Ø’s entrance is unwelcome. Her pupils dilate. Soaked in the overcast, she’s nearly blind. The gates shutter behind her, locking her inside the ring.

Two bestiarii, hand-picked from their Red and Black families, are locked in venatio with their animalistic adversary.

Beasts are commonplace in the jungles, the agropelters and aswangs lurking beneath every branch, the hidebehinds and dropbears prowling just out of sight. They skulk within the collective consciousness of Algonquin, and their ritualistic sacrifices inside amphitheater are cathartic to most natives and exciting to visitors. George Merrick knows this. So bets, heavily weighted, serve as momentary indulgences for the inebriated.

Following nearly three minutes of combat, the jackalope is still standing. Fourteen meters tall before the two tandem gladiators.

Its thick fur is split in dozens of notches, its hind legs continuing to thrash against the mud with terrorizing ferocity. Black pus oozes from the carcinogenic antlers that propagate its face, bursting from its freshly bleeding ears, its left eye socket a single thorn of keratin, twisted and sharpened. The pockmarked beast screeches in pain, flailing its front paws and stamping its rear appendages in anger.

The jackalope is beset on two sides.

On its left, in its blind spot, is Chief. The caestus wears only the black body paint and tattoos of his people. Nude, save for the bladed gauntlet at his wrist, gripped at the palm. Its cornucopia of blades drip with blood, his chiseled form too scarified to show fresh wounds in the raging storm.

Opposite, staring down the beast’s sole eye, is the Red. The newest convict. Gates’s shoo-in, newly sprung from Ticonderoga Station. Behind his rectangular shield, his steel helmet protects the provocator’s zonked-out mind, complete with two Red faux-feathers, rubbery, like antennas, collecting rain between their plastic fibres. More drug than man.

The crowd boos.

Your mare’s arrival, an interruption of the sacrosanct bloodletting, interferes with the holiest of mathematics. For the spectators and punters, bookies and commentators, introducing such an anthropomorphic variable is insulting. Untold amounts of betting data, organized and hidden in dehumidified enclaves, jury-rigged with stolen electricity, screech in pain. Within local records, enshrined in the hundred-page, laminated volumes found in the depths of the amphitheater, the athletic statistics will be voided. Crossed out in anger like an ancient sacrifice performed with error, or hymns interrupted with a coughing fit.

As Ø’s hooves sink to her fetlocks, her mane sopping, mouth agape in animalistic rage, she’s become a heretic. Such a sacrilege will task someone behind the reinforced shelters of the betting booths with returning bets. At knife-point, in most cases. Including fees.

At her moment of arrival, with one match of The Circuit’s nearly two hundred voided, she’s canceled enough transactions to the equivalent of 0.0008% of Algonquin’s yearly gross domestic product. The profits disappear through the rain and between the rolling storm. A brief, embarrassing reminder of numerological fallibility.

And so, the crowd boos.

The two fighters investigate the interloper. Like everyone else whom the tunnel has berthed into the center of the arena, Ø’s a mess. Moreso, the mare’s a target.

To the Red, the Wild Card, she’s another force set upon him from an absurd Hobbesian universe. The divine geometry of cause-and-effect has driven his life from his first triple-murder on Washington-in-the-Shapley, to the delayed end result of imprisonment at Ticonderoga.

Then, behind bars, submerged under the ice. With only seventy days under, mentally imprisoned for an accelerated thirty-five years of a fifteen-hundred year sentence of mental reform, his mind infers Ø is but one more consequence of many in his pursuit of his natural state of malice. He grips his gladius with renewed vigor at the thought of a chance at yet another unarmed woman.

Chief senses correctly that the fight is forfeit.

There’s no honor in an abandoned match, one without divined statistics and chances for tantalizing glory. The pseudo-shaman backpedals through the sludge, establishing as much distance between himself and the beast. Light on his feet, hyper-aware of the writhing jackalope meters away, he’s unfocused as his bare calves catch your poncho and bruised spine, comedically sending him to the mud alongside your half-conscious body.

The cacophonous jeering grows unabated. Against the crowds of furious gamblers, drunken revelers howl with laughter at your performance. Most assume you’re another barrelman, performing the death-defying comedy normally seen between setpieces of gore. The backdrop of humiliation swells against Chief as you regain your footing.

As you both achieve some sort of composure, his icy stare implies you’re in more danger than you thought possible.

