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  Niko lunged. He came in with a three-punch combo that could have dropped a donkey.

  But Emily wasn’t there.

  She spun away, pushing off his forearm as it careened by and stepping forward, throwing a quick jab into his kidney as she passed him. One, two, three steps. Then she planted her feet and turned back to face him as he came around like an eighteen-wheeler turning onto a residential side street.

  “Tsk, tsk.” She shook an index finger at him. “That’s hardly the way to approach a lover. What happened to radical consent, Nikito?”

  This time he tried to grab her, knowing that if he could get her on the ground, his weight and strength would be nearly insurmountable advantages. But Emily ducked the grapple, stomping on his instep and then pushing off his hip to bounce off the ropes and back into the middle of the ring.

  She blew him a kiss.

  He limped on the next charge and she dodged to force him onto the weak foot, air hissing between his clenched teeth as nerves twinged. Even so, he was close this time, a finger snagging her shoulder and coming away with a brilliant smear of glitter.

  Rizal had taught her the importance of combat as theater. But at some point in every fight, the audience receded. Thoughts, anxieties, expectations—everything beyond the ring faded away. There was only this cone of light, only this mat beneath her feet, only this deadly dance.

  As they advanced, retreated, twisted, and thrust, Emily felt for the underlying cadence. She imagined the 1973 house party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Fires gutting the surrounding housing projects, residents fleeing a world intent on forgetting their very existence to find respite in each other, in community, in music. DJ Kool Herc had improvised at the turntable, scratching the record to extend the instrumental beat so that people could dance longer and harder to the same groove. The partiers went wild, inventing new moves and riffing off each other in what would one day be called “breaking.” That dingy rec room in the Bronx was the birthplace of hip-hop, and Emily was one of the dancers.

  She explored the breakbeat, let her heart play counterpoint to the bass, allowed the tempo to regulate her movements, knowing that Niko would absorb it through osmosis, unconsciously mirroring her, his reactions governed by the groove. Adrenaline flowed cold as ice. The air was sour with sweat. Emily might die tonight, but for now, right now, she was more alive than ever.

  Block. Jab. Hook. Block. Block. Kick. Block. Dodge.

  Niko responded to her, matched her, fell into the silent rhythm. They were partners. They were tied together at the hip. They were iterations of each other. And then Emily broke the pattern and landed a discordant and vicious kick to the groin.

  Niko grunted and bent over.

  Emily sprang forward, bringing her knee up to meet his descending face, and felt cartilage crumple on impact. She brought a hand down to strike the brachial plexus, and then pushed off his shoulder and away, already five steps ahead, extrapolating trajectories and—

  An iron manacle closed around her ankle.

  Her body jerked to a stop.

  He had her ankle.

  She tried to twist free, but his grip was a vise.

  He had her fucking ankle.

  Fuck.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  He wrenched her ankle, and she spun her body in the air to prevent the joint from breaking, then landed with her hands on the mat. She kicked back with her other heel and hit his navel, forcing a huff of air out of him. But he yanked her ankle savagely, forcing her to hop backward on her hands until he was holding her upside down like a trussed turkey.

  He looked down at her and they made eye contact. His nose was destroyed and blood poured down his face, staining his bared teeth and dripping off his chin. The rage burning behind those dark-brown irises had gone supernova and for a fleeting moment Emily wondered what tragic sequence of events had landed Niko here tonight, what past abuses, deep-seated flaws, or repressed memories might have set him on a path to kill or die for spectacle. There were so many flavors of personal disaster, so many trip wires in this callous universe. It could have been nothing more than an accident of birth, or, like her, it could be entirely his own doing.

  His foot lashed out. She contorted her body, trying to avoid the kick, but she didn’t have enough leverage. At the last second she threw up one arm and the kick landed on her shoulder, setting her deltoid spasming. Shock numbed her, and white-hot pain followed in its wake.

