Champion

by Emmy Chandler

  The guard holding the screen starts to tap on it, to end the connection.

  “Oh, wait, there’s one more thing.” Warden Shaw fixes an almost amused gaze on Sylvie. “The pen, Miss Wolfe.”

  “What pen?” She’s playing innocent again.

  “I know Officer Beardon gave you his pen. He’s already been dismissed.”

  The other guard approaches the bars, his pistol drawn. “Give me the pen.”

  “Fuck off.” Sylvie sinks onto the bed, as if she’s reclining on a couch in her own living room.

  “Hand it over.”

  “Come and get it,” I counter, and the guard’s eyes narrow. But he makes no move to open the cell door.

  “Oh, hell, let her keep it, Vance,” the warden orders. “She’s going to need it.”

  “Thank you.” Sylvie stands again and approaches the bars until she’s looking right at the warden. “What happened to Cohen Roth? If you can’t give anyone an advantage, why did you stop Graham from killing him?”

  “That wasn’t my call.”

  “Where are you taking him? Will he be back?”

  “Of course. That’s why I’m letting you keep the pen.” For a moment, the warden only looks at her. Then his gaze flicks to me for a second before tracking back to her. “You should have let him kill Roth.” Then he taps the surface of his desk, and the screen goes blank.

  Miller rolls the device up and slides it back into his pocket. “See you on the feeds, Sylvie.”

  “Fuck off,” she snaps, as the guards retreat down the aisle. “Well, I guess it was nice of the warden to tell us. He didn’t have to do that.”

  I sink onto the bed next to her, debating whether or not to tell her what the warden and his guards didn’t say. She deserves the truth. The whole truth. “They waited, Sylvie.”

  “What?”

  “Why do you think they left us on lockdown for so long before they came in? They were waiting for us to…finish.” I pat the thin mattress beneath us, then point up at the camera. “The warden isn’t that nice. He could have told us what was happening before we put on another show.”

  “That bastard.” Her teeth grind together, and after a minute, I realize she’s fighting tears.

  “Sylvie.” I uncurl one of her fists and take her hand. “You okay?”

  “I can’t—” She bites off the end of her sentence and starts over, her voice so soft I can hardly hear her. “I don’t know how to deal with this. How to move past this. I can’t say anything, because I know they’re listening. I can’t do anything, because I know they’re watching.”

  “That was always the case. The cameras have been there the whole time. Surely you’ve seen footage from the bullpen, on the feeds.”

  “Yeah, but just shots of the men working out. Sometimes trash talking each other. I know it sounds stupid, but it never occurred to me that they’d broadcast security footage of me being…assaulted.”

  “They can’t broadcast what doesn’t happen,” I point out.

  She gives me a shaky nod. “You’re right. But I can’t…” The heartbreaking vulnerability in her gaze rips me wide open. “Graham, I can’t fight them all off. It was one thing knowing it might happen. Knowing I might have to let it happen. But people will see… Sick fuckers all over the galaxy will get off watching these bastards—”

  “No.” I take her face in my hands and make her look at me. At only me. “I’m not going to let that happen. You might not be able to fight them off, but we can.” One way or another. Now that Roth is gone, at least for the moment.

  She nods, her face still cradled in my hands. “Yeah. We fought off Cohen Roth, and if we can beat him, we can beat anyone, right?” But she doesn’t truly sound convinced.

  “Yes.” As long as they come at us in groups no bigger than two or three. “Definitely.”

  “Where did they take him?” Sylvie leans her head on my shoulder, and I slide my arm behind her back. Holding her close. “Roth, I mean.”

  “To the infirmary.”

  “There’s an infirmary?”

  “Yeah, but it’s only available to top-tier fighters, and even then, only if a corporate sponsor is willing to pay for it.”

  “And Cohen Roth has lots of sponsors.”

