“You’re the main event,” said the other one, and I decided my brain must still be scrambled from the Taser.
“Here! Quick!” A tall girl with dark hair shoved something at me. Instinctively my hands shot out to grab it.
“What the f—” I began, looking at it, but the girl interrupted me.
“Take off your jumpsuit and put this on!” she ordered. “Fast!”
Yes, because ordering works so well on me.
“No?” I tried, and then I recognized her. “Kathy? Kathy Hobhouse?”
“Yeah,” she said shortly. “Surprise. No time to chat. Okay, it’ll be worse with the jumpsuit. But whatever.” She grabbed my shoulders and spun me around, dropping something heavy over my head. It was… armor. Not fancy, knight-in-shining-armor armor—more like someone had taken a couple of garbage-can lids and riveted straps to them.
“What in the name of—” I started, but again Kathy shushed me. I stood there like a dummy while she fastened a helmet onto my head.
“This will be bad,” she said rapidly, hooking pieces together. “Just try to get through it. They always start with the one to break you down, so go ahead and get broken down. But the two of you will be stuck in a tiny room together afterward, so don’t piss him off.”
I understood each individual word, but strung together like that, they made zero sense. And I was still shocked to realize that I wasn’t the only one from our cell here.
“Who else is here?” I asked her. “How long have you been her
e? Who took you?”
“I saw Livvie Clayhill a month ago,” she said quickly. “But she’s gone. Now quit talking. And keep your tongue in your mouth. I mean, literally. Last week some poor schmuck lost his tongue.”
I stared at her. “Lost his—”
Kathy jammed my hands into something like a cross between boxing gloves and a robot hand. I couldn’t even wiggle my fingers. Finally she gave my helmet a couple of sharp raps, and met my eyes for the first time.
“Sorry,” she said, almost looking like she meant it. “Just… try to get through it. We’re all going to die soon anyway. Doesn’t matter if it’s now or later.”
She pointed to the steps. Feeling like I was swimming through a bizarre, disturbing nightmare, I climbed up them clumsily and stepped between the ropes. I stood uncertainly on the canvas, giving it a couple of experimental bounces.
The crowd roared as my opponent stepped into the ring. Clamping my jaws shut so I wouldn’t scream, I stared in horror. It was a guy, and he was almost as tall as Mr. Butcher’s prizewinning wonder horse. He was probably as broad, too. Maybe weighed about the same. This was who I was supposed to fight.
Time to die, I thought.
23
FIGHTING GOES AGAINST THE GROUP work ethic, so it’s strongly discouraged in the cell. However, I’d had a lifetime of not taking kindly to people teasing Careful Cassie for being a lily-livered chicken. So I braced my feet and scanned my opponent for weak spots.
Um, apparently none. And that was the last semi-coherent thought I had for quite a while.
As soon as the bell dinged, the guy lunged at me. He was huge, but I’m fairly nimble, so I ducked and tried to punch him in the kidney. In an instant, he spun the other way and gave me an uppercut to my jaw that lifted me clean off the ground, then laid me flat. The ref stood over me, counting, while I blinked up at the black stars spinning over my head. I tried to breathe and couldn’t. I tried to move my jaw and couldn’t. I couldn’t feel my face. My mouth tasted like blood, and blood filled my nose, making me feel like I was drowning.
As the crowd screamed the countdown with the ref, a white-hot surge of fury made me scramble awkwardly to my feet. I had a moment to see surprise in the guy’s eyes before I roared and walloped his head as hard as I possibly could. He staggered.
“You asshole!” I screamed, and spat blood onto the canvas. “You goddamn son of a bitch! I’m going to kill you, you shit-eating asswipe!”
Bruiser hesitated, then his eyes turned to steel and he came at me. That’s when I found out what the girl had meant about it being worse with the jumpsuit on. The guy had claws on his gloves, and he raked them down my arm, shredding my sleeve. The fabric got caught and he gave a sharp tug. The hateful yellow cloth ripped as he yanked again and again, pulling it off me. The seams cut into my skin, my shoulders, the tops of my legs. It felt like he was tightening tourniquets around me, scraping my skin raw. I tried to break his grip, punched at his hand and his arm and anything else I could reach, but he was determined. Soon the jumpsuit was gone and I was there in my underwear and a bunch of rough-edged armor. My skin was scraped and bleeding, my nose was trickling a mixture of snot and blood, and now that I could feel my jaw again I could tell that one of my teeth was loose.
The next mouthful of blood I spat right into his face. His eyes flared, and after that it was no holds barred—not that there had been any holds barred before. He was, as the girl had put it, breaking me down. I punched and kicked whenever I could, but he was so much taller and stronger and more of a douchebag than I was, and he kept slugging me long after he had clearly won.
An eon later I heard the bell ding, followed by the muffled roar of the crowd. I was lying facedown in a puddle of blood, feeling like every bone in my body was broken. Blearily my gaze wandered past the ropes to see Deputy Warden Strepp standing there, frowning at me, her arms crossed over her chest.
That gave me enough of a spark to struggle onto my hands and knees. A tooth had actually been knocked out, and I took a deep breath and spit it at Strepp. It barely made it to the edge of the canvas.
Her eyes narrowed. “There’s something wrong here,” she said.