  Another kick knocked the air out of her, and, as she gasped for oxygen, yet another one swiped her arms from under her. She swung freely from her ankle, a sparkling fairy in the grip of a monster.

  She had to move. She had to do something.

  She reached out for his knee and tried to land a grapple. If only she could get close, he wouldn’t be able to hit her and she might be able to create an opportunity to extricate herself. There were pressure points she could strike, flesh she could bite, anything to take back the initiative.

  But he saw it coming, snatched her other ankle, and swung her whole body around like a proud father playing helicopter with a favorite child. Air whooshed past her and the world spun, spun, spun, and then—

  Wham.

  He slammed her down onto the mat and fireworks went off inside her head. But before she could catch her breath, she was airborne again.

  Wham. Wham. Wham.

  The world faded and she was fifteen years old again, stepping into the Houston drug den where Javier and Rosa’s junkie mother had taken them. The reek of piss and body odor. Limp bodies scattered around the room, their owners’ minds floating in dissociative bliss. Javier and his younger sister huddling behind a rotting couch. Emily had funneled her crippling doubt and fear into a facade of fierce certainty, offered their mother a month’s worth of pills, and demanded she sign the paperwork. By pretending to be in control, Emily took control.

  Hard, awkward silences on the long drive back to LA. Flashes of profound weirdness as Rosa and Javier moved into Emily’s house and the three of them joined forces to game the system so they could remain independent, attend school, and scrounge enough money to get by. Seeing Rosa laugh when Javier tickled her one Sunday afternoon and thinking that one day they might even transcend friendship and become a family, the prospect at once terrifying and sublime. The wonder and surprise when she looked back to see that it had come true. Establishing their own code of honor in the absence of anything to guide them. Watching as a community formed around them, the house becoming a home for talented outcasts hoping against hope to build a better future.

  There was nothing more important than this strange new kinship. They had survived the system. They had subverted the system. They had changed the system. How could Emily have forgotten that? How could she possibly have risked severing those sacred ties? How could she have betrayed the family they’d built together?

  A tattooed face swam back into sight. Hoots and catcalls echoed in her ears.

  The ring.

  The fight.

  Niko.

  He held her gently in his arms, supporting her head with one massive hand. He grinned when he saw her blinking groggily up at him. He leaned in close.

  “Cunt,” he growled, apparently lacking a certain flair for creativity. “I am going to teach you a goddamn lesson.”

  Emily reached for her lucky glasses, but they must have flown off. No matter. She almost wanted to thank Niko, to beg him to bring the pain. This was why she was here. To chase exquisite agony as desperately as those losers holed up in Houston.

  Niko dragged her to the side of the ring and pressed her up against the ropes.

  Emily struggled, but her limbs shook and her strength had evaporated.

  He backhanded her across the face and stars peppered her vision.

  Something strange was happening. He was pressing the top rope back with one hand while pulling it forward with the other, sliding it across her scalp. Emily didn’t understand until the makeshift noose was already around her neck, the elastic tension cutting
off her windpipe.

  Her back arched. Her arms dangled back behind her. She was facing up, the single light glaring down at her like the eye of a disdainful god. Niko hit her. Hit her again. He was close to her, excited, pushing her back against the ropes. She could smell meat on his breath.

  She urged him on. This was the fate she deserved. Emily wasn’t here for glory or riches or even love of the fight. She was here to construct a personal hell on earth, an inferno worthy of Dante, a crucible that could burn away her shame. Only in oblivion could she find release. Niko was not her opponent—he was her psychopomp, ferrying her to whatever came next, whatever lay on the other side of this mortal veil.

  Emily pressed herself into the rope, arched her back farther, reached her fingers behind and down, yearning for a glimpse, a touch of the unknown underworld awaiting her.

  Contact.

  Something smooth and cool against her fingertips. She focused, trying to push back the sparkling pyrotechnics occluding her vision.

  It wasn’t the door to Hades.

  It was a champagne flute.

