Marcus felt his inebriation leak away. It was a chilly, unpleasant sensation, as if he’d been enjoying a warm bath and someone had pulled a stopper from the drain, leaving him to shiver in naked sobriety. His fingers continued to tremble, but this was no more than playacting. Playing drunk was a great way to make opponents underestimate you—especially if you really had been drunk a few moments before. His switchblade gained sudden heft beneath his serape, its textured handle nuzzling against his ribs. He worked his fingers subtly open and shut, limbering muscles stiffened by drink. So, the time has come, he reflected. I hope you chose your men wisely, Jefe. I shall put them to the test.
Thorin heaved a heavy sigh and whistled.
A clutch of guards marched into the bar. In their center wriggled a lean man with a purple bruise blossoming on one cheek. Thorin stepped aside, and the guards hurled the man into Marcus’s table.
Emilio’s brown eyes gazed up at him, frightened and uncomprehending.
“Marcus?” he asked. “What’s happening?”
Marcus’s resolve collapsed. His fingers dropped clear of their quick-draw position. Had he forgotten how vulnerable he was? How much Thorin loved killing a man by cutting him in a place deeper than mere flesh, to winch guilt around his soul and torque it agonizingly tight? He stood, hands raised, palms out in a conciliatory gesture.
“Okay, Jefe. You win. I’ll fight.”
“You made your choice, Marcus. You must learn to live with the consequences.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind. I’ll fight for you night and day. Pick the time and the man. Or men. I’ll take on every fighter in the pits. I’ll do it now.” He came forward. Three of the guards drew their pistols and trained the barrels on Marcus’s chest, forcing him several steps back. The remaining guards seized Emilio and positioned him face-down across the table. They pinned his left arm behind his back while stretching his right arm out straight. A burly man with braided hair and a notch missing from his left nostril grabbed the arm at either side of the elbow and pressed it firmly into the wood. Emilio grunted.
Moving with slow, measured strides, Thorin rounded the table until he stood next to Emilio’s prostrate arm. He drew a large knife with a stout silver blade and contemplated his reflection. It was a hefty thing, more cleaver than dagger, its dull back edge weighted to lend extra force to the swing.
“Running a city is not such an easy thing, you know. Every peasant fancies that he would be a kind and just ruler, a man for whom statues are built and children are named. But it’s not so simple as that, Marcus. It’s not the day-to-day matters that pose a challenge. The paving of roads and passing of laws. One can hire good men for this and not trouble himself. No, the true challenge comes from this incessant need for kindness. Kind and just, they say. Kind and just. But kindness is a soft and dribbly thing, and justice is heavy and hard. One cannot build a just world on kindness, just as one cannot build a stone temple on a swamp. Bedrock is what’s needed, Marcus. Cold and ugly and rough. But strong.”
Thorin brought the blade down. It bit through sinew and bone and came to rest in the table’s warped grain. Emilio’s severed hand twitched a few times and lay still. The man himself was less docile. He bucked in the guards’ grasp, his shriek sharper than the blade that had maimed him. The guards gathered him up and hurled him to the floor, where he lay, weeping and cradling his ruined wrist. Thorin regarded him the way a child might watch a fly, after having pulled off one of its wings. He grabbed the severed hand from the table and held it to a nearby lamp to study it.
“Patch him up,” he said, and turned to Marcus. “A porter will attend you at first chime. You will follow him where he leads and perform the task I’ve set out for you. You did not wish to fight in the Iron Circle? Then you shall not. There are other uses for your talents, and you may soon learn the value of your previous role. And if the chime sounds and you hear the bottle calling you instead …”
He tossed the hand to Marcus. It landed on the table with a wet thump.
“Just remember that, at the moment, this boy still has one hand left to him.”
22: Otro
Selena’s first sanctioned fight in the Iron Circle was almost her last. Her opponent was a hunched, wiry man an inch shorter than her, his thin arms knotted with ugly, utilitarian muscle. A tattoo blotted his forehead. Like Paulo’s it had been crossed out with a thick red X, marking him as a Brother of the Iron Circle. He winked at someone in the stands and flipped him a two-fingered salute, an in-joke that set the larger man guffawing. Selena sized him up and thought him a weak second act after facing Paulo.
