Page 6 of Ghost’s Awakening

I felt it through the Harley's frame, a second rhythm laid over the engine's idle, and I knew Blade could see it from three feet to my left, because Blade saw everything. He didn't say a word. He let me run.

That was the thing about Blade. He'd let me vibrate behind a dead tire shop in that industrial strip on the dead side of Henderson at 9:47 at night and never once tell me to knock it off.

"Run it again." Low, even.

"Blade, I've run it four⁠—"

"Run it again."

I blew out a breath. "I walk in with the crowd. Burner goes in the bin at the door. No colors, no ink, nothing that reads club. I'm a guy with cash who came to watch people hit each other."

"Comms?"

"None. They take phones at the door. I'm dark the whole time."

"And that doesn't worry you."

"'Course it worries me. But I can't exactly radio you from inside a fight pit." I dropped into a whisper. "Hey, Blade, quick update, the big scary man just looked at me funny⁠—"

"Ghost."

"I'll be fine."

"Extraction." Irish pushed off the brick wall where he'd been leaning with his collar up against the October cold. He came and stood at my handlebars. Up close, the easy humor he wore most days had pulled back, and what sat under it was the man who'd talked me through my first surveillance op with a voice steady enough to read a kid to sleep. "When do we come get you?"

"Two-hour window. In by ten, out by midnight."

"And if you're not out by midnight?"

"South side. Loading dock. There's a service area behind it."

"That's a lot of confidence from a man who's never set foot in the building."

"I'm good at buildings I've never set foot in." I grinned. It was a real grin and it was also a wall, and Irish knew it, and he knew I knew he knew, the whole tiring game of being the kid in a family that loves you hard enough to lie awake over you. "This is what I do, Sean."

He flinched at the name. Then softened, and his hand landed on my shoulder.

"Then do it and come home. We'll be right here."

"Getting your beauty sleep?"

"Watching the perimeter." He squeezed once and let go. "And, yeah. Napping."

I swung off the bike and checked my pockets a last time. Cash. The burner I'd hand over at the door. Nothing else. No wallet, no ID, no blade, nothing that tied me to the Phoenixes or to anyone but some nobody who heard about a fight and came to lose money on it.

I started walking. Out here there was nothing. A dead district on the far edge of the valley outside of Las Vegas, block after block of shuttered warehouses and chain-link and weeds punching up through the asphalt, the desert pressing in black on every side. No streetlights. No patrol cars. Nobody for miles to hear a thing. That was the whole point—you didn't run a fighting pit this size half an hour from the Strip and expect the law to come knocking, not out where the city gave up and the sand took over.

"Ghost." I turned. Blade sat his bike in the dark behind me. "You see Gravedigger, you leave. No hesitation."

"Copy."

The noise found me before the first corner, bass pushing through the buildings, the compressed sound of too many people in too small a room. It thickened with every step, and by the time the steel door came into view, two men flanked it under a work light.

The pair on the door were efficient. A folding table, a bin half-full of phones, a pat-down thorough enough to catch a gun and lazy enough to miss anything smaller. The one who searched me smelled like energy drinks and stale smoke and had done this so many times his hands moved on their own. Tag 147. I pocketed it and went in.

The corridor dumped me into the heat and the roar at the same time, and my body took both before my head caught up. I'd studied all of it in Blade's briefing photos, the platform, the hemp rope, the sodium lamps clamped to the rafters. The photos hadn't carried the wet weight of two hundred bodies, or the copper smell soaked so deep into the concrete it was part of the building now. I filed the sweat starting on my skin—wet skin caught fabric, caught eyes, made you visible—and evened out my breathing and let the room have me.

Then I went to work.