by Fonda Lee
Kye Soard came at him with shocking speed. Carr leapt, striking Soard in the air like his namesake, a bird of prey dropping onto a rival, feet and fists hailing down damage like talons and beating wings. Soard braced one leg and one arm to the first surface he reached, and, with the other arm, hurled Carr like a sack of flour. Carr felt his ribs jolt painfully as he struck the Cube, but he tucked his legs in time to use the rebound, powering off the wall and toward the spot where Soard was supposed to be but was no longer. A whip-like sweep to his legs nearly sent him spinning, but he grabbed the Martian fighter’s arm, dragging him into the rotation and preventing him from racing up and around the corner.
Mere seconds into the first round, and Carr knew the idea of pacing himself was moot. Soard was too fast, too good, too instinctive. They fought, back and forth, up and down, in the air and on the walls and across the corners. For everything that Carr did, the Samurai had a response. Each strike was answered by a faster strike, each movement by an opposing movement, each change of direction matched and raised. The air sang with the fight. Time and space carved around it. They were escalating, both of them striving to outmaneuver the other with greater strength, speed, and agility. It would look, to a spectator, like a video being sped up.
Soard kicked him with so much force that his body flew backward, and he lost his grip on the surface completely. The breath went out of him as his torso lit with pain, but he grabbed for the wall with both hands and skidded along like a falling climber dragging at the sheer surface of a cliff. With only the strength of his arms and shoulders, he checked his momentum and hurled himself back before Soard could get out of the way. They clinched and landed close-in blows.
“Lock him up! Don’t let him go!” Was that Uncle Polly’s voice or his own thought? Too late; Soard spun out of his grasp before he could secure a hold and nailed him hard in the side. The man’s shin crunched into him like a long, blunt iron blade; Carr felt his insides take the shock like a bowl of jelly. Under gravity, he would have crumpled to his knees. He could barely feel or move anything below his sternum, but he dug in his feet and swung anyways, slipping a fist through Soard’s guard and cracking him solidly across the cheek. The bell sounded.
Carr pulled himself back out to the deck. “He’s really good,” he conceded, holding his sides.
DK dug out his mouth guard and gave him a squeeze of water. Scull pressed ice to his face and neck. The two of them exchanged a glance of mute astonishment. Scull said, “That was the hardest-fought first round I’ve ever seen. Coaches are going to make future zeroboxers study it.”
Carr was slicked with sweat and sucking hard breaths that made his head throb. He couldn’t remember ever feeling like this after a first round. He could hear the ventilation fans in the Cube working like mad to move out the air heated by their exertion. Uncle Polly bent in front of him and cupped his hands behind Carr’s head, pacing several long, deep inhalations until Carr’s breaths followed his.
Polly nodded. “You’ve got his attention all right.” His rapid-fire voice was low and serious. “The two of you are burning like hyper-charged atoms in there. Don’t get fired up so hot that you get shoddy with defense, you hear? If he decides he can’t wear you down, he’ll start taking bigger risks to try to end it quickly. Pare it back, start looking for openings.”
Carr paused just before entering the Cube. Something seemed strange. The mostly Martian crowd, which had been chanting Soard’s name nonstop, was nearly silent. It was as if these people, who’d paid good money for the pleasure of watching men fight, had come to some collective realization that they were witnessing something extraordinary. The pinnacle of zeroboxing, the very frontier of what human beings could physically accomplish in a weightless chamber.
The bell rang on the opening of the second round. Carr dove through the hatch and Soard was on him again, right from the start. For all his jovial arrogance outside the Cube, the man was a silent, focused machine inside. He didn’t waste time; he didn’t waste movement. He started attacking Carr’s legs as he’d done with DK. It was a sound strategy—striking required bracing, and that meant legs were often planted, immobile and vulnerable. Soard’s own legs were long and bony, the shins tempered to steel, and he could whip them around with astounding swiftness. Carr found himself fighting like a mongoose on a snake, crouching tight to walls, striking, leaping out of the way of the taller man’s range, cutting angles, all the time moving and seeking chances to close in.
