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I try to get up, but she’s on me, pinning my shoulders, knees on my chest. She presses down, squeezing the air out. Her breath is right in my face, hot and sour, her eyes alive with the pleasure of the moment.

I punch, weak, at her thigh, but it does nothing. She leans in, puts her hand around my throat, and starts to squeeze.

Black creeps in from the edges. Kang said I was built to adapt. Let’s see if he was right. My fingers search blindly, find a fragment of glass. I jab it up, into her side. She howls, lets go, and I roll free, sucking air like it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted.

I stagger to my feet, glass still in hand. She’s bleeding now, a steady drip down her jumpsuit, but she barely seems to notice. She charges again, swinging wild. I duck, jam the glass into her armpit as she passes. She grabs my wrist, twists, and I feel something tear in the joint.

I scream. The sound is lost in the chaos.

Time contracts to a single bright line. In the center of the pit, it’s just me, her, and the wall of faces howling for more. I taste my own blood, cataloging the texture: iron, spit, and ozone. I can feel the rattle in my ribs—two, maybe three cracked. My left eye is swelling shut. But I’m still upright, and for a second, I catch sight of Kang at the edge of the ring.

He’s not cheering, not scowling. He’s perfectly motionless, except for his hands—white-knuckled on the rail, like he could snap it if he tried. The look in his eyes is not Authority cold. It’s naked, raw. The kind of look that says he’s calculating how to save me, or how to end it if I don’t.

I use that look to focus. To rip a last ounce of clarity from the soup of adrenaline and panic.

My opponent charges, barreling straight at me. I sidestep, just barely, and she clips my shoulder with her hip. The force is enough to send me spinning to the concrete, knees screaming on impact. I scramble, hands clawing the floor, and my fingers close around one of the test tubes—old, capped, half-full with something viscous and blue.

The crowd’s noise dims, replaced by the rush of blood in my ears.

I lurch upright. She’s circling now, wary for the first time, blood pulsing down her forearm where I gashed her before. Her face is a map of old trauma: broken nose never set, a seam of scar across her lip, the jaw too square for any mercy. She grins, showing teeth filed flat. “Got you,” she spits.

I ignore her, inventory the rest: another tube, this one cloudy yellow; the shard of metal; the memory of every protocol I ever wrote for controlled violence in a closed system.

She charges again. I let her come, absorbing the first hit—her shoulder in my gut, my back slamming the chain wall—then use the momentum to grab her around the neck and pull her forward, toward the tubes scattered at our feet. She tries to bite my ear off, but I jerk away just in time. She gets a chunk of hair instead.

I snatch the yellow tube, crack both against the ground. The stoppers pop. My hands are shaking, but I manage to mix the blue and yellow behind my back, using the last moments before her next attack.

She roars, goes for my legs, tries to take me down. I drive my thumb into her bad eye—brown, the weaker one—then use the empty tubes as a shiv, raking it across the bridge of her nose.

She shrieks, tries to gouge my face, but I’m already moving.

I bring my hands up, the mixed chemical cocktail sloshing between my palms, and as she lunges, I fling the liquid straight into her eyes.

The reaction is instant.

It hits with a fizz and a sizzle, the blue-yellow mess foaming as it reacts to the salt and sweat on her skin. She staggers, howling, hands to her face. Steam rises off her cheeks, her eyelids starting to go red and then pale, the surface bubbling in a way that makes my stomach turn even through the high.

The crowd goes silent. Then, after a heartbeat, they go ballistic.

I don’t wait. I tackle her at the waist, both of us hitting the concrete. She claws at her face, trying to scrape the burning away, but I’m on her, grabbing the nearest rock—sharp, heavy, probably a fragment from the wall—and smashing it down on her temple. Once, twice, and the flesh gives way, spurting blood and something thicker.

The animal in me is in charge now. I can hear it, snarling, urging my hands to keep moving, to make sure it’s finished.

I don’t stop until her body goes limp and the air is thick with the stink of burnt hair and copper.

The world tunnels down to a single point: my hands, the blood, and the distant sound of boots on concrete. I just wanted to live. I didn’t want to become this. But maybe they’re the same thing now.

Suddenly, someone yanks me up by the collar. I twist, ready to fight, but it’s Kang, breath hot against my ear. He wraps his arms around my waist, locking my arms to my sides. “Enough,” he hisses, There’s something in his voice I’ve never heard before—panic, not for himself, but for me. It scares me more than anything else in the pit did.

I don’t stop struggling. Not until he squeezes tighter, grounding me, reminding me of the body I’m still in.

He drags me upright, half-carrying me toward the exit. I see the other guards entering the pit, their guns out but pointed low, not at me—for now. They circle the corpse, prod it with a boot, then whisper to each other, eyes darting from the body to me and back.

One guard pulls out a radio, says something clipped, then nods grim. He holsters the radio, draws his gun, and with zero ceremony, puts a bullet in the corpse’s head.

The echo is louder than the crowd.

Silence follows, complete and total. Every inmate, every guard, every Authority figure in the building is watching me.