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Scar stared into the depths of the secret keeper.
It was just a tapestry, hung on the wall in Grian’s base. The party raged around him, laughs passed, a song playing, a Pearlescent Moon at his shoulder nudging him towards the dance floor every few minutes—but he couldn’t bring himself to indulge in any of it.
The tapestry had near perfect detail, the kind of refined look you get from map art, maybe, and he really had no clue how Grian had the ability to set everything up so quickly. The death games had ended no more than an hour ago, his head still reeling from it all. It was probably prepared in advance—had to be, the details were too perfect.
But he still didn’t get it.
He won. He won the game—the man with no friends, the man deemed most likely to die early, with his habit of losing hearts on a dime—he won.
Mumbo had come to his side and congratulated him on getting good. Ha-ha, very funny. He laughed, elbowing his side and grinning, after all, it had been part of his master plan, you see! Mumbo had doubled over giggling at him, poking fun at him for a few minutes, before Scar had left, finding the tapestry on the wall a few moments later.
“Why,” he wanted to ask, wanted to demand, because he hadn’t chosen this. He didn’t want to win—he never did, he wanted to have fun. This wasn’t fun. None of this was fun. The idea of a party was a joke, he got it now. He remembered all the past winners’ parties—the far-off look in Pearl’s eyes, the way Scott kept abandoning conversations, Martyn’s too-tight grip on his cutlery, the way Grian would never meet his eye. Scar read between the details that he’d never noticed before, but must have stored away somewhere in his subconscious, because none of them had ever seemed happy.
They looked like they had just met Death himself, shook his hands, and let him fester inside them. They would startle at every small sound, they would never close their eyes, but they wouldn’t ever look at anything, either. They would stare through it, stare through Scar, like they could read the chemical composition of his soul.
Or—maybe that was just Grian, he was kind of funny like that.
Scar didn’t take his eyes off the statue, considering the victors again. He was good at reading people—you had to be, to be a good conman! Which Scar was, after all. As he thought, slowly, surely, the details started to add up.
Grian won. He won first, he took Scar’s life. But before that, he was Scar’s ally. Scar held him in his arms, he saw him at his worst, and he let him kill him. Ever since then—when was the last time they were allies? Scar still remembered the feeling of the sword through his chest as his clock ticked nearer, the sinking feeling of turning red as he fell through that trapped floor, the way he never looked at Scar the same again, even when they were soulmates.
And then there was Pearl. Pearl won alone—she won in a tower, she lived without her only ally and threatened to freeze him to death—more than once. She only looked out for herself. Yet, she offered Scar her life, she told him that he deserved this win more than her. That she didn’t want to win again.
And wasn’t that all he needed to know?
Victory was a curse disguised as a blessing. This party wasn’t for him, but for the end of the games, for their release. It celebrated how entertaining it had been to watch them. How fun they’d been—not for those inside the games, not for those who had won, but for how funny they must have looked to a god. They were ants—an ant farm, burrowing its way through the dirt, and it was fun to watch them go. They thought they could escape, but the walls were glassed in—always were, and it was fruitless.
“Scar, I really think you should dance with me,” Pearl insisted, back again moments later, just as Scar had finished staring at the tapestry on the wall. And when she offered her hand, who was he to decline?
She knew as well as he did, after all.