him.
"Are you hurt?"
Proxy opened his mouth. Then closed it again. A rare event. I mention it because it happens so infrequently that it deserves clarification.
She stepped over the man's arm. One of the chrome ones. She treated it the way someone might step over a garden hose left in the yard.
Then she came to him and reached up with both hands to check his face, turning his head gently from side to side with the focus of someone conducting a careful inspection rather than a panicked check.
"Hey-"
"You have a cut." She had already located the graze on his jaw. Probably from the landing roll. Her thumb traced the edge of it like she was verifying the mark. "Is that from the fall?"
"I rolled," he said. "There's a difference."
"It's bleeding."
"There is considerably more blood on you than on me," he said. "I feel like that should be the current priority."
She glanced down at herself, apparently remembering her own body existed. The front of her jacket had gone dark with blood. Her collar, her forearm, and a wide splatter across her left side that had already soaked through the fabric.
She made a small, cutesy sound of mild displeasure and began rubbing at her sleeve with her thumb. This accomplished almost nothing. She then tugged a loose strip from the parachute rig and tried using that instead. The result was marginally better.
Three feet behind her left heel, the body remained where bodies tend to remain once they stop participating.
Proxy watched her for a moment.
He had known Nyx long enough to construct a personality card about her. She was small. She was warm. She made terrible coffee and never acknowledged the fact. She was devoted to him in a way he had treated as comfortable and therefore left largely unexamined, mostly out of laziness.
What he had never known, until roughly thirty seconds ago, was that she was capable of dismantling a man twice her size with a shard of broken glass in under half a minute without visible hesitation.
He was thinking back what he knew.
"You're staring," she said, squirming in embarrassment.
"Thinking."
"About what?"
"You," he said, "and a fairly significant lack of my understanding of you."
She looked up. Her cheeks a crimson red below the already tinge of blood.
"Y-You want to know more about me? Maybe talk over it in a date?"
"That is not what I said."
"Gosh... I'm not r-ready yet."
He considered a weak protest. Then decided the expected return on that wasn't worth the effort.
The speakers came alive before he could form another thought. The sound came from somewhere above them, woven into the resort's structure through a PA system built into the bones of the place. The voice that emerged belonged to a woman who sounded like she had never once cared about another human being.
Eliminations confirmed.
Contestant Volk — terminated.
Contestant Slab — terminated.
Contestant Reel — terminated.
Thirty-three competitors remain. The event continues.
Then silence returned.
Proxy didn't move.
Three eliminated already, and the drop had happened minutes ago. One of them had been theirs. Which meant two others had already finished each other somewhere else on this island before the announcement even reached this courtyard.
And the broadcast wasn't for them.
Contestants don't need narration. Only audiences do.
He looked up at the resort facade. Broken windows. Balconies strangled by vines. Somewhere in this building, or circling above them on a drone he hadn't yet spotted, was a camera.
Someone was watching this courtyard right now. Watching him stand beside Nyx while she wiped blood off her forearm with parachute nylon. Somewhere, someone had probably placed a number on how long he lasted.
"Hey," Nyx said.
He looked at her.
"You have the face."
"What face."
"The one where you figured something out and it's bad." She had stopped cleaning. She was studying him with an almost obsessive glint in her eyes. The softness remained, but now it had direction. Like light passing through a lens. "What."
"We're on camera," he said. "Probably several. This is a death game. Some sick corporation organized it for entertainment. And they are watching right now through drones or systems or both." He paused. "We're the entertainment."
Nyx turned slowly and scanned the courtyard, the way someone does when they've been told something invisible is present and they're trying to see it anyway. Then she looked back at him.
"Can the drones see up my skirt?"
Proxy stared at her.
"What," she said. "It's a normal thing to wonder."
"There are other thirty-one contestants on this island trying to survive," he said. "We are the competitors between them and that outcome. And your concern is your skirt."
"I have several concerns," she said with a pout. "That's one of them." She watched him for a moment. "Are you okay?"
"I'm thinking."
"Okay." She stepped closer. Half a step. Her solution to most situations. Her hand found the sleeve of his jacket and stayed there. "We'll work it out."
He let that moment exist for a moment. Then asked the question that had been bothering him.
"How did you do it."
"Hm?"
"The man had gorilla arms, Nyx. Full chrome. Oversized from the elbow down. Which means the rest of his frame had reinforcement to carry the load. And you cut through his tendons with a piece of window."
She made a thoughtful little sound and tilted her head to the side. Which, for the record, was not an answer.
"Nyx."
"Well," she said.
"Well."
"I might have some little things," she said carefully, "that maybe I didn't mention before."
"Implants."
"Little secrets." She looked at him with very wide, very calm eyes that clearly had no intention of explaining further.
He looked at the body. Then back at her.
Whatever she had hidden had just prevented him from becoming a mush of meat on broken tile. Demanding a detailed explanation right now had an extremely poor risk-reward profile.
"Fine," he said.
She smiled and resumed looking around.
Proxy closed his eyes. Not out of fatigue, but because reaching inward required less distraction that way. His neural interface stretched outward, probing the invisible layers of signal around them. This time it met no resistance. The heliplane had carried the jamming field away when it headed north.
His cyberdeck connected cleanly. The familiar current threaded through his nervous system like a second set of eyes opening after a long forced sleep.
The resort network was old. Running on whatever residual power the island infrastructure still pushed through its circuits out of habit rather than intention. Most systems were silent. Dead.
But not all.
Nodes still lingered. Access points broadcasting weak signals because no one had ever bothered to shut them down. Security systems maintaining ghost routines. Locked storage systems blinking in the background, waiting for instructions that would never arrive from whoever installed them.
He moved through the network slowly. The building began to resolve around him as a map of signals and dead channels.
"Hey," he said, eyes still closed. His voice came out flat. The tone of someone announcing a conclusion rather than proposing a theory. "We should move together. Stay paired. Two people is harder to eliminate than one."
"Yes," Nyx said immediately, with the sort of urgency that suggested this had always been the obvious answer and possibly the best idea she'd heard all year.
Then he spotted something in the east wing.
A cache.
The kind installed before an event begins.
He couldn't read the contents through the lock. But the node was intact. And untouched.
He opened his eyes.
"There's something inside," he said.