Shadows

And I can tell you why
People go insane
I can show you how
You could do the same
I can tell you why
The end will never come

Audioslave, “Shadow on the Sun”

The top of the Fortress is a windy place, even on a warm spring afternoon like this one. All the way up here, the spring breeze is surprisingly chilly. It tickles my neck and cuts through my vest and jeans. At first it had felt pleasant after the dankness of the poorly ventilated building- if anything, the breeze had not smelled of blood and feces and sweat, and that had been exactly what I'd needed to clear my head. Even when you're responsible for some of those horrid smells, they do kind of get to you after the better part of six hours.

It's been easier than I thought. There was another announcement just ten minutes ago, telling me that we're down to three contestants. Sheva, Juanez, and me. It shouldn't have surprised me that Juanez would have held out this long. He's a bloody menace with that ripper of his. Old-fashioned weapon or not, he knows exactly how to use that thing to its fullest advantage and he knows no remorse whatsoever. I've seen footage of him a million times. He's one of the winners that keeps returning to the arena; one of /those/ winners.

They say that once you've tasted the blood in the Fortress, that you'll lose something that makes you human, something that makes you... normal. I didn't understand that earlier; not until I'd been followed around by camera drones for the past month, not after the horrors that I'd witnessed in the Fortress. And especially not after I've felt so /alive/. Adrenaline is so fucking addictive. Fighting for your life, spilling other people's lifeblood to keep them from spilling yours... it's like an addiction, indeed.

Juanez is addicted. I'm not sure that I am- but if I indeed survive this, if this thrill will last longer than today, I might be too. So it's no wonder Juanez has survived so far. He's a fucking veteran, he's a menace, and he must have the better amount of kills made today on his name.

As for me, two out of twenty kills are mine.

/Not bad for a newbie,/ Stender commented cheerily.

My first kill had been part luck, part thanks to my quick reflexes. Two hours into the Game, I'd rounded a corner and had completely unexpected looked straight into the face of Eventine, right into the barrel of her rocket launcher. She had been as surprised as I was, but I had been just a tenth of a second faster to pull the trigger of my shock rifle. I hit the rocket launcher. The weapon had exploded in her hands, blowing parts of Eventine up as well. The shock of the explosion threw me on the ground like a ragdoll. Her blood was hot on my skin. I'd never even exchanged more than two words with the girl with the short ash-blond hair, and now I had ended her life.

Shivering with adrenaline and after-shock, I'd crawled into a hiding place to calm down while I heard the sound of gunfire and explosions in the distance. I'd looked at my bloody hands and found that bits and shrapnels of her exploding weapon had hit me in the face and my neck and I was bleeding profusely. I don't think that a major artery had been hit, but I was bleeding too heavily for comfort. I'd created a makeshift bandage of my t-shirt and had gone to see if I could use one of my credits to patch myself up at a regen point.

My second kill was exactly at that location. It had been a close call. Of course it had been. Of all the people in the Fortress, I'd had the rotten luck to run into three-times-champion, hero of the Northern Alliance, Steiner Elmontz. As it turned out, Steiner just had a run in with his rival Juanez and had come out of it rather banged up, but alive. He had been on his way to the regeneration point and so had I; the cellar we'd ended up in had been too small for the both of us.

It was a good thing the cellar featured many places to use for cover. The firefight that we ended up in lasted for a good ten minutes before I finally got Steiner where I wanted him and managed to take him out of the fight. I'd finished him off by standing over him and using three well-placed bullets in the head, throat and chest to make sure he would be surely and completely dead.

By that time, I needed regeneration /badly/. I was seeing swirling stars and darkness on the edges of my vision and I had a hard time concentrating because the bloodloss was becoming a serious problem. By that time the shirt that I had wrapped around my neck had become completely soaked with blood and to make matters worse, Steiner had managed to nick me in the upper leg while I was making my way over to him to finish him off.

The feeling of regeneration had been described by the media and former participants as 'unsettling', but I nearly creamed my pants in that beam of yellow light.

For the rest of the duration of the Game, I'd kept myself mostly hidden, figuring that I could finish off whoever was left.

And now there are two. Juanez... and Sheva.

Standing with my back against the wall on the roof of the Fortress, I find my first target.

Sheva de Leaz Lagina; of Portugese descent, twenty-five years old, wields a flak cannon. I don't know all that much about her. She's a first time participant like I am, a skinny girl that looks younger than her years with long dark hair and luminous dark eyes that look haunted. When I saw her for the first time I'd wanted to know what her story was, but she had evaded me as deftly as she'd evaded the media. Nobody really knows all that much about her, I guess. Her best asset is her evasion skills obviously.

Stender never tells the contestants directly who's exactly responsible for the killing that takes place, but he indicates a lot. And I never even remotely heard him say anything that was about Sheva. Until Stender called out our three names, I'd even forgotten that she's in the Game at all.

That would have been a stupid action normally, but perhaps there isn't all that much to fear from Sheva.

Because in the silver glaring afternoon sunlight, she's sitting on the edge of the roof with her back turned to me. Her feet are dangling in the air; there's nothing between her and the sky. Her flak cannon lies next to her, glinting innocently yellow in the light. There is no blood on her clothes, nothing in her hair. Nothing that even remotely indicates that she's been anywhere but here since the games started. She looks serene, relaxed.

