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The impulse was immediate: I spun on him, voice edged with frost.
“You vanished for weeks, and then show up to drag me through the block like a sack of contraband? What the hell do you want?”
He flinched, but only at the edges. His jaw was set, green eyes scanning me up and down, calculating. His gaze lingered on my wrists, the way the bones stood out now. On my face, the hollows under the eyes, the ring of bruises still fading from the incident in the showers.
“You’ve lost weight,” he said, deadpan, like it was a weather report.
I laughed, ugly and raw. “No thanks to you.”
He ignored that, or pretended to. Instead, he crossed to the table, leaned on his good hand, and fixed me with a stare that would have frozen tap water.
“You know why you’re here?”
“Enlighten me, Captain.”
He hesitated just long enough to make me wonder if the next words would be a threat, or something worse. “You’re on the next rotation for the pit.”
The word meant nothing for a half-second. Then it landed with the force of a sledgehammer.
The pit.
In the short memory of D Block, there was no story that ended well in the pit. Every month, Authority chose a handful of inmates—sometimes at random, sometimes as reward or punishment—and threw them in for “observation.” It was a bloodsport, a behavioral study, a social experiment in entropy. The survivors limped out, changed. The losers disappeared into the concrete.
I swallowed, found my voice. “You’re joking.”
He shook his head. “No. They want you ready in seventy-two hours.”
“For what?”
“For whatever they feel like throwing at you,” he said, and the words were so flat I almost missed the flinch behind them. “Sometimes it’s combat. Sometimes it’s psychological. Sometimes…”
He trailed off, letting me fill in the blanks.
“So I’m supposed to what, just die for their data points?”
He shrugged, the motion tight and ugly. “Not if you’re ready.”
“Is that what this is? A fucking pep talk?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he walked to the far wall, shoved the chairs aside, and squared his stance.
I understood, then.
“Now?”
“Now,” he said, voice stripped of anything human. “You fight me.”
The first move was mine. I lunged, not for his face but for his wrist, trying to torque his body into the table. He anticipated, twisting so my grip landed on bone, his counter forceful but not cruel. I used the momentum to feint left, then kicked at his knee, but he stepped inside the arc and pinned me with his good hand to the drywall.
“Again,” he said, voice so close I could feel the vibration in his chest.
I wrenched my arm free, circled. He let me. There was blood under his nails, and I wondered for a moment if it was from tonight or from the last time someone tried this.
“Why are you doing this?” I spat.
He didn’t answer, just waited. I charged, faking a sweep low and then ramming my shoulder into his sternum. It worked, barely—he stumbled, but pivoted, grabbing my collar and dragging me off balance. We crashed to the floor, me on top, hands at his throat. I squeezed, just hard enough to see his face change.
Then his bad hand shot up, digging the thumb into the nerve at my elbow. My grip failed. He rolled me, pinned my chest with his knee, but didn’t press further.
