Back in the waiting room I collapsed on a cot, catching my breath. I was met with the cheers of my friends, Mia, Vera and Alain shouting out across the room. I felt my cheeks grow hot, my success quite likely to go to my head.

“So we just have Javier then,” I muttered, rising from my bed. I couldn’t see him anywhere in the room, my view filled with other fighters I didn’t recognize. I walked over to Alain and Mia, about to ask if they knew where he was when I heard a great cheer from the arena. My eyes flickered over to the crowd in front of the window, my suspicions growing with each second. It couldn’t have been… could it? Was it?

He popped out of the hallway, wearing a thin smirk on his lips, his competitor dragged in by the worker. The man he had taken down towered over him in muscle and height, but those advantages evidently paled in comparison to Javier’s battle prowess, skill more than making up for the differences in physique between the two. It seemed in my brief period on the cot, Javier had not only been summoned to fight but just as quickly defeated his opponent, far outstretching the fight times of the rest of the team.

“Well, I hope the Mistress got what she wanted,” he muttered, pulling up a chair. Vera and the others joined us, their wounds patched up well enough to continue moving once again, even if the movement was punctuated with pain.

“Do you think we can just head on out and talk to her?” I asked. I was anxious to get out of this building. I wanted to practice my Direct Current further, and sans further fighting in the arena, I would have to wait until we were well away from Malagost.

My question didn’t need to be answered by the rest of the group, given one of the workers popped on by, motioning for our attention. Without even waiting for confirmation, she headed off, leaving us to trail after her back up to the upper level of the arena where the Mistress awaited our arrival.

“Well done, well done,” she cheered. “You put on a great show today. They’ll be talking about this one for weeks. Those who unfortunately were unable to attend will be wondering what they missed out on and attending every day thereafter, even if the odds of a repeat appearance are low. They say lightning doesn’t strike twice, but Perry, you may have put that rumor to bed. Norville might even start training again. I know he’d grown too confident, so perhaps we’ll grow to greater heights as an arena.”

“Are you sure you want stronger fighters in this current state?” I asked.

The Mistress made a short clicking noise of derision. “They’re not that stupid, Perry. This is a personal endeavor, not a political one. Now do you want your information before your colleague makes a greater fool of himself?”

I flushed pink, trying to hide behind Vera’s short frame. “We’d appreciate that, Mistress,” Javier said, deciding to take the reins.

“What do you want first? The good news or the bad news?”

Javier raised one eyebrow, his bush brows sitting beneath his shaggy hair. “You’re really doing it like that? You’re really that kind of person? I expected better of you. But sure, go ahead. Give us the bad news first.”

The Mistress brushed off Javier’s criticism, rifling through papers in her arms before settling upon one of them, her brows furrowed in thought. “Here we go… bad news it is then. I did what I could, but for a quick job, I couldn’t turn up anything for whomever it was that was backing Lord Montare. My team has their senses scouring every possible avenue, but I suspect that whoever it is that is backing Lord Montare has covered their tracks so thoroughly we’ll find no further information other than what you had. This is instinct, mind you, and my instinct tends to be right when it comes to information. I can still put some more feelers out, try to get a sense of whom he’s been meeting with, but this is likely the depths we’ll reach when it come to this part of the investigation.”

“That’s… not good,” Javier understated. “You really couldn’t find anything?”

“I know you weren’t underground too long, and that may give you reasonable misgivings, but I already had my people do some preliminary searching when I heard you were coming from the mansion. If there is something, it’s buried too deep to casually find, and like I said, my instincts tell me whatever evidence exists is out of reach. A conspiracy of this nature is the minimal required elements to create a new political regime in a city. I’m good, but this might be up against a master in political maneuvering, which means my results will likely turn up the same as what’s in that document you shared. A false identity through which all the business was transacted. Lord Montare may not be the source of all the action, but he is the visible foundation for the campaign, and part of the setup required the roots to not be visible.”

It was disheartening to hear that we were essentially back to square one. We had already suspected Lord Montare was implicated in the action, but that didn’t help us find the source of the turmoil. We couldn’t reasonably act upon Lord Monatre, given his political enmeshment within Malagost. Whatever we could throw at him would require negotiations between our two cities, and that was not a fast process, nor one we were likely apt to succeed at, given his work already in destabilizing Titan City.

“Fine. What’s the good news then?”

The Mistress bit her lips, averting her gaze from the group. “Good might not be the best word to describe it. It might be better to say it’s information you can actively act upon, although that doesn’t necessarily make it good information.”

“Stop stalling and tell us,” Alain demanded.

“Fine. We did turn up Lord Montare’s trail when it came to his influence in your city. There’s only one other lord we see having regular contact initiated. The money lending records do not hide this relationship— I’m surprised no one has looked closer at it, but I suppose they don’t have the correct connections to see all the disparate entities used to move the money around.” She paused, words having trailed off at the end. Something in her was reluctant, her body tensed up to flee.

“Come on, Mistress. Who’s the person Lord Montare has been working with?”

“Why, it’s Lord Nonan. Or as you may better know him, Amelia’s father.” She tensed up, as though she expected to be attacked, her bodyguard watching carefully from a distance, but Mia’s reaction was not an external one. She had been crossing her arms, and now her nails pinched into her flesh, digging deep against the skin, all of her energy focused on restraining from having an outburst within the arena’s vicinity.

