I don't usually post author's notes, but I figured I would today! (follow this username on Wattpad for regular updates regarding CDA) I just wanted to say that I hope ya'll are enjoying this fanfic. Feel free to leave some reviews regarding what you're loving about this fic, as well as any suggestions/questions you might have! As always, I hope this chapter is pleasurable to read. :)
Perhaps half an hour later, the car parks after a series of starts and stops and turns.
Another moment later, I have the sense that somebody's opened the door to my side, and my suspicions are confirmed when the headphones are yanked off my head along with my blindfold.
"What's up, Princess?"
A smiling Tyton Jesper greats me, though his smile isn't the kind that I like. It's sarcastic, and when it's paired with his spiked silver hair, I have half the reason to punch him in the face. He knows I don't like it when he calls me that.
But instead, I only unbuckle my seatbelt and heave myself out of the Mercedes. I give Tyton an equally contemptuous smile. "Can I ask you a question, Tyton?"
"Of course you can, Princess."
I bristle at the title yet again, but choosing to ignore it, I ask my question. "How do manage to be both TikTok famous and a Scarlet Street Fighter? Aren't there a bunch of crazy girls out on the streets stalking their favorite lame dancer's every move? Or am I wrong about that?"
Tyton scoffs, shutting the door to the Mercedes behind me. "I'm guessing that you're not a fan of TikTok."
"I tend only to be a fan of actual dancing."
"And I tend only to be a fan of what makes the most money," Tyton replies. "Oh, and yes, for the record. There are a bunch of crazy girls who stalk me on a regular basis. But I have my ways of sneaking around the city."
He deflects even better than Cal would a slam like that.
Coming around the car with the older woman who drove us, Shade grins. "Don't be mean to Tyton like that, Mare."
I sneer at my brother. "He started it, Shade."
"Did I?" Tyton asks, crossing his arms. "Princess?"
Oh, he does not like me at all.
Still, I choose to ignore him as I take in where I find myself.
Behind me, an industrial metal door with a line of black and yellow caution stripes guards the exit to the small parking ramp I find myself in; the space is enclosed, stretching two stories up and fifty feet wide. The floors and walls are cement, and the overhead lights are bright. A dozen identical black Mercedes park along both sides of the clinical space, filling in nicely between yellow lines that match the caution stripes.
Distantly, almost as though I'm in a dream and hearing the far-off sounds of reality, a track of music pounds. It comes from above me, the bass of the track bleeding through cement and into my ears. Either I'm about to see one rager of a party, or the Scarlet Street Fighters have something going on underneath a club.
"This way," the woman who drove us beckons, gesturing a gloved hand toward the elevator at the opposite end of the room. "We're going down."
I think of the Academy as we pass through the cavernous room the elevator opens up to.
The compound is dark and grey with dim overhead lights few and far in-between. The cement ground spans as far and as wide as the ballroom of Calore Industries does, but it contains none of the gild. Massive pillars hold up a ceiling that might as well disappear into the night sky, and like Blonos's studio, a wraparound balcony with wrought-iron rails graces the room's second story, meant for observers to watch over whatever happens on the floor.
One side of the space looks like a scary gym, with lines upon lines of dumbbell racks, flat bench presses, and a variety of weight and cardio machines faintly silhouetted in the lights so far overhead. Hallways stem off from this area and that, going who knows where. The biggest flatscreen I've ever seen in my life hangs from the wall in an alcove further down the way, and not so unlike Mister Calore's office, it's surrounded by couches and chairs. To my right, three massive boxing rings rise up from the ground, decked out with ropes and all.
Two shadowy figures practice inside of one, throwing punches with their gloved hands. In the sitting room alcove, more shadowed figures turn their heads at the arrival of me, my brother, the woman, and Tyton. A dozen or so Scarlet Street Fighters work out on the benches and machines to my left.
The more people I see, the more I wonder what's down those other hallways.
The more I have to wonder where I am in the first place other than below a raucous club.
In the center of the compound lies something out of a gymnastics facility. Red carpeting, that I quickly realize bounces like that of a gymnastics floor, sprawls from the weights to the boxing rings. Behind that stands a series of beams meant to practice the sort of crap Farley was trying when she ran across the balcony railing five stories above Calore Industries. Bars for learning flips and ropes for climbing await in another corner.
I wish that I couldn't imagine a context where a Scarlet Street Fighter needs to know how to somersault from one building to another or scale a rain gutter in an alley, but I can.
Tyton takes the lead, strolling past the last of the beams. An eerie stairwell waits behind them, going both up and down. From it, I hear new noises.
Mainly the sound of whispering voices.
We descend upon a new hallway, and it becomes clear to me where Cygnet Hydrotech's stolen things went this summer.
The first room we pass looks like that of a news center, where ten-or-so men and women typing away at computers—some sitting at desks, others sitting against walls or lying on the carpeted floor—glance between their screens and those of the dozen muted TVs bolted across the far wall.
They could be hacking, investigating, or putting together reports on who knows what about the Scarlet Street Fighters at the moment. I really couldn't say.
As it turns out, they do a hell of a lot more than fight.
