His patience was soon rewarded. Crouching in the far corner of what was probably once a kitchen—the shards of ceramic tile mixed in with the other detritus was a clue—Emily thrust her hands into the debris and grabbed hold of a plastic tarp. She tugged on it a few times and swept it to one side, revealing the top of a cement staircase.
Surprised, Simon stomped twice on the ground. The floor felt solid beneath his feet. There was no telltale thump to suggest a lower level. How could a suspended floor remain unbroken after so many decades of neglect? Puzzled, he chewed the corner of his mouth and followed Emily into the darkness.
The descent took longer than expected, sinking through a dozen feet of earth and concrete before entering a stark subterranean chamber hewn from bare earth. Stone columns ribbed the walls, steel struts binding one to the next. Simon glanced up uneasily through the gloom at the untold tons of dirt and stone hanging above him. That explains why the first floor’s so solid. He just hoped it stayed that way while he was down there.
Emily removed a small device from her pocket. She clicked a button, and a cone of white light shone from the glass bulb at its tip.
“Where’d you get that?” asked Simon. Flashlights weren’t exactly foreign technology to him, but he hadn’t expected to see one so far from Jericho.
“You want one? Wait a sec, you can have as many as you want.”
She led him to the room’s dim recesses, where the beam of her flashlight honed upon an enormous steel door. It stood eight feet high, hogging every inch of vertical space between floor and ceiling, its bulk wedged into a metal frame eight inches thick. Its face was without feature save a single wheel—a device that looked more to Simon like the master control valve for some vast urban reservoir than the latch for a door—set in its precise center. Judging by its size, Simon guessed it would require at least two grown men to move it, but Emily seemed undaunted. She stood on tiptoe to grasp the wheel and turned it clockwise. It spun silently on well-oiled bearings.
She gave the door a push and it swung inward. Intrigued, Simon studied the door as he passed. His engineer’s eye noted the sturdy hinges as thick as his wrist, the brushed copper contacts between door and frame that suggested an electromagnetic seal, the interior deadbolts for manual reinforcement once inside. Clearly whoever built this place wanted it to be well-defended, but didn’t want an unexpected power failure to make it their tomb. He nodded in silent admiration to his anonymous predecessor.
Bare earth gave way to concrete and metal, all of it curiously preserved. Simon ran his finger along the wall. He expected porous stone but felt instead a smooth lacquer. A steel grate held him half a foot above the tunnel floor. Rust nibbled at its myriad weld pools and speckled brownish patterns along its length, but here too the material held up better than expected. Emily’s footsteps rang along the grating, a sound Simon only noticed when it stopped. The beam of her flashlight fixed him in its gaze.
“You coming?”
“Right. Sorry.”
Simon scurried behind her to a bend in the tunnel, where the corridor opened onto a chasm of yawning black space. Emily felt along the wall for a switch and threw it. Banks of sterile white light ignited overhead. Many of the bulbs had burnt out, but enough remained to reveal a subterranean chamber twenty feet high. Simon wondered what power source they might be drawing on. Solar panels on the cliffs overhead? Geothermal energy? Deep-cycle batteries charged a century before, their long-dormant electric payloads unthawed through some long-forgotten process?
The steel grating became a catwalk that circled the chamber’s perimeter, feeding staircases that zigzagged down to the floor below. Sturdy plastic crates filled one corner of the room. A few of them lay scattered about the floor, their lids pried off and contents removed, but most remained sealed and stacked in tidy columns eight feet high. Emily clattered down a nearby staircase and slipped past them to a bank of a dozen-plus doors set in recessed frames. She motioned to the lot of them like a merchant displaying her wares. Simon chose a door at random and went inside.
The room was no wider than the doorframe, a pantry with shallow ledges running elbow high along both walls. Above the ledges hung dozens of high-powered rifles, their sleek barrels bloated with scopes and shrouds and extended magazines.
“There’s no bullets, before you get too excited,” said Emily. “Whoever was here last took ‘em all before they sealed the place up. Dad thinks it was one of the militias, during the Last War. Guess they had more guns than members by the end.”
“What happened to them?”