Something in the first round—probably many things, come to think of it—had made the painful tightness in his left side worse. Every time he twisted his shoulders toward the right, he felt a sharp stab. It was impossible to fight without rotating his torso, so he didn’t even bother trying, resolving to ignore the pain outright. Soard, however, sensed the weakness like a shark scenting a single drop of blood. He started aiming for the left side of Carr’s rib cage. Gasping, Carr let his arms drift up, opening his bruised body as an irresistible target. Soard went for the ribs again. This time, Carr slid forward, captured the incoming blow, and drove his shoulder forward. His screaming body slammed hard into Soard’s chest, stunning him long enough for Carr to wrap arms and legs around his opponent’s limbs as they both spun in a free-fall grapple.
He was impressed and dismayed that the man was as swift and competent in his grappling as he was on the walls and in the air. He went for a choke and Soard neutralized it, flowing straight into an armbar attempt. Carr distracted him by punching him in the liver, then tried the choke again, but Soard worked one knee free of Carr’s restraining leg and drove it up into his side. Carr felt his grip give but he held on, trying to get his legs up and around the man’s waist to take forward control.
He didn’t make it. They hit the wall, its magnetics tugging at both their waists. Soard was better positioned to capitalize on the direction of their spin; he rolled along the surface and, in a seamless reversal, trapped Carr’s left leg in a submission hold. He began levering the knee at an unnatural angle.
Carr would have to tap out or watch the joint pop from its socket. In a desperate move, he slammed his body back against the wall and the rebound jolted Soard’s grip and Carr’s spine. Pressure shot up his thigh as he used the split-second of slack to twist his hips hard and force his leg free. He kicked back with the other, catching Soard in the clavicle. They climbed away from each other, both grimacing, and that was how the second round ended.
Out on the deck, Uncle Polly probed his knee and Carr jerked, wincing. Then a chuckle bubbled from his lips and he started grinning like a maniac.
“What’s so damn funny?” Uncle Polly asked.
“Nothing.” It was just that, in some truly messed-up way, he was grateful to Kye Soard. He’d finally found an opponent he didn’t think he could beat. Every fight he’d ever fought—including his one loss to Jackson, his match against Henri Manon for the title, and the bout against that cheat Macha—he’d known, deep down, that he could beat them. Whether he actually would or not might have been in question, but he’d always felt that the fight was his to lose. Soard, he didn’t think he could beat. The Samurai was an outlier even in an engineered race. Carr doubted any Terran could defeat him.
But Carr was not any Terran.
He was pushing against the envelope of his enhancement. His heart rate and breathing were actually slowing, kicking into some hyper-efficient state. He could see the movement of every mote of dust in the spotlight-drenched air. He could hear someone in one of the cubeside seats going tap-tap on their cuff. The pain in his side and his knee were receding fast, as if the injuries were being compartmentalized and shunted away.
The doctor came and examined his leg. “Hmmm,” he said, “not good.”
Carr noticed, all of a sudden, that there were police officers on the deck. Not the stadium security guards, but uniformed Surya cops, three of them, standing near the entrance and holding themselves stiffly upright on magneti
c-soled boots. He recognized the lieutenant from last night, Jin. She looked across the deck at him, her gaze cold and curious.
“If you can pull him, I’d say do it,” the doctor was telling Uncle Polly. “If that knee blows out, it could end his career.”
Carr shook his head vehemently and tugged his coach down by the front of his shirt. “I don’t have a career.”
Uncle Polly’s glare was pained and fierce. “No fight is worth seeing you crippled. You can’t ask me to do what no trainer—”
Carr cut him off. “What are those cops doing here?”
Polly made a face, like he hadn’t wanted Carr to notice. He dropped his voice. “They showed up a few minutes ago. They’ve found the detective’s body. Or what was left of it. Gant says there’s a tug-of-war going on now between Genepol, who wants Rhystok extradited to face Terran criminal charges, and the Surya authorities, who’ve charged him with murder in Martian airspace. You’re a key witness, and I think they suspect you’re more than that too. They’re not taking any chances on you rabbiting out of here after the tournament.”
A WCC official came up to them. “I need a decision here.”
