Ø has a few hours to kill. Her pre-match ritual is at hand. For now, she sits atop the wooden bench, her temporary home. She’s determined to pass the time with little fanfare.
She chews her lips, as she does when she waits. They’re always moist and full from the humidity. Never chapped, never dehydrated as they are in the dry confines of a starship or artificial atmosphere.
Now, if she were aboard the Cimarron, if she were preparing for a raid, she would be meticulously organizing. Loading this armament, torturing that informant, ordering her crew to perform whatever is necessary for a successful operation. Always the captain in motion.
But, with nothing but the one-minute kill to look forward to, her body enters its catatonic state.
Warriors of all flavors make their entry: the drug-fueled criminals wearing their Red jackets, the tattooed, scarred braves in their Black ponchos and headdresses, the solitary professionals in their subtle Blue overcoats. They enter, strip, and lounge as she has done.
They linger in equal breadths from one another. Two full-arm lengths. A radius just outside the reach of a blade’s rogue swing. The mutual atmosphere of distrust, a polite alienation, keeps the room devoid of conversation and filled with nonverbals. Every soul looks for a heavy leer, shift of the shoulders, or any preemptive aggression embedded into the psyche of intelligent life. Aggression to be returned tenfold.
So she sits alone, predatory and statuesque.
A few exotics lurk between the day’s selection of fighters. Of foreign origin, representing colors Ø has forgotten. Oranges, Yellows, Purples, faded memories of expression.
These few visiting managers inspect the warriors as livestock. They make marks in their notebooks of gait, height, weight. References to be reviewed later, once survivors are tallied. From there, The Circuit chooses another lucky few, replacements for the dead, elevating the victors to comparative luxury.
Like these others, she watches a veteran. His is skin criss-crossed with deep-set scars. In his glory, he stands a few meters away.
The teakettlers wrap his arms with hefty leather straps, fixating his pauldrons. They polish his khopesh and test his round shield with petulant smacks. Finally, they secure a chest plate, an unquenchable Red. The warriors draw breath as furry claws clasp the final harnesses, and the fighter takes his place at the pit’s gateway.
As usual, a pause sweeps the den upon the Red’s approach. The lingering gladiators halt their work out of a reciprocal, sportsmanlike respect. Some interrupt the sharpening of weaponry, their arms frozen in place halfway down their blades. Others clutch their prayer beads, holding at an arbitrary syllable of their mantras and rosaries. In this politeness, the room squeaks to near-silence. A still-life that produces only the sound of dripping water from faucet-heads and foggy vaulted ceilings.
The gate is ancient. Simple steel. Devoid of markings save for a single serif ‘G’ and ‘M’. Through its thin bars is darkness. A thousand meters of damp walkway constructed at a sinuous, upward angle. Water snakes down the incline and into thousands of notches that lovingly prevent flooding, echoing against the limestone walls, themselves bare and lacking identification.
Today, hundreds of warriors will march through this gateway. Sometimes alone, more common alongside a competitor. Once in the pit, all are enemies. But, before that, however, in the endless dark, the gladiators are two mutually condemned souls. Both must reach the arena unscathed, or no fight occurs.
And with no fight, consequences.
And so each warrior acts as guard and captive in bilateral resignation, some even dragging their miserable, demoralized opponents into the ring only for a haphazard execution before the jeering audience.
The gate closes as before. The Red figure dissipates from a light rose, to a forlorn crimson, and ultimately disappears. His resolute footsteps bounce off the walls at first, drawing themselves slowly until only silence remains.
Finally, his existence gone and forgotten, the din returns without fanfare.
Behind Ø, through the thousands of marble columns, comes a shrill laugh. It cuts the air with a dull knife, forcing those around to take notice. High-pitched, never-ending like a crocotta’s. Across the mare’s nostrils dances the little squaw of tobacco. Without fail, it’s Gates.
