Valt missed the wall for the ninth time in a row, and I stopped counting out loud after the fourth because it wasn't helping.
The Bey Club room was too small for the Winged Launch. He knew that. He was doing it anyway. Every afternoon since the semifinal he launched Valtryek off the practice stadium wall, and every attempt came off flat and died in the pile of gym mats he'd stacked in the corner. Then he picked it up and reset without a word. No crowd in here. No phones. Just him and the angle, and the right angle wasn't there yet.
"Number ten," Rantaro said from the beanbag, not looking up from his homework. "The mats are winning ten to nothing."
"The mats are TRAINING EQUIPMENT, they can't win."
"Then why do they keep catching your Bey, huh?"
Shu sat across the table from me with the finals bracket sheet between us. Neither of us had touched it in five minutes. We both knew what the conversation was, and neither of us wanted to open it.
"I want Lui."
"I know you do."
"He beat me in last year's final, Ryo. In front of the whole country. I've spent a year building toward the rematch, and I just fought the best battle of my life, and I'm telling you I've never been more ready than I am right now." He said it level, no heat in it. "Give me one good reason it should be you instead."
"You've had my reason since the district final," I said. "I've spent this entire tournament on the bench starving him. Every battle I didn't fight is information he doesn't have. If you take him, all of that was for nothing, and you walk into that stadium against someone who watched your Xander match on a screen somewhere and took it apart frame by frame. He knows your everything, Shu. He knows my nothing."
"And when he bursts you with all that nothing? Then it's battle three with no insurance."
"Then it's battle three with you in it."
"Guys," Valt started, coming over with Valtryek still in his hand, "maybe we should just..."
The door opened.
Nobody had knocked. Nobody had heard footsteps. The door just opened, and Lui Shirosagi walked into our club room.
White hair. Sharp eyes. Hands in his pockets, Longinus somewhere on him. He looked at the trophies and the posters and the stacked gym mats, and moved on. Rantaro's pencil stopped. Wakiya was already on his feet.
Lui's eyes went across every one of them without stopping. They landed on me, and stayed.
Then he raised one hand and pointed.
"I want you. In the final. Across from me. Nobody else." His voice was flat and certain. "Set your lineup however you want, but I'm the second one to come up. So, Ryo. I only want to see you coming up in the second match. Anyone else, and I'm leaving." His eyes slid sideways and found Shu. The corner of his mouth moved a millimeter. "So, Shu. You're not up yet."
The silence lasted half a second.
"AHAHAHA!"
The laugh came out of him sudden and loud and cold. It bounced off our club room walls and stopped as fast as it started.
"You can't just walk in here and..." Wakiya started.
"I just did." Lui didn't look at him. He was still looking at me, and I gave him nothing back. "You've been hiding since the festival," he said. "Smart. Boring, but smart. It won't matter."
"Then you have nothing to worry about," I said.
"Worry," he repeated. "I watched your district final on a screen in a hotel lobby. I've watched it again since. Whatever that was, I want it fresh, and I want it in a full stadium, and I want it at its absolute best, because anything less is a waste of my time." He turned for the door, stopped, and looked back once. Not at me. At Valt, standing there with Valtryek in his hand and the gym mats behind him.
"Nine misses," Lui said. "I was outside for six of them."
Then he was gone. The door clicked shut, and for a few seconds nobody said anything.
"I hate him," Wakiya announced. "Deeply. Enormously. With planning."
"He watched me train," Valt said quietly. He was looking at the mats. "He stood outside and watched me miss."
"He watches everything," Shu said. His voice was very even. He picked up the bracket sheet, looked at it, and set it back down in front of me. "So. That settles the lineup question."
"Shu..."
"He's right, Ryo. That's the worst part. You're the one thing in this tournament he can't prepare for. It has to be you. I just wanted it to be me so badly I was willing to argue against our best chance of winning, and it took HIM walking in here to make me hear it." He breathed out through his nose. "I'm not done with him. But it's not my turn. He said so himself."
"Your turn comes," I said. "Individuals. And when it does, he's going to regret announcing the schedule."
Rantaro dug out his lollipop bag, looked inside, and passed it around the whole room without a word. This time even Shu took one on the first offer.
Valt was still standing at the practice stadium. He looked at the wall, and at the mats. Then he put Valtryek back on the launcher.
"Number ten," he said, to nobody in particular. "He can watch this one too if he wants."
He missed. But it came off the wall higher than all nine before it, and this time, when he went to pick it up, he was grinning.
---
That night I couldn't sleep, and I didn't really try.
Drago sat on my nightstand where it always sits. Somewhere past midnight, the gold lines in the layer started to glow.
I put my hand over the layer, and the room folded away.
The space was the same as always. Dark and wide, no real floor, and Drago filling most of it. Gold and black, coiled loose, head down at my level, eyes glowing warm in all that dark.
"He was at the club, pointing at me for his match," I said. "So we are finally getting our long-awaited match with another left-spin Bey."
"I felt it on him." Drago's voice filled the space the same way its body did, deep and old and completely unhurried. "Longinus. It was awake in his pocket the whole time he stood in that room. It knows we are here, the same way I know it is there."
"Then you also know what I know." I sat down. "Against him there is no trick. There's just you, and me, and everything we have. And here's the strange part: since the mountain, we've never needed everything. Not once. Nobody has pushed us that far. We don't hold anything back anymore, and we still don't know where the end of us is, because no one has ever made us look."
"Good," Drago said.
"Good?"
"I have waited a long time for someone worth all of it." It lowered its head until one gold eye was level with both of mine. "I am not a clever thing, Ryo. I am a burning thing. And he is the first one who has come to find out how hot."
"And if it's not enough?" In that place you can't hide how a question really sounds, so it came out smaller than I meant it. "That's the part I keep circling. I'm not scared of Lui. I'm scared of finding out where our ceiling is, because nobody has ever made us look for it. He will."
Drago was quiet for a moment. When it spoke again, the voice came from closer, and warmer.
"I have burned for a very long time," it said. "I have never met one. Only people who stopped climbing." The great head pressed forward against my hand, and heat came through my palm. "Do not stop, and we will never learn the word."
"Everything we have, then," I said. "For the first time because someone earned it."
"Everything," Drago agreed, and it sounded pleased about it, the way a fire sounds pleased when you open a window.
When I opened my eyes, the ceiling of my room was back, ordinary and dark. Drago's glow was fading down on the nightstand, and for the first time since Lui walked through our door, I slept.