Page 66 of Ghost’s Awakening

Every one of them would fight me believing it was the one fight that mattered, because for them it was. And Gravedigger had built all of it, the beds, the bills, the line of desperate men, the prize, and aimed the whole machine at me and called it a game.

Kill one, and Liam's number went to zero and I went up those stairs and handed him fifty people who'd voted to bleed for me. Refuse and lose, and I was a beaten product with nothing left to bargain, and the word never got said. Refuse and win, all seven, clean, without killing anybody…

He hadn't offered that door. Which meant it was mine.

Win everything. Stay in this ring. Be standing under that cable when the night had no choice left but to bring the mic down. And if it never came down, find a way up. Fifteen feet. And six people in this crowd had promised I wouldn't be doing any of it alone.

"First fight!" A new voice cracked through the horns, thin and higher, splitting on the hard sounds. The announcer. I flinched, my eyes snapping to the cable overhead, hope kicking in ahead of sense.

The silver mic hung exactly where it had hung all night. Fifteen feet up. Dead.

The ponytail had a handheld in his fist, black, cabled off toward the wall, produced from somewhere like a card trick. Nolan's ears lived in the one above my head, and the one above my head might as well have hung on the moon. The word I'd been saving for two weeks needed fifteen feet of air I didn't have.

He was ahead of us. He'd been ahead since the arch at the door, and I felt the places click together in a line pointing somewhere I couldn't see yet.

I didn't look for them. Six faces were out in that crush with beers in their hands and no wires on them, and everything in me wanted to hunt for gray hair, for new ink, for her. I kept my eyes on the ring. Eyes pull eyes, and the last man mine had found in this building had nearly died for it.

Harlan came up the lane, one arm out, breaking drunk hands off his shoulders without looking. He stopped at the foot of the steps and gave it to the line of seven at a volume made for the back wall.

"Whoever wants the fight, get up there! You can concede, same as any night. No order. Your call." I'd heard Harlan bored and I'd heard Harlan careful, and this was a third thing, dark and dragging under the volume, a man reading out a sentence he hadn't written.

Nobody moved.

The crowd howled and waved money, and the seven men stood in their line looking at me, at each other, at the mat where I'd put seventeen men down, and for thirty seconds the space between them and the steps stayed empty. My pulse ticked in my wrists. Maybe nobody comes. Maybe the whole obscene machine stalls right here, seven men refusing to feed it, and the thought was so bright and stupid I almost⁠—

A hand closed on the bottom rope.

Renzo came over the hemp the way he always did, smooth, no wasted motion, and set his feet on the mat ten feet from me. He still wasn't looking at my face. He was looking at my stance and my hands. A fighter's look. An opponent's.

"The Saint versus Monk!" The announcer's handheld crackled and spat. "First fight of seven! Get your bets in, ladies and gentlemen, two minutes! Two minutes!"

The floor turned into a market, runners fighting through the rows, fists of cash in the air, odds rolling front to back in a chant. The sound crawled into my head and sat on the thoughts I needed. I walked a small circle to keep my legs warm and pushed my voice through the noise.

"Renzo, stop!" I pitched it under the crowd, hard, just for him. "Climb back out. I don't want to hurt you, and you don't know who you're helping! He's the one who put your wife in that bed! Her and my brother both, the same way, the same reason!"

"Big words, Cal." His feet kept moving, side to side, warming. His eyes finally came up to mine, and they'd gone somewhere flat and far away. "Big, big words. Look, I'm not saying you're lying. I'm saying that's an operation the size of a city, and the feds would've smelled it, the cops, somebody, in all the months this thing's been running. However long that is. You've got a story. You don't have proof⁠—"

"That man has more eyes and paper and bought badges than you can imagine! You don't know who he is, Renzo! I do!"

"Enough, Monk!"

The switch of names went through me like cold water down my back, and it took the last of my hope with it.

"The only thing I know for sure," and his voice cracked once, in the middle, and he stomped it flat, "is that her bill can be zero tonight. That's real. That, I can touch. You're talking, and talking's free, and it hasn't paid for one hour of one machine she's plugged into. So fight me!"

Somewhere behind the ropes the two minutes died.

The bell fired off, a rapid cling-cling-cling, and three hundred voices came down on the ring like a wave on a seawall, and Renzo left the ground.

He came up and forward all at once, higher than a man his size had any right to jump, hips already turning, and his knee rose at my face like something launched.

Two blocks away

GHOST

"I don't like this."

I'd been saying it for an hour. Out loud, at first, to whoever was nearest. By now the words had worn a groove and went around it on their own.