Glitter + Ashes

by Dave Ring

  I was a courier. This was what I believed in.

  Everyone hurts everyone. That’s the whole game. Nestor resents all rules and forbids their existence within the walls of Utopia Gulch, so in the cage at the city’s heart there is only a patchwork of vague and unspoken understandings: that it’s smarter not to kill or permanently maim one’s opponents, because that sows too much bad blood with the city’s other quadrants and leads to reprisals; that three out of the four Champions must be thoroughly knocked out before Nestor will pull the lever that opens the door to the valve room; that the pipes are set up so that only one quadrant’s valve can be open at any one time, and only by means of that valve does that quadrant of Utopia get its taps to run that day. Beyond that, anything goes: punches, kicks, bites, bludgeons, knives, guns, armor, stimulants, audience interference. Whatever it takes to win the fight is fair game.

  That’s always been how it works, since Buzz was only a child—since the rivers stopped running and Utopia Gulch rose from the ashes of some other world. But right now, as he pauses to spit blood one last time before prying Killer into a headlock, he’s haunted by the absurd thought that even in the bloody heart of a city with no rules, something about this fight is terribly unfair—because he can hurt Killer in all kinds of ways, but Killer is even now hurting him back in a way he can’t block, can’t run from, can’t hit back at. Even as Killer’s blue eyes finally roll back in their sockets, his taut and blood-greased muscles going slack, his chiseled face gone peaceful—even in the moment of Buzz’s triumph, it’s as if Killer is punching him right in the heart.

  A collective sigh of relief moves through the spectators beyond the bars: Buzz hasn’t won in a while, and all the secret water reserves in his quadrant’s bathtubs and buckets are down to their last rancid inches. Only one person really cheers: Nestor himself, gleaming silver hair and silk smoking jacket and all, perched up there on his balcony above the cage, treating everyone to a full minute of golf-clapping before pulling the lever to open the valve room door. (Privately, Buzz is thankful for the delay. He has time to watch Killer in the corner of his eye, tracking the rise and fall of the chest under his glittering chainmaille, the beating of a heart so strong it ripples visibly under his left pec, letting everyone know he’s going to be okay, thank God.)

  Then Buzz hobbles into the valve room and keeps up his end of his secret pact with his ostensible nemesis: he opens the valve for Killer’s neighborhood first, for the thirty-odd seconds he can get away with, just to keep the pipes full. Then it’s time to climb the central staircase and let Nestor’s clanking robotic guards lead him to his reward.

  The circular deck above the cage is a panopticon overlooking all four quadrants of Utopia Gulch, connected to a spiderweb of catwalks that look down into the streets and rooms of all its residents. The former billionaire waves Buzz to the edge impatiently, ignoring how he limps and pauses to wipe off the last trickles of fresh blood.

  “Behold your fellow Champions,” Nestor says, tipping his wine glass at the defeated fighters below as they’re scraped up and dragged from the cage. “Absolute specimens, each and every one—and all because of my vision. Because of our great Utopian game. What would they have been, back when the rivers still flowed and rain still fell free from the skies? Valets, butlers, tax accountants. They’d be moping their way through life, slouched in desk chairs by day and on couches by night—but here, my dear Buzzsaw, they must earn each and every drop of their life’s blood. Here they pursue the very zenith of their self-actualization, what Aristotle called Eudaimonia. The flourishing of the soul, through excellent achievement of one’s innate purpose.”

  Buzz plays the part he knows Nestor expects of him: he nods, purses his lips and furrows his brow, as if a walnut-sized brain is sloshing around in his skull and it’s getting blown wide open by every word out of Nestor’s mouth.

  “Sometimes,” Nestor sighs, “I can’t help but miss those days when any cretinous taker could fill his stomach with water with the turn of a tap. But make no mistake: that wasn’t the Golden Age of Man—this is, right here and now. That is why I brought you all here as mere children, to be my Utopians. So your minds would be clean slates, untainted by the old paradigms.”

  “Huh,” Buzz says. “I never thunk about it that way, Mr. Nestor.”