Carr stood. He wasn’t sure his leg would hold up his weight if gravity were involved. “This can’t be the way it ends, coach. Pulling out can’t be the last thing I do in the Cube.” DK and Scull were staring, bewildered, between him and Polly, but Carr plowed on. “Like Blake said: sometimes you can’t win, but you can decide not to lose.”
He went back into the Cube.
Soard was not smiling now. His mouth was set in hard resolve, and his eyes held a hint of uncertainty. Carr realized, with some irritation, that the Martian champion had never, not for one second, not until now, seriously entertained the idea that he might lose to an earth-born Terran.
“All right, have it your way,” Uncle Polly said softly in his ear. “You want to fight, then fight. Take it to him. Make it your fight.”
Carr sent himself into the air in a tight somersault and uncoiled, springing across the right angle of the Cube with his good leg, and down on Soard from behind and above. The man dropped to the wall and shot out a kick from a crouch, connecting with Carr while he was still in the air and sending him flying. Carr launched off the rebound, but his injured leg altered the angle of his flight and he went sailing past his intended target. The Samurai made a grab for him; Carr swiveled his body away narrowly and landed in a crouch.
Soard flung himself across a steep angle, attacking Carr from the left. Carr felt time elongate. He had to decide: which would it be? He shifted his stance to protect the knee; Soard dropped a blow onto the body. As the punch connected, Carr pushed up onto the toe of his good leg; the impact buckled his midsection and knocked him into the air, but that was better than absorbing the full force with his battered rib cage. As it was, one side of his torso had gone completely numb. He reoriented and found his footing. Soard came after him again and they clinched. He felt the other man’s breath, his sweat, the straining of his body. They jammed up each other’s attacks, then flung apart again.
They faced each other across a corner. Soard relaxed a little. Carr sensed it in the set of his shoulders, the way they came down just a fraction. It was obvious that Carr couldn’t move the way he used to, couldn’t rely on his left leg to strike or climb, couldn’t get full range of motion from his body. All Soard needed to do was pick him apart for the rest of the round and count on a win from the judges.
Carr’s mouth was dry. The fight seemed infinite, yet he was running out of time. His knee throbbed, not with pain but with a kind of frantic, pulsing heat, as if it were trying to repair itself, but not fast enough. With his mobility down, he needed to fight from close in. Minimize the handicap of his slow leg. Grab his opponent and hold him. There was no way Soard would let him do that, not if he was being smart.
His opponent flowed toward and around him like a riptide. They clashed again, and Carr, his breath roaring in his ears, began to feel that it wasn’t enough; what he had wasn’t enough.
Soard relied on his endurance. He waited until he saw Kabitain start to tire, then just closed in and swarmed him. That’s what Jeroan Culver had said.
Carr let himself sag a little. It wasn’t hard, he wasn’t even feigning. He steadied himself and went after Soard with a few heavy-handed punches. Soard hit him in the side and he let out a very real grunt of pain, putting his hands up in weak defense. The man clocked him across the ear. Carr’s head rang like a bell and he swayed on his grippers. Two more unanswered blows to the head, and Soard eased into his final victory stretch. His face slackened with confidence, his long limbs loosened, and he went to work, backing Carr into a corner and punishing him steadily.
“Carr!” Uncle Polly shouted. “DEFENSE! Get the hell out!”
No. I know what I’m doing; this is the only way.
A stinging sensation spread across his forehead. His gashes had split back open. Wet warmth jellied over his brow, red droplets scattering into the air and across his eyes. The crowd had started to roar, sensing finality. Carr saw the next blow fly toward him in slow motion and slipped it. There. There was his opening. He dug in his feet and slammed a fist into the spot where Soard’s chest and arm connected, sending the man’s upper body into a rotation. Carr saw his opponent’s back come into view and threw himself across the broad shoulders, right arm wrapping around the neck, left arm locking it into place.
He almost got it, the perfect chokehold. Almost. Soard managed to turn his head and slide a hand in next to his throat. Carr squeezed anyways; it was the best hold he’d gotten so far, and he was out of time. Soard’s eyes bulged, but he tucked his free left arm into a chicken wing and drove the elbow into Carr’s injured side.