“Oh, ‘ave a gander!” she exclaims. She totters towards Ø on the stilts she wears at all times. The Red dyes that course through the technical satin of her pumps does not run. “Ye look fantastic. A proper prin in ‘er element. What do ye have, anuvver hour ter go?”
The question hangs as her eyes dart around the locker room. Her lips curl in relish and disgust at the warriors’ minutiae, her mind slapping cash registers, attempting to quantify the financial victory she may yet achieve today.
“Still ‘aven’t reconsidered? Between yous and me, you’ve gorra sound chance for today, Bless dat. I’d really rather ‘elp ye than get in yer way.”
Ø looks on, disinterested, trying to ignore the entrancing cigarette stench.
“Dis is yer last chance,” Gates sayd. “Ay ‘erd all about last night. Blasted business, dat. Ay dun think it would’a ‘appened if yous were one’a me Reds. Why don’t ye consider it? Ay won’t be look’n to buy yer corpse come days-end.”
The audacity.
Ø knows Gates is right. Gates knows it, too. Your mare could walk away with a modicum more in funds, another ten percent for every win, sans armor damage fees. And without a hammock to call home, without a guarantee of surviving the evening’s maelstrom, you’re both destitute.
But Ø thinks of the only currency she has left: spite.
So she basks in the silence, refusing to answer. Instead, she reviews the night before, her hoof colliding with the corpse of the Black assassin. Even against the overlay of slime on The Deseret’s floor, the newtons of force from her core, even tired, caught flat-footed, still severs trachea and pulverizes larynx. The audacity for Gates to think she’s intimidated the most dangerous fighter in the settlement.
“Blast dat,” Gates sneers. “Enjoy me clinic.”
Ø pays no mind as Gates exits. She tries to ignore the clap of heels against metal lockers, fine tiling, foreign silvered scutum. Or the palpable smell of rogue Keowees, the gift she’s given up for cattiness.
But she can’t ignore it all.
The base of her equine skull wracks with anger, anxiety, bloodlust, and, with Gates’s every step, wasp stings that coordinate in a single location. Nerves, Ø assumes. She grinds her teeth and her molars crinkle like aluminum. Nerves she can’t afford, she thinks as they threaten to harden and become spiky, to shoot out like some defensive evolutionary feature.
The stinging grows inescapable. She wonders if she’s committed an error by not tearing the lanista in two and looting the half pack of cigarettes from her bisected corpse.
Ø draws a hand to her ears, turgid and at attention with stress. Then down her mane, where her occipital skin twitches, spasming uncontrollably. Lower, at the base of her neck, in between her overlapping lamellar and pauldrons, she finds the source.
A single dart, no larger than a thorn. Poisonous. Blue, impregnated with lord-only-knows.
The poke missed her spine only by a hair, and the small droplets of blood at its entry have already coagulated. She stands and turns. Scanning the crowds, she finds only the milling, silent, disinterested fighters, each wholly unassuming. In movement, quickly replaced in view by similar characters.
Her eyes twitch, toxins seeping, as the stirring masses of muscle and manpower prepare for their executions without a care towards her existence.
Yelling is pointless. Weapons like this, under-handed and simple, are unstoppable once deployed. A single dart or needle, lightly coated in the venoms of New Port Moresby’s flora, chemically tamed and geographically sequestered, can poison twenty healthy men. Slathered darts like these can hide in the tiniest of teakettler paws, be shot from the smallest home-made sumpit, threaded through hand-picked twigs or repurposed piping. Or, simpler, it can jabbed in the back during conversation.
For all the fanfare that rumbles overhead, byzantine and codified, the act of murder has already been perfected and deployed.
Ø prepares for the muscle relaxants, the curare that no doubt fills the simple tribal weapon. Poisons that can freeze her in place, asphyxiate her, cut off the oxygen to her brain before she can choose to tumble over. She nearly swallows her tongue as the gladiators brush past her, unaware of the numbness she knows is about to strike.
