Chapter 3: The Party Trap
The fire was ashes. The gray, septic light of a Sakaaran morning leaked through the window, painting the room in tones of dull metal and old bruises. Loki hadn’t moved. His legs were numb, a deep, buzzing protest from thigh to foot. Sage still slept, her breathing a steady, shallow rhythm against the stillness. The position was an absurdity—a god of lies and chaos, used as a pillow for a broken witch. He watched the slow pulse of the collar, counting its beats against the slower rise and fall of her ribs.
He was mapping the vulnerabilities of its design in his mind when the door chime blared—a cheerful, three-note fanfare utterly at odds with the hour.
Sage jolted awake with a choked gasp. Disorientation flashed to panic in an instant. She scrambled away from him, her back hitting the wall, eyes wild as they darted from the door to Loki to the remote on the shelf.
“Breathe,” Loki said, his voice rough from disuse. He pushed himself up, the blood rushing back into his legs in a painful, prickling tide. “It’s just a door.”
The chime sounded again, more insistently.
“He doesn’t just visit,” she whispered, her hands pressing flat against the stone as if she could melt into it. “He summons.”
Loki straightened his tunic, composing his face into something bored and mildly annoyed. The mask clicked into place just as the door didn’t slide open, but was pushed open from outside.
The Grandmaster stood in the threshold, framed by two silent guards. He wore a robe of crushed orange velvet that hurt the eyes, and his hair was sculpted into an even more elaborate series of peaks. He beamed, taking in the scene: the ashen hearth, the nutrient wrapper on the floor, Sage cowering against the wall, Loki standing stiffly beside her.
“Cozy!” he declared, gliding in without invitation. His guards remained outside. “Really, very domestic. I love what you’ve done with the place. The…” he sniffed the air, “…the scent of despair is really grounding.”
“To what do we owe this… sunrise visitation?” Loki asked, not moving to intercept him.
“Oh, I was just in the neighborhood. Checking on my investments.” The Grandmaster wandered over to the shelf, picked up the remote, and turned it over in his hands. He didn’t look at it; he watched Loki. “And I realized something. I gave you this lovely tool, and you haven’t filed a single usage report. Not a peep. It’s like giving a child a new synth-drum and they just… stare at it. Puzzling.”
Sage had gone perfectly still, a rabbit sighting a hawk.
“The tool seemed superfluous,” Loki said, keeping his tone light. “The asset has been compliant.”
“Has she?” The Grandmaster turned his smile on Sage. “Darling, were you compliant? Did you sleep well? No bad dreams? No little surges of that nasty, untidy magic?”
Sage said nothing. Her jaw was locked.
“See, silence,” the Grandmaster sighed, placing the remote back down. “That could be compliance. Or it could be simmering mutiny. It’s so hard to tell the difference without data.” He drifted closer to her, his robe whispering across the stone. He stopped a foot away, leaning in. “You know, I read the full report. That pleural tear is a nasty piece of work. Like a little ticking clock. Makes every breath a choice. Exhausting.”
Loki felt a cold knot form in his gut. The salve had eased the muscle pain, but it did nothing for the internal damage. The Grandmaster knew it.
“I manage,” Sage ground out, her eyes fixed on a point on his gaudy collar.
“You struggle,” the Grandmaster corrected, pleasantly. “There’s a difference. And struggle is so… unaesthetic.” He straightened up, clapping his hands once. “So! Let’s generate some data. A baseline. Loki, be a dear and pick up your tool.”
The room temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. Loki didn’t move. “A baseline for what?”
“For responsiveness! For pain threshold. For obedience. The classic metrics.” The Grandmaster’s eyes sparkled. “It’s a level two. Just a little wake-up call. A conversation starter.”
“We’re already conversing,” Loki said, his voice dropping a degree.
“Not that kind of conversation.” The Grandmaster’s smile didn’t waver, but his eyes turned flinty. “Pick it up. Or I’ll have my guard do it on a level four and we can skip to the end of this chapter.”
The choice was an illusion. A staged humiliation. Do it yourself, or watch it be done worse. Loki saw the calculation in the Grandmaster’s face—a desperate hope that he would refuse, that he would show a spine, just to have it broken more entertainingly.
Sage looked at him then. Not with pleading, but with a bleak, clear understanding. She gave a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of her head. Don’t. It was a gift. An absolution.
That decided him.
Loki walked to the shelf. His movements were fluid, casual. He picked up the remote. It was cool and smooth. He faced Sage, holding the device up so she could see it. Her breath hitched, her hands fisting at her sides. He saw her brace, her shoulders tightening, her eyes squeezing shut.
“Level two,” the Grandmaster chirped. “And… action.”
Loki pressed the button.