  Emily was hanging off the edge of the ring a meter above one of the VIP tables that Rizal had crammed in as close as possible. She watched with detached curiosity as her fingers closed around the glass and jerked it up to grab the base.

  And then her arm came up and around, flying droplets of golden liquid indistinguishable from the galaxies whirling around her. She smashed the slender, elongated bowl across Niko’s temple, and when he jerked his head up to keep the glass and liquor out of his eyes, Emily stabbed the stem into the soft flesh under his jaw and all the way up into his brain, her hand stopping only when the base of the shattered flute met skin, like a carpenter driving home a nail.

  Niko stumbled back.

  Emily’s hands went to the rope at her neck, pawing at it as black spots swam and multiplied in her vision. One finger between rope and skin. Two. Three. She ripped it over her head and gasped for air as she came free, trying to regain her balance, clawing back from oblivion.

  She vomited. Sickly-sweet teh tarik and chunks of roti canai spewed across the blood-and-glitter-stained mat. Bile seared her throat. It hurt to breathe. She coughed. Coughed again. Sucked for air.

  Niko swayed. His body was polka-dotted with glitter where her strikes had landed. His face was a gory mess. Thick muscles twitched involuntarily, as if his tattoos were trying to escape their doomed host. It was Emily who would offer Niko the reaper’s sweet relief, not the other way around.

  She reached up and flicked him between the now-dead eyes.

  He toppled backward and crashed onto the mat.

  Silence.

  Applause grew from a trickle to a cataclysmic flood.

  But when Emily looked around, she saw only roaring darkness beyond the ring.

  CHAPTER 4

  Emily stared into the mirror. The glass was cracked and smudged, and the greenroom itself was little more than an oversize closet. They weren’t pop stars playing stadium shows. They were fighters spilling blood for credit.

  That blood was caked onto her skin and leotard, the uneven splotches dark against glittering fractals. The woman in the mirror was a stranger, an evil djinn smuggled in from a nightmare parallel universe. Emily had spent years covertly seeding Dag’s feed with her own visage so that her face became an object of obsession for him, a Platonic ideal against which he measured beauty. Not even he would recognize her now.

  An old memory surfaced. Rosa standing in the living room of the old house in LA, practicing her mythology presentation for world-history class. Emily gently coaching her to stand up straight, make eye contact, slow down. Being unable to hold back a smile at Rosa’s fierce frown when she couldn’t remember how Perseus slayed Medusa. Emily prompting her, and Rosa snapping her fingers and interrupting, explaining that in order to avoid being turned to stone by Medusa’s direct gaze, Perseus had polished his shield and looked only upon her reflection. The shield was a mirror and the mirror was a shield. Emily had always imagined herself to be Perseus, fighting the monsters of a broken system, but the bloody, bedazzled woman staring back at her seemed liable to sprout snakes out of her head.

  Now Rosa ran a gallery in Addis Ababa and had earned herself a sterling reputation as a curator. She’d discovered Damaris Mwangi, catapulting the talented young artist onto the world stage. Emily was so proud of her. So, so proud.

  Emily tried to summon her feed before forgetting it wasn’t there. All she wanted to do was watch Javier’s speech one more time, see what Dag was up to, read Rosa’s latest post, and call up a live satellite stream of the island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca that she had once called home. She might not be able to be with them physically, but she would experience their lives vicariously, etching every detail into her memory. Her only comfort in this godforsaken place was that they still lived and breathed and loved.

  They were her people. Her family. Her victims.

  But here, even their apparitions were beyond her reach. This joint was feedless. Analog had been the first, of course. The infamous San Francisco social club had banned digital technology within its walls before the feed was a thing. Now the ubiquity of the feed and the global power of Commonwealth had inspired copycats like Rizal to set up feedless fight clubs in dark corners around the world. Not just venues for violent entertainment, they were places to whisper secrets beyond the reach of the feed itself.

