Chapter 9
Pit games..
The holding bay smelled like rust and ozone — the particular smell of a portal that had been running too long without maintenance. Lukas sat cuffed on a metal bench bolted to the wall, watching the queue of participants ahead of him shuffle forward, one by one, into the ring of pale blue light.
It didn't look like much. A simple archway, humming faintly, the air inside it rippling like heat over asphalt. Two-armed men stood on either side of it with clipboards, calling names — or numbers, since most of these people didn't have names worth writing down.
'Aren't port-towns supposed to be restricted areas? They have such a complex portal down here and no enforcer has come to bust them. Yeah, there's definitely an enforcer working with them.
"Next."
A thin, shaking man stepped through the ring of light and vanished without a sound. No flash, no drama. One second there, the next not.
'Efficient,' Lukas thought. 'Whoever built this clearly doesn't care about the passengers enjoying the ride.'
He watched four more people disappear the same way before the guards finally reached his row.
"Move," one of them said, jerking his head toward the archway.
Lukas rose, chains clinking, and walked toward the light without complaint. Now that he noticed, he was kind of the only one in chains.
He was three steps from the ring when it happened.
*Zzzzzt—!*
The hum of the portal spiked into a shriek. The blue light guttered, flickered violet, then black, then blue again, the ring of it stuttering like a candle in a wind tunnel. One of the guards stumbled back, cursing, shielding his face from a sudden burst of static that crawled up his arm and made every hair on it stand on end.
"What the hell—"
The light snapped back to something resembling normal. The guards exchanged a look.
"Just a power fluctuation," the one with the clipboard muttered, though he didn't sound convinced. "Happens sometimes. Keep the line moving."
Lukas took another step forward.
*ZZZZT!*
Worse this time. The archway convulsed, its light splitting into jagged veins that crawled across the metal frame like lightning looking for ground. A low, wrong noise came out of it — not mechanical, not quite. Almost like something breathing on the other side.
Both guards backed away fast.
"Hold the line! Hold the line, nobody move!" the clipboard guard barked, though nobody had been planning to.
Lukas glanced down at himself, unbothered, then back up at the shuddering arch.
'Well. That's new.'
————————————————————
They pulled him out of the queue entirely after that — hauled him to a holding cage off to the side while two technicians in grease-stained coveralls argued with each other over a control panel bolted to the wall, alternately smacking it and pointing.
"I'm telling you, it's not the array. The array's fine."
"Then why does it keep doing that every time we send someone through?"
"Not every time. It only spikes on this batch."
One of them turned, slow and reluctant, to look at Lukas through the bars.
"...It only spikes when he's close to it."
Silence.
"That's stupid," the other tech said. "He's just a body. Bodies don't do that to a spatial portal."
"Then you go stand next to it and tell me I'm wrong."
Neither of them moved. Lukas chuckled to himself.
From somewhere beyond the crowd of grumbling, delayed prisoners, a familiar wet, heavy voice cut through the noise, drawing closer with every word.
"What," Baron Bane said, "is the meaning of this delay?"
The technicians straightened so fast one of them nearly dropped his tablet.
"S-Sir. There's an anomaly in the transport array. It's— it seems tied to the new participant." One of them gestured weakly at Lukas's cage.
Baron Bane's small, glassy eyes drifted over to him, and the delighted, hungry look from their first meeting crept back over what passed for his face.
"Mr. Nobody," he said warmly, as if greeting an old friend. "Already causing trouble before you've even reached the island. I do admire consistency."
"I didn't even do anything." Lukas said.
"Fix it," Baron Bane said, not looking away from Lukas, addressing the technicians without turning his head. "I don't care how. I have a broadcast schedule to keep, and half my investors are already seated."
"Sir, if the array is genuinely unstable, sending someone through it could—"
"Could what?" Baron Bane's voice dropped, losing its warmth all at once. "Kill him? Scatter him halfway across a dying rock? He's cargo. Expensive cargo, granted—" he tapped one thick finger against the bars of the cage, close enough that Lukas could smell something faintly rotten on his breath, "—but cargo all the same. If it breaks him a little on the way in, that only makes for better television."
The technicians exchanged a look that said, very clearly, neither of them wanted to be the one to argue further.
"...Yes, sir."
"Hey?! Octopus guy" Lukas called out to the baron. The nearby gaurds and technicians froze.
'Did he just call the Baron an octopus?'
Baron Bane faced Lukas.
"My Watch and Compass. I'll be back for it."
The Baton grinned again. This guy was just too interesting.
"I hope you make it back also, Mr Nobody. Afterall I bet on you."
————————————————————
They marched him back to the queue twenty minutes later, the portal still flickering unevenly behind the archway.
'Alright,' Lukas thought, watching the light spit and stutter in front of him. 'Let's think about this properly for a second, before someone throws me through a malfunctioning hole in space out of impatience.'
'This isn't my portal. I'm not the one making it. So why is it reacting to me at all?'
He turned the thought over, prodding at it the way he might prod a loose tooth.
'Unless the Appellation doesn't care whose portal it is. Unless it just... doesn't like the idea of me going somewhere on purpose. Any purpose. Even someone else's. Tsk, now that's just petty'
"Move up," a guard said, shoving him forward before he could finish the thought properly.
The archway was close enough now that Lukas could feel the static crawling over his skin, raising the fine hairs on his arms. The light inside it churned, blue bleeding into violet, into something with no name at all.
'If I'm right,' Lukas thought, watching it warp, 'this isn't going to be a clean landing.'
"Send him," Baron Bane's voice called from somewhere behind, bored now, already turning to leave. "We're behind schedule."
A hand shoved between Lukas's shoulder blades.
The world came apart at the seams.
Light. Not blue, not violet — white, total, all-consuming, swallowing every sound including his own thoughts. For one long, suspended moment there was no floor beneath his feet, no cuffs on his wrists, no gravity at all — only the sensation of being unravelled and folded back together in the wrong order, over and over, too fast to count.
Then, just as suddenly, weight returned.
*Thud.*
Lukas hit the ground hard, rolling once across something that felt like packed dirt and dry grass, coughing hot, ash-tinged air out of his lungs.
For a moment he just lay there, staring up at an unfamiliar sky — a strange, bruised orange color, streaked with drifting cinders that fell like slow, reversed snow.
Silence. No guards. No queue. No Baron Bane.
Lukas sat up slowly, looking around at an empty stretch of scorched, unfamiliar terrain — no sign of a landing zone, no sign of anyone else at all.
A short, disbelieving laugh escaped him before he could stop it.
"Of course," he said to no one. "Of course it did that."