Carr’s rib cage contracted with concussive red pain. His grip started to wilt and he fought off the weakness, redoubling his effort and squeezing down harder on his choke. He didn’t have the windpipe, but he could still cut off blood to the man’s brain, make him pass out. The Martian fighter hit him again and Carr heard his own sucking gasp. A third blow. A fourth.
Desperation and urgency coursed through both of them. They were locked together in some primal stalemate, like two prehistoric beasts rending each other even as they sank together into the tar pit. The edges of Carr’s vision blurred; the Cube walls seemed to be shrinking and receding at the same time. He imagined he was tightening a screw, and every bit of his own hurt was another notch. He wouldn’t stop. His ribs would turn to powder and he would pass out before he stopped.
Kye Soard tapped.
He tapped, again, frantically, before the signal reached Carr’s brain.
Carr let go. He fell away, oblivious to which direction he drifted, unaware of where the walls were. His shoulder bumped against a surface and he pawed at it weakly. In his ear, he could hear Uncle Polly shouting as if from a very vast distance, but it was unintelligible. He put his hands and feet on the wall and laid his cheek against the Cube. It was cool and bumpy against his skin, humming with fans and magnetics, its microgravity tug like a gentle and welcome embrace. Like putting his ear up to a seashell. He felt transported.
In a corner of his brain, Carr knew he’d won. He didn’t want to get up and shout his victory to the heavens. He didn’t want to do a triumphant lap around the Cube, or raise his arms to the crowd, or somersault through the air in jubilation. He wanted to lie here with his face against the wall and feel relief. And joy. And sadness.
The referee came up to him and said, “Can you get up? Do you need a doctor?” He let himself be pulled off the wall and toward the hatch. Everyone was there, crowded on the deck. Uncle Polly, Bax Gant, DK, Scull, Adri and the rest of the team, and Risha. Poor Risha, crying. They stared at him in silent awe, no one moving. Then they surrounded him, all at once, and lifted him. In the crush, he said, “Risha,” and held out his hand, and the warmth of her fingers slipped into his.
&n
bsp; He started shivering, and they put towels on him, and a heated top, and wiped the blood from his face and gave him water, and through it all, the crowd, the immense crowd of thousands, was silent.
Finally, they helped him to the center of the deck, where the referee and Kye Soard stood. The Martian put a hand to his bruised neck and looked at Carr as if seeing him for the first time. “The old planet delivers surprises, after all,” he said. Shock and bitter admiration crawled up his sweat-slicked face. “You’re wasting your time on Valtego. You should be fighting in the Martian system, my friend, though I hope you never do.”
Carr extended his hands, right crossed over left, and they shook. The referee raised Carr’s arm, and the Terran sections of the stadium lit up with delirious screams of elation. Then, slowly, the rest of the stadium began clapping. Grudgingly at first, then louder, then cheering and standing up and drifting out of their seats. Over by the entrance, even Officer Jin and the cops were applauding.
Carr didn’t cry, though his heart ached, for he knew that what he’d once dreamed to be his future had already come and gone. He had no dreams for tomorrow, not yet. The truth of him would emerge, slowly, in the days and months to come, and he couldn’t imagine what would become of him, what would be said about him, and what he would mean, in the end, to everyone who’d ever looked to him for meaning. But he knew he would always remember and be remembered, for this moment, and for others like it, raw and honest.
He felt free.
Acknowledgments
The fighter climbs into the ring alone, but it takes many people to get him or her to that moment, and an entire team is working just behind the ropes. So it is with authors.
Thank you to the team at Flux for getting behind Zeroboxer and shepherding it into the world. My editor, Brian Farrey-Latz, loved the story immediately, even though, as he admitted to me, he never thought he’d be “bouncing up and down in his chair over an MMA book.” Brian, thank you for backing me and Carr all the way, and for your consistently insightful editorial guidance. Thank you to Kevin Brown for designing a stunning cover, and to Alisha Bjorklund, Mallory Hayes, Steffani Sawyer, and Sandy Sullivan for taking care of Zeroboxer every step of the way.
