“I think maybe we can help each other.”
“Come in, darling,” Zerena said. “I wouldn’t want you to catch cold.”
• • •
Kazimir hailed Josh and Nadia when they returned to the room with the boxing ring, and got them more drinks, and carried on most of the conversation himself as they got ready for the next fight.
“It’s very exciting!” Kazimir’s Russian was better than his English, but no less enthusiastic. “We have a new middleweight in town. We have had such a difficulty finding a good match for Andrej”—he pointed to the short, square, burly man ducking through the ropes, testing his gloves—“ever since he broke Blahoslav’s three front teeth and his four ribs. Which is a shame, because I do love to watch Andrej fight. This middleweight, you will like, I trust,” he said as he set a hand on Nadia’s arm. “Very much your kind of fighter. And you,” he said to Josh, “do you have a kind of fighter? Of your boxers, is there one you enjoy most?”
Josh was looking for a way to say he didn’t follow boxing without damaging his rapport with Kazimir when audience uproar gave him the perfect excuse to swivel in his chair and face the ring.
Kazimir’s new middleweight had entered the ring while Josh looked away, wearing a hooded robe. That by itself would not have caused a fuss. But the person who revealed herself when she threw the robe aside did.
She was, he thought, Southeast Asian. Short hair. Her sleeveless top bared thick arms and the trace of a tattoo. Her eyes were still, and sharp. Burly Andrej, across the ring, bounced on his toes. The new middleweight did not bounce. She rose onto the balls of her feet. Taut muscles shifted in her calves. She settled down. Dust burst from the mat.
They touched gloves in the center. Andrej’s bounced off hers. They were about the same height. He was thicker. Her bones must be heavy, or her muscles dense.
“What’s her name?” Nadia asked. And Josh’s eyes flicked off the fight as the bell rang.
The Russian watched the ring, fixed, pinned, sure as Josh had been pinned to that wall.
And Josh realized Alestair was right.
Josh would have to go through the motions, to come on to Edith, to convince her he was straight.
He hated it, almost enough to hate Alestair himself. Because the Russian across the table, she was better at this spy stuff than Josh. No sense denying it. And even so, a blind man could have read her now, as she watched the woman box. He knew that cocktail’s taste: awe, and hunger, and need, each strobing and transforming into the next and back.
He heard glove strike flesh. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, Andrej go down, saw the middleweight raise her gloves in triumph. Saw, out of the other corner, the hint of teeth in Nadia’s grin that said I want one.
He turned back to the ring, sipped his bourbon, and watched Andrej lose.
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Writer Team
Lindsay Smith is the author of the YA espionage thrillers Sekret, Skandal, and Dreamstrider, all from Macmillan Children’s. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and dog, where she writes on international issues in cyber security. LindsaySmith.net. @LindsaySmithDC.
Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia, drank almond milk with monks on Wudang Shan, and wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. Max is also the author of the Craft Sequence of books about undead gods and skeletal law wizards—Full Fathom Five, Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, and Last First Snow. Max fools everyone by actually writing novels in the coffee shops of Davis Square in Somerville, MA. His dreams are much nicer than you’d expect. MaxGladstone.com. @maxgladstone.
Cassandra Rose Clarke grew up in south Texas and currently lives in a suburb of Houston, where she writes and teaches composition at a pair of local colleges. She holds an M.A. in creative writing from The University of Texas at Austin, and in 2010 she attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in Seattle. Her work has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her latest novel is Our Lady of the Ice, out now from Saga Press. CassandraRoseClark.com. @mitochondrial.
Ian Tregillis is the son of a bearded mountebank and a discredited tarot card reader. He is the author of the Milkweed Triptych, Something More than Night, and the Alchemy Wars trilogy. His most current novel is The Rising (Alchemy Wars #2). His short fiction has appeared at numerous venues including Tor.com, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Popular Science. He lives in New Mexico, where he consorts with writers, scientists, and other disreputable types. IanTregillis.com. @ITregillis.
Fran Wilde’s work includes the Andre Norton-, and Compton Crook Award-winning and Nebula-nominated novel Updraft (Tor, 2015) and its sequels, Cloudbound and Horizon, as well as the novella The Jewel and Her Lapidary (Tor.com 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Nature. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, and iO9.com. franwilde.net. @fran_wilde.
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