Chapter 10: The Gamemaker's First Disaster — Fire in the Eastern Stands

The fire starts at the edge of his vision.

He sees it before he smells it — a particular quality of orange at the amphitheater's far eastern wall, too steady to be sunrise, too uniform to be anything natural — and then the smell arrives, synthetic in a way that actual fire is not, carrying beneath the woodsmoke a chemical sweetness, something accelerant and deliberate, and he has time to think: *there she is*, meaning Seraphine Voss, meaning the hand that moves behind the arena's apparent physics, before the fire stops being a distant quality of orange and becomes instead a fact.

It moves fast. That is the first thing he genuinely did not anticipate. He has read about wildfire — he has read about most things — but reading about the rate of spread is categorically unlike watching stone seats ignite as if they have been waiting years for permission. The eastern wing catches in long diagonal lines, the fire following channels of accelerant he cannot see, and the smoke comes next, thick and grey-white and moving with the wind the Gamemakers have apparently also engineered, pushing it inland, pushing it toward the amphitheater's center.