The sound Sage made wasn’t a scream. It was a short, punched-out uhn that seemed to be torn from the base of her spine. Her body didn’t convulse—it locked. Every muscle seized at once, rigid as stone. Her back arched, her head slammed against the wall, her eyes flew open, wide and unseeing. The blue node on the collar flared, a bright, violent azure.
It lasted three seconds.
When it stopped, the release was catastrophic. She dropped, boneless, to her knees. A line of saliva trailed from her slack mouth. She trembled, a fine, full-body vibration like a plucked wire. She dragged in a ragged, wet breath, then another, her hands splayed on the floor for balance.
Loki lowered the remote. His face was a sheet of perfect, neutral ice.
“Fascinating!” The Grandmaster crouched down, peering at her as if she were a fascinating insect. “Physiological response: textbook. Neurological override: complete. Recovery time… she’s breathing, that’s promising. And look—no magic flare! See? The system works. It neatly interrupts any… rebellious neural impulses.”
Sage managed to lift her head. Her blue eyes were glassy with shock and a pain so deep it looked like confusion. She stared through Loki, not at him.
“Now,” the Grandmaster stood, brushing non-existent dust from his robe. “Was that so hard? A little shared experience. It builds rapport.” He plucked the remote from Loki’s numb fingers. “I’ll just hang onto this for now. You seem… reluctant. Maybe you need more time to appreciate the nuance of the gift.”
He tucked the remote into a fold of his orange velvet. “The lesson, my dear trickster, is that everything here is a lever. You just have to be willing to pull it. Or,” he added, wagging a finger, “you become the thing that gets pulled.” He gave Sage one last, appraising look. “Get her presentable. The midday spectacle is a good one today. A former warlord from some pitiful little agrarian sphere. He cries real tears before he fights. It’s delicious. I expect you both in my box.”
With a final, radiant smile, he swept out. The door hissed shut behind him.
The silence he left behind was different. Charged. Ruined.
Sage was still on her knees, trembling. Loki moved first. He went to the preservation unit, filled a cup with water, and walked back to her. He knelt, placing it on the floor beside her hand.
She didn’t look at it. She was staring at her own trembling fingers as if she didn’t recognize them.
“Look at me,” Loki said, his voice stripped bare.
Slowly, her gaze traveled up. The glassiness was receding, replaced by a hollow, focused fury. And something else—a flicker of greenish light, deep in her pupils, quickly extinguished.
“Did you feel the signal?” he asked, his question clinical, a lifeline thrown into the wreckage.
She blinked. Swallowed. Nodded, once. “It was… a sharp tone. A high, mean frequency. Just before…” She trailed off, her hand rising unconsciously to the collar. “I tried… to push it away. Into the floor. It was too fast. But I… felt it.”
A spark. In the middle of the violation, a fragment of control. Loki held onto that. It was the only thing he could hold onto.
“You grounded a fraction of it,” he stated. “That’s how you breathed right away. That’s why you’re not seizing.”
She absorbed this, her fury tempering into a cold, hard clarity. She picked up the cup and drank, her hand steadying by the time she finished. She pushed herself to her feet, moving with a stiff, deliberate dignity. She looked at Loki, and the understanding between them was no longer fragile. It was forged in that high, mean frequency.
“He took your remote,” she said, her voice rough.
“Yes.”
“So next time he wants a shock, he’ll do it himself.”
“Yes.”
She walked to the window, looking out at the swirling, toxic sky. Her reflection in the glass was a ghost superimposed over the chaos. “You pressed the button.”
“I did.”
“Would you have pressed it if he hadn’t threatened the level four?”
Loki considered lying. He found he didn’t want to. “Yes. To keep the choice mine. It was the wrong choice. But it was the only one he left me.”
She was silent for a long moment. “It feels like burning wire inside your veins,” she said, almost conversationally. “And for a second, you forget your own name.” She turned from the window. “You need to get your remote back.”
“I know.”
“And I need to learn to hear that tone before it starts.” She looked down at her hands, flexing the fingers. A tiny, almost invisible wisp of green energy, like the first hint of moss on stone, flickered across her knuckles and died. “We’re going to be late for the spectacle.”
She walked toward the washroom, her steps still unsteady but determined. Loki remained kneeling on the floor, staring at the spot where she had fallen.
His hand, the one that had pressed the button, curled into a fist. The phantom sensation of the remote’s smooth surface was gone. In its place was the memory of her locked muscles, the sound of her breath being stolen.
The Grandmaster had been wrong. The lesson wasn’t about levers.
It was about catalysts.
And Loki felt something cold and terrible begin to catalyze deep within his own chest, a chemical reaction of shame and fury looking for its target. He stood, smoothing his expression back into its practiced, elegant blankness just as Sage emerged, her face washed, her hair roughly tied back.
She met his eyes and gave a single, sharp nod.
They left the tower together, two prisoners walking into the roar of the arena, one with a collar glowing at her throat, the other with a new and silent prison locking itself around his heart.