But the time comes and goes.
She stands, chest heaving, sweat forming across every ridge of her pelt, her maw jealously sucking in the eucalyptic oxygen. Her eyes flutter, enjoying her precious moments of life. She moves, stumbling around in a stupor, in some confused quest. As if a blowpipe-wielding assassin would materialize for retribution and tell her everything she wants to hear, namely that she hasn’t been poisoned.
But at that moment, you lose her. She loses herself in her mind, letting the vapors of confusion escape her lips. She’s alive but empty, until a tidal wave of curare-fueled emotion finally strikes her. It bursts from every vein and shoots through her irises.
To nobody’s surprise, she’s angry.
---
You have a few hours to kill in nervous fear. Hundreds of faces pass by, tense, tusked, turbaned, the looks of strangers who neither have time to meet your acquaintance, nor the interest. All standing, shuffling against the wind and rain, reeds in the swamp of debauchery. You draw your purified hands against your empty firearm beneath your tattered poncho, like a child clutching a harmless cloth doll.
You ascend the flights of stairs, traversing the mazes of tarpaulin, to approach your personal promontory in the ruined boxes. It’s sloppy to have such a pattern while being so paranoid, but as always, your job is twofold.
First you’ll bet, attempting to pluck from poverty some sort of income in the face of chance. Second, you’ll operate your vantage point. You’ll signal down below from the strategic perch to your mare in the ring. No matter how much Ø resents the unsportsmanlike edge, one that statistically makes her deadlier and justifies your continued existence at her side, you’ll be there to provide a justification for your existence.
Ignoring safety, intent on reversing your fortune, you trudge up the dangerous inclines, dodging your fellow spectators.
They fill the amphitheater to the brim. Unlike other days, payment is required for entry. The fees no doubt come with the expanded surcharge from the individual guards themselves. They browbeat the odd-out drunk or confused first-timer for another credit or two, gathering in groups and intimidating the plebs.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
But, as much as the personal taxes increase, they never skim from George Merrick’s take. You can steal from others on New Port Moresby, the deracinated and disconnected visitors, but never the institutions. Such monolithic altars to the religion of bloodshed are existential, godlike, and carry inhuman retaliation. This spiritual relationship between peon and immovable business, the true social contract, allows the embezzling guards to keep their own miniature local monopolies.
The only safety is in numbers, as the groups of color palettes demonstrate.
They’re cliques. Organized into squadrons of two to fifteen, never alone. Outside they lurk on streetcorners, far from the parkways and boulevards. Inside, they coalesce around landmarks—huddled to the side of crowded stalls and decaying statuary, next to abutments inscribed with gang signs and erotic graffiti.
Wherever they are, their specialty is limited to small-scale wildcat political violence. Drunken beatdowns and money-motivated ideological intimidation.
Between verses and chants, songs scrawled on passed-down laminated parchment, they attack in packs. They always travel in packs. For safety, mostly, pooling together limited resources like zip-locked pouches of half-spent lighters, rubbing alcohol for both transdermal and oral usage, and expired antihistamines with hallucinogenic side-effects.
They accomplish multiple objectives in a single whooping, frighteningly efficient in their hunger like the omnivoric scavengers they are. Omniscient, too, seemingly everywhere between the sheets of rain. Like any other pack creature, they rest mostly, perched atop windswept and spongy stone, languidly watching friend and foe alike with bloodshot or blackened eyes.
Thankfully, you’re outside of their food chain. Brown. They’ve no beef with you. You’re not clean and vulnerable like a tourist, nor a native, pseudo-aristocratic target surrounded by uniformed security. You’re discolored, mangled, nearly diseased to their predatory minds. So they leave you alone, some eyeing you with suspicion, most ignoring your presence, unsure of your true valuation, content with never knowing.
And as these visitors fill the amphitheater, they fill your box.
