The Champion

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  PROLOGUE

  “You’re a murderer, Cade.”

  Finch’s voice drifted from the darkness. Cade could not see him. He floated in a black oblivion.

  He knew this was not real. That somewhere he lay in bed, tossing and turning from fever. He had a memory of it. Saw it in his mind’s eye.

  Quintus, fussing over the infection in his leg. Unpicking the rough stitching with his gladius. Draining and cleaning the infection that had set deep into his leg.

  Amber, bathing his head with a wet rag. Blessedly cool as his brow burned and he tossed from the pain.

  But the fever dream did not abate, even as he clawed at consciousness. He could not wake, no matter how hard he tried.

  More memories flashed across Cade’s psyche. The slavers, taking him to New Rome in chains. The emperor, trading armor and freedom for victory in the arena. His return, and the battle with the alpha. Amber kissing him. He clung to that single happy memory, but it melted away like snow.

  “Murderer!”

  Cade walked in the sands of the arena now. It was almost empty. No cheering crowds. No emperor watching from his box.

  But there were men standing in front of him. Pale as corpses, eyes wide and staring. Finch. The Chinese soldier. The Confederate colonel.

  Three men he had killed, for the entertainment of thousands.

  “I had no choice,” Cade whispered. “Abaddon made me do it.”

  “There’s always a choice, Cade,” Finch’s voice rasped across the sand. “Abaddon picked you for a reason. Because deep down, he knew what you were. A killer.”

  He laughed, a choking, wheezing laugh. And as Cade spun away, seeking the oblivion of unconsciousness, Finch’s voice morphed into the cruel voice of Abaddon’s avatar.

  “What’s the matter, Cade?” she giggled. “Don’t you like my game?”

  But then there was another voice. It was distant. But kind.

  “—gonna be okay,” it said. “You can do this.”

  He saw his mother. His father. Going about their lives, cooking together in their home’s kitchen, like they always did. His home. And he would return someday. One way or another.

  He half opened his eyes.

  Amber looked down at him, her brown eyes filled with concern.

  “Your fever’s breaking, Cade,” she whispered. “I don’t know if you can hear me. Just keep fighting. Just a little longer.”

  It was hard to keep his eyes open. He closed them, and felt her fingers smooth his sweat-slick hair.

  Fight a little longer.

  He could do that.

  CHAPTER

  1

  Two months later

  Cade pressed his face into the soil, praying he would remain unseen. He stilled his breath and listened to the throaty rumbles of the giant beasts ahead of him.

  Not yet.

  The rushing of the river beyond accompanied the sound, and the wind moaned through the leaves of the trees above. But only one sound broke through the tempest of his thoughts. Thudding. Footsteps that shook the very ground.

  Branches crackled as they neared, snapping beneath an enormous weight. Cade clenched his fists, forcing himself to remain motionless.

  Just a little closer.

  One breath. Two.

  They were right on top of him.

  “Now!” he roared, leaping to his feet.

  Without looking to see if his friends had joined him, he charged toward the herd that had halted no more than a stone’s throw ahead of them.

  A pair of shouts joined his own as Cade waved his arms at the startled animals: A dozen long-necked sauropods seemed to blot out the sky. More than he had expected.

  Twenty feet. Ten. Five.

  Cade’s scream choked in his throat. He halted in the shadow of the nearest beast. For a moment their eyes met, and he saw the dull cow-like eyes roll back in their sockets.

  Amber and Quintus came to a stop on either side of him, their yells fading, in awe of the elephantine beasts before them.

  “Move,” Amber screamed hoarsely. “Come on!”

  For a long, hanging second, the beasts only stared. And then, as if by some unknown signal, the herd turned and ran.

  “Go!” Quintus yelled.

  The very air thundered from the stampede. The chase had begun, and now Bea, Trix, and Yoshi emerged from the trees nearby, crowding in from the side, screaming like banshees and forcing the lumbering giants to hug the riverbank.

  As they followed the path of least resistance between the tree line and the flowing water, Cade watched the largest of the beasts slow, though whether due to exhaustion or the realization that the small humans chasing them were no danger, Cade could not guess.

  “Just a little farther!” Cade panted.

  But the beasts had come to a halt, the nearest creature even turning to face them. It was a large specimen, its neck and flanks pitted with scars from attacks by far more formidable predators.

  It took a step forward, its long tail lashing behind. And then, a final outcry, as two more figures emerged from the trees. Scott and Grace.

  They waved a giant banner, hollering at the top of their lungs. The flag, no more than a stretched sackcloth between two poles, looked puny. But at its center, painted in ash, charcoal, and river clay, was a giant eye.

  The sight was enough to startle the beasts once more, and the ground reverberated as they took a further few steps back from the new arrivals.

