Chapter Text
I. Moons
She had only survived long enough to see him arrive because she had rules, and she followed them:
Know who holds the power
Listen to them
Always do what they want
Those rules had served her well in Guangzhou, and they served her even better in the Arena. She had listened carefully, fiercely, until she understood enough of the patwa spoken by the other peb - not children, never children - to work out the rules of the place. She learnt the pecking order, arranging everyone into a kind of mental, unacknowledged hierarchy. She learnt what was wanted of her:
Train hard in the Gymna
Put on a good show
Remain a child
(There was a fourth expectation, linked to the first three, that she refused to voice: Risk your life, and die.)
Making friends was not one of her rules. Friends tied you down, forced you to worry about something other than survival. Friends died.
~
He tumbled into the Gymna, all red hair and angry swearing and defiance, throwing a contemptuous look at Mihret, who was leading some of the younger boys in hand-balancing exercises. He turned back to whisper something and that was when she spotted the other boy, his knobbly-kneed, dark-eyed, nervous-looking shadow.
The other peb flocked over, leaping and gesturing and flapping around, the way they always behaved with newcomers. She stayed where she was, before coolly continuing to climb the rope.
Allan - Allyman, she heard the red-haired boy say, introducing himself, and Ashmaq - gesturing at his companion. She was already high above them.
~
She had not, at that point, given anyone in the Arena her name, and she did not plan to. Hythe called her Birdie, because he had to call her something, and because she flew, and the other peb called her nothing at all, and in any case, in the seven years she had been there - since she was five - they had come and gone in the flap of a pair of wings. (They didn't stop dying until six months later, when Leeward showed up, but that is another story.)
Allyman wouldn't let her namelessness rest.
'What can I call you?' he asked her in the Gymna, a week or so after he arrived.
She raised an eyebrow and then said, 'We need to practice using this new rope trapeze.'
'What can I call you?' he shouted across the room, Ashmaq at his side, as they scoffed down food packets after a training session.
'She doesn't give her name,' explained Sergei, who had been at the Arena for four months and would die less than a month later.
'What can I call you?' he asked, when he encountered her after a performance, adrenaline bands still on her wrists, the UV paint streaked and sweaty on her face, the scent of resin on her hands.
She stared out the window into the night sky.
It had been his first time in the Arena. Although it had not been Hythe's preference, Allyman had been matched with Ashmaq, flying between ropes and trapezes, and at one point tumbling through a giant metal wheel that was suspended in the air.
'What can I call you?' he asked again, his voice cracking slightly as he caught a glimpse of the starry sky.
And she suddenly realised that he had not been asking for her name.
'You can call me what you want,' she said.
'Precious Flower - Presh,' he said.
The twin moons of Vexak floated beneath their feet in the inky sky.