Emily shrugged. “Who knows? Whatever got ‘em didn’t get ‘em here, though they left in a pretty big hurry. Took the food and the ammo but left the rest. They sealed it up tight, so they probably figured they’d be back. Didn’t work out that way, though.”
The other rooms were similar to the first, their contents less outwardly arresting than the rifles but ultimately—to Simon, at least—more exciting: banks of small plastic drawers heaped with bolts, nuts, screws, and nails; coils of copper wire spun tight around cork cylinders; anonymous white jugs heavy with oils and solvents; resistors, capacitors, and diodes of every sort; an armory of hand tools, from pliers with wire-stripping notches to screwdrivers with exotic triangular tips. His exploration brought him around the room to its far end, where a concrete archway fed into a second chamber even larger than the first. He had only just passed its threshold when the chamber’s contents stopped him mid-step.
Transit in New Canaan was basic and communal—the upper-class Seraphim took the mag-train while the plebian Salters and their middle-class minders the Shepherds walked—and the scarcity of fuel and paved roads made personal vehicles a rarity, but Simon had grown up among the elite and recognized an automobile when he saw one.
But these were not the sleek wriggles of quicksilver chrome that well-heeled Bishops used to putter about the Outer Baronies, affectations of the eccentric rich. These vehicles had purpose. Iron grills snarled across hoods of olive-green metal, steel plates bobbing on outsized chassis. Cabs sank into armored frames, limiting the driver’s view to a foot-high band of reinforced glass. They showed their age more than the tools, their tires sagging and their undercarriages flecked with rust, but they retained a look of ferocity subdued but unbroken—circus lions eyeing their trainers with quiet, patient hatred. Simon half expected them to roar to life as he approached, imprinting their decades of captivity on his pulverized bones.
“Do they work?” Simon asked.
“No. I’ve tried ‘em all. Not so much as a flicker from any of ‘em.”
“Do they need fuel? Is it an electrical problem? Or do you think it’s more structural?”
“How should I know? I flicked all the switches and nothing happened. Beyond that, I’ve got no clue.”
“Can I take a look?”
Emily presented her hand, palm up, in a “be my guest” motion. Simon licked his lips. In the back of his mind a plan was already growing. He pruned back his expectations as best he could, told himself that there was no point in planning before he’d even checked the engine blocks—the things could be totally gutted for all he knew, nothing but the hollowed carapaces of long-dead machines—but the tendrils of hope sprouted quicker than he could trim them.
“How long can we stay here?” Simon asked.
“Well, we’ve got enough food and water to last us a few days at least.”
“And that’s for two of us, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Listen, I know you’ve already helped me a ton, but would you be able to get more supplies? You can go about your business otherwise, I’d just need them before I run out.”
“Of course. You’re the reason our crops aren’t toast already. But what are you going to do here for a whole week?”
“I don’t know yet, exactly,” Simon said, though this wasn’t strictly true. He knew what he wanted to do, all right.
He just didn’t know if it
would work.
20: A Tide of Blood and Bone
The ring felt bigger once you stepped inside it.
As a spectator in the upper rows, it seemed big enough, a circular arena more suited to team sport than a one-on-one brawl. In the tunnels below the stands, it grew bigger still, the narrow confines and the susurrus of a dozen fighters preparing their bodies for their personal wars stretching its iron contours into a parched and hostile wasteland. But once Selena stepped into the ring itself, and the weight of a thousand pairs of eyes pored over her, the unbroken ramparts of crowd-roiled adobe swelled to the size of a country. And she knew in the deepest chambers of her heart that none may pass beyond its unbroken, noose-tight border unless their toll had been paid, and that the only currency the Circle recognized was blood.
Selena stood just outside the ring’s geographic center. There was a grandeur to this place she’d never encountered in any fighting venue before, a weight that was awful and terrible in the oldest and truest sense of these terms, and as the guards dragged into the ring the human scab they called her opponent, she felt an anger rise in her, not just at the things they’d done to her and were making her do—though these factors were present, too—but at the way they’d cheapened this place, wrung the honor from its proceedings and contorted them into something petty and perverse.