  “Of course you haven’t.” Nestor pats Buzz’s shoulder paternally and motions to the buffet—but no matter how much food Buzz stuffs into his belly, there’s a hollowness that doesn’t leave. He knows it won’t until tonight.

  He spends all afternoon and evening secretly looking forward to it: sitting still on the makeshift Champion’s throne of his home quadrant, wearing a mask of rugged dispassion, grunting his thanks to the people who come and go, tending to his wounds and washing his feet. He does his best to seem present—but his thoughts are nowhere near his body until the last daylight fades completely, and he can drape himself in a blanket and sneak out to the narrow crevice where the concrete wall has settled and cracked, and only a strip of chainlink fence separates his quadrant from the neighboring one. There’s Killer, his rich brown skin dusted with moonlight, whispering through the metal:

  “Hey. I, uh...I have a favor to ask.”

  “Anything,” Buzz says hopefully. “I mean...yes. What?”

  Killer takes a long moment to decide whether to ask his question. It makes Buzz ache. Finally he clears his throat and looks at his feet and says “Don’t poke me in the eyes.”

  Buzz’s heart drops into the acid bath of his stomach. “Did I do that? Shit. I didn’t mean to.”

  Killer wiggles his head. “No, no, it’s not an accusation. I’m just saying, can we agree to never do that? I worry about it every time I go in there. After what happened between Drexa and The Beef last Winter—”

  “I would never try to hurt your eyes.”

  A heavy silence fills up the air between them. It rings in Buzz’s ears.

  “So it’s a rule,” Killer says through a smirk. “Kind of funny.”

  “How is it funny?”

  Killer shrugs his armored shoulders. “We wouldn’t even have the concept of rules if Nestor never yelled at us about how wrong they are. But here we are, you and I, making one right under his nose.”

  “Yeah,” Buzz says. “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you—?” Buzz cuts off. There’s sound behind him: one of Nestor’s robots rattling along on the catwalk above, keeping watch. He ducks down and drapes the blanket so he looks like a pile of trash. Every time he sees one of those bots, he can’t help wondering if it’s the one that used to change his diapers or feed him as a child.

  When the noise passes, Killer presses his enormous body harder into the bars expectantly. “Do I what?”

  But Buzz is too nervous now to say. Instead he hurriedly improvises: “Do you ever think about jumping up and trying to grab the edge of Nestor’s balcony? It’s so close. I always feel like, if you boosted me up, I could reach it.”

  “Champions have tried,” Killer says. “Taller ones than either of us. Even working together. They always fail.”

  “I know,” Buzz sighs.

  “What are you thinking?”

  That I’m only really living for those precious few seconds before the knockout, Buzz answers in his mind. When I’m there in your arms, swaddled in your strength, knowing you could kill me but trusting that you won’t—or when you’re there in mine, and I know, can feel it in your bones, that you trust me too. The only peace I know anymore is in that violence.

  “Hello?” Killer asks.

  “Oh.” Buzz hurriedly composes himself. “Just that, you know, Drexa hasn’t won in ten days, and her backup is still getting over dehydration—”

  “I know,” Killer says. “We should make sure she wins tomorrow.”

  “Really?”

  It’s a risk. Throwing a fight for each other still feels new and dangerous, let alone doing it for one of the other two quadrants—b
ut Killer reaches three muscular fingers through the chainlinks, and the skin of Buzz’s face is on fire with blushing when they touch, silently agreeing: yes.

  That first rule seems to open a floodgate, and before long the two of them have a list almost too long to memorize. They start with practical issues like which body parts are not to be hit or stabbed; how to furtively reveal their next moves to help each other block; how to decide the rotation of who’ll win and who’ll play dead, so all the buckets and bathtubs in Utopia Gulch are always at least half-full; how to make it up to each other when one of them accidentally breaks a rule. But there’s a strange pleasure in making rules, and it leads to ever more elaborate and arbitrary ones: if Killer puts Buzz in a chokehold, he has to tap his neck an even number of times; if Buzz kicks Killer in the hip, Killer has to kick him back in the same hip; if one groans, the other has to groan a higher note back.

