Crixus quickly drops and rolls around the Minotaur’s feet, coming up at its back, but the Minotaur spins and punches him in the face. Crack. A broken nose.
Crixus falls to the dirt, but that doesn’t keep him down. He’s back on his feet, wiping blood away from his eyes and lifting his gladius to meet a strike from the Minotaur’s axe.
“I’m not your enemy, Crixus.” Poor timing on my part for such a statement as Crixus takes another hit from the Minotaur. This guy’s like Boromir with two arrows in him. The third is about to strike.
The Minotaur lifts his axe above his head, and while I do believe Crixus might be able to block or dodge or something, I leap between them with my own broadsword and knock the axe out of the Minotaur’s hands.
“Stand down,” I order the creature.
It doesn’t look happy about the command, but it drops its arms and steps aside. Crixus is already back on his feet, responding to my previous statement.
“You want me to trust you, Cain?” He laughs. “One moment you’re saving the Emperor’s father, the next you’re running off to the Spore base.”
“I was trying to save Stranna.”
“Who?”
“Stranna.” I’m thrown by the fact that he doesn’t recognize her name. “Someone I know.” Someone I want to know better. Someone Crixus, if he really were an Adelphoi, should know.
“You claim to want to save Spore children and this person you know, but you left a high-rise filled with dying people.”
“Is that what this is about?” Me ignoring his request to locate other people in the high-rise? “Look, I’m sorry that whoever you care about is stuck in that high-rise, but since you can apparently return to the Real World, you could have saved them yourself.”
“It was me!” Crixus bursts out and swings his gladius. I meet it with a clang from my broadsword. The Minotaur snorts, waiting for permission to join the fight, but Crixus doesn’t attack again.
“I was in the high-rise, fading away in a dead LifeSuPod.”
He’s breathing hard. For the first time I see his emotions flare.
“I’ve been Luc’s man since the beginning of all of this. He set me up in that LifeSuPod, yet when power was cut to the high-rise he didn’t once talk about rescuing me. Instead he offered the one remaining LifeSuPod to you—a stranger. A nobody who happened to have a lot more Sleeps lefts than the rest of us.”
His story explains a lot. Why he wanted me to consider other people in the high-rise. Why he tried to get Luc to change his mind about powering up the high-rise.
I put distance between us. “Why go through all of that when you could wake up and save yourself?”
“It’s not that easy.”
“So everyone keeps telling me,” I say drily. “You have to die first.”
“Yes, but I’d never died here before. I’d only ever heard stories. There’s always the doubt: What if I’m not enough of a Spore?”
He admitted it. He’s a Spore. Except . . . “Don’t you mean Adelphoi?”
He looks at me blankly. “What?”
I relax a little even though I have the sneaking suspicion he’s still going to kill me. “We don’t kill, Cain. We die.” But Crixus doesn’t seem to know Stranna, and he doesn’t recognize the name they call themselves. This doesn’t make sense.
They said the Adelphoi cut power to the high-rise. If Crixus is an Adelphoi, why would he cut power to his own life source? He would have asked the Adelphoi to help move his body before they did that.
“It was clear you weren’t going to help me. I could feel myself dying, so I did what I had to do.” He doesn’t refer to the Adelphoi as a group. He only talks about himself. On his own.
“You’re a Spore, but you’re alone, aren’t you?” I hazard. He doesn’t answer, but the grim press of his mouth gives him away. “So then how did you wake up in the Real World? Who killed you?”
He shrugs and then pats his own gladius.
I feel sick. He did it to himself. Something about that feels more wrong than all the things Stranna has told me.
“You’re lucky it worked,” I mutter.
He nods grimly. “I’ll never do it again. I learned that much.”
“If you’re one of them then why don’t you smell like tar? Or cinnamon? Or whatever?”
“Blood and sweat are enough stench for me. And I’m not one of them.”
So he’s been capitalizing on his gladiator stench to hide it this whole time. Haven’t I always sensed something underneath all that? “Doesn’t sound like you run in the Spore circles.”
“It doesn’t matter what circles I run in, you’re not in them.” He lifts his sword again and the Minotaur gives a throaty laugh, swaying his axe back and forth.
“We going to fight this out?”
He shrugs, and all it takes is a nod from me to send the Minotaur attacking. I’m not sticking around to fight Crixus until his tirones arrive for backup. Or worse, Luc. I can see the boost of energy Crixus has from the new LifeSuPod. He’s only going to get stronger.
I watch the Minotaur leap like a video-game character, wielding his axe high over his head, and bring it crashing down into the ground beside Crixus who dodged at the last second. Crixus counters, and while he’s locked in a battle of strength with the Minotaur, I dart forward and yank the cord of keys around his neck. It pulls him out of the fight and to the dust for a minute, but the cord snaps.
I blitz toward the training grounds, not caring to look back to see if the Minotaur took advantage of Crixus’s downed position.
I have the keys. I know where I’m going.
