Page 3 of The Fake Divination Offense
“Go on now.” He bats my chest. “Git.”
My eyes cast up again as I start to move off the barstool—and I catch the other screen.
That’s my face. My headshot is next to one of the ostentatiously ragey sports reporters who always tries to have the most boisterous opinions on every single move we make during games. The reporter is gesturing wildly, stabbing his finger to make a point, his face red as he shouts, but luckily the TV’s muted.
Are they talking about my trade? My stats? How I was one of the Vegas Chimeras’ best defensive tanks when they won the rawball championship last season? How the Philadelphia Hellhounds got astealwhen they traded for me?
Doubtful. Not by the way the reporter looks one blood pressure spike away from a stroke, and then the symbol for Urzoth, a stone with an axe jammed into it, flashes over my headshot, followed byOrok Monroe: Traitor?
Call me a traitor to the magical community for bringing down Camp Merethyl, and it’s annoying, sure, but anyone who says that can fuck off.
Call me a traitor to Urzoth, and my stomach sinks, all that beer I chugged shaking up at the sudden lurch.
Because they’re right.
Or they will be, at least.
Yeah, I’m definitely not looking at my phone now.
I rip my eyes away from the TV. They land, instead, on Seb, whose forced levity vanishes at the look on my face.
No.
Tonight’s about freedom. About celebrating the end of a four-year-long lawsuit, but it stretches beyond that, all the way back to our childhood. To our days at the magical paramilitary training camp that became the source of all my nightmares.
Literally.
I haven’t slept in months.
I scramble for some of that good feeling again.
The lawsuit ended. The verdict’s in: they’re guilty. Camp Merethyl’s directors owe us restitution for torturing us under the guise of training. The world knows what they did and how wrong it was.
Yeah, the worldknows.
Including people like the Chimeras’ managers and my other teammates. After my testimony came out, theyknewthat someone who belonged to a god made out of stone and handled conflict with his fists was patiently fielding a lawsuit, so how bad could my experience at Camp Merethyl really have been?
If I were a true Urzoth follower, I would’ve fought back when these supposedatrocitieshappened.
If I were a true Urzoth follower, I wouldn’t have gone through with a lawsuit; I would’ve challenged the head of the camp to a fight and let that victory lay out the guilty party.
The pro rawball community seems almost evenly split betweenknowingI was right to stand up against the abuse andknowingI’m a weak coward.
All that buzzing in my skin fatalistically shifts from excitement to anxiety, creep-crawling up my spine and wrapping around my throat.
Seb grabs my forearm. “Hey. We don’t have to be out tonight. We can go back to one of our—”
Saved by the squeal of a microphone.
It wails over the crowded bar and we all flinch—well, not Marlow, who watches us and laughs—before a voice reverberates in the proceeding silence:
“Let’s get this party started! It’s karaoke night, bitches, and you know what that means. No heckling. No booing. Everyone’s welcome. If you have siren lineage, warn usbeforeyour song so the audience can cast disenchantment wards. Now, first up, we have… Alexo the Magnificent! Let’s give it up for Alexo!”
The crowd applauds. But Seb keeps his grip on my arm.
“O,” he says over the din. “We can—”
“I’m gonna go closer to the stage,” I say. We’re still wearing Marlow’s clip-ons, which are a huge help in situations like this; I know Seb can understand me even with the noise.