Within those few seconds, while a sea of teakettlers crawl from their spaces to act as pickup men and contain the beast, armed with their mouseguns and pocket-pistols, miniature banyal cutlasses and hand-carved pisuwe daggers, feathered with plastic skins, a local observer belts into his microphone. His broadcast reaches the hundreds of thousands within the nearest four star systems. In his Strine-poisoned Neo-Makassarese, holding back sniggers and roaring with an intoxicated flair, he calls the situation ‘bedlam.’

The first stab of Wild Card’s gladius goes for Ø’s neck, sending her stumbling backwards. Successive chops are playful in delivery, the elation of a maroon haze of spice muffling the seriousness of the convict’s murder attempts. His tendons explode with narcotic ferocity, his bloodied blade swiping X’s, Y’s, and Z’s as Ø sprints in reverse.

At one particularly careless swing, she lands a single blow, a haymaker into his helmet, the clangor nearly dislocating two fingers on her left hand. The deafening ring of bone on metal makes Wild Card flinch, the tin man wavering as Ø attempts her sloppy run towards you and Chief.

As expected, you burst into a sprint against the liquefied floor. Centimeters, sometimes half-meters, of suction return your forceful stomping as the planet itself tries to swallow you whole.

Beneath the initial layer of detritus are the corpses of freshly killed fighters, some still-suffering as their mechanical writhing only speeds up the silt’s suspensionary forces. Further down is the decomposition, where swarms of venomous worms and carnivorous bivalves hunt in packs, stripping flesh from bone over the course of only a few hours, leaving only skeleton and effects in a hasty warrior’s burial. Then subcontinental tidal energies massage together, churning age-old garbage to the top, releasing pockets of methane and carbon dioxide from the first few years of the planet’s terraforming efforts, sometimes erupting with enough volume to asphyxiate entire villages.

As your foot collides with some other hard, unseen substance under the surface, you wonder if it’s body or bone, still living or dead for centuries.

Chief is light on his feet. With as little armor as possible, his frame works with the forces of nature rather than against. His jog is fluid. Rhythmic, muscle systems like surface tension in their efficiency. The hunter’s instinct threatens to close your gap, to bring him within the meters he needs to pounce and mutilate with his bloodied gauntlet. Honor, the only currency his kind cares for, slips from his bony fingers with every stride, the humiliation of his Black colors building his intent from a trough and into a murderous crest.

Your only hope is the bedlam.

You drag yourself towards the torrent of fur at the center of the arena. The hurricane of meter-tall teakettlers surges against the bulwark of the boxing hare. To preserve the animal, no doubt an expensive acquisition, the miniature army prods the beast to an open gateway. There it can return, back into the labyrinthine underground tunnels, starved in absolute darkness until needed for another event.

The guards are only somewhat successful. Their weak forms are no match for the powerful punches of the wounded monster as it howls and bleeds. By an outsider’s arithmetic, it may take up to five minutes for the ghastly corralling to succeed.

At the rate it slashes at the teakettlers, you can expect one in ten to be crushed into the mud. An acceptable loss. And such estimates are without your imminent intrusion, where you cut the gap between the shaken teakettlers and the hare to draw all the ring’s disparate forces together.

Your yell is pitiful. High-pitched, nearly breaking. It’s a death rattle, escaping between panting and coughing, cutting through the downpour. The prey-like display does its job, attracting the apex predator’s attention away from the legion of expendable workers and back to the center of the pit where Chief is dead on your heels.

Ø struggles to meet your trajectory. Her powerful strides are too haphazard, too anxious, as if she’s never felt the mud swell against her hooves. She runs too fast, pumping her legs until her knees pop, relinquishing one of the few advantages she normally holds—her home-field advantage.

A calmer, more calculating mare could remember every meter of smooth limestone that encircles the arena. Two hundred meters length and width. Sitting room for ten thousand. Standing for nearly twenty. For forty on days like this.

From the dual perspectives, hers in the ring and yours in the voyeuristic boxes, she could rebuild the amphitheater from scratch, lovingly recreating the subtle sanded-down slopes of stone, stitching together the torn plastic canopies, to create a perfect facsimile of her life as slave both past and present.

The thought of another George Merrick, hundreds of them, built with her own bloody fingers and caging thousands of instances of the same mare, spurs her limbs to pump harder, frantically kicking sludge as her mind bucks the nightmares.

Wild Card trudges behind. His armor is heavy, no matter how many attendants imply it to be light. Mud chokes helmets.

Ø knows.

The surface tension can suction them, grip them into place. Too quick a jerk, and pressure can snap back against bone, severing spinal cords with the same blunt force of a mace. Even with her usual barding, she’s learned to ditch the headwear at the first sign of intensity.

