Page 3 of Accidentally Fearless

I typed. That's amazing Meg! So proud of you!

I did not type anything about how things were with me. I locked my phone and finished closing up.

On the drive home, I passed the billboard for Drexel University's adult education program. It's never too late to start. I'd been passing that billboard for three years. At first I'd felt a little kick of possibility every time I saw it. Now I just checked my mirrors and changed lanes.

My apartment was a twelve-minute drive from the arena, which I'd timed across every possible traffic configuration, because that's the kind of thing I did for fun. Optimized routes. The GPS said fourteen minutes, but the GPS didn't know about the left turn on Maple that skipped the light at Third and Franklin.

My apartment itself was fine. One bedroom, galley kitchen, a living room just big enough for a couch and a TV that had been new when Obama was in his first term. The walls were painted a color the landlord called "eggshell." I called it "depressing beige." I'd hung exactly one thing on them—a framed photo of me at age nineteen, standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, grinning like someone who still thought the world was going to be big.

I'd driven there alone. Two days straight from Pennsylvania because my friends had all bailed at the last minute. I'd stood on the rim and taken the picture with a self-timer balanced on a rock and thought, This is the beginning of something.

That was ten years ago.

I kicked off my sneakers, nuked leftover pad thai, and dropped onto the couch. Netflix asked if I was still watching something I'd started three days ago. I honestly didn't remember. I hit continue.

The pad thai tasted like Tuesday. The show was about people with better lives making worse decisions. My feet hurt from ten hours on concrete. There was a bruise forming on my right hip where I'd clipped station seven's barricade during the Fortress reset, and CO2 residue under my fingernails that wouldn't scrub out no matter how hard I tried.

I picked up the stress ball from the coffee table—a promotion shaped like a grenade that we'd ordered for the arena and never used, and squeezed it while I stared at the TV without seeing it.

Twenty-nine years old. Six years at Battlezone. An apartment I could afford but couldn't make feel like home. A family that loved me the way you love a plant you keep forgetting to water, not neglect, exactly, just a consistent, gentle failure of attention.

The thing about being competent at something nobody values is that after a while, you stop valuing it too. I was good at reading rooms. Good at managing chaos. Good at making split-second calls under pressure and keeping everyone alive and reasonably happy while doing it. Those were skills. Real skills. The kind of skills that mattered when everything was going sideways and someone needed to be the calm one.

But there was no career path for "good at keeping things from falling apart." No LinkedIn title. No salary bump. No mom telling her friends at brunch about it.

How's everything with you?

Everything's fine, Meg. Everything's exactly, precisely, suffocatingly fine.

I fell asleep on my couch with Netflix asking if I was still watching for the third time. The stress-ball grenade had rolled onto the floor, and my phone screen glowed with a notification I didn't check. Tomorrow I'd wake up, go back to the arena, and do it all over again.

That was the plan, anyway. Turns out, the universe had other ideas.

2

VREX

I should have refused the Bureau's offer. I should have told them that hiring a human "expert" based on their malfunctioning translation algorithm was a fool's strategy.

I should have done a great many things.

Instead, I agreed. Desperation, I have learned, makes cowards of us all.

The war room was quiet for the first time in seventy-two hours. My officers had retired to their quarters after the latest debriefing—the latest inventory of failures, more accurately. Three positions lost in the eastern corridor of the valley. Supply lines strained. Morale declining in measurable increments that my second-in-command, Zenir, had stopped bothering to quantify.

Three years. I had been fighting this war for three years, and the map on my tactical display looked almost exactly as it had on the first day.

No. That was not entirely accurate. On the first day, we had held more ground.

I pressed my claws against the edge of the display table until the metal protested. The glow along my forearms—the bioluminescent markings that every Velkorin warrior learned to control by age twelve—flickered amber. Frustration. I dimmed them with effort. A commander who broadcast his emotions through his scales was a commander who had already lost.

The valley spread across the display in lines of light. Kren Valley. Named for the mineral deposits that ran through its bedrock—valuable enough to fight over, deep enough to fight over for centuries. Seven territorial wars in the last three hundred years, all fought under the ancient ceremonial codes that governed our people's disputes. Formalized combat. Rules of engagement so byzantine that interpreting them required specialists. Neutral observers from the High Council to verify compliance. Scheduled battle days, approved weapons, designated combat zones.

Civilized. Honorable. And I was losing.

Therak's words from the last council session scraped through my memory like claws on stone. Perhaps, Commander, the problem is not the enemy's strength but our own leadership's inadequacy. The other council members had shifted in their seats. Not agreeing. Not yet. But listening.

Therak had been listening for three years. Waiting for the moment my failure became undeniable enough to act on.