Apex Five: Mech Elite novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Terms

Ronan's contract, the Black Meridian hangar, Hob, and a blade core still pulling at four dead frames.

I said yes.

I said it on the open channel, loud enough for every speaker in the stadium to carry it.

"Wynne Calder, license four-one-seven, flies for Black Meridian."

The guard frames stopped where they stood.

Alder Pryce lowered his microphone, and I watched his calm face go flat.

A league referee in the tunnel held up a tablet and nodded.

The filing was real.

Ronan Hale walked his black frame backward out of the Ring with Old Nail limping beside it.

Behind us, Dane's command frame still hung in the center of the stadium, awake and helpless.

The cameras did not leave it for a second.

The Black Meridian hangar was a converted shipping warehouse at the end of Dock Nine, with a dozen frames chained along one wall and a kitchen table in the middle of the floor.

Ronan climbed out of his cockpit without hurrying.

He was taller than he looked on screen, with short dark hair and grey eyes and the scarred left forearm everyone talked about.

He looked me over once, top to bottom, and said nothing about my shaking hands.

"Sit," he said.

"I'll stand."

"Then stand over there. Hob Garrity is coming through the door and he's carrying something."

The side door banged open.

Hob walked in with his welding cap crooked and a long grey case in both arms, and he looked like he had been crying and was furious about it.

"You crazy girl," he said. "You crazy, stupid, wonderful girl."

He set the case on the table and pulled me into a hug that smelled like solder.

"I thought they'd take the frame," I said into his shoulder.

"They took the frame," Hob said. "They did not take the core."

He opened the case.

Inside, wrapped in a shop towel, sat my blade frame's core, the dull silver sphere I had built in his yard when I was nineteen.

I had watched the Pryce crew carry it away on a cart.

"How?"

"I told the loader it was a bad capacitor," Hob said. "He believed me. Men like that believe anything said by a man in overalls."

Ronan stood at the end of the table with his arms folded.

"Here are the terms," he said.

I turned on him.

"I haven't agreed to terms."

"You agreed on the open channel. Forty thousand witnesses." He slid a single page across the table. "Three matches for Black Meridian, starting with the qualifier on Friday. You get a frame, a bunk and a quarter of the purse. I get your blade."

"My blade is not for sale."

"I'm not buying it. I'm borrowing it."

"And the touching?"

I don't know why I asked that.

Ronan raised one eyebrow.

"The cockpit is the only place we touch," he said. "Everything outside it is business. Nobody asks about the link."

"What link?"

"Any link. Yours, mine, or why your old team's frames wake after yours does."

The room went very quiet.

I looked at him for a long moment.

"You watched that?"

"I watch everything," Ronan said. "Four years of Apex footage. You always woke first. Dane always called it luck."

"He said it was a superstition."

"It isn't."

"Then what is it?"

"No questions," he said. "That's the third rule."

I picked up the pen.

It was a bad idea, and I knew it, and I signed.

Hob read over my shoulder and grunted.

"I don't like him," he said, loudly, to Ronan. "He's too clean."

"I'm very dirty," Ronan said, without any expression at all. "Ask anyone who's flown against me."

Hob almost smiled.

I carried my core to the work bench and set it on the cradle stand.

The moment my fingers left the sphere, it woke.

A faint blue pulse ran through it, once, then again, then in a steady rhythm I knew better than my own heartbeat.

I had never seen a dead core do that.

"Hob."

He leaned in, and the grin dropped off his face.

"Wyn, that thing's not powered."

"I know."

"It's not even plugged in."

"I know."

Ronan crossed the hangar.

He looked down at the pulsing blue light, and for the first time since I had met him he looked surprised.

"It's still pulling," he said softly.

"On what?"

He said nothing.

Hob swiped the screen on the bench monitor and ran a diagnostic.

Four tiny signatures bloomed on it, one beside the other, in a row.

Four frames that should have been silent.

The scout, the heavy, Mira's artillery, and Dane's command frame.

My core was pulling on all four of them, and all four of them were pulling back.

Across the hangar, the television on the wall switched to a news banner, bright red.

*BREAKING: Pryce Dynamics announces a new Apex Five. Challenge Black Meridian in the Cup semifinal, in six days.*

Alder Pryce stood in front of a wall of cameras, smiling, with his son beside him.

Dane was looking straight into the lens.

He was looking straight at me.

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