It’s a rookie mistake, one that a sober fighter could realize as an advantage.

To the pair of zonked-out murderers, however, the prodding of an adversary’s defenses is subconscious. Like hunger, or an aversion to smoke, energetic spasms that systematically cling to life. In their twin sloppiness, success is with Wild Card, with his freshly honed zest for violence, as he rips at Ø’s mane from behind, his free, non-gauntleted hand bending back in the attempt to drag her beneath the gunk.

Ø crumples, her nape splitting under the pressure. Every wet follicle screeches in pain, catching between soft, tearing fingernails and drawing blood. First at her neck, then core, and finally knees. She hobbles against the impromptu scalping and falls alongside the Red convict.

Spasming on the ground robs Wild Card of his thrusting advantage, forcing him to slap his meter-long gladius at Ø’s mutually prone form. The edges of his blade, although sharpened, are poorly maintained, the metal overworked to pig iron. His gauntleted arm sucks into the mud, too sticky to raise and easily bring a final stab into his opponent’s chest.

It becomes a contest of grappling.

Ø’s furious ministrations are familiar to Wild Card, the adrenaline-fueled whipping and bucking of a woman driven to the ground in malice. Familiarity is what he feels as his sword’s capulus assaults her spine, its orbed pommel sanded, misshapen, a forgotten recreation of the emerald planet itself. A detail not cared about in the slightest as Ø shrieks in pain, her body seizing in temporary paralysis.

As her shoulders clench, she brings her weight as close as possible to her pursuer, locking them both into a mediocre death roll. Short-range punches and beatings exchange, deafened by layers of sediment. With the single mis-use of a thrust, Ø restrains the Wild Card’s gauntleted arm and digs her premolars into his semi-exposed knuckles, his muscles taught from the grip on his gladius. Roaring in pain, Wild Card responds with multiple blows into the side of Ø’s flat head, straining her jaw’s tightened zygomaticus to ripping and delivering one concussion after another.

But his grasp flusters, his hand’s palmarus longus tearing along her row of filthy teeth, mixing blood and peeled skin, sounding like the soft, decisive crunches of a freshly plucked pear.

Ø’s natural inclinations take over, spurred further by her reflexive taste for fresh meat. She can’t remember her name, the slave’s coat-of-arms on her sternum, the faces of her crew aboard the Cimarron, the mechanical stuttering of Dyle’s low-poly tones, the feeling of your hand along her bare hide, your breath along her neck as you sleep, together, enraptured within the thick hammock linens night after night. Only the shadowed, blinded carbon-copies of murderous muscle memories remain.

They’re her years of pancrazio. Before she met you. Enslaved.

The forceful holds against her young skin, against her will, twisting and throwing, bruise her joints and rub her pelt to bleeding. Her hands, lacerated and healed, are purposely calloused with the luxury sensations of natural coiled jute. She’s another entertainer, a giadiatrix with a whole nervous system contused to build pain tolerance. Numbed in mind and body.

The only reward is the raw meat. Still pulsating, force-fed in the calming presence of the training suite by the trainers. Under their dutiful supervision, flanked by the imported hand-carved stone Buddharupas aboard the Chang Tsung-ch’ang, her cage awash in the gummy incense scents. Paraphernalia lit by her captors to cement the Pavlovian need for violence. It’s the only true release she’s permitted to feel.

Once more she tastes it.

She writhes, rolling and shifting her weight in the surf, buoying herself against the frantic grips of her prey, slowed by the molasses of mud. It’s a grapple, a turn of the wrist to breaking, that allows her to force her opponent onto his side. She takes hold of his arms, maneuvering his shoulders against themselves, clutching his wrists in her bloody hands.

She knows it’s over.

The announcers know, too. Some jovially muse about the disgrace unfolding. They tut-tut to their staff, ashing their cigars. Others, dressed in tailored dyed wool jackets and pantsuits, laugh, joke, spit idioms of their own languages into their receivers for interplanetary broadcast. The crowd hollers, leaning forward, their torsos casting dangerous shadows into the pit, awash in revelry at the total breakdown of martial-societal function, collapsing like the stilt houses on Algonquin’s outskirts that buckle under the pressure of the hurricane, pulverized by falling treetrunks that pin their unsuspecting victims beneath the silt.

One can only watch as Ø’s grapevine of grapples also tilts the Red gladiator into the mud, head first, arms yanked upwards, shoulder joints snapping in duress, muscles tearing in horror.

Whatever death rattle escapes is muffled, his frenzied convulsions of self-preservation ignored. Ø’s torn ears grace instead with the pandemonium of the ring.

