“Most of the cells in the bullpen still lock, but the locks are automated, and they only engage from sundown to sunset. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
I shrug. “During the day, I’ll have nowhere to hide.” Not that I can afford to hide, when everyone else is training.
He nods. “On combat days, show up at the arena when your name appears on the screen. Unarmed, even if you managed to find a weapon in the yard or the bullpen. You’ll be dressed and prepped for the fight. Then you’re on your own.”
“And if I don’t…make it?” I don’t want to think about that, yet it seems foolish to ignore the possibility—the probability—that I will die in the arena. If not before.
“Unless your family has previously made arrangements to claim your body and pay for its return, we will deposit your remains in a disposal site outside of zone one.” He says it with no hesitation. No inflection or emotion. Because disposing of corpses is a routine aspect of his job.
Would my parents claim me? Could they afford shipping? What few assets I’d had were seized by the government to pay for my upkeep in jail, while I waited for my trial.
“What happens if I win?” I ask, and the guards behind me snicker.
The warden looks skeptical, but he maintains a professional bearing. “You live to fight another day. The reigning champion at the end of the season will have his—or her—death sentence commuted to life in prison and will be released into the general population.”
Which is exactly why I’m here. “How far away is that—the end of the season?”
The warden taps the surface of the table between us, then taps again to open some kind of schedule. “Nine and a half weeks. If you’re still in the running at the end of that, there’s a six-week hiatus before next season. Use it to get back in shape and stay that way. If you can.”
“Make a friend,” Waite suggests. “A friend with damn good benefits. Someone who will watch your back so you can heal.”
Cottrell scoffs. “One won’t be enough. You’re going to need a fucking army to survive in there, so you better pick men who play well with others.”
“If they played well with others, they wouldn’t be in the bullpen in the first place,” Beardon snaps.
I expect the warden to contradict them. Or at least tell them to shut up. Instead, he swipes the table to clear away the schedule, then he stands. “Ms. Wolfe, there’s been a lot of interest in you on the corporate side. Some of the investors are, well, cautiously captivated by the novelty you represent and the viewership you could draw. I’ve warned them not to get too excited. As I’ve said, I don’t think you’ll make it to the arena.”
And suddenly I understand. Shaw isn’t concerned about me. He’s worried about Universal Authority. Or maybe his position within the company, after whatever went wrong with that other female prisoner. He’s trying to talk me out of going into the bullpen and trying to squelch the investors’ expectations.
“But I’ve been wrong before,” he adds. And based on his sour expression, the memory has left a bitter taste in his mouth.
“Either way, there won’t be any exceptions for you because you’re a woman. No one is going to ride to your rescue if someone in the bullpen decides you belong to him. Or if it becomes a free-for-all.”
“I’m not asking for exceptions, Warden. I only want the same shot everyone else gets. A chance to walk out of there alive.”
Shaw leans toward me with both palms flat on the table. “Ms. Wolfe, let me be clear. There is no chance of that happening. Nothing awaits you in the bullpen but a hell you can’t possibly imagine. And you’ve agreed to let Universal Authority broadcast it, down to your very last breath. Are you sure this is what you want?”
He looks nervous. So I have to ask. “Warden, why do you keep offering me an out?”
Shaw scowls. “I’m trying to show you the last mercy you will ever see.” But he’s lying. The warden is uneasy about sending a woman into the bullpen, but his concern isn’t for me. So what is he worried about? Riots? Upsetting the status quo?
His job?
“I appreciate your concern. But I’ve made my decision.”
“Then what happens to you is out of my hands.” For a second, I think he’s going to extend a hand for me to shake. But then he turns abruptly and marches from the room.
“What was all that about?” Cottrell asks as he sets a pair of white socks and gray sneakers in front of me and motions for me to put them on. “He doesn’t usually editorialize the briefing.”
When I’ve tied my shoes, Beardon pulls me up from the chair and out the door. “She’s not the usual fighter.”
