Sirena took George by the hand to guide him in the dark since they would be using a bank of elevators different from the one that they normally used to ascend to Floor 118, a bank of elevators set off an inner hallway away from the Wonderdome city lights coming in through the windows. With his human eyes, once they left the illumination provided by the windows, George needed the assistance. George realized that they had never once used interior lights on Floor 118 and he didn’t even know where the light switches were located on the walls if he ever wanted to. Each floor of the skyscraper was laid out according to a similar pattern until Floor 118. Floor 118 broke the mold. This new bank of elevators didn’t correspond to the layout of the other floors. Once they got inside, the elevator was lit so that George could see the control panel only had buttons for Floor 118 and above, and for five basement levels below the entire building. There were no buttons for any of the building’s ‘nor

Outside the building containing the Genetics Institute, Floor 118, and the animal pit fighting arena, George’s head began to clear. Barolias Festival Week was going on, so even though it was either the end of the Period of Family or the beginning of the Period of Sleep, distant music could be heard from block parties with dancing and merriment. Dancing and merriment. George wondered how those things fit into Sirena’s theories about power as an end in life and not merely a means. He’d been dancing with her. He knew she enjoyed beauty. Or did she? George turned and followed the music, finding a block party of Festival revelers. The live band had begun a slow love song. Couples swayed to the gentle, haunting sounds of the instruments, some vibrating strings made from carefully treated whale sinews, some giant hollow shells reverberating with deep percussive sounds when struck, and other shells either naturally shaped as or carefully crafted into sonorous horns. George recalled the dan

George was about to run in fear as the towering stone figure stepped off its pedestal toward him. What stopped him was that he saw that the statue was bending down, reaching toward him with its palms open upward, offering him its staff. The expression on the statue’s face did not change. It didn’t speak. It only moved to offer him the staff and then stopped, waiting for him to take it. George thought the staff must be impossibly heavy, for it looked like it was made of the same kind of stone as the statue, coral limestone with nacre inlays, and it was proportioned for a person of the same unrealistically large size as the statue. George reached out for the staff anyway. When his hands clasped it, the staff shuddered. It shrank down to a proportional size for him. It also changed in composition from coral limestone to wood, honest to the gods wood, like from a tree in the surface world. The staff also made spluttering noises, as if a person had been deeply asleep and was being roused

The roar of the crowd at the public-pool-turned-combat-arena washed over George like a tidal wave, thousands of sea elves had come, more than had been there on the first day when the ill-fated Kraken versus Nautilus match had taken place. George gripped the edge of his seat, his learning pad forgotten in his lap, its screen still glowing with Maverick’s diagnostic readouts. The Barolias Festival was back in full swing. The arena was a spectacle of red and gold streamers, their colors rippling under bioluminescent lights that mimicked the ocean’s depths.The mood was jubilant enough on the surface. George supposed it seemed like the atmosphere of Barolias Festival Week any other year, but there were a few serious faces in the crowd, worried faces. After breakfast at Nereia’s, George had made his way across Wonderdome as fast as he could. As he had made this way through the city, he had noticed that, if one stepped away from the music and cheering and dancing, and listened to the talk

Maverick dodged, rolling to one side, and a new compartment in his chest sprang open, ejecting a net woven from synthetic kelp fibers. The net tangled one of the Leviathan’s claws, slowing it, and the crowd roared approval.George’s pulse steadied. Maverick was holding his own, but the Leviathan’s armor was thick, its titanium plates deflecting the tridents’ thrusts. George knew what came next. “Get serious, Maverick,” he whispered. As if hearing him, Maverick retreated a step, his right arm whirring as another hidden panel opened. Out slid his deadliest weapon: a monofilament-edged sword, its blade so thin it was nearly invisible, its edge capable of slicing through most armor like whale milk cheesecake. The crowd hushed, sensing a shift. Even Anemone leaned forward, her breath catching. “What’s that?” she asked.“His best shot,” George said, pride swelling. He’d spent weeks perfecting the sword’s edge, using nanotech to align the monofilament’s molecular structure. It was science at