The cursing, snot-filled cries of observers reach the first of many octaves. Their voyeuristic choruses break the surface tension of marshy water. The din competes against the storm’s intensity, undulating with supernatural vibrations against the dancing lightning. The Wild Card’s head floods, awash with the penultimate sounds of heckling, bubbling with the gnats and maggots, the roots and branches, an invasive mixture of naturalistic horror that seeps into every screaming orifice.

Following the formal cancellation of the match, for George Merrick’s statistical record-keeping purposes, it’ll be as if the Wild Card never existed.

But Ø’s victory is the furthest thing from your mind. You’ve cornered yourself, placing two opposing forces atop one another, leaving you the mutual target. At your heels is Chief, at your head, the jackalope. Two predators with the supposition of the other’s willingness to intrude for an easy kill, pausing in confusion.

The jackalope rears in a vain presentation of strength, standing to its full height, nearly tripling that of the Black. It scatters the remaining teakettlers in the pit. In fear, they step over one another, living and dead, planting themselves into the dirt at the chance of a mad dash to safety. Chief readies his gauntlet.

However, it’s for naught. The math is off.

Every minute spent in the ring, with your flagrant disregard for sportsmanlike violence, costs something. Cash from bets, voided contracts, terminal manpower turnover, delays in advertising sponsorships, the material erosion of intangible goodwill and professionalism that enshrines the nymphaeum of George Merrick. Cartridges cost less than these expenses that mount, quintuple by the second.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

That’s why a line of scrawny arquebusiers have lined the stadium’s edge. The teakettlers beat back the quarrelsome crowds to affix upon the ringside their impromptu fork rests of adhesives scrounged from the treetop canopies. They’re sticky, slathered on the windswept railings and sticking between their grubby paws.

The smoothbores, twice the lengths of the teakettlers in height, are cheap. Ineffective. Paltry enough to be deployed en masse to the dregs that live within the amphitheater’s walls.

In their imperfect synergy, the first volley shatters the barrier of the storm, sending super-heated projectiles into the back of the jackalope, spitting holes in its fur and shattering bone shard through its ribcage, rogue shot skipping across the mud and sizzling alongside the jezails’ antique muzzles.

Gore drips like a cape from the beast’s swarthy pelt, ruining any chance of resale after stripping. The jackalope’s last moments, turning towards the ringside bee-stings, give you enough time to curl up. Hands against your knees, making yourself as small as possible. As the gale whips into a frenzy, Chief starts towards you, tearing through the ninety-knot winds and pelleted rain that scratches bare skin. The beast’s howling mixes with the natural cadence of wind on rock, diving between whipping tarps, carried along the same octave of the monsoon’s zenith.

A second, final, volley of pellets rips through the chest of the animal, pockmarking its appendages randomly, grating fist-sized malformations in its four-chambered stomach, scraping filthy fur from its atrophied skin. The starved, half-dead beast collapses, finally put down in a pathetic display of sunk cost to the confused ovations of the crowd.

At its demise, bifurcated in multiple places, you’re alone. Untouched save for a searing, pistachio-sized hole in your bicep that has been shot clean through.

The momentary realization of pain triggers Ø’s orgones, her palms finally letting go of the Wild Card. He’s been still for nearly half a minute, now submerged to his waist in the hurricane. Once more she violently speeds against the uncaring floor, her face and arms cut, left eye sewn shut with contused fluids, her inhuman gurgling a response to three dislodged molars that choke and scrape against her mouth’s palatine. Chief, too, in his lily-jumping movements, breaks into a sprint, determined to remove your blemish of an existence.

But, like everything else, the conflict is forgotten. The revelry, fighting, screeching, cuts silent. They slow, the two gladiators running, then walking, finally kept in place, sinking to their ankles in stupefied nonaction.

In the haze of fate, the plastic-wrapped physical record is incapable of adequately describing the event.

Paradoxically, for the denizens of Algonquin, those born and raised in the corrals of filth with nursemaids of mud, whose children occupy the ruined schoolhouses only occasionally, huddling around the single-page laminated documents of forgotten education and literacy, or those from the Frontiers, those pockets of incivility lost in the encroaching treelines, gathering for subsistence, who have undertaken the perilous journey through the neglected concrete roads to reach George Merrick’s altar, it’s the only memory to dearly remember in their waterlogged lives.

The sun peeks through the rain.

