I throw my hands up, palms empty. Eyes darting left and right in search of an exit. But these are baby professionals. They can see that they’ve got us cornered. Smell the single beat of panic that pulses through my veins. Like hounds, they spread out, block Feint and I in, and close the noose in an instant. They stand too far apart for a single attack to hit more than one, wary of any classes I might have been holding back when they saw me last. Wary of Feint, too.

I can’t get caught up in anything here. If I do, I’ll be questioned, and my skimpy fake identity will not hold up. But the more my heels begin to ease back, the more it triggers that special sense for weakness that all these cocky college warriors have.

They know I want to run. But they also have a reputation, and in a gladiocracy, murder is the highest sin. So they’re not going to kill me. Not when there’s a witness. They’re just gonna fuck me up real, real bad for what I did to their leader.

Then I take another look at the guy in charge, and I’m not even sure of that guarantee.

It’s not anger I see on his face. It’s hate. A cool hate, a calculating hate, a proud hate. He takes his time wrapping his knuckles in tape while the others flank us, tearing off each length with his teeth. That mane of orange-red hair pulled together like a comet.

“Nice of you to turn on the lights,” he says, inspecting his knuckles. Almost lazily, he adds, “Grab them.”

Feint tries to dart away and gets clubbed in the back of the head as one of the three other fighters lunges to catch her. He fishes through her empty pockets in search of a JOY before dumping her against a pile of moth-eaten storage crates. Half-conscious and dazed.

“This one’s just a mook,” he says.

Then they surround me. On my right, a densely muscled girl with geometric tattoos covering her arms in dark ink. Leather-bound cybersword taller than I am strapped to her back. To my left, a wiry guy with slew of throwing blades hidden in his uni windbreaker; slicked back fade and a razor-sharp gaze. They close from opposite sides, moving with the trained smoothness common in all team fighters. Only the third, that straw-haired boy with the fox- Tamer class, the pet handlers- refuses to budge. While I let the others grab my arms and wrench them back, he puts himself between the ringleader and Feint, one hand protectively extended.

“Aurix, do not do this,” he warns, staring down the taller brawler. He glances at me. “Look at her, man! She’s probably just some Venter looking for a place to sleep. Let her off. We’re better than petty revenge. You are better.”

“Venters don’t fight like she did,” Aurix says, finishing his tape. “You saw her throw that match. She’s some pro smirk who thought it’d be funny to embarrass us in front of a crowd. I’m just gonna teach her a little lesson in respect.” He looks past the girl. “Her jacket.”

They rip Dad’s jacket off my shoulders and throw it over. Aurix flips back the collar, frowns, and drops it atop his bag. Powerful hands reaffirm around my bare wrists.

“Nice arm,” the tattooed girl sneers. “Should’ve used that money on a real one.”

“I would if I could, believe me.”

“Aurix…” the Tamer tries again.

Aurix shoves right past, winding his arms in small circles to loosen up. Heather grey shirt already stained by sweat, violent eyes the color of a lake at midnight. A buzzsaw trickle of elemental fire seeps from his sleeves. One snap will ignite it to lethal levels.

Fox boy shakes her head in disappointment, voice sinking. “What would your father think?”

Aurix blinks twice. The question actually stalls him for a moment. Then his hate doubles. All of it narrowing on me, finding an outlet in me as he snarls, “Wouldn’t we all love to know, Felix.”

The fighters holding me wrench my arms back with an iron grip. I flick my chin up, egging their leader forward. Only thing I’m thinking of is how the hell I’m going to get Feint and before I escape. I can’t just leave her.

My fingers curl inwards, five metal then five real, knuckles cracking. “Real brave of you, ganging up three against one. Maybe you’ll land a real hit this time.” I glance over at the huge girl gripping my prosthetic arm. “Might want to hold on a little tighter.”

She responds by slamming me against the side of the fighting square hard enough to bruise my back. My spine arches over the edge. I grimace at the pain. Aurix closes, balling a fistful of rippling fire around his right hand. Dominant hand. “Keep talking,” he says. “Get all the snarkiness out, before I beat it out of you.”

My voice steels in warning as he comes to a stop in striking distance. “You let us go, I’ll walk out right now and never come back.”

He glances up as a couple of the lights flicker above us, eyes quickly returning to my face, my prosthetic arm, my lanky frame. Deciding what to break first. “Nah. No one embarasses me like that and walks away. You did it twice.”

He settles on my face. Typical.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“So I’m just an emotional punching bag for your daddy issues. Killer.” I try to look past him, shouting at the fox tamer. “What about you? You’re just going to sit there?”

He refuses to meet my gaze, not that I care. The lights flicker around us again, drawing the attention of the uni fighters for a split second. I don’t bother looking up. I can already see the way this night’s about to go, and it’s not pretty. The nonchalance is just a distraction while I subtly adjust my weight to the balls of my feet. “Mah. Go ahead. Your friend here needs all the help he can get.”

Aurix’s arm chambers back like a piston. Potential energy skyrockets in the shoulder joint. The flames build around his fist, shuddering with waves of compressed heat. And then, right as his hips swivel to release the body-breaking punch, a high-pitched electric whine saws into our eardrums like steel against steel.

Everyone recoils. Aurix slams his palms to his ears. The others try to follow suit, but can’t release me. Instead, they shout in confusion at the noise, heads swinging towards Aurix as the flames around him sizzle out like a pinched wick. The giant JOY-created sword strapped to the girl’s back follows a moment later, dissolving into a slurry of electric-blue nanolines. Gone in a blink.