  I nod. “He’s very commercially viable. His sponsors were probably in contact with the warden—or the UA board—the second they saw him go down. They’re not going to let their prize investment get killed. Not behind the scenes, anyway. If and when he dies, they’ll make sure it’s on the sand, in front of millions of live viewers.”

  “So, he just gets to do whatever he wants? They’re just going to patch him up and send him right back in here with something to prove?”

  “Probably. But at least you have your trusty ballpoint pen.” I reach across her and hold up her other hand, which is still clutching the weapon, as if she might need to kill someone else in the next two minutes.

  “Yet somehow, that’s cold comfort.” She stands and walks to the front of the cell, where she peers across the aisle. “Why do you think they knocked everyone else out?” Her head tilts as she listens, and I realize that I can hear inmates from the other cell blocks. “Everyone on D block, anyway?”

  “My guess is that the warden didn’t want anyone else to know there are investors interested in you. That’ll make the target on your back even bigger.”

  “So, he was helping me?”

  “He was protecting an asset.” I take her hand and tug her back from the bars. “Shaw is not on your side, Sylvie. There’s a self-motivated reason for every word he says and every kindness he seems to offer. Next time you’re tempted to forget that, remember that he could have played that god-awful tone to keep Roth from raping you just as easily as he played it to keep us from killing him. But he didn’t. He was going to let that happen on camera. Then let UA profit from it.”

  Her grip on my hand tightens. The look in her eyes hardens. “That motherfucker.” She turns and looks up at me, and her gaze softens. Her forehead crinkles. “I’m so sorry I dragged you into this. I wouldn’t blame you if you want to wash your hands of me.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “I don’t want to be what gets you killed, Graham.”

  I lean down for a kiss, then I hold her close and whisper into her hair. “I’m going to die in here anyway.” But until then, I’m going to take her cue. I’m going to truly live, every single second I’m with her.

  10

  SYLVIE

  The tone startles me, and I flinch, my arms tightening around Graham while I wait for pain to split my head open again. Then I realize I’m hearing that other tone. The lower-pitched one that means the lockdown is over.

  The cell door clicks behind me, then I hear a metallic grinding as it rolls open.

  “Get your stuff,” Graham whispers. Then he darts across the aisle into Cohen Roth’s cell, where he evidently dropped his backpack when he went on the attack.

  I grab my own bag and tighten my fist around my ink pen, and by the time I make it into the aisle, he’s already waiting for me. “We need to get back to my cell. If we head into the open, it’ll be too easy to get surrounded.”

  I start to point out that we can’t live like that forever. Then I realize that everyone else in D block is still lying on the ground. Most of the inmates are blinking, some rubbing their eyes, but none of them have made it to their feet yet, after having been stunned.

  But I can hear prisoners from the other cellblocks moving around. They weren’t stunned.

  “Graham.” I pull back when he tries to tug me down the aisle. “Wait.” I point into Roth’s cell. His wide open, undefended cell. “He might have something we need. Like, a weapon.”

  Graham looks at me. Then into Roth’s cell. Then down the hall, where we can still hear inmates talking, trying to figure out what caused the lockdown. “Hurry.” He takes up a defensive position in the aisle. “It won’t take them long to get here. Won’t take these bastards long to wake
up, either,” he adds with a glance into the nearest cell.

  I dash into Roth’s cell and start going through his things. He has more stuff than I’ve seen in any of the other cells, which tells me he doesn’t have to worry about it being stolen. But most of it is worthless to me.

  A cardboard box under his sink holds a stash of still-sealed snacks and desserts. There are a couple of tubes of toothpaste, two sticks of deodorant, and a bottle of one-dose antibiotics standing on his sink.

  I stuff the pill bottle into my pocket and move on.

  His bed is piled with three thin mattress pads, but there’s nothing between them except a couple of glossy, full color printouts of naked women. Clearly he has some source of contraband, which explains how he was planning to pay Graham for me.

  “Sylvie,” Graham hisses, and now I can hear people on D block moving around. Asking questions.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Guards on the ground. Lights out. No idea why.”

