Page 52 of Winterveil

Giselle suddenly felt very warm, in spite of the cold.

“Does any of this make sense to you?” Nadiya asked. “How I was able to visit you here? In your dream?”

“I think it’s starting to,” Giselle replied. Then she hesitated. She felt somehow reticent to share what Professor Blanchard had told her, and what they had done the previous day. She was even more reticent to tell Nadiya how it made her feel. Powerful. She had never felt anything close to it before.

Nadiya inched forward again, and now she stood at the very brink of the lake, her position precarious. “What do you think would happen if I went in?”

“Don’t go in. I couldn’t follow you. I can’t swim.”

Nadiya frowned. “Really?”

“I’ve never waded past my knees. Sutton was always so sore about it. He kept wanting to have these romantic skinny-dipping dates. . . .”

Immediately, Nadiya’s nose wrinkled. “I can’t believe you were ever with him.” There was an edge to her voice.

“Me either.” Giselle felt even warmer. In a teasing tone, she added, “But at least he wanted to hang out with me in the light of day.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t want to be seen with me, in the real world. I get it. You have a reputation to maintain. . . .”

“That’s not true,” Nadiya said. She was silent a moment. Then: “There’s an exhibition this Friday, at the amphitheater. Dr. Iver wants us to demonstrate our skills, and show off the new line of weapons we got from Auric. You should come.”

Giselle’s heart pulsed. “So I’ll finally get to see you in your element?”

“It will be more impressive than roughing up Sutton, at least.”

“Okay.” Her heart leaped again. “I’ll be there.”

And then, just like it had before, the dream shuddered away.

Twenty

Spring 2037

Rural Virginia

Now that Thymos was under Dr. Iver’s purview it was, like all things within Valeran’s walls, precise. The tournament began at exactly midnight.

The first phase was entirely virtual. Over the course of two days, the participating students would play up to forty Wi-Fi battles, where they would be randomly paired off by the algorithm. A loss would cause one’s rating to fall; a win would elevate it. The four players who had the highest rating—the best win-loss ratio—would proceed to the next phase of the tournament, which was in person. A semifinal round and then the finals. The winner would be crowned on the fourth afternoon of May.

Julian had spent days poring over Mikhail’s handbook, running calculations. He would half construct a team and then abandon it when he realized he couldn’t beat Klaudia. Hours of false starts and furious surrenders, pacing around his dorm room in agitation.

He pulled multiple all-nighters with Jane and Mikhail, the three of them practicing their matchups. Mikhail, having designed the game himself, had unrivaled insight, and Jane was so creative in her thinking that it inspired Julian to look toward the unconventional. Sometimes the downright heretical.

“I think I’m done with Cervelet,” Jane said one night, slumping over in her seat. “It’s just not working.”

“It doesn’t fit on your team,” Julian agreed. Cervelet was an elegant-looking deer that wore a rainbow diadem, one of the many pieces that reflected Mikhail’s inventive and detail-oriented game making. “It’s too fixed. There’s really only one thing it’s there for, damage, and if it gets knocked out then your strategy falls apart.”

“You’re right.” Jane tapped a note onto her tablet. “I can afford to sacrifice power for flexibility—don’t you think?”

Julian nodded. “I’ll run it with you again, once you’ve replaced Cervelet.”

Jane gave him a weary smile. “Thanks.”

Cervelet and similarly overpowered pieces didn’t fit on Julian’s team, either. He was currently piloting a balance team, somewhere in between the slow and bulky teams that aimed to whittle their opponents down and the fast-paced, hyperoffensive teams that tried to overwhelm their opponents with damage. But his matchup into Klaudia’s team remained abysmal. He found himself baited, over and over again, into the Ghostly Trap.

Three days before the tournament, as he emerged almost sleepily from a haze of testing and team building, Julian arrived at their usual table early, before Jane and Mikhail. Distracted running calculations, he hadn’t noticed Klaudia approaching.