Foreign Blue light folds through the subsiding precipitation. The tidy ring of storm clouds chases themselves away from view, forming a single window from which the morning’s sun, in all its forgotten glory, birthing light into the stadium, drawing itself like a curtain across the crowd. Sunlight cascades against Blue ponchos, thaws Black muscles, refracts through Red lenses, searing, damaging the nocturnal eyes of Purples, Oranges, Greens, Yellows, entire spectrums of forlorn souls who have never felt its presence against their skins, scales, and furs.

It’s been months since you’ve known such an embrace.

Around you, you notice the details hidden by shadow. Ancient torn canopies that drip water are awash with their savory colors, displaying the emphatic hints of bygone cornucopia, even in their decayed opulence sending ocular signals of comfort and satiation. The claw-marks of the dying against the limestone, which still preserves its childish brilliance. Assorted cigarettes pop with White, betting cards with highlighted Yellows, Orange heat from alkaline-threaded spezie, lush Green canopies that breathe above, dotted with Purple vines.

The rain stops, and in its absence only the pleasant, relaxing silence of still water. Hecklers silence themselves. Broadcasters breathe into their microphones, recording four minutes of static for confused listeners and aggravated off-world producers.

It’s warm. You’re in pain, but you’re warm.

The light lies on your bloodied skin, Ø’s torn fur, Chief’s fresh scarring, the corpses of Wild Card and the monstrous jackalope, between the whiskers of the teakettlers, living and dead, on the noses of the gamblers, the wrinkled digits of the addicts, lips of the whores, and the souls of the gladiators who have come to the surface in curiosity. It’s a bygone touch, one found even here in the most doomed of backwaters, in the most forgotten corners of existence.

But a drop lands on your forehead. Then another, the shadows appearing. The gale returns and the sky darkens.

Maybe it’s the momentary glimpse of paradise, the implication of hope, a blessed reminder of the warmth most have turned their backs upon, that triggers the following response. At once the dam breaks and George Merrick snaps.

Violence surges in every direction. The mass psychosis spreads from the Blacks who beat the teakettlers with their own muskets, the Reds who batter the Blues for sacrilege, the foreign colors who lash out indiscriminately, minorities in their temporary existence. Crowds plunge from their promontories and into the pit, wrestling into the mud against the storm’s resurgence, which bends the treelines and sends the underweight living-corpses off their feet and into the air, only for moments, before sending them toppling into huddling, rioting groups of desperate souls.

Ø, in her quick thinking, lashes out against Chief. She pulls the Wild Card’s forgotten gladius from the unforgiving mud, and whips it several meters away towards your hunter’s direction. It strikes him improperly, the handle’s flat colliding with the side of his skull, whipping his neck, delivering a powerful concussion that sends him hobbling, stupidly, onto his hands and knees.

His eyes are blank, Black, empty. Too rattled to continue.

Bodies fill the pit. Drunken fools and unseated supporters rampage about, looting fallen teakettlers and looking for trouble. The sizable crowd grows as more lost souls prowl around the stadium, their waves converging across seating sections and through service tunnels. With the state monopoly on violence written off, the dejected multicolor ponchos lurch through the storm, searching for personalized entertainment.

Ø continues to follow her only subconscious need, crawling to her hooves against the gale. As she trots against the sludge, you search for her orgones. Spiritually, she’s gone. Her eyes are more inhuman than usual, their normal life sapped, replaced with a fiery Red.

You haven’t seen it before. It’s not the bloodshot look of spezie. Nor the constant stress that ekes from the most unexpected places. This is otherworldly, specialized, murderous. And it’s directed towards you alone.

Ghastly cuts draw across her body, her sorrel coat stained, edged with dried gore. Lung collapsed, one-eyed, she bounds against the sheets of rain. As she pursues you with building speed, nostrils flaring, teeth broken and bleeding, eyelid stapled open with a hunger you’ve never seen, you freeze in fear.

A whistle passes your ear. Its childish intrusion breaks your anxious concentration. You watch as Ø’s path kicks up mud. Pockets before and after her path pop with foreign projectiles. They’re almost passive. Nonviolent compared to the super-heated rounds that have perforated you.

Ø skips. Her weight carries on one leg, in stride. Then suddenly it shifts.

Her leg twists at her calf, arcing to the side, her whole body’s airborne trajectory off-kilter, her internal gyroscopics adjusting against confusion. The force takes her into the air, nearly horizontal, as the bola fastens itself around her, its heat-seeking weighted spheres clasping together, sending painful shock-waves that force her tendons to seize in pain. Her face, puzzled yet devoid of human emotion, plants itself into the sludge, her frame’s momentum skidding to an impotent pause.