She looked to the other fighters waiting in the tunnels surrounding the circle. Her eyes moved past the gladiadores with their motley array of rust-flecked death weapons and the blanco bruisers seeking a frisson of infamy and settled on the elite clutch of talent and muscle congregating in the northern alcove. Mary had told her about these men. They were Los Hermanos del Círculo de Hierro, marcado warriors of renown who, over years of unparalleled spectacle and flirtation with death, had shed their marks of bondage and become slaves to the Circle alone. Such stories had naturally inflamed Selena’s imagination, though freedom took years to earn.
One Hermano, his hair lathered with oil and bound in a tight braid down his back, noticed her staring and responded by raising his hand to his lips and waggling his tongue between his second and third finger. A tattoo danced on his right cheek. Once a greyish shape of some sort, it had been blotted out by a red X set in a like-colored circle, beneath which writhed a small, elaborate squiggle. He dropped his hand and winked at her.
Shaking her head, she returned her attention to the man she was supposed to fight. He could barely stand unaided. Some dreadful disease had eaten away his nose and most of one cheek, leaving in their place a yawning red cavity rimmed with a greenish-brown crust. The guards—or perhaps attendants was a better term—unlooped his thin arms from their shoulders and shoved him forward. He collapsed to his knees and coughed, spewing a mist of bloody phlegm. One of the guards gave him a prodding kick to the tailbone to get him moving.
He staggered to his feet and gazed about, seemingly unsure where he was and why so many people were staring at him. A fringe of matted hair hung down over one eye, while the other floated in a film of yellowish ichor. After a few seconds of reflection, he raised his hapless fists, thumbs tucked into the hollow formed by his curled fingers. Selena shook her head in disgust. A punch from those hands would land like jelly and snap his thumb at the first knuckle.
Selena approached the man without caution. She didn’t deign to raise her arms in a fighter’s stance, nor move on the balls of her feet as she would against a real opponent. Her every motion lacked the spectacle of combat, in which the tension of the fighters’ muscles coils the audience tighter in sympathy. She stood a few paces from the man, arms at her sides. The man cringed behind his raised fists.
As seconds passed and nothing further occurred, the roar of the crowd settled into a murmur. Selena’s opponent peeked out from between his fists. A few spectators shouted taunts, their general meaning obvious despite the words being in Mejise. Selena yawned and scratched her chin. This brought several more jeers, which encouraged several more, and soon the individual insults coalesced into a single amorphous growl of displeasure. Selena’s opponent glanced back and forth between sections of the crowd, his eyes swollen with fear.
Selena grabbed her opponent’s left wrist. His skin was hot and clammy, its greasy expanse flecked with patches of flaky, dry crust. Suppressing her revulsion, Selena brought the man’s arm up behind his back and, with modest but steady pressure, eased him to his knees. The man obeyed without struggling. Whatever spirit his disease hadn’t eaten away had been beaten out of him by Thorin’s strongmen. He was defeated before he’d even entered the Iron Circle. The least Selena could do was signal this defeat gently.
She laid him on the ground and pressed his shoulders into the dirt. He seemed to get the message, for when she released him, he stood slowly, nodded at her in uncomprehending thanks, and scuttled out of the circle. She imagined he wouldn’t get far and would likely face his punishment in some other form. There was nothing she could do about that, but at least she wouldn’t be the one providing it. In recognition of this resolve, she stepped back and raised her arms to the crowd, beckoning their ire.
The crowd obliged, hurling incomprehensible epithets and pounding their fists on the railings. Selena ignored them, summoning her inborne Seraphim’s hauteur. She set her eyes instead on the clutch of fighters awaiting their own bouts, scanning for an ideal target. There was no shortage of options, but Selena was choosey. It would have to be someone who appeared unbeatable, and he would have to be among Los Hermanos.
One presented itself almost immediately. The Hermano who’d gestured obscenely at her before the fight was now tapping his friend on the chest with the back of his hand, signaling his derision at the spectacle before him. She scoped the topography of his muscles, sized up his potential speed and power, noted points of weakness: long hair and beard for easy grabbing, an offset knuckle that would weaken his left jab, a peculiar slope to his jaw hinting at an old break. He commanded respect from his peers, which meant he was good—but also meant he was cocky. Selena was good, too, and no one here had seen her fight.
