They are all the main characters in their own story.
The cruelty of this particular floor was getting to me. I sighed and turned to the main part of the table, finally taking in the full scene. Before we dealt with this Corcunda quest, we had an even more pressing matter.
Tran and Zhang sat at the end of the table, flanked by Imani and Elle. Tran was in his spider wheelchair, nursing a beer, while Zhang had his head down on the table. I knew Elle had been trying to talk to Na, but that clearly hadn’t worked.
“Did you put your song in?” Imani asked as I slid into a chair. Donut jumped to the table and gave Zhang a headbutt.
“We did,” I said. “Prepotente is up there now arguing with the DJ. He’s going to try to get in, too.”
“Hi, Donut,” Zhang said, reaching up and giving her a pat without looking up.
“What have we decided?” I asked, looking at the sour faces all around.
“Hey, Carl,” Tran said, sounding morose. “We were just explaining to Zhang that he’s being an idiot.”
Zhang finally looked up, eyes rimmed red. “It’s the only way. Rezan. Sammi Harrison. Ming Lui.” He reached up and touched the side of his face. “Soo-bin kissed my cheek before that last heat. She said she trusted me. They’re all dead now.”
“Like I told you,” Tran said, clearly doing his best to sound patient, “this is not your fault. And it’s not all Na’s fault, either. They attacked her. Rezan was an ass. And the decapitator had it coming. Never trusted her.”
Zhang shook his head. “They attacked us because Na’s gone completely psycho. There’s nothing left. She died when her brother did. I thought maybe I would be enough, but I’m not.”
“She didn’t get player-killer skulls,” Tran said. “It’s those dreads of hers. They all killed each other.”
“It was horrible,” Zhang said. “I can’t do that again. I can’t do another race with her.”
“Wait,” I said, raising a hand. “What do you mean, ‘It’s the only way’? What are you planning?”
Zhang wiped his nose. “Na is in lead saddle for the next race. I’m going to kill Torpedo when her back is turned. It’s the only way. I’m not strong enough to stop her, and if any others try to, they will die, too. But with Torpedo dead, the system will kill her. It’ll kill us both.”
Torpedo was the name of their mount. The octopus.
“No,” Donut said. “No, you can’t.”
“That won’t work anyway,” I said. “Not anymore. You just lose your containment. Na is strong enough to get to the finish line without a mount. But you’re not.”
He shook his head. “What else can I do?”
“No,” Donut repeated. She looked at me, eyes shining. “We’ll find something to fix it. Right, Carl?”
“She’s killing people,” Zhang said. “She’s stopped talking to me. She got poisoned, and it’s slowly draining her health, but it’s not going down fast enough. She’s not who she used to be.”
Tears streamed down his face. He met my eyes, and he ripped the target cape off. He threw it on the table. “I wish I had died before. In the temple. I was scared, but I wasn’t ashamed. Now I am ashamed. I wish I’d never gotten this far. I wish Jun was here. Why? Why was it him and not me?” He started to quietly cry again. “I promised him I’d watch over her, and I can’t even do that. What sort of friend have I been?”
“Oh, Zhang,” Donut said, rubbing back and forth against him.
“There’s gotta be a way,” I said. “We need ideas.”
“That’s what we’ve been doing,” Imani said. She sounded grim. “We’ve been workshopping ways to fix this.”
Zhang wiped his eyes and then the words just tumbled out of him. “She ripped Jun’s eye out of his face after he died, and then she ripped her own eye out to install it. Who does that? It was then that I should have known she was gone. I used to think I could, you know, keep her from going too crazy. Jun didn’t want us telling people what had happened on the eighth floor in Beijing. She apologized. She’s always been so practical, so matter-of-fact. She wasn’t like the others at the warehouse. She never joked, never laughed. But she would smile at her brother, and she would smile at me sometimes, too. She used to be so pretty. And I don’t mean pretty in the face, but she was that, too. I mean, I used to feel so safe and happy when I looked at her. She was my best friend’s sister, and I thought maybe I could get her to like me, and we would get married, and I would have my best friend and her, and now I have nothing.”
He put his head back down on the table. He let out a sob. “We have to kill her. What other choice do we have? If we don’t, she’s going to keep hurting everyone.”
“She’s not killing for fun,” Tran said. “She’s not going out of her way to hurt people. She’s not bad... She’s just sort of lost her humanity.”
I nodded, remembering what she’d done to that mantaur on the fourth floor. She’d pulled all his limbs off just to keep him alive. She’d always been like this. She’d been a sociopath this whole time. But that wasn’t a bad thing. “We need that. Weneedpeople like her. She’s so strong.”
“She’s not a weapon, Carl. She’s a person,” Donut said. Her voice lowered. “And I like her, of course. But we can’t let her keep hurting people.” She straightened. “But we can’t let Zhang just kill himself, either. It’s not right.”