She lays still. Her fingers don’t twitch against the precipitation. Her mane, a mop, folds against her eyes and shields them from view. In the distance, her chest does not heave. You don’t hear her thoughts, her cursing and cannibal’s musings. No connubial disappointment whispers between your psyches.

For the first time in months, it’s silent. You’re alone.

Momentum tears into your side, another set of bola ropes cutting your poncho to shreds. The octopus arms embrace over your bloodied frame, knocking into your face, pinning your forearms to your sides and hurtling you into the ground. The overwhelming pain you feel is overshadowed, briefly, by an even more intense burning as the bolas eject their poison into you. You’re turned to limestone, your concussed mind shooting you into darkness.

---

The polypropelene ropes scratch around your neck. Rather than burn, the fibers tear at your waterlogged body, lacerating your skin. Your teeth chew your plasticky geomembrane gag, flaying your filthy gums. Snot seeps back into your esophagus from your broken nose, mixing with internal bleeding, suffocating you with spit that bubbles from the sides of your mouth as you struggle for air.

Unseen forces manhandle you. They flip, toss, rotate you in a vacuum. You haven’t seen total darkness since you were last adrift in space, you think, as your head collides with limestone walls in a haphazard carry. The mud on your face smears against the unyielding surfaces of the tunnels, streaking them with clay and fresh blood.

Zero gravity once more. You float between the stars that streak against your straining eyes. Galaxies, following obstinate patterns as they do in your cockpit, graze in front of you. You’re safe in your captain’s chair, gun hidden, loaded, clean, your AI silently on autopilot, as you enjoy a dose of spezie. You’re content with the tantalizing mediocrity of another heavily medicated trip through the universe.

In control again, only for a moment, and only in your fantasy.

As your tailbone collides with hard ground, your gurgling becomes energized with further pain, frothing into a coral slime at your lips. You wake in smoke, your vision hazy, eyes trapped in a thick glaze of sugar. Muck cakes your face, and as you twitch, the film breaks along its dry fault lines. Drop by drop, the uncoagulated refuse plods onto the carpeting.

Then, vomit.

You lurch forwards, dragging a torn ear against the floor. Your knees jerk towards your chest instinctually as you retch, spewing acid against your gag. With nowhere to go, bile wrestles with the savage spit, choking you and dribbling from the corners of your raw, sliced jaw.

“Disgust’in,” a familiar voice hisses. “Scrub ‘im up, one o’ ye.”

Your eyes struggle against the glare. Above you, a collection of artisan-blown light fixtures hide betwixt the subtle geometry of a crystal chandelier. In vibrant fashion, it refracts the light throughout the spacious room. The stone walls are warm to the touch and meet hand-knotted carpeting at chiseled moldings. Your cheek caresses the floor’s tender fabric, tracing the wool stitching like notches in a lover’s spine. The sensation of civilization you garner through the spittle is divine.

A teakettler saunters to you, and drawing its bowie knife against your lip, slices both the geomembrane and the first layer of your skin. To the floor drops the gag, the fresh blood, and the viscous concoction that foams at your throat. The servant’s grubby, inhuman digits probe your brittle skull and pinch your teeth, positioning you with one hand and dabbing a rag with the other.

“Don’t ruin de carpet!” Gates screeches, throwing her hands in the air. “Fix it, er Ay’ll have yer ‘eads, ye stupid lit’le creatures!”

Gates huffs and paces before sitting atop the massive tallowwood desk at the room’s center. She clutches another cigarette and tries to light it, failing. Her control falters, lips contorted in agony. Her bob is unkept, thrown off balance in the humidity. She sits, jittery, on the furniture, her legs crossed with stress.

Aureola bathes her form. A single, unblinking Blue light shines behind her, accentuating her businesslike silhouette. She barks.

“Out wi’it, Blue.”

What you think is concussion is, in fact, an external whirring. The machine’s sickly Blue illuminates the entire wall. Its luminance cascades and flickers, the wellspring of sea-foam populating with geometric Black rays. You squint to make sense of the zoptic forms.

Stuck into the marble facade is the Blue screen. It blinks, sputters, spits heat into the room. Its mechanical groan grows louder with its calculations, its silicon skeleton rattling the room’s walls, vibrating, the computer drawing more energy through its brittle ceramic vacuum tubes. It breathes through the private box, its windowless enclave. Here, the Old Blue light enjoys the luxuries reserved only for the highest caste of Algonquin, the owners.

You wonder if Old Blue appreciates the ambient lavender stench that filters throughout the central air, or the molecularly dehumidified atmosphere of his box-seating burial mound.

