Page 1 of Ghost’s Awakening

1

THE PIT

CALEB

Some nights I heard the ventilator before I heard the crowd.

Hiss-click. Hiss-click. The machine that breathed for my brother, looping over everything while my hands worked the tape. Around the left wrist. Across the knuckles. Pull it tight with my teeth. The same pattern I'd learned at eight years old in a martial arts gym in Vegas that stank of old sweat and rubber mats that nobody ever replaced.

Nineteen years later, I taped up in the back hall of a warehouse that smelled like bleach laid over blood, two hundred strangers packed on the other side of a cinder-block wall, waiting to watch somebody get hurt.

"That tape's a crime against humanity."

Renzo. Leaning on the wall across from me, arms folded, already wrapped and loose. A middleweight fighter out of North Las Vegas. A massive scar hooked from his ear down to the corner of his mouth and tugged his face into a half-grin that never meant anything good. He had spent nine months on this fighting circuit. Around here, that made him practically a veteran.

"You say that every week."

"Because every week they hand you the same garbage tape, and every week you wrap it like it's gonna hold." He shoved off the wall, crouched, and pulled at the edge near my wrist. "Look, a gap, right here. If your hand swells mid-fight, the whole thing slides and you're throwing bare knuckles."

I looked down. He was right. Sloppy work. The hiss-click sound that haunted me had dragged me off somewhere.

"Thanks."

"Don't thank me, I got money on you." He smiled, and the scar stretched from the motion. "I'm kidding. Mostly. They don't let fighters bet, supposedly."

"You follow that rule?"

"I follow the rules that don't cost me. The rest I work out." He dropped onto the bench across from mine and bounced his wrapped fists against his knees, that pre-fight buzz some guys never burn off. "You hear what happened to Cortez?"

"No."

"He had been undefeated… what, five months? Then they put him in with some Sambo guy nobody had ever seen, and the Sambo dude popped both his shoulders out of socket in under a minute. First minute, Cal." His hands went still. "Cortez doesn't fight anymore. Doesn't walk too good either, from what I heard."

My hands stilled over the tape. "Why are you telling me this?"

The grin disappeared from his face. "Because they're matching you up harder. You clocked that, right? The first couple months it was drunks off a barstool. Lately they're sending guys who've actually trained."

I'd clocked it. Cleaner footwork. Combinations that came in sequence instead of one wild swing at a time. Men who had stood in a real fighting gym at some point in their lives.

"They're feeling for your ceiling," he went on. "And the night they find it, they put you through it. An undefeated guy's worth more to the room when he finally drops. More money riding on it."

I let a slow breath out through my nose. "I'm not dropping."

"Nobody plans to." His voice came down lower, rough at the edges, closer to recognition than pity. One fighter catching another's blind spot. "Who you doing this for? Because it sure isn't you. Nobody fights the way you fight for fun. You do it clean, in and out like you're trying to clock off a shift."

I looked at my phone, lying face-up on the bench. Dark screen. Nothing from University Medical Center since the last billing alert that came three hours ago.

I kept my eyes on the black screen. "I do this for my brother."

He nodded once and left it there. You learned fast not to dig into why another man was bleeding in this place.

"Then keep your eyes open tonight." Renzo stood. "They don't hand out winning streaks for free."

He went off down the corridor. The door swung and the crowd's wild noise rushed in for a second, raw and starving, then the closing door tamed it back down.

I opened and closed my fists. The tape held this time, no gaps.

Two hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars. That was the number on Liam's bill, the one I carried everywhere now. Into the shower. Into my shifts at the restaurant. Into the fights in this horrid place. Into the three hours of sleep I scraped together in between. Two-forty-seven and climbing, because every day my brother lay in that bed with a tube down his windpipe, the figure ticked up.