Rainwater batters down on the observers who have claimed your nook. The crowd is separated, their positions on either side of the entry. Five in total. Three in Red, two in Black. Even through the din of rain, they study your unannounced entrance with uncanny interest.
The two jackaroos, Black ponchos sticking to their bodies, gaze past the brims of their cowboy hats. One, face mutilated, scarred with collections of Black triangles, nudges the other, the hunched one. Their gnarled hands lurk beneath their waists and their stares lurch up and down your form.
The other three in lay in a garrulous Red boodle. They shoot you three pairs of spezie-addled eyes from beneath their Red rain jackets. Only five eyes between them, skins are patchy with ulcerative fungi. One, the Huntaway, stares through the thunder, flashing her mouth full of canines. They’re false, a collection of shimmering cobalt alloys. Her group’s drunk, corned whispering lowers, hidden from the bloodbath below, as another roar rocks from the crowds.
All five of their lips flap with ill-intent. You only think of the night before. The three dead balandas, one only left with two-thirds of a body. Someone’s willing to space you, to sacrifice a dry night’s safety. If they’d brave the floodwaters of the streets, why wouldn’t they space you here?
After all, what’s another corpse to George Merrick?
So instead of your usual home, you shift your weight, turning back around, and down towards the stands, where the throngs of onlookers can keep you safe in numbers like all prey.
Your natural twinge of agoraphobia is magnified in the tumorous mass of colors. Reds, Blues, Blacks, and visiting Yellows, Purples, Greens, entire palettes of drunken revelers. Seating is nonexistent, the limestone blocks eroded with rain and footsteps. Their smooth surfaces are deadly. The only safety rail is the fellow next to you as you cram together, your feet leaving the ground in times of genuine excitement, carried by the crowd. It’s here, in the ringside rookeries, that safety paradoxically seems within reach, prey among prey.
Past the hundreds of heads below on the stadia’s decline, the pit groans. At this distance, the hazy figures of mud-soaked fighters contend. Wind whips the edges of the masses, forcing you further inside, the storm worsening as it did the evening before. As you pass the screeching fans, wet, cold, intoxicated, you spy the ones holding betting cards; the others lighting cigarettes beneath the brims of their sou’westers. Bloodshot spezie eyes, mucus leaking from the differences in air pressure, elbows digging into ribs as slurs of disgust are hurled at defeated corpses.
Near the edge of the pit, fans clasp the aged railings for safety, fall-in’s finding themselves collected and re-released to the top of the pile to begin the pilgrimage anew. Assuming they avoid being gored while momentarily dropping into the heat of battle, of course.
You lurk within the clutch for some time. Eternal dusk slathers you, waiting with bated breath for Ø’s first match. Lacking the ringside vantage of others, she’ll have to go without your shared vision. She’s capable enough, as much as she’ll chew you out later, grateful for another issue with which to beat you over the head.
You feel the adrenaline cascade from her withers. The tension between her shoulder blades is almost piercing, stabbing. A copper sort that feels like a fingernail against broken glass.
A bit early for her usual blood rage, you think.
Only another hour or two, you exhale. Hundreds of meters above sway the formless canopies, their unmistakable rainforest forms blinking ochre with every stray lightning strike. Even from the edges of the settlement, where the impenetrable walls of organic life encroach further every day, the treetops spew leaves, branches, entire shelves of ecosystems into the maelstrom, pelting fans and fighters alike. You watch one branch with tired eyes, its banking and diving with calligraphic skywriting, closing the distance from Algonquin’s far-off boundaries.
The thwack as it slaps against the pit’s mud floor is more of a thump, like the fist that lands between your shoulder blades.
The shock of a hit from behind makes you slide forward, tripping against the smooth stone seating and smacking into a Yellow. You contort at your ankles, spiraling in pain to meet your assailant. A familiar mutilated, tattooed face shoots you an inebriated grin from beneath a weathered cowboy hat. The familiar Black jackaroo can’t hide his off-pace shuffling, even in the square meter where you both stand. He’s breathing into your face, smelling like rancid meat, shouting against another crash of thunder.
