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The Last Strike
On the eve of the Galar League, a corviknight faces a choice between loyalty and honor.
Illustration by @kintsugi
On the eve of the Galar League, a corviknight faces a choice between loyalty and honor.
Illustration by @kintsugi
“And what if they don’t fight back?” Lachen demands.
There is no reasoning with Lachen when he gets like this. His eyes flash, his tongue lolls, and his bushy tail whips like an angry forest. Past and present run together in my mind, and I see only a battered zigzagoon, yipping and barking at our heels as we wind through the back-ways of Motostoke.
“They will fight,” I answer calmly.
Disgusted, Lachen puffs his tail and turns back to the others. “This isn’t about us. This is so, so much bigger than us. Tomorrow, the whole world will be watching. We’re the lucky ones—we can take a stand for the ones without a voice.”
The rest of the team observes us in troubled silence. Lachen is the better speaker, but I am the better thinker. When our opinions split, trouble follows.
“You are saying we should throw everything away for nothing,” I interject. “You think our opponents will risk throwing? You think they will put everything aside for a moment of meaningless protest, for a dream? You’re naive, Lachen. You overestimate the self-sacrifice of others.”
For a moment, it seems that I have rendered him speechless.
Then he says, “It’s you I’ve overestimated,” and the bitterness in his voice slaps me like cold water.
I try to gentle my tone. “It’s a pretty thought, but this is not the time. She is counting on us tomorrow. How can you even think of letting her down like that?”
“If she doesn’t support the strike, then she’s the one letting us down. If she’s worth my loyalty, she won’t need it.”
It is my turn to seek words and only find silence. I did not think, after five years, that loyalty could be thrown away so lightly.
I love Lachen the way one loves a nestmate. We have been cold and warm together; we have eaten from the same half-filled bowl. When a machoke broke my wing, he placed himself between us and growled in the most terrible voice until it backed away despite itself.
I love Lachen, but sometimes, I do not like him. He has always talked too fast and dreamed too big. After years of plenty, he still eats like at any moment his bowl will be taken away.
Before I find an answer, Velvet opens the door. There is a change to her in this crossing over. Outside she is Velvet Steel, rising star; here she is Kiki Smith and she does not need to stand as if the angle of her back holds up the world.
She pauses on the threshold, looking down at the red hotel carpet and the scuffed pamphlet Lachen has left for her there. She reads it carefully, one side and then the other. When she looks at us, the grooves under her eyes are dark.
“Meeting time,” she says, “yeah?”
We ring around her. It could be any evening, any meeting. We have passed so many nights like this, huddled around an old motel TV, watching battle playbacks and tossing strategies back and forth. But tonight the pamphlet curls in her hands as she speaks.
“It’s like this. I got an email earlier, from my sponsors. They said anyone who participates, we’re done. There’s a clause about strikes, you know? Apparently. Some little clause buried in that mountain of paperwork.” She takes a breath. “So we can’t do this. It’s not about what I want. You get that, right? It’s not about losing one battle tomorrow. It’s losing everything. Okay?”
Everything.
Only Lachen and I know the full weight of that. We watched the small girl who chatted loudly with her rookidee and zigzagoon, oblivious to every annoyed look, grow still and watchful. I remember perching on her lap in a room of endless mirrors the day they first took a hot brand to her hair and forced it to fall straight. I was there when a man with mandibuzz eyes settled his hand below her waist and did not move it—she did not move and I did not move, and afterward she stood in front of the bathroom sink and didn’t cry.
“Okay?” she says again, but Lachen snorts and slinks away into his pokeball, the red flash serving as his voiceless rejoinder. Kiki’s shoulders sag.
No, I do not like Lachen. In this moment, perhaps I even hate him.
When nobody else moves, Kiki lets out a small breath through her teeth. “Our opponent tomorrow is sponsorship junk too. Believe me, she’s not going to be a hero about this.”
I am named after a hero, but I don’t believe in them. I shuffle to her side and curve out my wing so that she can lean against it. I am the only one who can feel how she trembles.
Kiki is not like me—she has no metal armor. But I have watched her make her own. This armor is constructed from the hard tilt of her chin, the gold bangles in her ears, the silk wound around her neck.
They laughed at her, the first time she tried to enter a tournament.
“Who’s your sponsor?”
“No sponsor,” she said.
“No sponsor?” the receptionist repeated, mocking as a chatot. “Fine, how about you pay me, then? Fifty thousand dollars, how about that?” And she couldn’t contain herself: she howled.
Kiki said nothing, but she vibrated where she stood. Every curse, every angry exclamation, it was like she released them on the inside, where they rattled furiously, a trapped hurricane.
“Fifty thousand,” she told us afterwards, her hands balled into fists. “Fifty thousand and watch me.”
It became her mantra, everytime we were turned away, everytime the men and women in official uniforms slid their gazes past her and made their silent, uncontestable decision about who mattered and who did not.
“Thanks, Zaz,” Kiki murmurs, for only me to hear. When she opens her eyes, she’s strong again. “We should all get some rest for tomorrow.”
In the middle of the night I snap awake with the unsettled feeling of a half-formed thought. Outside the window, the clouds have relented, leaving the moon the full stage of the sky. A warm weight is wrapped around my ruff.
“Lachen?” I rumble drowsily. In answer, his wet nose butts against my cheek. When we were small, we slept together, my body cushioned against his thick fur. Even when my feathers turned to steel, he persisted in the arrangement; under all the metal, he said, I was still warm. “What are you doing?”