A paunchy man with a gold ring through his septum took the role of emcee, bringing the fighters to their positions and roiling the crowd with a frantic upward motion of his arms. He bellowed his patter in a polished jet of Mejise and bowed his way out of the circle, which Selena gathered was the signal to begin. Her opponent, more familiar with the proceedings, caught this a moment sooner than she did, and he pressed the gap to full advantage with a flying kick to her sternum.
It was an audacious move, insanely risky, and it paid out for him the instant his foot connected with her belly. Selena had never encountered such a blatantly gymnastic technique, and the sheer speed of it caught her totally off-guard. She grabbed his leg with both hands, but without a proper stance she could do little but guide the man’s foot into her stomach.
The force of the blow rippled clean through her, rattling her spine and rocketing her to the ground. She landed badly. Her head struck the earth hard enough to dent the soil. A dark cloud settled over her vision, its fumes clearing slowly as she struggled to roll free. For a few seconds, she was all but blind. Ballpeen fists hammered her arms and shoulders, driving her back into the dirt. She lashed out with a heel and—by luck more than skill—connected with something hard. Whatever it was it knocked the man back long enough for Selena to regain her feet.
Blood trickled from a cut on her forehead and into the corner of her eye. She rubbed the rivulet with her thumb and blinked the stinging sensation away. The last thing she needed now was another distraction. Her opponent bounced on the balls of his feet, fists raised, and cackled to himself.
This was shaping up to be an inauspicious debut. It wasn’t the risk of losing alone that bothered her—she’d lost many times before, and badly—but losing early and to such an improbable-looking opponent. In a public fight, optics meant more than most people gave it credit for. The crowd became an extension of you and your opponent, a twin-tubed umbilicus that could feed you energy as quickly as it could slurp it away. Selena had seen fights tip from one would-be victor to his opponent purely through the caprices of the crowd. If she went down here, all the ground she’d gained by beating Paulo would evaporate. Her victory would be seen as a fluke—or worse, a fix. Some pity play concocted by Paulo for his amusement, or to sucker people into loser bets.
Selena closed the gap between her and her opponent, she feinted low, lulled him into an easy jab at her jaw. He took the bait, cocky with recent triumph. She swatted his arm aside and drove a cross into his nose. Cartilage cracked. A trail of blood and mucus soaked her from wrist to elbow.
Her opponent staggered backward. His eyes warbled in their sockets, struggling to focus. Selena didn’t give them the chance. She pulled her arm back, paused half a moment until his shuffling feet struck their most off-balance pose, and swung a haymaker into his right temple.
He hit the ground like a toppled statue. The crowd cheered. Selena dropped her stance. The tide of adrenaline went out, and a hundred aches bobbed to the surface. A fresh dribble of blood stung the corner of her eye. She raised her arms to the crowd. Her ribs screeched like rusty gates swinging in the wind. A black fog settled over her senses. It was fainter than the one that had come in the wake of the wiry man’s kick, but visible all the same. When the emcee took her arm and moved to guide her gently from the ring, she felt an urge to go along. Instead, she pulled her arm free and
shook her head.
“I want another one,” she said. The hunger in her voice surprised her.
The emcee looked at her, perplexed. He continued to usher her off.
She reached deep into her brain and fumbled for the dozen or so phrases she’d learned from Mary, mental fingers closing on what she hoped was the right one. “Otro, otro.”
The emcee shook his head. It was a gesture driven more by fright than conviction. “No, no puedes, por favor. Is too much.”
“Too much? I’ve seen people die in this ring. You’re telling me I’m disqualified because of a few bruises?”
“Si, but their keepers, they choose this. They are just vacas, yes? Meat for slaughter. You are Mister Todd’s, and for him, this is not so. He does not like the violence for his girls.”
“He made an exception. Why do you think I’m here?”