  It was enough. The great matriarch that led them fell away from the front of the herd, braying with panic. And then the moan turned into a single scream, cut short almost immediately.

  At the loss of their leader, the beasts scattered into the woods, barreling by Bea, Trix, and Yoshi as they dove for cover behind the trees.

  Cade staggered, panting, to where the great sauropod had fallen: a pit that had been covered with branches, and then a thin screen of mud and leaves.

  He crouched and peered over the crumbling edge. It was a cruel sight. The great beast had been spitted by stakes embedded at the bottom, fire hardened and sharpened to pierce the thick hide and flesh that had fallen upon them.

  Even in his moment of triumph, Cade could not help but feel a tinge of regret for having killed the gentle giant. The sauropod breathed a last shuddering breath before its head fell to the ground.

  “It worked!” Scott cried. He scrambled up beside Cade and stared down. The look of elation on his face soon faded at the grisly sight below.

  The others joined them, equally in awe of what they had done.

  “I didn’t think we’d … manage it,” Amber said.

  Cade shook his head. “Native Americans used to do something similar for thousands of years. We just used a pit instead of a cliff.”

  That hole in the ground had been their personal hell for longer than he cared to
remember. It had taken weeks to dig. In fact, it would have been impossible had there not been a natural depression there already, likely carved by a now-defunct tributary of the river.

  The gathering of their “bait” had also been tricky, for the sauropods would only be tempted by the tender shoots and buds from the tall branches that even they could not reach. Luckily, Quintus could climb like a monkey, cutting free the branches and gathering the bitter fruits that the great beasts seemed to love. They had left these near a natural bush trail, and had taken turns to camp out there, waiting for the herd to come.

  As for the eye banner, Cade hadn’t been sure it would work. But Amber had come up with it when she saw the same markings on a butterfly’s wing, designed no doubt to scare other animals too.

  “Now what?” Yoshi interrupted Cade’s thoughts.

  “Fetch Amber’s axe,” Cade said. “And Scott, you go up ahead to watch for predators. We won’t have long before they come to scavenge.”

  He gripped the knotted rope set in the pit’s side and began to descend. It was going to be a bloody evening.

  CHAPTER

  2

  As the sun slowly began its descent toward the horizon, the team got to work.

  The hunt had been one of desperation. Fish, once plentiful, had become scarce, with their stretch of river empty of the small silver shoals that Yoshi had once caught in his nets. They had been forced to make an attempt at big game.

  But it had been worth the risk. The giant they had felled was a treasure trove of food. Cade’s only regret was that they had not planned better for harvesting the great bounty. He now realized that their work had only just begun.

  First, they had to breach the tough hide on the outside—thicker than a rhino’s and twice as tough, with a layer of yellowed fat beneath. It took almost an hour of hacking with Amber’s axe to cut a hole in its belly. Another to pull forth the folds of intestine and get to the nutritious organs within. There was no hope of cutting through the great bones and sinews of the legs, though Scott succeeded in cutting free a tail tip the length of a forearm. He dry-heaved when he was done.

  Regardless, it was the fatted offal within that they needed in the first place. In the modern world, humanity had turned their noses up at anything but the muscles. Yet their ancestors would have fought for the nutritious organs within. The starving teens were no different.

  Quintus had some experience in the butchering of meat, having rustled sheep from the Picts he had fought in Scotland. But he had never come close to processing an animal this size. Yet, to Cade’s surprise, the nimble boy crawled into the belly of the beast itself, gladius in hand.

  Soon enough, Quintus shoved out the wobbling lump of purple flesh that was its liver, so heavy it took two of them to lift it. Next came the football-sized kidneys, and the heart so large that Cade could put his fist through the arteries. More organs followed, ones Cade could not recognize, but he trusted Quintus to know what he was doing.

  As for Grace, she busied herself with attacking one of the giant legs, cutting away at the knee joint with Amber’s axe. All the while, the others worked at carving gobs of yellow, grainy fat from around the belly’s slit … And then the pterosaurs came. Circling overhead like vultures.

  Once these flying scavengers arrived, Cade knew their time was almost up. Their arrival was the first sign carnivores looked for, if the smell of blood did not attract them first. When Grace finally succeeded in cutting free the leg, he accepted it was time to load up.

  It was painful to leave before a carnivore was actually seen, but Cade knew by the time they were warned of one’s approach, it would be too late to take the meat with them. So he called it, wiping the blood and sweat from his brow, ignoring the disappointed groans of the others.

  Exhausted, they succeeded in transferring their prize out of the pit and back to the keep in a single trip, hauling it up in makeshift wooden cages they had made specially for the occasion, and then dragged in sleds of sackcloth and sapling logs. It was a mountain of meat.

  But they could not feast yet. Only a snack, to give them strength for what was to come next.