  It takes great effort and concentration to uphold these rules in the cage, all while contending with the other two Champions, and all without showing it. Fighting becomes as much about defense as it’s about deliberately opening themselves to the right attacks at the right times. Conversely, the confidence that neither of them is out to kill the other enables their safe use of ever more dramatic weapons: a gun that misses, a whip that only lands on well-armored spots, swords that always glance off each other with dramatic clanks and metal sparks.

  One day it’s Buzz’s turn to get knocked out. He and Killer form a plan, communicating through what has become a well-developed language of hits, blocks, and feints. They judge the angle of Nestor’s perspective from the deck above the cage, and arrange the perfect knockout: Killer swinging a bat right under Buzz’s chin; Buzz simulating the concussive full-body whiplash of the hit landing square in the temple. He falls face-down next to Drexa’s prone form, where he’s shocked to discover she’s still conscious: her remaining eye burning through him like a laser beam. Through a mouth pressed flat against the blood-caked dust, her face twisted up in the straps of her leather helmet, she whispers:

  “I don’t know what you two are doing, but I want in.”

  A similar message reaches Killer from Hammer a few days later, passed along by intermediaries. It takes time to catch the newcomers up on the rules, and the secret physical language by which they’re negotiated, and it takes a toll on Buzz: because of the city’s layout, he has to meet Drexa at his quadrant’s other border, just as Killer has to go meet Hammer, so that the two of them are stuck on opposite sides of Utopia every other night—but when their fingers finally meet again through the chainlinks, the look on Killer’s face is all he needs.

  “I feel good,” Killer tells him. “I feel really good.”

  Buzz’s heart leaps to hear that. “Me too,” he sighs. He catches himself and forces a dispassionate look. “Wait—why? What about?”

  Killer chuckles, drawing creases in his soft cheeks. “Man, I used to get shanked at least once a week. One stab never had time to scar over before I picked up another. But since we started making up rules? Right now, all my stabs are healed at the exact same time. I have all this energy. I could take on the world.”

  Buzz is staring at Killer’s fingers where they rest on the chainlinks, thinking that if he were to pry his muscular body deep enough into the crevice in the broken concrete wall between their quadrants, he could press his cheek or his lips to those fingers.

  “So I wanted to ask you something,” Buzz asks. His heartbeat pounds so hard on his ears that he can barely hear himself speak.

  “Yeah?” Killer asks, hopefully.

  His real question is on the tip of Buzz’s tongue, but for the second time he chickens out and swallows it down, asking instead: “Can you remember anything from before Utopia?”

  Killer sighs as if disappointed. He shakes his head.

  “Can anybody?” Buzz asks. “Besides Nestor.”

  “We were all just kids,” Killer responds. “Why?”

  Because all night I dream of a world that needs no chainlink fence crevices, Buzz yearns to say, without quadrants or the walls between them. Where water falls free from the sky, and we need no bloodsport to justify our touch or communicate our wishes, and nothing stands between your fingers and my lips.

  Buzz clears his throat and answers: “No reason.”

  That night he lies awake thinking about how Nestor never told the Utopians there was any such thing as love. Either he wanted them to discover it for themselves as they grew up, or he believed it was just another relic of the old world—that if he never gave his children the concept of an emotion, they’d never feel it. Yet somehow, even without a language to describe it, it followed them from the world before their earliest memories. Buzz had watched it roll through them like a fever. He’d always imagined himself immune.

  All four Champions know something is wrong the moment they line up in the morning. Nestor doesn’t pull the lever to open the gates to the cage. He just stands there on his balcony, hands clasped behind his back, looming. Finally he picks up a microphone and flips a switch, and his amplified voice bellows out through the screeching static:

  “I am a visionary. Decades ago, while my peers ran around screaming like Chicken Little, I alone recognized the opportunity in the crisis. I built this city and the walls that protect it from the ravages beyond. I populated it with all of you. I founded a Utopian society the likes of which could never be achieved, back when the rivers ran. Here, at last, I have made a world where nothing is given—where everything is earned.”

