Apex Five: Mech Elite novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cut
Dane drops Wynne from the Apex Five on live broadcast, she calls the Gate Challenge and scraps the first frame. Dane dares her to scrap all four.
Dane Pryce cut me from the Apex Five on live broadcast, two minutes before the Meridian Cup final.
Forty thousand people watched him do it.
I was in the pit with my helmet under my arm and my blade frame already warm behind me.
That morning Dane had fixed my collar himself and told me I was the reason we would win.
At breakfast Mira had squeezed my hand and told me, "Whatever he says up there, trust him. He has a plan for us."
I had believed her, because she was my best friend.
Now she stood three steps behind Dane on the pit stage and looked at her boots.
"Wynne Calder is stepping down for sync instability," Dane told the camera, in the same easy voice he used to thank sponsors. "The team thanks her for four years of service."
The crowd made a sound I will never forget.
It was not a gasp.
It was forty thousand people deciding I was the problem.
"Dane," I said, loud enough for the mic on his collar. "We're three years in. What is this?"
He didn't turn his head.
"Security," he said. "Walk her out."
Two guards took my arms.
A third reached past me and pulled the team badge off my chest, pin and all.
My frame went up on the cart behind me, and the Pryce Dynamics crew started stripping its core.
My frame.
I had spent two years building the blade it carried, at night, in a scrapyard, with burns on both hands.
Mira finally looked up.
She mouthed, "Don't make a scene."
That was when I stopped being scared.
I pulled my right arm out of the guard's grip, and I went for my kit bag instead of the exit.
The blade hilt was in the side pocket, where it always was.
Nobody had thought to take it, because it wasn't League property.
It was mine.
The guards lunged, and I ran.
Past the cameras, past the sponsor wall, past the tunnel that led out to the street.
I ran the other way, toward the open Ring, where the League's oldest law still hung over the gate in iron letters.
*Any licensed pilot may call out a ranked team on the night of a final. The loser's frames belong to the winner as scrap.*
Nobody had used it in nine years.
I hit the red challenge post with the flat of my hand and the whole stadium lit up.
"Wynne Calder, license four-one-seven, calls the Gate Challenge," I said into the post. "On every frame in the Apex Five."
The announcer stopped mid-word.
On the big screens, Dane's smile slipped for the first time in his life.
Hob Garrity was waiting at the Ring gate with his old junker frame, Old Nail, idling behind him with its paint peeling.
Hob had raised me in his scrapyard since I was eleven.
He had built Old Nail out of a farm tractor and a crane.
"I saw it on the yard feed," he said. "I figured you'd want a ride."
"You figured right."
"It has one good arm, Wyn. The other one is a prayer."
"I only need one."
I climbed into the cockpit and the cradle closed around my head.
Out of habit, I woke Old Nail's core first, five seconds before anything else in the Ring.
Dane had made me do that in every match for four years.
He called it his luck ritual, and I had always thought it was sweet.
The four Apex frames walked out of the far gate in a diamond, silver and white, with the Pryce Dynamics crest on every shoulder.
Dane's command frame led.
Mira's artillery frame took the left wing.
The scout and the heavy gunner, who had both let the guards drag me out without a word, filled the back.
Dane's voice came over the open channel, warm and amused.
"One junker against four Apex frames, Wynne. You'll embarrass yourself."
"I'm already embarrassed," I said. "I dated you."
Someone in the stands laughed, and then more of them did.
The bell went.
I didn't wait.
I charged across the Ring with the blade hilt locked into Old Nail's good arm, and the plasma edge came up blue and screaming.
The scout's frame turned to meet me.
Its cannon swung and then it just stopped, mid-turn, with every light on its chest still glowing.
I did not ask why.
I brought the blade down across its shoulder and through its core, and the frame came apart in two halves and hit the Ring floor in a cloud of sparks.
The scout's pilot screamed over the channel.
Nobody fired at me.
I turned to the other three.
Dane's frame had stopped dead in the center of the diamond, its arms hanging.
Mira's artillery frame was frozen with its cannon half raised.
The heavy gunner's frame shook where it stood, and nothing in it answered him.
All three of them were awake.
All three of them were watching me come.
The stadium lights went red.
Guard frames began to roll out of the tunnels at both ends of the Ring.
Dane's voice came over the channel again, and for the first time that night it shook.
"Go ahead, Wynne," he said. "Scrap all four. Then see what's left of you."
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