The air down here is cold, and I'm glad for the coat I wear, even if it makes me stand out between Shade and Tyton. My Converse gently pad across the concrete floor, while the boots of Shade, Tyton, and the older woman—who goes by Nanny, apparently—clunk away as though my companions are trying to let people know we're here.
We pass by more rooms. Some hold shadowed offices that don't contain much other than computers, filing cabinets, and the occasional dying plant. Another holds spare training clothes and washing machines, and the one after that has cabinets and fridges of food. Then there are the doors that are shut and locked altogether. I imagine that somewhere around here is a pretty impressive armory.
I cross my arms as Tyton takes the lead again, turning sharply into the next room on my right. I try to shed the skin of the Midtown girl that I so often find myself becoming and remember who I actually am.
The room we enter is red and black, an onyx conference table and a dozen rolling chairs at its center. The floor is still cement, but a couple of crimson rugs have been thrown across the empty portions to liven up the room. Mismatched couches and chairs sit off to the edges, and a couple of plug-in heaters emit warm air from nearby. If only for dramatic appearances, the lamps hanging from the ceiling give off neon red light, casting the room into the color of a Shirley Temple.
Scarlet Street Fighters indeed.
Tyton branches off from us and heads to the center table, where he takes a seat beside Ada Wallace, one of the Street Fighters I met at Shade's apartment. Nanny goes to a spare seat on the right half of the room, and Shade and I head left.
The next thing I know, I'm plopping down in one of the couches set off to the side, and my best friend, Kilorn Warren, is smiling gleefully right back at me. His eyes are turned brown in the red light.
I think of Ptolemus telling Blonos that everything will be back to normal by the week's end and Blonos telling Ptolemus that she'd believe him if not for the gauze pad beneath his shirt.
"You shouldn't have come up to me like that, Kilorn," I tell him, giving him a little slap on the shoulder when I come up with nothing else to say. I'm only now realizing how long it's been since I've really seen my friend, and those two months of time steal any words of substance away.
Kilorn's smile pinches itself into a thin line. "I couldn't exactly resist myself, Mare."
I huff, crossing my arms yet again before staring straight forward. I may no longer have the right to be angry with Kilorn for becoming a Street Fighter, but that doesn't mean I can't find new reasons. And that little stunt he pulled with the rosé at the gala is reason enough.
I recognize three of the twelve people at the center table. Farley, still sporting a chin bruise that turns questionable colors in the red light, sits to the side of a man at the head of the table. He wears an eyepatch over his right eye. Tyton and Ada Wallace sit farther down on the opposite side, Tyton with his head tilted back so that he can stare up at the ceiling, Ada with her nose just about pressed into the laptop she has on the table.
The entire room has around fifty people inside of it. Most of the Scarlet Street Fighters wear black, and some of them don't even deign to take off their sunglasses. Like Blonos's morning technique class, a few here or there mumble among themselves, but most stay quiet, content to cross their arms and stare ahead with frowns written upon their faces. It doesn't take much effort to sort those who are like Farley, bulky and muscular and ready to fight at a moment's notice, from those who serve different roles.
As spies, as hackers, and as God knows what else.
As God knows what I'll become.
"I know you couldn't," I admit a moment later. "I know you don't have that kind of self-control." I turn my body towards him. "But I'm glad you're safe, you know."
Kilorn, seeming to feel the same way about not having seen me in so long, opens his mouth.
But at the same moment in time, the door to the gloomy hallway swings shut by an invisible force. The absence of the yellow light makes the red bulbs more intense, more suffocating, and it's as though I'm one of the nocturnal creatures in a zoo, always under those red heat lamps.
"We should talk later," Kilorn mutters to me in my ear just as the man with the eyepatch slaps both of his hands down on the board table. "Like, we have a lot to catch up on."
I only nod, feeling that so much as a whisper would earn me a glare from the man.
"Alright," he says with a gruff, deep voice. "Let's get started."
I lean my chin into my fist, finding myself too interested in what's going on.
The Scarlet Street Fighters at the center table—along with the occasional interjection from somebody on a couch—are currently dissecting everything that happened on Saturday evening.
Now, they replay bodycam footage from the Street Fighters who were part of the attack. I bow my head with the rest of the Street Fighters as Tristan's descent into a sea of marble and glass replays, as though seeing it the first time wasn't enough. Both Farley and Kilorn's bodycams, unfortunately, got knocked off at the time of their tackles to the ground, but from what I hear, it doesn't sound like anything interesting followed. To no avail, Dane Davidson interrogated them for the better part of a couple of hours, and Kilorn stayed silent while Farley mocked the police chief.
Like Tyton told me on Sunday, the explosion wasn't meant to kill that man on the bridge, and everybody here acknowledges that. They swallow as a bodycam manages to capture the moment when a mighty gust of air from the grenade throws the gala guest from his kneel and to the stone-cold marble thirty feet below. It turns out that there were Street Fighters on the ground corralling guests this way and that to get them away from the wall; they had it timed so that nobody was supposed to be in the grenade's vicinity, and it almost worked. The bodyguards were casualties of war, they say.