  Which left Emily bereft of the digital prosthetic that was a sixth sense. She couldn’t listen to her hip-hop playlist. She couldn’t call up footage of Javier’s talk or access her bank account. She couldn’t immerse herself in a virtual walk-through of Rosa’s gallery. She couldn’t view Dag’s latest sketches, check the forecast, or read the news. The feed was the global brain in which every human was a single neuron. It was the forum for trillions of ongoing conversations, the library of all human knowledge, the cognition that drove every car and train and plane and drone, the source of all media and entertainment, the information infrastructure that made civilization possible, the vast and intricate clockwork on which the world ran.

  And in its absence, silence.

  A profound and disturbing silence that felt intensely antisocial, that put everyone on edge, but that gave fight-club regulars the initial thrill of transgression that bloodshed compounded. It forced you into the present moment, forced you to be, to exist, and nothing more.

  Emily coughed and touched her swollen neck. The skin was already mottling into patches of yellow and purple. Everything hurt. The present was the last place she wanted to be. It held nothing but pain and self-recrimination. She wanted to climb those stairs into the warm tropical night and submerge herself in the digital impressions left by those she loved. She would summon the feed, endure the stares of passersby, weave through those normal people leading normal lives, hole up in her apartment, all in the company of her long-lost friends.

  A migraine went off like a grenade, forcing tears.

  No.

  She had no right to such indulgence. She had lost control of herself. She had broken the code. She had betrayed one of her own. She would sit here and savor the agony until she toppled off the stool. This, all this, was her penance.

  A tentative knock on the greenroom door.

  “Pixie?” Her stage name—the only one he knew her by.

  “I’m fine, Rizal,” she called out. “Just leave me be.”

  “I’m coming in.”

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  He entered, closing the door behind him.

  She looked at his reflection in the mirror. Rizal wasn’t quite a boss or an agent or a coach but a little of each and more. He’d gained a few pounds since he’d trained her, a layer of flab accruing as he spent less and less time in the ring and more and more time managing the fight club. Emily knew that Rizal, a devoted single dad, really just wanted to focus on raising his sons, but after the expenses and requisite bribes, the fight club earned less profit than outsiders might expect, so h
e was always scrounging to keep the place afloat.

  He held up her lucky glasses.

  “Thought you might want these.”

  That’s right—they’d been knocked free in the ring.

  “Thanks.”

  She inspected them and, finding them undamaged, put them on.

  “Dude claimed they were his ’cause they landed on his table,” he said. “I had him thrown out.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Look, Pixie . . .” He leaned down, wincing at her wounds.

  The concern in his wide-set eyes made her uncomfortable. They had spent a lot of time together over the years. Endless hours in the gym. Occasional late nights of heavy drinking. Brainstorming new ways to make the fight club’s spectacle more compelling. But through all that, Emily had snipped off any buds of burgeoning affection. She had hurt the people she cared for most, proving herself unworthy of friendship. She wasn’t about to let a new person into her life and thereby do them harm. Rizal deserved better.

  “I said I’m fine.”

  He raised his palms, placating.

  “All right, all right.”

  A beat.

  “You’re still here,” she said. She didn’t want to walk this particular emotional tightrope right now. She needed to be alone with her pain.

  “You’ll get paid through the usual channels,” he said. “Tonight’s take was good, so I threw in a little extra.”

  “Great,” she said. “Thanks again.”

  Another beat.

  “Yes?” she asked. He was fiddling with the end of a dreadlock. Why was he stalling? “What is it?” Oh no, he wasn’t going to try to make a move, was he? Not Rizal. Not here. Not now. No, of course he wasn’t. But hinting at it might disarm him, ease him into sharing whatever it was that was on his mind. “You’re not about to hit on me, are you?”

  “What?” She had to repress a smile at the genuine confusion on his face. “No. God, no. Come on.” He backtracked. “I mean, not that you’re not—I mean—no—I—”