  “Where’s Roth? What happened to the woman?”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Graham growls, and I look up to see him blocking the aisle with both arms. “I’m not messing around, Paul. You fucking look at her, and I will pop your eyeballs like grapes.”

  Out of time. Yet I haven’t found anything. But that kind of makes sense. Why would Roth hide a weapon in his room, when there are no guards on the ground here? No room searches?

  He wouldn’t. He’d keep it on him.

  The champ had been wearing nothing but pants when the guards carried him off. If he had a weapon in his pocket, it’s now lost to us. I grab my pack and am heading for the door of the cell, ready to give up, when I spot another backpack on the floor, propped against the end of the concrete block that passes for a bed.

  I grab it, and the second I step into the aisle, the catcalls begin—mostly obscene invitations that make Graham so tense I’m afraid he’s going to pull a muscle just standing there. Then someone shouts above the din.

  “Where’s Roth?”

  “He’s gone,” I shout as I step up to Graham’s side, then nudge him into motion. “Maybe dead. The guards took him away on a stretcher.”

  “What happened to him?” someone else calls out, standing in the doorway of a cell halfway down.

  “You lay one hand on her and you’ll find out,” Graham growls, sliding one arm around my waist as he guides me down the gauntlet.

  At the end of the aisle, a very large man covered in tattoos steps into our path. “You’re saying you took down Cohen Roth. The champion.” The way he says it, I can’t tell whether it’s a question or a repetition of fact.

  “Yes.” Graham turns us to face most of the rest of the aisle. “I took down the champ. What was his is now mine. You guys go nuts with whatever you find in his cell. I don’t give a shit about any of that. But if you come near her, I’ll fucking kill you. Spread the word.”

  For a heartbeat, no one moves. I’m so tense I can hardly breathe, waiting to see how they’ll take the announcement.

  Then Paul—who jacked off watching me and Graham together—darts into Roth’s cell. That starts a chain reaction which at least temporarily diverts attention from me and Graham.

  “Now get the fuck out of my way,” Graham growls at the tattooed man. For a second, they seem to be trying to stare each other down. Then the man with the tattoos steps to the side.

  “Wolfe,” he says as I pass him, his voice a rumble almost too low to hear. “You get bored with this asshole, come find me.”

  “Fuck off,” Graham says through clenched teeth as he leads me into the atrium. But I’m actually a little relieved that the man with the tattoo didn’t just try to take me.

  In the atrium, a man I don’t recognize pushes off from the wall he was leaning against, and I tense as he approaches, expecting trouble. “Graham? Holy shit, man,” he whispers as he falls into step on my other side, and I realize he must be a friend. Or what passes for a friend, in a place where you could be asked to kill anyone, at any time.

  “And you are…?”

  “Sorry. I’m Chris Hardy.” He holds his hand out, and I shake it. But then he keeps staring.

  “Hardy,” Graham snaps, when his friend’s focus strays below my neck.

  “Sorry, man. It’s just hard to believe there’s a fucking woman in the bullpen.”

  “For you and me both,” I mumble.

  I expect them to head back to A block, but Graham leads us through the atrium toward the yard instead. “I thought you didn’t want to be surrounded.”

  “I still don’t, but we need a show of confidence,” he says as our steps echo back at us from the large, empty space. “If we hide, they’ll think I can’t defend you.”

  “And I assume they’re just not mentally equipped for the radical notion that I can defend myself?”

  “You can’t,” Hardy says. “Men here don’t stand in line and they don’t take turns.”

  “They don’t seem to like working together, either,” I note. As we pass the hallway leading to the enclosed shuttle landing pad, I turn to find that the corpse I left there has been removed.

  “You’re right, for the most part,” Hardy acknowledges. “But if there’s anything that could change that, it’s a woman in the bullpen.”

  “Strength in numbers,” Graham says as we step out of the atrium into the sunlight on a broad expanse of cracked pavement. “They need to see that you’re well defended.”