“If he wants to fuck her—”
Beardon cuts Cottrell off with a glare. “After what happened at the Resort—” He shakes his head and starts over. “This is about money. If she survives long enough to step into the arena, the ratings will go through the roof. We’ve never had a female fighter before.”
Waite makes a scoffing sound in his throat. “And we never will again, once they see her slaughtered on camera.”
“The warden’s right.” Beardon leads me toward a transport shuttle waiting for us on the landing dock. “She’s not going to live long enough to step onto the sand.”
2
SYLVIE
To my relief, the guards leave me uncuffed as the transport takes off, then moves smoothly through the gate in the pyro-shield—a barrier that will incinerate any unauthorized ship that tries to leave the planet.
“Zone one’s about an hour away,” Beardon says as we descend into Rhodon’s atmosphere. He and the other two guards sink into three of the four chairs bolted to the wall of the shuttle, up front, near the locked cockpit. “So get comfortable.”
Instead of settling into the other seat. I set my backpack on the floor of the shuttle—it’s empty, except for the four of us—and drop into a deep squat.
After weeks spent in a cage, unable to stand or stretch, I need to move, and my muscles ache pleasantly with the use. I do several more squats, then I bend at the waist and place my palms flat on the floor, smiling as the tension in my frame finally begins to ease.
Next, I drop onto the floor for some pushups and am relieved when my arms don’t shake. After a few of those, I plant my palms on the floor again and swing up into a handstand with my heels against the wall of the shuttle. I pump out five vertical pushups, elbows in for stability. To isolate my triceps. I can feel the strain, but there’s still no shaking. Thank god.
With no way to exercise in my transport cage, I’d worried that I’d lose critical muscle mass on the trip. That they’d dump me into the arena with some huge psycho, and I wouldn’t even be able to defend myself, much less fight back.
Despite how good the exercise feels, I make myself stop before I get tired, because I’ll need both strength and energy in the bullpen. When I stand, wiping a thin sheen of sweat from my forehead onto my sleeve, I find all three of the guards watching me.
“So she’s in shape.” Cottrell shrugs. “Doesn’t mean a damn thing against those animals. Any one of them could break her in half.”
He’s right. There’s no way I’ll be able to overpower most of the men in the bullpen, much less in the arena. I’ll have to be smarter. Faster. I’ll have to be in better shape, both physically and mentally, than everyone in there with me.
I’ll also have to be extraordinarily lucky. And ready to pay for protection wherever I can find it—even if I only have one thing worth selling.
My skin crawls at the thought, but I push past dread and disgust and arm myself with determination. This is about survival. I can’t afford to be squeamish or soft.
No one else in the bullpen will be.
While the guards argue over my chances—they seem to be placing bets on how soon I’ll die—I move toward one of the long, horizontal windows as a rich, dense patch of red zooms into view. We’re flying over a thick stretch of forest, and though we’re moving too fast for me to focus on any one
tree for long, they look a lot like the trees on my homeworld. With one exception.
Though both my planet and this one were terraformed using plant and animal species native to Earth, humanity’s home planet, everything that’s taken root on Rhodon seems to be growing in one of a thousand shades of red, rather than Earth’s greens, blues, and browns. Even the oceans visible from Station Alpha were a rusty color, similar to the patches of bare ground visible through gaps in the forest canopy.
“Minerals,” Beardon says, and I turn to see him standing several feet away, his hand on the butt of his pistol. “They turn everything here red. Kinda cool though, isn’t it?”
“It’s stunning,” I breathe. And I’m a little pissed about that. A place like this—a planet where people only live long enough to suffer inevitably violent deaths—should look like the hellhole it is. Like the demonic eye it appears to be from space.
This place has no right to be beautiful.
Just like the guards have no right to be friendly. “What do you want?” I ask, suspicious of both Beardon’s proximity and the change in his attitude.