She approached him with casual strides, thumbs tucked into the waistband of her pants. He smirked as she loped over the iron circle and cleared the remaining distance between them. She stood uncomfortably close, her eyes level with his chin, gazing up with a defiance that denied the slightest difference in their sizes. He cocked his head to one side and spoke a query in Mejise. She knew it for a question for its rising cadence and guessed its derogatory nature by the simian guffawing of his compatriots. In response, she smiled, took his vest in her hands, and noisily blew her nose into it.
The man’s smirk flattened into an ugly line. Its ends peeled upward a moment later, purporting a levity that didn’t match his eyes. He wiped his vest clean with one hand and flicked the snot from his fingers. Selena walked back into the ring, turned, and beckoned him forward.
For a moment he seemed uncertain. He whispered among his fellow fighters, likely asking what this crazy woman was up to and if he would face any consequences if he taught her a lesson. Ultimately, he seemed to decide it was worth the risk, for he jogged forward and vaulted gracefully over the Iron Circle. Selena studied the ease with which he’d heaved himself aloft, one-armed, and wondered if she’d made a serious miscalculation. The thought remained with her only a moment before the red wave of impending combat crashed over her, a tide of blood and bone that drowned lesser emotions in its merciless fathoms.
Unsanctioned, the fight had no formal beginning. It simply was, a fluid conflict that burbled to the surface with her gauntlet-throwing sneeze and gushed into full-on combat.
He tested her with a few open-handed blows, not quite ready to dignify her with a fist. She swatted them aside like so many bothersome mosquitos.
He marched forward, shoulders squared, in hopes of muscling her about the ring. She threw a high jab to his face, pulled the punch, and delivered a punishing shovel hook to his solar plexus.
He woofed out an incredulous breath an
d stared, gobsmacked, as her second jab connected with his lips. She didn’t pull this one, and the blow rattled his teeth in their sockets. He closed his hands around his head and shuffled away from the flurry that followed.
A lupine voice in Selena’s head howled for her to press her advantage. She ignored it. His power was still untested, and her ruined ear remained a weak spot. A hook from a lead-armed fighter could flatten her. Better to take things slow and steady.
Scenting blood, the crowd leaned into the fight, a thousand chants and cheers and admonitions pouring from its myriad mouths. Her opponent glanced at a few spots in the stands, testing the timbre of their response. He rolled his shoulders, raised his fists, and came at her fast.
No kittenish slaps this time. His fists were tight, and they landed hard. Selena felt their impact rattle through her arms. She hurled back a few jabs and a cross, landed half, but took a slashing blow to the cheek that split her skin and left that hemisphere of her skull ringing. They collided in a formless scuffle, a snarl of grapples that wouldn’t take, until Selena shoved the man away and took the free instant that followed to settler her stance.
Her opponent surged forward immediately, raised his left arm for a haymaker, and threw a right kick instead. It was a swinging blow, not chambered but whip-fast and delivered with power. Selena cocked her hip at the last second to divert the blow away from her liver to the hefty sheath of muscle below it. It connected with a savage thwack that sent her sprawling. She scrabbled for her footing, lost it and turned the fall into a roll, hurling herself upright before he had a chance to press his advantage.
He tried to take her off guard, but she’d been knocked down many times before and had studied the awkward grey art of regaining your equilibrium before your opponent got his foot on your throat. She met his charge with a palm strike that threaded neatly through his dukes and slammed the bridge of his nose. Cartilage crunched. He gritted through the blow and kept charging, his hooked arms scooping her up and hurling her to the ground. She landed on one knee, sprung forward, and hammered his abdomen. He rained closed fists onto her back, strikes whose crudity belied their savage power. She slid back, hoping to put herself in range to throw a solid cross, but he pinned her arms to her sides and squeezed. Several inches taller, he managed to contort the bulk of his weight onto her back, pressing down on her spine with agonizing force.
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