I don't get it.

“I know that you're here, Peter,” her soft voice suddenly sounds. She doesn't turn to me, she doesn't reach for her weapon. She just sits there, outlined brightly by the blue sky behind her. Her curly dark hair shows golden highlights in the sunlight.

Perhaps two seconds have passed since I exited the stair house and entered the roof. Those where two seconds that I was disoriented by the chilly breeze and the blinding silver sunlight. Precious seconds in which she could have turned and taken me out without relatively few problems.

“Why don't you shoot me, then?” I hear myself ask. My hands clench around my rifle and I aim for her unprotected back, but I don't shoot. Not yet, not yet. I need to know.

I can hear her smile. “Why would I?”

“Isn't that what you're here for?”

She shrugs and tilts her face upwards, towards the warm spring sun. “I didn't come here to kill.”

Sheva de Leaz Lagina, grown up in Faro, ex-prostitute and pickpocket, recovering speed addict. What else do I know about her? I've seen her stats. She's said to be good with the flak cannon, has passed all the preliminary tests without many problems. There's nothing to indicate she isn't here for the kill or the money or the fame and glory. Just another participant of the Games; assumed to pay debts off with blood. Or perhaps to drown her inner demons in the blood of other participants. Who knows? Everyone has their own reasons to enter the Game.

It has to be a trick of some sort, but I can't for the life of me imagine what she's trying to accomplish here. I refocus my aim upon her again, ready to riddle her back with plasma, ready to shoot her off the roof. “Then what?” I challenge her.

She stands up slowly and turns to me, still not picking up her weapon.

My mind is racing over the possibilities while I try to make sense of her actions. /Is she in league with Juanez? Stender's been awfully quiet since the announcements, perhaps they are leading me into some kind of trap?/

But then the sunlight glints on her face. There are tears in her eyes, there is wetness on her face. She's been crying. Is crying still. “I came here to kill and lost my taste for it. I thought I needed to kill but I don't.”

I click the safety off my rifle. /Just to make sure,/ I tell myself.

“I've been sitting here the whole match, trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with me. I was so angry after my daughter died, I thought I needed blood to get rid of that anger.”

Ah yes, that's correct. I remember now. Sheva's seven year old daughter, born of one of her former clients, had been raped and beaten to death in the shit hole that used to be Faro's airport in the old world. It had turned into a bad place after the Great War, and Sheva had lived in the area with her little girl. What the hell she'd been doing out there no one would ever know. But her girl had disappeared one day, and Sheva'd found the girl three days later. She had only been able to identify the girl by the dog tags the kid had been wearing before she was taken. No wonder she signed up for blood.

“That makes sense,” I say, trying to keep her talking. In the meantime, I diligently scan the environment, seeing if I can spot Juanez somewhere behind one of the other stairhouses. Is he here? Is he taking advantage of the situation? “Blood pays for blood, sometimes.”

Sheva shakes her head. “I found that I didn't come here to kill.” Despite her tears, she doesn't even look all that distraught. She looks like someone who is... resigning. Or accepting, if you will.

“Then what did you come here for, Sheva? Don't waste my time, Juanez is still out here.”

Stenders voice suddenly resounds from one of the loudspeakers nearby. It comes so suddenly that I nearly pull the trigger in reflex. “Don't let the thought of Juanez ruin your little tea-party, people. He's still five floors below you two.” He sounds thoughtful, not nearly as dripping with biting wit and amusement as he normally is.

“What did you come here for?” I insist.

Her dark eyes fix upon my gaze and captivates me effortlessy. For a moment, the whole world narrows down to the two of us on the roof. Nothing exists anymore save for her and me and what she has to say. And she smiles a little, crazily enough. “I came here to die,” she says. “I guess I just didn't want to die alone. I wanted people to be there with me, to watch me as I died.”

Aw, shit. Millions of living rooms have tuned in to this confrontation. I understand what she's getting at, but I remember the empty look on Steiners face as I finished him off. I remember the glint of shock and fear in Eventine's light coloured eyes the moment she knew she was going to die- the moment my finger found the trigger and hers faltered. One nano-second of pure intensity. It was a moment I shared with them, but not in the way Sheva thought it was.

“You're wrong there, Sheva,” I tell her quietly. “Everybody dies alone. Your daughter died alone, and so will you.”

She makes a shadow against the bright sunlight. “At least we'll be together again, then.”

“Maybe.”

My finger finds the trigger again and for a moment, the blue light of the plasma outshines the sun in my eyes, casting everything in shadows for a split second. The blueness hits her and her eyes meet mine for the tiniest of moments and there's shock in her eyes as there was in Eventines, before she falls backwards off the building. She hits the grounds seconds later with a soft thud.

“Sheva de Leaz Lagina, died from a fall off the roof after a meeting with Peter Delmont's shock rifle,” Stender announces. He sounds subdued. “Peter, Juanez, it's down to you two now. We're entering the final stage of the game.”

I walk over to the edge of the roof and look at Sheva's lifeless body all those stories below.

“Everybody dies alone,” I tell her quietly. “But I would have done the same.”

One. Two. Three heartbeats I give her.

Then I turn around. Time to find Juanez.
Time to get back into the shadows.

Time to end this.

(december 2006)