“You’re in my seat,” he slurs. His tongue nearly falls from his mouth. He moves like moss, eyelids threatening to close at any moment, as he brings a fist below into your stomach, starting a cacophonous square dance that uses the crowd as ringside ropes.
One slap of yours lands at his ear, sending the Black figure a seat below, into a nest of Blues. In response, the Black behind him, taking offense for his comrade, gives you a shove into the lower seats as well. An avalanche of colors folds into itself, unaware spectators toppling towards the arena, growing bolder as it accumulates more meat. Those coming later fall harder and faster from the momentum of the semi-human wave.
An attentive observer can say such an event happens once, if not twice, a day. Today, it has already happened four times; the amphitheater packed to bursting with marauding cliques and their own agendas.
Fights break out before spectators hit the floor. Red on Yellow, Blue on Black, Green on Purple and White, a full spectrum of hooliganism. Tooth hits marble and knuckles crack against rib in a lascivious display of public appreciation for sport, a homunculus birthed from a society built on the back of semi-restricted, state-sponsored-advertised-performed violence. As a familiar Red throws a heel into your left eye, you can’t help but believe the good fun you’re taking part in has a suspiciously malicious undercurrent.
It’s a thought that reflects from the Huntaway’s cobalt jaw as she gives you another firm kick.
Her boot’s alto-rubber sole is thick. A combat boot of sorts. Military surplus. Possibly molded with the escutcheon of two crossed jambiya daggers or a single skull and crossbones.
Maybe she’s an askari on holiday, or a visiting rancher who purchased the pair second-hand. You think of the drunks in The Deseret, and wonder if she’s a poor soul you’ve slept beside, night after night, without noticing. Her motivations are unknown, violence absurd, colluding with that of an uncaring predestiny.
Nevertheless, her stray kick hurtles over the railing and into the pit.
---
Ø fires another left hook into the lockers. Must be nerves, most other gladiators think.
All have their vices to provoke calm. Home-made trinkets wrapped around ankles for good luck, or special powders to be snorted and shot. Toxins and mantras ultimately lead to outbursts of unprofessional emotion. As such, Ø’s locker-room performance is tolerated, if noisy.
But as the fresh blood cascades from her knuckles, a few bystanders take notice.
Her tongue is numb, flopping out past her dark gums. Her cheeks are on fire, her teeth brittle as she froths. While she has an hour until her match-up, a solo fight, the first of the day’s bracket against a visiting Orange, she’s lost track of the time. The match is tomorrow, suddenly multiple weeks from now, then it’s about to start.
Several hundred degrees of heat churn within her arteries, threatening to burst. She hasn’t been this angry in months, years, as the rabid, toxic sensations take hold. Her right fist comes into the locker, denting it further, cutting the skin beneath her knuckles, bald of sorrel fur.
Blood rages have kept her alive, and her lifestyle warrants such degrees of anger. They keep her spry, quick on her feet. Foxy enough to sniff out the backstabbers amongst her crew and summarily deal with the mutinous instincts that arise with time. And such man-eating urges come in handy, notably in the ring.
But this rocketed trajectory, the unsustainable incline of emotion, one that combusts through her lactic acid, both mental and physical, is foreign. She’s poisoned. Maybe at an earlier point she understood that fact, but now she can’t understand much at all. Whatever rational self you’ve painstakingly built through your time together has evaporated.
Whatever rational self that is, she detests.
In under a year, fate has stripped her ill-gotten titles. All the loot she’s fought so ruthlessly to accumulate. Now she’s stuck back in the muck she had once battled to escape, all because of the obtuse animal magnetism which ensnares you both.
And as she detests herself and her lot, she detests you more. Your unbearable softness in the face of danger. The maddening meekness with which you accept your mutually destitute lives. You’re a living millstone around her neck, dangling at her branded barcode, holding her in place with timidity, dragging her beneath the surface of mud that she fights to stay above. She doesn’t need you, nor want you. If she can take the chance, she’ll get rid of you herself.
