One Life

TWO

. . .

. . .SINCE I WAS young, One Life has ruled my dreams.

Every year, the Onasa and the Vale each submit four girls and four boys between the ages of fourteen and nineteen to compete in a race in which they must fight to retrieve five tickets, or Holopasses, that grant them the opportunity to live in Sector One. The first pass is found in a city in the host sector, which alternates yearly between Sectors Two and Three, and the hunt for the next three carries the contestants across the sector. The last is found in the Aura, and only one pair, from one sector, can win it. Only they can stay.

One Life earns its name from the ironic fact that it grants one extra life. Auran technology makes the contestants able to kill their competitors with their Blessings, but those killed are not truly dead; merely failures, sent home to regret.

The winners? Wealth, fame, glory, and everything in between; safety from droughts and fires and blizzards and freeze. The winners find paradise in the Aura.

Father said the competition was a gift to us from the elusive leaders of Atla living in Sector One. It is a chance for every Atlan to show appreciation to the people who saved us after the Anchoring, the event that eradicated almost everything and everyone—except Atla. The OLC is a blessing, like the gifts the sectors received from the sun and the moon respectively.

"The same way you nurture your fire, the way you value it—this is what you must do with this chance," Father once said.

Neros Arderis intended to win the One Life Competition and go to the Aura. I know he did, and he could've if it weren't for the Night Rebellion. He was called to service at seventeen, lost his arm to a Vaeli savage at eighteen, and lost his "chance" at nineteen, the official cut-off for the One Life draw.

My sister, born during those dark times, is gone. Like my father, she encountered a coward Vaeli, just months after starting her training with the Atla Guard in the Onasa's north four years ago. Only she didn't live to tell the tale.

I am the last one. I have to go to the Aura.

Mila, my maid, helps me put on my ear and nose rings. Hoops, diamond diath rings, other gold adornments, and soon my head feels heavy with the weight of tradition. She spins me to face my vanity mirror.

I have on my finest dress—a pale white with gold and red accents, for my Singe Blessing. My piercings gleam in the sunlight. Charcoal black painted around my eyelids, for a fiercer impression.

One strand of my auburn hair is out of place.

I stand up, pacing past Mila without apprehension for the piercing hot gust I brush her with. As a Serventa—Vaeli immigrants allowed into the Onasa for a more comfortable life, in return for their servitude—she is not and never will be accustomed to the heat of my sector, or the heat I produce. Just from getting me ready for the Draw, hair has sticked to her pale forehead and her white suit is sweat through.

I might feel bad, but Mila does all of this with a smile. She's grateful to be here. Grateful to have escaped the frozen, impoverish wasteland that is the Vale, a lucky minority to be welcomed into the Onasa. She gets to work for the Supreme Guardian, live in the hills of the capital city, and never worry about when she'll eat. So, Mila smiles.

"Don't worry, Miss Valerie," she says, her big blue eyes gazing into mine. "You look perfect. Today will be perfect."

I take a deep breath. Smoke plumes out of my nose. Focus.