I shot a glare in Dante’s direction, but he kept his gaze ahead and ran faster, leaving me in the dust.
For two months, we’d been participating in this little morning run. Four miles, sixteen laps around the track, every day beginning just before the sunrise. My legs ached and my lungs burned, but Dante told me not to fight my body’s responses, that pain meant progress. He was lucky the new exercise regimen kept me too tired to knock him flat on his ass.
Not that I even could.
We’d begun weight training as well. When I’d questioned the purpose of it, I’d been given a wink and a nod and assurance that it would pay off when the Trial came around. It seemed to be well known in the upper echelons that the third Trial hadsomething to do with strength. And Dante, it seemed, wasn’t convinced I had a single muscle in my body that wasn’t in need of some serious honing. He was right.
So beginning on the morning after our second Trial, he’d dragged me to the center of the First Ring where an enormous track rested atop a massive construction they called the Mitte, which housed everything from weight rooms to a gigantic vat of water for a strange activity Dante called swimming.
When I first saw it, I stared at it, mouth agape. I’d never seen so much water all at once. For something considered to be Sanctuary’s most precious resource, the First Ringers seemed to be making poor use of it. Most Deckers didn’t see this much water in their lifetime. They didn’t even have personal showers in their homes. They were required to use the community baths dotted along the residential quarters of the lower levels. And yet here, First Ringers floated around in a pool of it for fun? The injustice made more than just my lungs burn.
Fueled by my newfound rage, I pumped my arms harder to catch him. Dante was fast, deceptively so for someone weighed down by so many bulging muscles. But I could be faster. I was leaner, designed better to cut through the stifling summer air. With practice, I was sure I could beat him on the track.
The weight room, however, was another matter entirely.
I was certain Dante had shown up the first day ready and able to bench pressmeif it came to that. And Olympia, the girl he’d grown up training with, the woman who was always intended to be his partner, wasn’t too far behind.
She’d been in the Mitte the first day we’d arrived and every day since. Sometimes she was training with her partner, a boy from House Lynx by the name of Luca. He was shorter than Dante and lither where Dante was all bulk, but he ran the obstacle course faster than anyone. He seemed nice enough. He always smiled at me and pretended not to notice Olympia’s glares.
It took the full two months to get used to the blessing of heightened senses too. The first few days, I hid away in my apartment, all the lights off and curtains drawn closed to combat the throbbing migraine I got whenever I gazed halfway across the Third Ring or whenever I descended the stairs and faced the onslaught of a dozen different scents, countless muffled voices speaking all at once, or the taste of the very air as it touched my tongue. It was so overwhelming, I’d gotten physically ill once or twice, only to be assaulted by the stench of my own vomit moments later.
Dante was content to let me recover in peace for a time, assuming that either the horrors of the second Trial or the following trauma of Dahlia and Cyrus had affected me more than I’d let on, but either his or his grandfather’s patience ran out three days later, and he showed up at my door. That was when he had explained it, the heightened senses.
It was common knowledge for the pious, apparently, that each success in the Trials brought about what they referred to as a “Blessing”. It was a gift from the gods, a touch of their holy hands which bestowed some unique ability. It was magic. The others would never call it that. They preferred to use their theocratic terminology of Blessings and Gifts. But in the quiet hours of the night, when I was alone in my room—breathing deeply as I rifled through the pages of an illustrated edition of The Right of the Acolyte—when one of Dante‘s cousins began to play the violin from six rooms away, I could not only hear it as clearly as if they were in my room, I could see colors dancing through the air with each note. And I called it what it was.
They promised me that a room in House Viper would remain mine for me to freely use as I saw fit until the end of our Trials. I’d utilized it more than I wished, usually too tired after our intense trainings to make my way all the way back down to the Third Ring and my apartment.
As much as I hated to admit it, House Viper was almost beginning to feel like home, like more than a place to pass out from exhaustion after a hard day. I wasn’t quite sure why that was. Maybe it was simply the amount of time I was spending here or maybe it was something more, something about the connection I had to this place, the link to my partner.
Mother is here.
I nearly tripped at the finish line.
Myrine was, in fact, waiting for us at the end, a stern expression in place as always. She lowered her head to her son as Dante bowed respectfully back. I had no such compulsion, choosing instead to grab a nearby water bottle and chug the whole thing dry.
“Sparring,” Myrine said and walked away.
Dante glanced at me but followed his mother without question, even though she was throwing our entire day out of whack. We had a routine. Wake up, run, return for breakfast, spar in the yard, separate for our studies, lunch, return to the Mitte for weightlifting and other such training, more sparring, dinner, and more studies before bed. This visit from Myrine eliminated any chance of a hard-earned breakfast.
I scowled as I followed them.
Three hours later, I peeled myself up off the ground for the umpteenth time, gritting my teeth against the dull ache in my bones and the sharp pain in all the areas where Dante’s blows had landed. Not to mention the rumbling of my stomach since we’d left the track. Not that anyone noticed.
“Again,” Myrine spat.
Dante took up his stance, expression blank, as I turned to face him, wiping the dirt from my brow with a sweaty arm.
“Maybe we could take a break?” I spat a few drops of blood into the dirt between us.
Myrine raised a brow. Dante’s shoulders slumped only slightly as he glanced toward his mother. She cocked her head to the side and examined me from head to toe, likely for any sign of injury that might explain why I had the audacity to question her command. Obviously, my crimson saliva didn’t suffice as reason enough.
“Do you know why you lose, Adrian?” she asked.
“Because I haven’t trained for this my entire life?” I answered drily.
“Because your fight is derived from your anger. There is no strategy in anger, no cunning in rage. You can’t take the time to examine your opponent, their stance or their range of motion, because if you do, that fury which fuels you will dissipate, and you’ll have lost all chance of winning.”
“Fascinating.”