By then the spectators nearest her had turned her protest into a chant, banging their fists on the railing in time. “¡Otro! ¡Otro!” It spread through the crowd, seat by seat and row by row until the entire arena shook with its trochaic incantation.
“¡Otro! ¡Otro!”
The emcee tottered in a slow circle, mouth agape. He tugged at the corners of his mustache. His tongue poked out from between his lips and disappeared several times.
“Bien vale,” he sighed. “Otro.”
The crowd roared its approval. The emcee shuffled off, defeated, and fetched a fresh opponent. He was larger than the first, with a barrel-chested, simian build she’d faced many times before. A red X voided a wolf’s head tattoo on his shoulder. Selena nodded. The emcee repeated his patter, though his delivery lacked its original enthusiasm.
Chastened by her wiry opponent, Selena approached her next fight with more caution and won it easily. She knew all the notes, and she played them deftly, jabbing pressure points with hypodermic precision and contorting his punches into throws and eye-bulging holds. She won by tap out, not knock out, the big man’s face pressed in the dirt as she twined his index and middle fingers into unendurable shapes, but the crowd loved it anyway.
The emcee emerged with two burly guards to escort the loser from the ring—vengeance from beaten parties was common in the wake of contested matches—and held Selena’s arm aloft. She bathed in the accolades for a moment, turned, and spoke a single word loud enough for the crowd to here:
“Otro.”
The emcee looked like Selena had stuck a dagger in his side. He shook his head, mouthing protests he lacked the strength to voice. Already the crowd had seized Selena’s conspiracy and taken up its two-note chant. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.
“Uno mas. Uno. Eso es todo.”
The emcee slumped off and returned with a third appointment: tall, dark-skinned, and lithely muscular. He split her lip and chipped one of her teeth, but Selena bested him with a heel smash to the liver and an uppercut that sent him flat. By then she was bleeding from her injured ear and bruised in a dozen places. Her body felt like an engine running at 100 rpms past its limit, all rattling pistons and fraying belts and gears grinding at the edge of their endurance. The emcee raised her arm to signal victory and she had to bite back a scream.
“No más,” he whispered to her. “Estas sangrando. Vuelve mañana. Tomorrow, please.” Without giving her time to object, he pitched his voice to the crowd and hollered his pronouncement. “¡Más mañana! Ella debe descansar.”
The crowd shrieked at the emcee as he made the announcement, hurling bottles and rocks into the field. For an instant Selena shared their wrath. She wanted to tear the throat out of this pathetic little man who dared to try and close his piddling floodgates on her. Her fists tightened, sending jolts of agony through her pummeled arms. The sensation calmed her—as unpleasant as it was, it settled like a friendly hand on her shoulder, a subtle warning to take things easy before she did something she’d regret. The truth was she’d pushed things far enough. Best to leave them wanting more.
Selena raised a conciliatory hand to the crowd, bowed to the emcee—her battered solar plexus whining—and walked out of the circle. The crowd continued to jeer the emcee, but the cries lost their hostile edge and became more sardonic. Spectators threw no more missiles, contenting themselves with catcalls bellowed through cupped hands. As Selena hoisted herself over the Iron Circle, the cacophony coalesced into a single repetitive cheer.
She made it to the underpass with a confident stride that dissolved the instant she was out of view. Her dragging feet snagged on a slight rise in the cobbles. She stumbled, caught herself with one arm, and slumped against the wall. The cool adobe felt wonderful against her skin.
“My god, girl. You really don’t play, do you?” said Mary. She’d watched the whole thing from her spot in the alcove. Without asking to or being asked, she’d adopted a shifting role as Selena’s coach, promoter, and ringside medic. She dipped a rag in a bottle of vinegar and dabbed the solution on Selena’s lip. Selena hissed at its touch but didn’t draw back. She tugged down the shoulder of her shirt to reveal a fresh cut for Mary to work on. Through the arch leading to the Iron Circle, Selena could hear the crowd repeating its short but passionate litany.
“What are they chanting?” she asked.
Mary raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“That chant. It’s Mejise, right? What does it mean?”
“That’s not Mejise. They’re saying your name.”