She feels the change in weight and reaches back on instinct. “What the…”

Slick-fade’s eyes widen as he pulls out his JOY. The sphere’s dead, cold metal. His head whips to me. “It’s her!” he suddenly shouts, mouth agape. “She’s Feint! The pro-killer!”

Feint?

“Feint!?” the fox tamer gapes.

Pro-killer?

I don’t even have time to process the second accusation. Because at the exact same moment that Slick shouts, every overhead in the gym suddenly cuts out at once, coating us in darkness. The JOY in Slick’s hand blinks back to life, splaying projector screens in every direction as it reboots. Orange-hot fire cuts back on around Aurix’s hand. He’s throwing his full weight into the punch at me when the blinding light of the rebooting JOY’s projector screens slashes across us, hitting him square in the eyes.

Pinned still, back to a hard wall, surrounded on all sides, outsized and outnumbered four to one, I move as my father taught me. Aurix’s fist has only started to accelerate when my right foot snaps up in a blur, cracking the two halves of his jaw together hard enough to fracture teeth. The punch flies wide left. I drop in the same moment, catching Slick off guard and dragging him into the path of the blow. A fire-wrapped fist collides with his unprotected jaw like a sledgehammer against hollow wood. He cracks into the side of the square headfirst.

The overheads click back on. Still dropping to the ground, I plant a hand on the floor and flick out a kick at the side of the inked girl’s knee. Only her Guardian class’s built-in reinforcement keeps the joint from popping like a cork. She collapses with a roar of pain and I keep rotating. Handspring over her back and onto my feet, then whip my entire body into an evasive roll at a microsecond warning as I hear the familiar oxygen shriek of elemental flames being concentrated into lethal compression. A vitriolic beam of fire slams through the space I just occupied like a foot-wide hole puncher, incincinerating the air, a table, a pull-up bar and one of the gym’s support pillars before it slags a hole straight through a brick wall and tears into an alley across the street; bridging the road in a string of roiling light.

Fire swells and blooms along the devastated path. Scorched skin itches on my lower spine from the near miss. I jerk upright just in time to meet Aurix’s lightning-fast chaser. Boxer’s triplet; jab-jab-haymaker. I throw myself sideways to juke the first jab and shoot back instantly. Smash an elbow into his sternum to stagger him, and link it into a reverse snap kick to the gut. He goes through a stack of dusty furniture like a cannonball.

The other two are back up the second I look away. Slick grabs a blunt wooden training blade from a nearby rack, clutching a hand to the bruised side of his face. “Get manual weapons!” he slurs. “She’s killed leaguers from the M. The reports said she’s immune to JOYs. We can’t rely our classes.”

“Just our luck,” Ink growls. She seizes a ladder leaning against one of the pillars, whirling it like a tree trunk. Blocking space. Buying time for Aurix to smash out of the debris, then sweep into her wake, feline-quick.

They splinter into a triangle formation, not even giving me time to deny the accusation. Slick closes first, flanking to my left. Aurix and Ink charge straight from the front. I pick a target and explode into motion. Snag a weight clamp from a nearby ramp and backhand wing it at Ink’s head like a steel bullet. Her hardcoded university training costs her. Instinctively, she tries to lift the ladder and deflect the projectile, but it’s too cumbersome. She doesn’t even blink before the clamp brains the center of her forehead and drops her like a sack of meat. Aurix powerslides beneath the ladder as it swings wildly above his head, flames gathered orange-hot in his hands, shearing the floor with twin curtains of fire.

Pounding footsteps to my left. I glance, line my foot up with a rolling crate, and kick it into Slick’s legs, ending his attack before it can begin. Pain explodes through my torso as Aurix smashes into me like a jackhammer from the front the moment I look away. Heavy, muscular, violently fast. The impact force of the punch spins me sideways, opening my midline. His sneaker pistons heel-first into my chest, catapulting me into a pillar hard enough to eject the breath from my lungs.

Airless, I throw my hands up instinctively. Orange hair whips in front of me like a panther’s tail. A burning fist pulverizes the wood as I duck to the side. Another haymaker chases the first so hard Aurix’s knuckles drive into the pillar’s guts, trapping me at point-blank range.

We’re staring eye-to-eye. My back to the pillar, his hand stuck inside it. His knee already chambered for a brutal strike meant to obliterate my intestines through explosive kinetic force. He sneers. “Some killer you are.”

I slam my forehead into his face. Bone cracks against bone. Stars explode inside my head, but he recoils even worse. Before he can recover, I grab the side of his head and smash him facefirst into a bench press. There’s a sick crunch of cartilage. Red smearing his face. A bloody moan as he rebounds off of it like a backboard. I kick his body over the bar and out of the fight, then suddenly throw my prosthetic arm up and back to no-look block the wooden training sword that Slick swings at my skull. The blunt weapon snaps clean against hard carbon fiber. Splinters shower over my shoulders. I duck Slick’s followup and he rolls right over my back with a surprised yelp, straight into a dismissive heel that dumpsters him into a rack of wooden training implements, scattering the decade-old weapons like bowling pins.

Only then do I manage to get air back into my lungs. It comes slowly at first, as my heart gradually remembers it can breathe. Painfully straightening up, I clutch a hand to my chest and stumble a back against the side of the sandstone square, reeling from confusion.

They think I’m Feint? And that she is some kind of assassin who’s immune to JOYs- that’s not even possible- who they clearly recognized? Who’s wanted on the news? Shit, shit, shit.

It can’t be true. But they sure thought it was.

And if they’re even half-right… a spontaneous dinner date with a killer who’s wanted for murdering major leaguers doesn’t just happen. Feint finding me on that Electric Town curb didn’t just happen.

She told me she was looking for someone. I knew she wasn’t lying when she did.

Now, a day too late to save me, I get why.