The NYPD was right. The Scarlet Street Fighters escaped through the parking garage, most of them mad-dashing out and into the safety of nearby parked vans. Farley and Kilorn were the only ones who had to go with Plan B, which of course involved me and Shade.
Ada Wallace, who was majoring in computer science at MIT before she dropped out, deciding—and I quote—that she was wasting her time when she already knew how to hack, led the operation to take control of Calore Industries' computers. That's why the Street Fighters could turn the lights and cameras on and off at their will and whim. They were ghosts, even though everyone could see them.
What happened on Saturday was indeed a warning and an attack.
But it was a third thing as well.
A damn distraction.
"In the minutes before the clock struck ten, a secret force infiltrated Calore Industries and broke into Tiberias Calore's office, for those of you who don't know," the man with the eyepatch says. He nods towards the projection screen in the now-dark room, showing scanned images of the blueprint copies Maven gave Farley at the Loeb Boathouse. "We were able to gather a number of files."
What are on those files eludes me.
I've come to the conclusion that if a Scarlet Street Fighter doesn't say anything more at first, they don't intend to. I lean back on the couch, knowing that I won't be finding anything out about the stolen files from Mister Calore's downtown office this evening.
In time, Tyton said. In time, I'll understand that everything that I'm doing—or soon to be doing, as indicated by the pointed glance the man with the eyepatch gave me earlier upon talking about the Academy's gala—will make sense, and it will be worth it. Whatever future damning role I will play for the Scarlet Street Fighters scares me every bit as much as the shadows do in this place, as much as the dark did at Calore Industries. But I don't let myself close my eyes, intent to stare at the board table in front of me and focus on the present.
Ignoring the future.
More interestingly, I have also concluded that the one-eyed man is Farley's father, based on the repeated scowls she gives him, the fact that he calls her 'kid' every chance he gets, and the murderous glare he gave Shade when he chuckled at a comment Diana made.
All those years ago, he was the one who got too close to whatever the Calores were doing. He lost his wife and daughter for it, and somewhere along the timeline between then and now, he lost an eye too.
Cool.
I try to catch the names of the unknown men and women at the table, but they're already slipping like quicksand from my mind. The man goes by Ram, Farley goes by Lamb—that alone is another clue to their connection—another woman at the table is referred to as Swan, and I note the names of Horizon and Drummer. It's all in code for their protection, and it gives me the sense that I'm in the presence of some fairly dangerous people this evening.
It's only a question of how dangerous they are compared to Mister Calore and his cronies.
While they won't tell me what's in those files, I know something, that Swan, at least, doesn't. She asks where the blueprints of Calore Industries came from, and Farley merely responded with "a source."
A source, meaning Maven Calore.
He, I suppose, is our greatest weapon that nobody trusts at all.
Shade told me that I could have an hour to talk to my best friend before we had to leave.
That leaves Kilorn and me sitting atop one of the balance beams upstairs, me kicking my legs back and forth just as I would if we were sitting on the lip of our apartment roof.
Just glancing at him, I can tell that he's changed. Kilorn's been living here all this time, learning and training with the Scarlet Street Fighters until they deemed him good enough to go on the front lines this weekend. He can tumble, sprint, and lift a hell of a lot more than he used to be able to. I can tell that he's bulked out a bit from whatever they have him doing here, and his eyes have a new look to them. They look something between hardened and brightened. I'm not sure which. Kilorn also claims that, despite his subpar performance against Ptolemus Samos at the gala, he does in fact know how to shoot a gun.
"What are they like?" Kilorn asks after a lapse of silence between us.
I didn't have to fill him in like he did me. I guess that Shade already told him about how I wound up auditioning, and there isn't much to the rest of my story. Just practices by myself that begin at dawn, an endless number of pointe shoes, and a fouetté contest with a bitch named Evangeline.
Though I know who he asks about, Kilorn elaborates. "I mean, Maven and Cal. Before I came over with the rosé, it looked like you were having a good time with them."
If I recall, I was actually bickering with Cal over contemporary, but whatever.
I shrug, pursing my lips as I stare out at the Scarlet Street Fighters' lair.
I'm not sure which part of my life seems more ridiculous and insane at the moment when I spend my days dancing in Times Square with the Calore brothers and my evenings in situations like these.
The training grounds make me feel small, just like Cal and the auditorium do, even when Mister Calore told me earlier today that I can fill a stage so well by myself.
"They're great," I tell Kilorn, forgetting where I am and what I'm supposed to be while I'm here. I don't even bother to think about Cal and his aggravating smile or his love of contemporary or the pack of bubble gum he said I could buy him. "They're nice. I'm serious, Kilorn."
Still, Kilorn looks at me skeptically. "Really?"
He knows the situation I'm in with Maven, and he knows just as well as I that Cal is a great wildcard in this game that we're playing.
I give my best friend a meaningful look. "They've changed my perspective of what I thought people like them were like. People like the rich boys who paralyzed my dad. Maven and Cal are different, I think."
You think.
My words are venom, and my words are poisonous. I say them anyway.
Knowing no more about the Calores than I did this morning, I see no reason why not to say them.