“No fans backstage before the fight,” said the manager, his jowls quivering beneath his Basset Hound eyes. He spoke directly to the arena employee, ignoring the disheveled man in the jacket. “What kind of amateur establishment are you people running here?”
“Mr. Cade here has an urgent—”
“I’d like to buy your fighter,” said Cade.
The manager made a face like he’d caught his own foul stench in a breeze. “What is this? Find my agent, Lenny—good-for-nothin’ sonofabitch is running around here somewhere—you can set something up for later this—”
“I’d like to buy your fighter, now.” The two men locked eyes. “And I’ll pay you, now.”
The manager blinked first. He took a little step back and nodded at the attendant to leave. “S’not up to me. You gotta ask it yourself.”
It.
Cade followed the manager through a heavy metal door that groaned painfully on its hinges and down a cinderblock hallway sparsely lit in fluorescent yellow. The manager lit up a cigarette; unbelievable really, the damn things had outlasted even oil. He stopped at another door.
“Don’t say shit until I give the okay.” He shouldered through the door without waiting for a response.
A woman sat on a long bench. Her head was draped in a towel and hung above her knees. She swayed from side to side, bouncing her head like someone feeling an adrenaline rush, though Cade knew that wasn’t the case. Her hands were wrapped in gauze, but it was purely aesthetic. Something for the crowds.
She could have passed for human. Then she pulled off the towel.
The plates of her face were porcelain white while the framework of her cranium was all graphene and tungsten. Electric red light pulsed from within the cracks between her faceplates, perhaps in mockery of a pulsing heart. Her eyes were dead things made of machine, but Cade new what lived behind them.
“Synthia, this gentleman here—”
“This is no gentleman,” she said.
The manager gulped. “Of course, of course, but he’s got a business proposition. Maybe you want to hear him out.”
“They’re going to kill you,” said Cade, drawing the manager’s ire. “Maybe you win tonight, but eventually you’re going to lose, and then they’ll melt you down and make a monument out of the slag.”
Now the manager reddened like a lobster gone to boil but not yet quite dead.
“And what,” asked the fighter, “you’re going to save me?”
“They think you’re a machine!”
She launched herself up with the electric speed of superconducting muscles and grasped Cade’s lapel with one high-pressure hand while the other cocked back for a skull-crushing blow. “Fucking look at me! I am a machine!”
Cade’s voice came out barely a whisper. “If you can’t see it, how can they, Harper?”
The sound of that old name triggered a violence no machine could muster on its own, and she let her fist fly. It shot past Cade’s ear with millimeters to spare and plowed a hole into the cinderblock wall. Dust exploded outward, but the woman had no need to blink.
“I already told you, don’t ever call me that. If you do it again, you won’t live long enough to see that monument you’re apparently so concerned about. It should be a hell of a sight.”
She shoved Cade away and turned to the manager. “I’m ready. Show me to the ring.”
Warmup Pages 