Behind his godless Blue eye, though, the overwhelming power of the AI has more realistic questions to answer. Ones more profitable than air fresheners and antique carpeting. Computational conundrums of probability, game theory, weight classes, contract periods, over-unders, parlays, each-ways, the quantified and cross-referenced databases of fighters and their statistical propensities towards successful murder. In short, the ritualistic commodification and gamification of death.

A simple White text, sans-serif and thin, pops from Old Blue’s malaise.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Blessed. Blessed, dat. Dat’s doable. Pull up da foo’age from da bett’n booth. Camera 4-C.”

“Inoperable.”

“Den pull 4-F.”

“Inoperable.”

“Not’in? There’s not’in behind de counter er in de vault?”

“Retrieving live video feed of Camera 4-L. Bet Processing desk. Retrieving.”

With a flash, the screen is awash with the monochromatic footage of the central betting window. Crowds cascade and recede against the sloppy marble columns of the amphitheater, the tide crashing against the shuttered bookmakers. The window’s rusted aluminum shutters are dented, threatening to peel like the skin of a freshly picked sloe.

“Twen’y minutes? Ye stupid machine, de shutt’as won’t ‘old fe five!” Gates stands before you, as you marinate on the carpet. The teakettlers have scurried off in the commotion, leaving you to drip into the fibers. “Ye did dis! Ye ruined de whole tournament, de bett’n, de admissions, ye knob’ead!”

She hops into a stride, bringing her leg into a wind-up and landing a pump into one of your broken ribs. Once more you vomit, spewing two forgotten teeth into the matrix of swill and tufting, covering the Blue fibres with an unsightly Red. Gates hesitates as she brings her heel back for another kick, weighing the options of protecting the flooring or exacting revenge on your mangled body.

She looks down on you, past your inability to speak, your jaw frozen shut with ruptured capillaries. Gates knows your look. One of petulance, childlike and costly to owners like her. Her eyes narrow with the whispers of revelation.

She kneels down within inches of your face, within spitting range, wearing a look of mercantile perspicacity.

“Ay know what dis is. Ye think dis is revenge fe all dat business last night dat er’ryone’s buzz’n about. ‘Ave ye ever stopped to think yer not de cen’r o’ de universe? Ye and yer litt’l trollop, run’n ‘round space’n everyth’n in sight? Yer miniscule. Unimportant. Ay don’t know ye both, and Ay don’t care unless yer out there dy’n fe me. Thir’y times yer value is at stake, ev’ry cycle in this pi’iful arena, and yer circl’n-the-drain shenanigans pale in comparison. If anyone cared about yer meager lives, ye wouldn’t be stuck ‘ere on this planet, scrap’n by, pick’n millipedes from between yer teeth, sleep’n with de day-laborers and lepers, and whore’n yerselves out fe de likes o’ Old Blue and Ay.”

She hisses down at you, curling her lips in disgust before kicking you once more, emphasizing the end of her spirited reflection.

“Ay’d sooner toss meself, arse first, into de pit before Ay throw away de sanctity o’ this arena. Unlike yous two, we ‘uv someth’n in de universe.”

The screen blinks. Old Blue begs attention. Heat warning. Gates stares up at the machine, the camera focusing on the metal shutters of the betting area.

32.1 Degrees Celsius, to 54.6 Degrees Celsius, oscillating to 734 Degrees and higher. With a flash, bulbous boils appear in the hive of aluminum, gurgling for release. Shrapnel erupts, spewing into the clamouring crowd and vaporizing two other camera angles. Dust clouds the feed. Gates holds her breath and balls her fists, her manicured nails cutting deep into her moisturized palms.

The smoke clears. What remains of the betting desk is a skeleton of dismembered bodies and twisted metal shielding. No sooner has the last appendage hit the ground with a wet slap, than a fresh wave of ugly spectators of the entire visible spectrum swarms into the vaulted area, intent to pilfer whatever they can find.

The Circuit’s festivities are canceled, but a portion of their bets may yet be recovered.

Gates dives beneath the desk. She fumbles about, clicking her heels against the wood as she trembles with rage. Then a resounding click, and another, before she shimmies once more to her knees. In her arms, in pristine condition, is a single, antique, blow-back operated rifle. She pulls back the bolt with an amateurish lack of physical prowess, on the verge of tears.

“Blue, activate de auto-defenses and call up de fight’is. Nobody gets in er out. Ay’m not los’n any more o’ our money. Blast dat.”