  Having passed through the tunnel back to the keep, they lit their firepit and flash roasted select slices from the tail tip. Soon, they were sitting around the fire, hungry chewing precluding any conversation. The only noise was the soft groans of relief as they filled their bellies. It had been their first taste of meat in a long time.

  “You sure this is going to work?” Yoshi finally said, mumbling through a mouthful of sauropod flesh.

  He nodded to the structure that they had spent almost as long building as they had digging the trap. A wooden shed, rough and ready as a shed could be, with walls of logs and mud, and a roof of branches, sealed with woven palm leaves and sackcloth from their bedding. Who would have known just how important Amber’s axe would end up being? None of this would have been possible without it.

  The smokehouse was smaller than Cade would have liked. But it would have to do.

  “Let’s get cutting,” Cade said.

  Now the most grueling work of all began. Freshly sharpened swords hacked at the steaming meat, slicing strips to be hung on the horizontal poles affixed within their rickety shed.

  Cade himself worked on the great, clawed foot that Grace had succeeded in detaching. He was careful not to nick his blade on the enormous leg bones within. To hold up such weight, they must have been strong as steel.

  It looked for all the world like an elephant’s foot, with the same leathery skin and longer claws. Cade was just glad that the herd of sauropods that had stumbled across their path was of the smaller variety.

  They worked into the night. Fat was transferred to buckets, to be kept in the cool of the baths below the keep. It was to be rendered later, and their main source of energy—without carbohydrates to fuel them, they were in sore need of it. It would be their cooking oil, their butter, their soup and sauce.

  Only when they were done did they light a fire within the shed itself, using green leaves to produce the most smoke, and stop the fire from spreading to the shed itself.

  Cade knew only the theory of what they were doing—that the smoke would dehydrate the meat to the point of preservation, making a dinosaur jerky that would last for months.

  When the fire was lit, and the smoke billowed into the shed, the group fell where they lay. But not Cade. He sat and stared at the sputtering flames, his face blackened, arms bloodied to the elbows.

  Survival was one thing. But he knew that soon, the Codex would speak again. And the game … would start once more.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The Codex had been silent since the battle with the alpha. But the timer … it ticked away, just as it had before. Two months had passed already, with no sign of the drone waking.

  There was a week to go. Cade had decided to focus on survival and ignore the dark cloud of dread that filled his nightmares.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Amber’s voice broke through his thoughts, startling him from the nodding doze that he had become used to over the past month. Their fear of a return from the slavers of New Rome meant that one of them kept watch each night, keeping an eye out for any ships coming up the river, or dark figures emerging from the tree line.

  Cade nodded and scooted aside, and Amber collapsed beside him. It was cool at the top of the mountain, and though he had yet to bathe away the grime of the hunt, it was a welcome relief from the hot work below.

  “How’s the fire?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Yoshi’s keeping an eye on it.”

  Her fingers intertwined with his, an unconscious affection that still set his heart aflame. He clasped it back, and the two stared out across the valley. It was beautiful this time of night. The twin moons of red and white cast a warm glow across the expanse of trees, tinged with the first rays of the sun blushing the horizon.

  “It’s nice up here,” she said. “Romantic.”

  She la
y her head on his shoulder, and he smiled. The food they had gathered today had lifted a great weight from those shoulders.

  “Who knew you could still be romantic while covered in dinosaur guts?” he said.

  She kicked him gently, but he heard her snort. “Way to ruin the moment.”

  Their romance, hardly begun before his battle with the alpha, had been interrupted by his long recovery. But it was Amber who had sat by his bed as he had tossed and turned from the pain. Amber who had tended to his legs, and bathed his forehead as it blazed hot with fever.

  Despite it all, Cade had recovered well, though he was left with a few scars. Thankfully, there was no permanent damage.

  “We don’t need to keep watch tonight,” Amber said, shifting closer.

  Even now, Cade couldn’t tell if it was the cold or affection. But he smiled nonetheless.

  “Oh yeah?” he asked. “How do you figure that?”

  “Look at the pit.”

  Cade squinted through the red light of the moons, his eyes following the reflection of the river. At first, he could see only shadows. But as his eyes adjusted, he could see the shifting shapes, a darker black against the gloom. And as the breeze changed, he could almost hear the snarls and snap of teeth as the predators of the jungle fought over the carcass.

  “You think any slavers are gonna come for us with every predator in the vicinity hanging around?”

  Cade pressed his lips to her forehead. “I think it’s worth the risk if I get to spend the evening with you.”

  Amber chuckled. “That was just the right amount of cheesy. What did you have planned for me?”

  “Dinner and a movie?” he asked.

  “Classic,” she mumbled, lifting her head and stretching. “Can you get hold of some Terminator movies for me? You said they made a few more.”

  Cade shook his head. “Trust me. Once you’ve seen the second, you don’t want to watch the rest.”