“Information.” He lowers his voice, but I’m not sure that matters. The other two are arguing over whether or not their bet should pay off if I die before my first fight. Off camera.
“What information?”
“About your background. I looked you up. You have no record of competitive fighting. No prior arrests. No history of violent behavior, other than the obvious exception.”
The crime that got me sent here.
I shrug. “So?”
“So, that can’t be the whole story. There’s no way a high school science teacher with no fighting experience demands death by combat. Science teachers don’t do vertical fucking pushups. There’s something you’re not saying.”
“Maybe.” I cross my arms beneath my breasts and shrug. “I assume you’re planning to profit from this insider information. So what are you willing to pay for it?”
“Credits won’t do you any good down there.” He nods out the window as we fly over a cluster of dilapidated buildings in what can only be one of the open population zones. “And I don’t have any food on me.”
“Get creative,” I whisper. “Got anything I could use to defend myself?”
He actually rolls his eyes. “You couldn’t shoot my pistol, even if I gave it to you. It’s programmed for my fingerprints. And I’m not giving you my knife,” he adds, when I open my mouth too quickly. “It would just be taken and used against you.”
Thus begins the inevitable underestimation of the only woman in the bullpen.
“Fine.” I didn’t really expect him to give me an actual weapon anyway. “Got a pen?” It’s a long shot. I can’t imagine he has use for a writing utensil, with a wrist com strapped to his arm. But I can see from the sudden lift in his eyebrows that for whatever reason, he actually has one.
“Deal. Assuming you keep the source quiet.”
“Unless the inmates tattle, no one up here will even know I have it,” I assure him.
“I’ll give it to you as you disembark.”
Another shrug. “Then that’s when I’ll answer your question.”
He frowns. “I can’t arm you while you’re still on the shuttle.”
I roll my eyes. “Unless it’s a magic pen, it won’t help me overpower three armed guards. And I’m not stupid enough to give you an excuse to hurt me right before you leave me in a cage with a hundred death row inmates. So if you want information, hand over your pen.”
While he considers, with a glance at the other two guards, who’re still arguing, I turn back to the window. I’m surprised—and a little terrified—to see the arena in the distance. Our approach seems to be echoing the flyover shot played at the beginning of every fight, on the Universal Authority feed.
It’s strange to be seeing that in person, after years of watching the fights with my brother. Never, in a lifetime of forevers, would I have pictured myself here.
As I already knew from the feeds, zone one is surrounded by two layers of a tall, apparently seamless metal wall, one nested inside the other, with a broad, treeless expanse of land between the two. Like a grass moat. Presumably, that’s so that even if an inmate were to breach the inner wall, he’d be still be penned in by the outer one.
Within that inner wall, the zone is divided into two distinct halves. To the east is the combat complex, including the open-air arena itself, as well as a series of support buildings and walkways.
To the west, separated from the combat complex by a narrow, metal-walled walkway and two gates, is a sprawling, single-story building shaped like a hand, with only four fingers. Those fingers must be the cellblocks—rows of cells that will auto-lock at sundown and unlock at dawn, according to the warden.
I assume that the palm of the four-fingered hand contains the other prison facilities, including showers, an unmanned cafeteria, and presumably offices that were once used by the staff that ran this place, back before the original colonists abandoned Rhodon for more central planets, allowing it to be bought by Universal Authority and repopulated as a prison.
Stretching out from the base of the palm is a completely enclosed rectangular exercise yard, with a large, paved section in the center. And though there’s open land between each of the cellblock “fingers,” it appears to be walled off and inaccessible for the inmates.
Zone one grows closer and closer as Beardon waffles. As my pulse races.
“Time’s almost up,” I say, and when he turns to find the arena taking up most of the view, Beardon heaves an impatient huff.
“Fine.” He digs an old-fashioned ballpoint pen from a pocket on the outside of his left thigh, but instead of handing it over, he only shows it to me, hidden from the other guards by his palm and his wrist. “Start talking.”