As she starts towards the door, a lone man enters with Ø over his shoulder. It’s Chief. His eyes are cloudy, his mouth barely half-open. Where a proud warrior once stood, now only a haze, an unthinking, unconscious motor ability.

He’s mud. Compacted, fashioned into a broken body, life whispered to him through the darkest of impulses. Only moving for his subconscious. Concussed, a sleeping humanoid with no promise of awakening. He turns, tossing Ø’s carcass to the ground.

She hits the floor with a thump. Dense, her figure nearly cracking the ancient tiles beneath the soft carpeting. Across her leg are the bola’s lacerations, tendril cuts that have left most of her thigh skinned and exposed. You squint, trying to see through your pain, studying for signs of life.

Another explosion rocks George Merrick. The glare above flickers, ominously fluctuating and gasping for breath. The largest, Old Blue, flickers himself. His display struggles to keep composure.

At once, the electricity cuts, the marble room aphotic and Black.

“Right, dat’s enough. Leave dem ‘ere, not like dey’re go’n anywhere.”

With that, the owners take their leave. Not long after, the reliable pop-pop-pop of small caliber arms and the odd detonation confirms their rampage.

Only after a minute do the lights above reawaken. Old Blue’s display pops back to life, announcing his low-power state, a rebooting that estimates multiple days until completion. The familiar hum of his ancient processors surges through the floor, fluttering you conscious.

Sterilized air drifts against the numb hole in your arm. You’re paralyzed. Maybe it’s blood loss, or the bola’s toxins. An infection. Blunt trauma.

Dyle will know. His sensors will probe you, cross-referencing his multi-dimensional medical displays. He’ll coach you, encourage you to reset bones and stitch organs back together. Internal, external, emotional, whatever the wound, he’ll fix it. Or he’ll chide you until you do it yourself.

He’ll help you survive. In exchange, a mutual relationship of safety and a vicarious organic livelihood. You wonder where he is, how long it’ll take for him to save you, to arrive at the right place at the right time.

But you’re alone, and your confidence falters.

You don’t fight against the bola’s tendrils. Your eyes stop scanning for Ø’s movements. A way out doesn’t matter. It’s George Merrick, after all.

Once outside the ring, the struggle is concluded. Ø doesn’t believe that, though. You can feel her after the matches, whole body tense and rigid in stress, lactic acid never having time to congeal and place the muscles into a forced inactivity.

But now, she’s silent and still. Her energy is gone. The fight has concluded for her, finally.

Preemptively, you throw in the towel. You’re not a fighter. A fact not easily swallowed when responsible for another entity with whom you’re charged with protecting. It’s easier to give up.

For months you’ve wondered when you’d break the chains and leave New Port Moresby. Now, out of the ring, you realize just how simple escape is.

Your breathing slows, and as you shut your eyes, you notice your mind’s garden is less impressive than before in its spiritual glory. Within your personal Empyrean, the flowers are duller. Ancient trees are more gnarled. Weeds and sleepy bulbs twirl on a cloudy day, devoid of kaleidoscopic beauty.

Most of all, you’re alone.

Nothing stirs behind the trees, waiting to complete you. There’s no mare, no inhuman and unfathomable energy, to keep you grounded in this world. It’s like you were before, you think, rootless in direction.

As the temperature lowers on the timeworn, distant Spring day, you’re almost content. Disappointed, unfulfilled, but accepting. Almost relieved to have a moment of silence following selfish inaction.

But unlike your visions, the voice that you hear does not have an image. It has no vibration, only a spirit. Formless, non-anthropomorphic, and unlike the uncertain dreams, it’s clear as day.

At first you think it’s George Merrick. Smiling, patting your back, careful to avoid your wounds, congratulating you with a better-luck-next-time. But he disappears from view, his firm handshake and tailored wool suit evaporating along with the utopian dream of Algonquin.

Nor is it the mana-sprouted hyssop groves, or seraphs that linger just out of your purview. It doesn’t reverberate through your thousand-folded memories, imperfectly preserved, coming to you in dreams that grow in intensity as sorrel fur caresses your nostrils. It’s within you comprehension. Fallible, impuissant against the universe like yourself.

Completely real. Something you can touch, apply pressure to, understand on a human level. And that fact is comforting.

“Not yet,” it whispers. “You’ll be able to rest, but not just yet.”

The third needle punctures near your sternum, the multiple spears perforating through layers of lung and heart to deliver amphetamine. Your eyes shoot open, and you take your first breath in centuries, one of blood, mud, and pus that escapes between the fresh cuts pocketing your lips. Above you, just out of sight, is that old man.

Not George Merrick, the other one.