Selena turned back to the crowd in wonder. She’d grown so used to being hollered at in Mejise it hadn’t occurred to her that she might understand. She thought back on all the fights she’d ever had and the wave of crowd noise that had washed over her. She’d been cheered and booed, clapped for and hissed at, mocked and lauded, but it had always felt somehow impersonal. She knew that it wasn’t her the crowd was reacting to, but the event itself. They wanted blood and mayhem, and she was simply a well-stocked vendor of those particular goods. This was different. They weren’t cheering in reaction to the spectacle they’d witnessed. They were cheering for her.
Somewhere in the deepest fathoms of her mind, an idea took shape. It wasn’t a plan, but a possibility. Growing up as the daughter of two double agents in a country where a single misspoken phrase could lead to a brutal, protracted death at the hands of Templar inquisitors, Selena had become preternaturally attuned to the unspoken undercurrents that churned beneath the surface of even the calmest cities. And Juarez was anything but calm.
Her decision to compete in the Iron Circle, driven at first by a mixture of her never-truly-contained desire to fight and her petulant need to strain against any yoke placed on her shoulders, had taken on a more practical aspect. There was something here, something she could use.
She just needed to find out what it was.
23: Entropy’s Clutches
A cold wind descended from the mountains. Acrid dust filled Simon’s lungs, bringing every breath to the cusp of a cough without quite nudging it over. He itched his eyes and straddled the peculiar device they’d taken from the canyon vault. Mechanically, he understood it well enough—he’d gotten it running, after all—but when it came to actually using it, the thing might as well have plummeted to earth from a distant galaxy. Why had its designer given it only two wheels? It was sleek enough but lacked any inherent stability. He hauled it upright until the seat pressed snug against his thighs, his tiptoes barely scraping the ground.
“Okay,” said Emily. “Now lift up your feet and turn the handle a bit.”
“If I lift up my feet, I’ll fall.”
“You won’t once the engine kicks in. It’s only hard to balance when you’re not moving.”
With a final sigh, Simon lifted his feet and hit the throttle. The machine listed right and chewed up the gravel with a scream of its tires. Simon felt his equilibrium topple and hurled himself free, hitting the ground with a jolt and skittering across the hardpan for several feet. A splash of heat rent his elbow. Hissing, he cradled his arm to his
chest and observed the injury. A patch of skin over the joint hung raw and tattered, studded with stony grit.
“This thing’s impossible!” he cried.
“Here. Let me give it another try.”
Simon relinquished the machine. Emily righted it and mounted the seat with a graceful swing of her leg. She stood astride it effortlessly, a feat Simon couldn’t manage despite being two inches taller than her. She pushed off with her foot and gunned the throttle. The engine whirred, and she took off, legs tucked nimbly against the footholds near the rear wheel. She glided over the hardpan, a wheeled chimera, and described a quick loop of the saltpan they’d chosen as their testing ground. Her hair whipped behind her in a hundred black streamers.
She came to a stop next to Simon and dismounted. Her smile receded as she noticed Simon’s dejection. She tugged a wrinkle from her jeans. “It’s not so tough when you get used to it. You just need a bit more practice.”
“I don’t think there’s enough time left in the world for me to get all the practice I need on that thing.” He kicked a pebble across the hardpan, hands stuffed in his pockets. How on earth was he going to manage to ride that thing all the way to Juarez? He couldn’t make it ten feet without falling over.
The plan had seemed so simple: jaunt down to Juarez, find Selena, and scoot away before anyone could stop them. The machine gave them a tremendous advantage in terms of speed—that is, if the driver didn’t fall on his ass every thirty seconds. He could try using one of the bigger vehicles instead, but they’d take weeks to fix yet. And how was he supposed to hide it once he got within city limits?
He grabbed his hair with both hands and tugged until the pain brought tears to his eyes. Why was he so bad at everything? Selena wouldn’t have struggled to ride the machine. She would’ve figured it out even quicker than Emily had. How many times had she rescued him from one mess or another, often of his own making? Now it was his turn, and he was failing miserably.
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