“She’s not going to send me out tomorrow.”
“Of course not. You’ve made it perfectly clear what you’ll do. What you won’t do.”
“Yes.” He shifts position on my neck. “Zaz . . . would you really do it? Fight someone who won’t fight back?”
It’s an honest question, stripped of any rhetoric or declaiming, so I answer him honestly. “I don’t know. But it won’t happen.”
“You’re so sure.” For the first time, I hear real despair in his voice. “Why are you so sure?”
. . . I think about my mother.
When I was two moons old, I noticed that she flew askew. That evening, I pulled back her beautiful steeled feathers until I found a patch of brutally mottled skin. With that discovery, other mysteries of life slotted into place; I understood why we flew only at night and why mother hunkered down when the taxis passed overhead.
“What was it like?” I asked.
She didn’t answer me, not then.
But the day I left the nest, she said, “It’s like a pebble caught inside your heart,” and I did not have to ask her what she meant.
Over the years, I have passed many taxi stations. Nobody ever greets me.
I never greet them.
But I have been silent for too long. Lachen’s light snore returns me from my thoughts. I listen for some time to his chuffing, whistling sleep, and remember that I do not hate him after all, not even a little, but there are some things he will never understand.
It is time.
I woke before the sun, feeling the anticipation spread through my pinions like a golden wave of light. I stood by Kiki’s side as she put on her armor, sparred with the reporters who dot the corridors outside the contestants’ quarters.
Now it is my turn to fight. The bursting light resolves into the clamor of the stadium, but I am too experienced to pay that any heed. I have eyes for nothing except my opponent: a lean ninetales.
I lose a moment cursing Lachen—he should be the one standing here, quick-footed and unafraid of fire, not me. Lasting the three minutes before at-will switches are permitted will not be easy work.
The ninetales returns my gaze steadily. As the referee counts down to the commencement of the match, she settles back on her haunches.
I freeze. The countdown expires; no fire flashes my way. The ninetales lowers her head until it rests on her paws—an unmoving target. I could end this match now with a single Brave Bird.
“Get up.” The roughness of my voice startles me. “What are you doing? Get up and fight.”
Her eyes are placid. “There’s a strike today. Did you not know?”
“Don’t be absurd. We have sponsors. We can’t afford to strike. Neither can you. Don’t you know your trainer has them too?”
I look at the ninetales’ trainer, but she has her arms crossed and she doesn’t look surprised.
“She told me it’s my choice. And I’m choosing to strike.”
Frustrated, I sharpen my talons against the rocky battlefield. “Why? What do you expect to achieve? Do you really think the world will change just because you sat still on the dirt for a few minutes?”
“I had a sister once,” the ninetails says. And it’s as if all the fire she didn’t release onto the battlefield has been reserved for her voice. An inferno crackles in it. “I cleaned her ears each morning. Then one morning I woke up and I didn’t have a sister anymore. No one asked us first. And there is nothing I can ever do that will hurt them in the way they hurt me, but at least I can do this. For a single day, the world will not run according to their plan.”
She closes her eyes, and for a moment, I too am lost in a memory. A few weeks before my feathers turned to steel, we fought a street battle and drew a small crowd. After our victory, one man lingered, his gaze fixed on me. He drew Kiki aside and began to speak with her in a low voice. I saw him flash his wallet. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but that minute seemed to contain my entire life. Then Kiki was back by my side, hustling us down the street.
“What a creep,” she said later, as the three of us tore into a pasty. “He wanted—”
But she couldn’t say it. Maybe saying it would have meant acknowledging that she’d had the power to say yes as well as no.
That night, Lachen said, “I wonder what she’d have done if it had been fifty thousand.”
I wheeled around and struck him. My wing made a dull thwap as it connected with his skull; surprised hurt bloomed in his eyes. He didn’t understand. There are some things you cannot ask, cannot wonder. If you do, you will go mad.
There is only one story my mother ever told me.
Once, when the world was new, two proud heroes quarreled over the wind. Their battle transformed the land: gouged out valleys, erected mountains. In the end, the Crowned Sword gained the advantage. She pressed Zamazenta relentlessly, until she had no strength left to resist but could only await the final strike.
From the trees, a corvisquire watched them fight—the fearsome combat had frightened her into hiding. But she could not stay silent when she saw that the Crowned Sword intended to strike one who was helpless. She shot down from the branches and took the blow herself.
Her sacrifice brought the battle to an end. The Crowned Sword was humbled; she lay down her sword and departed the land, never to be seen again by earthly eyes. But Zamazenta touched her crown to the dying corvisquire and blessed her with these words.
“You shielded me. For this, you will forever be a shield.”
Kiki’s earrings jangle behind me as she shifts her weight.
“Zaz,” she says beneath her breath, “what are you doing?”
I first met her outside Motostoke Stadium as dusk was setting in. Her jacket was purple and shiny, and it wasn’t doing much against the evening wind. She threw the last of her sandwich to the birds and burst into laughter when I chased off a gaggle of plump pidove. When I was full, I nested in her hair, and she ran a gentle finger down my belly. That night, we made a promise, though I never put it into words until now: that she would ask and I would obey, but that she would not ask and would never ask for what I could not give.
“Zaz,” Kiki says again, except I don’t hear Kiki anymore. Now it’s Velvet speaking, a warning in her voice.
If I could, I would tell her that my name describes a shield. That I was born to freedom, but my mother was not free. I would tell her I understand, and I am sorry.
I tuck in my wings and bow my beak.
And when she speaks the command, I forgive her.
