And I don’t mind learning to fight and survive in this place. I’d be a fool to think I won’t be here for the long haul and not take advantages when they’re handed to me.

Crixus points to me. “You, come with me.” He leaves through the archway.

The anger coiling in my chest makes me want to stay behind in defiance and run after him to throttle him, despite knowing I’d lose that fight. Some echo of logic manages to speak up from the shadows of my mind. Crixus is the only way to get a weapon in my hand and answers about this dreamscape. And I’m not used to such wild emotions. I need to defeat those before I can hope to defeat anything else in this place. I take several deep breaths, then shove away from the table and stomp after him.

I find him in the weapons room.

“We don’t get a lot of Angers,” he says. “Maybe one or two a month. Helene was our last. But Angers tend to do better in the Games. The Fears are boring to watch and even worse with their weapons.”

“Lucky me,” I drawl.

“You need to tamper your anger, otherwise it will keep building until it consumes you.”

“What’s wrong with being consumed by it?” That sounds powerful. I could take Crixus down and get out of this place. The very consideration builds the emotion even higher. I want to feed it.

“I’ll kill you before you get that far.” He doesn’t look up as he says this.

“Go ahead and try.” This Tenebra that Crixus worships took Nole’s life. Anyone who accepts it as their new world is an enemy.

Crixus tosses me a short knife with a smoking black blade. “I was an Anger when I first got here. I kept it under control through fighting—not because hitting and defeating people released it, but because it exhausted my body, so I was too tired to feed the anger.”

“What body?” I grumble. “You’re a figment of your own imagination.”

“Then explain how I get full when I eat, hungry when I don’t, and die if I’m stabbed.”

An opening. “Can you explain it?”

He eyes me. For a moment I think he might answer my question, but then he says, “Opening fight starts in three minutes. Keep heading down that hallway, through the two gates, and you’ll be in the Arena.”

“I don’t get to train first?”

“For you, this is training.”

Even through the haze of building anger I know my limits. “I’m not going to kill people.”

“Someday you will. Someday you’ll have to. It’s inevitable if you want to get out of the Arena.” He examines a hefty, knotted net hanging on the wall before straightening a javelin beside it. “Right now you’re nothing more than a tadpole in the pond of noxior fighting. You won’t be killing or even fighting other noxiors today. It’ll be nothing more than a couple nightbeasts.”

“Like the flying stingray yesterday?”

“You’re thinking way too big for your first fight.”

I start piecing it together. If this were a video game, the stingray might be an entry level boss. I’ll mainly be fighting NPC enemies. I can handle that. It’s like what I’d hoped to create as a Draftsman—an adventure world with enemies that allowed dreamers to fight and go on adventures without true danger to themselves.

I toss the smoking knife from hand to hand. “What’s with the smoke?”

“A mistblade will kill only nightbeasts—creatures created in Tenebra.”

“Created? By who? Do you know the Draftsman who made this place?” The words feel like sludge on my tongue, almost like speaking a different language, and for a moment I’m unsure if I even used the right term. Draftsman is a word, right? It means something. I know it means something.

“Just focus on the fight, Cain.”

I gesture to the blades along the wall that don’t smoke. “And those? They’re not smoking. What are they for?”

“You seem smart. Figure it out.”

Real blades for real people. “Got it.”

I brush past him with my mistblade and jog up the wide hallway toward the enormous half-moon barred gates at the end. Two men stand beside them and with a single glance open them to let me through into a holding place between two barred areas. Like a large elevator with gates on both sides instead of doors. Through the opposite gate stretches a swath of lit sand.

Sun.

It’s enough to make me want to run into the awaiting battle. But the longer I look at it, the less sunlike it seems. Not quite golden enough.

I press my face against the bars and squint at the sky. No sun, but spirals of yellow flame line the top of the Arena walls behind the last row of spectators. That’s the source of light.

“Does the sun ever rise here?” I ask one of the soldiers.

He merely looks at me. Probably not allowed to speak to noxiors.

“What’s with all the fire?” I’ve gathered by now it isn’t destroying the coliseum. No one inside acts as though their city is burning down.

Still, he doesn’t answer. I turn back to what I can see of the Arena. It’s grander than a football stadium. Almost double in circumference. It would take a lot of effort simply to cross the sand to the other side, let alone chase some opponent until I could catch and defeat them.

If this world can trick my body into thinking it’s eating calories, maybe I can learn to trick my body into being stronger than it is Above.

The stands are filled to the brim. The crowd lets out a loud cheer, and I scan the sand to see what they’re cheering for, but there’s nothing there. Then the noise dies down, and a voice echoes from a projection. No speakers, no microphone. The crowd goes dead silent.

I press against the bars, trying to see the source of the voice, but can see only a few heads above the sand turned the same direction, toward a spot on the Arena wall outside of my view.

“Welcome to another day of Games, citizens!” It’s a man’s voice. Young. He leaves a pause for cheering, but none comes. To my surprise he laughs. “Shall I get right to it then?”

Now there’s a cheer, but it’s short lived. They’re waiting for something. He’s here to say something important. “I’m pleased to say we have rescued three children from the Spores! One, sadly, had already been infected, but the other two were saved in time. I’ll be sharing the first surname now and the second at the end of the Games.”

The crowd explodes—some cheering, but also desperate chattering. Two forms walk to the center of the Arena. A small boy, escorted by a Roman soldier. Someone from the crowd screams. But a mass of voices hushes them.

Silence.

The announcing voice speaks again. “You know how this works. If the name I call is yours, and you know this child, come out to the sand and claim him with his name.” A pause, then a shout from the speaker. “Surname Whitlock!”

The crowd cheers again, though there’s a tinge of disappointment in it. Two people are trying to bulldoze their way past other spectators. Those around them laugh and give them a clap on the back. They disappear from sight for a few minutes, but then reappear on the sand, sprinting toward the child. A young mother and father.

The boy lurches toward them, but the Roman soldier’s hand holds him back.

The mother screams again and again, “Tory! Tory! His name is Tory!”

The crowd laughs again. A white handkerchief flutters to the sand from wherever the announcer stands out of sight. The mother picks it up and holds it like a lifeline. Everyone cheers. The mother, father, and child embrace.

Of all the things I expected to see in the Nightmare, this was not it. A reunion that puts a lump in my throat. A family brought back together on the same sand on which I’m about to fight for my life.