  “Not as an ally, but as a possession,” I whisper. “You want them to think I belong to you.” Even though he’d said the opposite to Roth, last night.

  Graham gives me a grim nod. “For now, that’s the easiest way to keep them at bay.

  “I understand. I’d rather be outside anyway.” After weeks in the prison transport, the last thing I want is to sit in another cage all day. And after everything he’s done for me so far, I’m not worried about Graham buying into his own lie, so I can go along with this, to save my own life.

  Graham and Hardy give me some space as we cross the yard, and at first, I think they think I’m mad. Then I realize this is more posturing. They don’t want to look like they have to keep me close in order to keep me safe.

  “Anderson! Who’s your friend?” a man calls out from the butterfly press, and all across the yard, weights clank as men stop what they’re doing to look. A crowd starts to gather. I try to pretend I don’t know there are fifty sets of eyes leering at me.

  “Fuck off, all of you,” Hardy shouts. “Anderson took down Cohen Roth. Guards pushed the fucker out on a stretcher during the lockdown. That’s all any of you need to know, except that the bitch is his.”

  I bristle at his announcement, and I can feel Graham tense at my side, worried that I’ll contradict it. But I know better. I’ll choose survival over personal pride every day of the week.

  Silence settles over the yard while the inmates process Hardy’s statement. Then someone shouts an obscene comment at me, and on its tail, a chorus of similar catcalls erupt all across the yard.

  Graham ignores them, and I try to do the same, but as we head toward a table at the back of the yard, I study every man visible in my peripheral vision, trying to get a feel for my new neighbors, which I’m now meeting en masse for the first time.

  Most of them are big, from what I can see, but several stand out as smaller—though still larger than I am—and wiry. I know from having watched the feeds that they’re just as much of a threat as the larger men. Sometimes more.

  As we pass through the loosely formed crowd, about half of the men return to a collection of exercise equipment including parallel and pull-up bars, as well as weight machines with the weights enclosed in inaccessible compartments, so they can’t be used as weapons. They appear to be made from the same kind of rust-proof metal as the perimeter walls and the exterior of the bullpen.

  But even the men who’ve gone back to whatever they were doing before seem to be watching me in intermittent glances. Their gazes fe
el like an army of spiders crawling across my skin.

  “Up,” Hardy orders as we approach a picnic-style table near the huge metal wall that separates the west half of zone one from the arena complex, and the men sitting at the table leave without argument.

  “All that just from posturing?” I whisper as I sit with Graham on the side of the table next to the wall. Facing the rest of the yard. I’m still well aware that all eyes are on me, but I’m not sure how I’m supposed to act in my role as Graham’s possession.

  “For now, it’s enough for them to know that Anderson took down Roth.” Hardy sits on the bench across from us. “But eventually he’ll have to prove his mettle.” His gaze fixes on Graham. “And you damn well better be ready to do it, or it’ll be even worse for her.”

  “So, really, we’re just waiting for someone to pick a fight with us?”

  “Basically,” Graham whispers, though his gaze never stops roaming the yard, watching for threats. “But that’s pretty much everyday life in the bullpen.”

  “So, what is there to do in here, other than wait for all hell to break loose?”

  “You’re looking at it.” Hardy nods toward the large, cracked patch of concrete. “Stay in shape. Eat. Shower. Sleep. There are a couple of decks of cards floating around, so games will pop up every now and then. But that’s about it.”

  “It’s a lot of nothing,” Graham confirms.

  “Well, so far, even if I consider every man here to be a threat, present company excluded—”

  “And most of them are,” Graham says.

  “—this is still a hell of a lot better than being locked into a cage too small to stretch out in. At least here there’s a track.” Sure, it’s just a reddish dirt trail stretching around the concrete workout area, where grass has been killed off by the repeated pounding of shoes. But it’s a track. A place to run. To stretch. To get my blood pumping and let my body feel normal again, even if the rest of me remains on high alert. “I want to move. Run. Train. Can we let them see that I’m well-defended while we do that?”