Somehow, even more than you, she detests the never-ending storms, the ethereal design beyond her control or comprehension that grafts you both together in destitution. The sharpened weapons that lurk beneath the shadowy corners of the room look tantalizing in the moment, as the rhythms of otherworldly anxieties, angers, fears course through her veins. Release is close, and she feels it. All it would take is a single carve on her own sickly fur, lovingly placed, goaded by the whispering nymphs of synthetic poison.
But, she feels the thud of your body into the pit.
Your fall is clumsy. A fifteen-meter drop. It reverberates against the walls of the amphitheater, rocking the limestone foundations, causing tree-trunks to split from the canopies above. Vibrations shuffle through the mare’s barding, shaking off the fresh Blue coat of paint, threatening to snap the leather straps that hold them together. It shakes her brittle teeth, shatters the steel of her sword, and rattles the nest of hornets that has taken residence near her spine.
Vision dissipates, and her hooves take flight. She marches towards the entrance of the pit. Ahead of her, the unmistakable silhouettes of those next in line for a match.
One, a Blue android. The other, a humanoid in Black. Both are adorned in their hand-me-down armor, shoulder-to-shoulder in fate and content with the inevitability of the other’s murder.
Ø bursts between the two of them, shattering concentrations, cutting prayers under breaths. In short, making a spectacle of herself. Her bloody digits grip the bars of the interior entrance gate leading to the center of the amphitheater and shakes them, possessed, rattling the “G.M.” typography.
“Not your turn, Blue,” the Black sneers. Her priggish tone reeks of religious reverence. She spits, disgusted with the display of what she assumes is nerves. Ink bleeds beneath her skin, fresh, nervously issued tattoos coating her body with imperfect watercolors.
“Compose yourself,” the other Blue hisses. Two of his synthetic teeth are missing, and an amusing whistle escapes the edge of his scowl. His rigid frame refuses to respond to the embarrassing outburst, steeling himself against the performance.
Your mare declines to listen. Entranced, she continues to shake the bars with fervor. Her bloodshot eyes follow the ridges and curves of the wall, across the bas-reliefs and chalk-laden physical scoreboards, continuously amended, to the single bullwheel in the corner.
The automated locomotive is ancient. Simple enough for the most braindead yobbos to operate. Namely, its operators comprise two teakettlers. One keeps an ear to the ground, waiting for some unknown signal or vibration to activate the contraption, the other entranced by the mare’s outburst. Its flat face is agape, catching flies.
Ø’s deliberate saunter alerts most others. The obnoxious clip-clopping, off-beat and stumbling, interrupts the pregame meditations. Crooked stares watch as she approaches the mechanism and kicks a single hoof against its winch. With a familiar groan, the rusted wheel turns, coiling the metal helixes of steel rope. The mare’s swift punts easily dispatch the two little guards, who land against the walls and scamper to safety.
A chorus of disapproval echoes from the crowd.
It’s a cardinal sin to disrupt the machinations of murder. The thin veneer of sportsmanship keeps the warriors in place, sitting, stewing, preparing for their shot at a measly few credits. Disruptors are dangerous, insane threats.
As Ø’s legs think for themselves, her unconscious body nearing the entrance to the pit, a sober mare would have agreed with the sentiment.
The tunnel takes form around her. She’s senseless as the bemoaning killers shout after her, their insults and curses funneling with her down the dark chasm. Hooves pound the aged limestone along with the bakya soles of angry teakettlers in chase, their commotion dissipating, evaporating with distance. Soon she hears nothing, only her heartbeat radiating from the dull Blue haze of the tunnel’s exit. It floats towards her, enticing her towards your half-conscious, vulnerable body.
Whether it entices her to help or harm, however, is anyone’s guess.