“How do you know this?” Javier asked, no doubt trying to diffuse the situation from escalating further.

“Same place, just no cover up this time. The deals were all ostensibly done under the proviso of business, but the quantities are so irregular, and the rate of transfer spread amonst the various lenders tells a different story. Whatever kind of support he’s showing through money may be dwarfed in other channels, so if there’s more entities he’s working with, they may be burrowed deeper, but this is the obvious connection. Sorry, Amelia. I may be an immoral mistress of information, but that doesn’t mean I like to cause pain for the sake of pain.”

Whatever words Mia had she swallowed, a grimace masquerading as a smile plastered to her face. She couldn’t even speak, only nod back at the Mistress.

“Thank you very much. Do you have some papers we can refer to?” Javier asked, ever the consummate professional.

The Mistress nodded, passing along a handful of sheets bound with twine. “All copies, of course. It’s a rush job so don’t complain about the quality. If you wanted better quality content, you should have arranged to be here before you had questions to answer, or arranged a preliminary declaration of interest with one of my intermediaries.”

I turned towards Alain, curious to see if he knew what the Mistress was referring to, but he just shrugged back at me, a finger held over his lips enforce my continued silence.

“Thank you, once again. We’ll keep that in mind if we ever have need of your services in Malagost, and with proper payment materials as well. I think we should be off. We have a lot to think about.”

“Take care. Get home safely. You never know who else is watching.”

We left the underground pub and made our way back to our inn, ready to rest for the night, given the need to return the following morning and discuss what we’d learned as soon as we could. This was huge news. This was a new lead to tackle in terms of stopping the riots in our city. The only issue was the the one we didn’t want to confront. Mia’s issue, really.

How she felt about her father.

How were we supposed to proceed while Mia was in a languished state, sobbing into her pillow at the thoughts that plagued her mind? Vera sat with her, rubbing her weary shoulders, softly humming an unfamiliar tune, while the rest of us had split off for our own bedroom to try and discuss the next steps while avoiding the topic fraught with peril.

“So, we head back first thing in the morning?” Alain asked.

“That’s right. I think we’ve done all we can here. It’s time to return home. To return to Titan City. To return to the city that needs our help.”

“Was this how you thought things would turn out, Alain?” I asked.

He looked down at the dirty floor, hands clasped against his lap. “That’s an aggressive question to ask, Perry. Rude to imply that I thought Mia was the daughter of a traitor.”

My jaw dropped. “No, no, no, not like that, Alain. I would never ask like that. I meant if you thought we would end up in an underground fighting arena, forced to put on a show. Not anything about Mia, not that. Don’t think so poorly of me.”

He looked back up, flashing a weak smile. “Sorry, Perry. On edge. Aren’t we all? I surely didn’t expect to have to fight, and my body is bearing the burden of that mistaken assumption. Guess I’ll have to be more thorough in my investigations going forward.”

He peeled back his tunic, showing the puncture wounds, derived from Mia’s act of aggression. “She really hit hard. You need to train her less, Javier, or else she’ll overtake you,” Alain said, a smile plastered on his face. He winced as he poked at his bandages, getting a feel for the damage she had inflicted upon him.

“Be happy she’s grown this much, Alain. You want your allies to be stronger if they’re the ones supporting you. You don’t want to go against a spike feeder at a disadvantage.” Javier replied, taking a close look at Alain’s wounds. He winced at the injuries, pulling back from the cat man.

“Wow, I suppose I was quite fortunate to not come out with any damage.”

“You did seemingly discover a new technique during that fight, unless you were holding out on us. You do know how I frown upon discovering new techniques in the heat of battle, Perry,” Javier said.

I shrugged, swallowing my anxieties. “The pressure was real. I didn’t want to kill him, and I was afraid of ending up with another loss. A new technique was the only thing that came to mind, even if it didn’t work the way I had expected it to.”

Javier sighed, falling down onto his own bed. “This day was a lot. Let’s go home.”

We had successfully danced around Mia’s anguish. An attempt at addressing it was pushed away, our own failures pushed to the forefront. It was easier that way. Trying to go back into Mia’s room and confront her feelings over her father required a different kind of strength, one that none of us had cultivated. Perhaps Vera had experience at it, for Mia’s sake, but I had lived a life untethered in the village once my parents died, only connecting with Levin and to a lesser extent, those I traded food with, their names already fading the way their faces had from my mind.

I obviously couldn’t speculate for Alain or Javier, other than by their continued presence here. Perhaps they would try and find a window to commiserate with Mia later, but for now, we stared at each other in silence, ostensibly preparing to sleep.

I would just have to find different ways to support her, given I knew I wouldn’t have the words to do so. If I tried words, I would be speaking as though I had lead in my mouth, my words clashing against my lips, unable to breach through the wall of intent into something coherent. So instead I would prepare for sleep. I would prepare to leave Malagost, to deal with the issue of Mia’s father one day later, the distance of one day transposed to be imagined as a distance from which it would no longer hurt to acknowledge the matter, and so that we could talk with Mia about it.

And perhaps I could pretend I couldn’t hear Mia’s sobs piercing through the walls, my lies the blanket needed to swaddle me from her overwhelming grief.