“We’re here.” Waite stands and heads for us, picking up my backpack on the way, and when Beardon turns to answer him, I snatch the pen.
Beardon turns on me, jaw clenched, but he can’t rat me out without admitting to his coworkers that he’s just armed an inmate—surely a termination-level offense. Instead, he grabs my arm and takes my pack from Waite, then waves him off. “I’m holding on to your supplies until you uphold your end of the bargain, Wolfe,” he whispers fiercely as the shuttle flies over the first metal wall and begins to descend inside zone one.
“We appear to be at a stalemate.”
He shakes his head while the shuttle gently touches down in an enclosed landing pad. “I can afford to lose my pen, but you can’t afford to go in there without food and clothing.”
Fair point.
“Beardon.” Cottrell takes up a position next to the door, his hand hovering near the oversized button that will turn it into a ramp for disembarkation. “What’s the holdup?”
“Nothing. Open it.”
Cottrell slaps his palm down on the button, and hinges groan as the door begins to fold open.
“Now or never,” Beardon whispers.
“Fine.” I surreptitiously pocket his pen, then hold my hand out for my bag. Beardon lays the strap across my palm but seizes my wrist before I can put it on. “Have you ever heard of Havoc?” I whisper. “The man, not the concept.”
He frowns. “The gladiator?”
“Yeah.” I jerk my wrist free of his grip and swing the bag over my shoulder as I head for the ramp. “You’re going to have to figure the rest out on your own.”
“Good luck, Wolfe!” Cottrell calls as I disembark, and I’m pretty sure he’s only saying that because he’s bet a shitload of credits on my survival. “Once we’ve lifted off, they’ll open the gate. The yard’s to your right, the bullpen on your left.”
While the door closes, I pull my hand from my pocket and wave to Beardon, his pen in my grip, echoing my middle finger.
The other guards only notice that I’m flipping them the bird.
As the shuttle lifts off, I turn and take in my surroundings. The wall enclosing the landing pad is way
too tall and smooth for me to climb, even if I didn’t think they’d shoot me down for trying to flee. And even if I could scale a wall with no seams or handholds, I’d just be cut in half by the red beam of a laser wire running along the top.
The gate in front of me is made of vertical metal bars, beyond which a narrow, walled path will funnel me directly into the bullpen, through an entrance that has long since lost its actual door. What I can see of the inside of the building is dim, and as the shuttle rises even higher behind me, blowing hair into my face, someone walks past the open doorway. An instant later, he’s back, as if it took him a second to process what he’s seeing.
A woman.
I can tell from his surprise that the inmates have no idea I’m coming—a stroke of luck for which I’m eternally grateful. If they knew, surely they’d be crowding the doorway. But for now, there’s only this one man, and though he’s huge and just as unkempt and brutal-looking as one might expect from a death row inmate in a prison with no guards, rules, or minimum hygiene standards, he doesn’t seem inclined to announce what he’s just discovered.
Clearly, he’d rather keep me for himself. Which is fine with me. I’d rather face them one at a time.
The shuttle’s engine begins to fade as it flies away, and a smaller motor rumbles as the gate rolls open. I walk through the gate and the inmate steps out of the building, facing me from the other end of the narrow, uncovered walkway. “What the fuck is this?” he growls with just enough volume for me to hear. “It’s not even my birthday.” He laughs, exposing front teeth that have been broken off halfway up and are starting to rot. “Like I even know what fucking day it is. Could be my birthday.”
I set my backpack on the ground and palm my ink pen, so that he can’t see it. “Come on then,” I say softly, because neither of us wants anyone else to notice me. “Let’s get this over with.”
He barrels toward me, as if he were waiting for an invitation, and his intent is clear in every lumbering step. His attack is the simplistic brute force of a human battering ram, all of his thought and effort concentrated in a single blow that is as unsophisticated as his strategy.
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