  “Oh hell,” Drexa hisses.

  “Do you think I don’t know when you share water with the losers’ quadrants after a bout?” Nestor bellows. “I always knew there was a chance that altruism might one day come to infect our Utopia, despite my best efforts. The valve controls were my litmus test.”

  It’s not just the Champions who can sense what’s about to happen—it’s everyone. The entire population of Utopia Gulch, pressing its faces against the cage or craning its necks to squint up at its silver-haired founder.

  Nestor stares pleadingly across the crowd. “Don’t any of you understand why rules are so wrong? Why I take such pains to protect you from them? It may seem innocent, but it is a foothold. Rules turn into laws. Laws turn into taxes. Regulations. Socialism. A thousand other cancerous adulterations of Man’s freedom and dignity.”

  “We get water or not depending on who wins in the cage!” shouts a woman in the crowd. “Ain’t that a rule?”

  “No, no, no, no, no! That’s a fact, not a rule!” The ex-billionaire takes a deep breath to calm himself. “Clearly I’ve been failing you as a teacher. You all sorely need to rediscover the virtue of selfishness, so today a mere knockout will not be sufficient. I will only open the valve room as reward for a kill within the next five minutes.”

  On the underside of Nestor’s balcony, a long-disused clock begins to tick, its rusty hands jittery behind the bars of its cage. Nobody moves.

  “Oh!” Nestor snaps his fingers and raises his hands to address the entire crowd. “I almost forgot. I’ve sent my robots into your hovels to tip over all your buckets and bathtubs.”

  All the Utopians shout and groan and curse—and in the cage, the dance of death begins spontaneously. The four Champions creep around each other in an increasingly taut square formation, all their eyes darting between each other, struggling to read intent. The crowds outside the cage devolve into what sounds like a riot.

  “I don’t expect you to understand the favor I’m doing for you all,” Nestor sings into his microphone. “You were beginning to care about the other quadrants—your enemies, for crying out loud!”

  Buzz looks Drexa and Hammer up and down, tracking their every nervous twitch, mentally counting down to the instant one or both of them inevitably snap and go in for the kill. They’re new to this cooperation thing. They’ve only been fighting by the rules for a matter of days.

  Forfeit, Killer is shouting with his eyes, his posture, his fists. Let the clo
ck run down. We need time to plan our next move.

  We’ll get dehydrated, Hammer and Drexa are both communicating with their body language. If somebody doesn’t win, we’ll all start dying.

  But when Buzz meets Killer’s gaze, it all becomes crystal clear. He answers: Let it be me. I’ll die so you can live. So you all can.

  “No!” Killer yells aloud. “Not you, me! Kill me!”

  “Me!” Drexa shouts—Hammer shouts—everyone shouts together—and when their eyes meet now, all the feelings they’ve all been hiding shine through all the matted scars, calluses, leather and metal, all masks lifted by desperation. Love beams through sweat-greased muscle and glitters on chainmaille.

  “What have you been trying to ask me all this time?” Killer shouts over the din of the crowd and the feedback in Nestor’s microphone.

  “Do you know I love you?”

  “Yes!”

  All of Buzz’s fear evaporates. He looks up at the concrete lip of Nestor’s balcony. He starts to unstrap his armor, piece by piece.

  “Nobody’s ever made that jump!” Hammer yells.

  But Buzz’s confident grin answers for him: no one’s ever tried it without armor weighing them down—and no Champion in the history of the cage has ever been as healthy and hydrated as the four of them are now. Without another word or moment’s pause, Killer kneels and knits his fingers together, and Buzz and Drexa and Hammer all jump up one after another.

  “Outrageous!” Nestor shouts. He runs around the edge of the deck, stomping on their fingers, but the blows are softened by his fur slippers. One by one all four of them heave themselves and each other up—while behind and below them, the Utopians are breaking into the cage with makeshift cutters and prying bars, helping each other climb up after the Champions.

  Nestor snaps his fingers again and again to rally all his robots at once—and here they come by the dozen, surging in from every quadrant, along every catwalk, faster than human legs could carry them.