The Games

efficiency, and the police took comfort in the knowledge that there wouldn’t be much to throw if the crowd turned ugly. There were no rocks in the streets, no bricks, or cinder blocks, or chunks of wood. All the garbage cans and benches had been removed days ago. If the crowd was going to throw things, it would have to throw things it had brought.

Muffled in the distance, a cheer went up in the bright lights of the arena. The opening ceremonies. The Games were about to begin.

The men in dark ties lifted their bullhorns. Slogans were shouted, amplified.

In the distance, another voice rose as if in response—a commentator’s voice broadcast from a thousand speakers, booming from the arena walls, rising into the hot Phoenix darkness: “Welcome, everyone, to the gladiator competition of the thirty-eighth Olympic Games!”

In the street, the crowd convulsed and began to move.

The march on the arena had begun.

THERE WAS a knock on the door.

“Who is it?” Silas said.

“Open the door,” came Ben’s voice.

The door swung inward, and Ben stepped through.

“They’re starting,” Ben said.

“Then you’re going to be late,” Silas said.

“You mean we’re going to be late,” Ben said. “Hey, what the hell are you wearing?”

“I’m all about comfort tonight,” Silas answered.

Ben looked down at his own tuxedo, a pained expression on his face. “I’m that overdressed?”

Silas was wearing faded jeans and a white tee. Bare feet. “No.”

“You’re not going,” Ben said, realization dawning.

“Exactly.”

“You have to go.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You’re the program head.”

“I’m also persona non grata among the upper echelon of the commission, remember? Besides”—Silas flipped Ben’s collar up—“you make this look good.”

Ben smoothed the collar back down. Against the far wall of the hotel room, the holo-screen was quietly babbling the pre-show, handsome talking heads talking, point and counterpoint, men calling one another by their first names the way people never do in real conversation. Back to you, John. Thank you, Rick.

“I’ll have a better view from here, anyway,” Silas said, picking up the controller. He hit the button, and the image on the holo-screen changed, showing the arena from a different camera angle. He ran through several more before settling for a close-up of the battle floor. Ben could almost count the individual shavings of sawdust.

Just then Vidonia emerged from the bathroom. Ben looked her up and down. Slacks. Blouse. No dress. “You, too?” Ben said.

“Best seats in the house are right here.” She rubbed the foot of the bed.

“I can’t believe you guys are throwing me to the lions like this.”

“Go get ’em, Tarzan,” she said.

“Helix is proud of you,” Silas added.

The overzealous voice of a commentator broke in on the TV: “Welcome, everyone, to the gladiator competition of the thirty-eighth Olympic Games!”

“Better hurry,” Silas said. “It’s starting.”

“—OF THE thirty-eighth Olympic Games!”

Baskov tuned out the commentator’s voice and focused his attention on the people eddying within the skybox. They were men in suits, for the most part, with pretty women at their elbows. They were businessmen, moneyed men, politicians. Many he knew personally; others were strangers, but nearly all made a point of shaking his hand and congratulating the commission on bringing another gladiator program to fruition.

“It’s going to be quite a night,” he assured them. His hand was sore from it, his smile worn thin.

Still no Silas. He looked at his watch. Good. The doctor had apparently known enough to stay away. Having to deal with Silas would have been just another irritation he didn’t need.

Baskov turned back toward the glass to stave off further rounds of salutations and looked down to the floor of the arena a hundred and twenty feet below.

He touched the glass with his index finger, and the pane in front of him opaqued slightly. A holographic image of the pit zoomed toward him, magnified a dozen times. His eyes had a choice now. They could focus on the close-up image in the glass or through it to the actual fighting pit far below.

The crowd in the stands cheered as the commentator’s voice modulated upward. Baskov didn’t bother to understand the words being spoken; their meaning was clear. Two flags rose on opposite sides of the oval.

The matchup was decided by a complex system of ranking and lottery. The winner of the first round would advance into the second, and so on, and so on. A classic pyramidal elimination. He looked at the flags and saw Argentina and France would be first.

Icers stood at intervals around the periphery of the oval. Near the commentator booth, he saw the armed guard, light glinting off his chrome helmet. Baskov touched the dial of the two-way clipped inside his breast pocket. “Can you hear me?” he said softly.

The guard shifted, and his arm came up, touching the side of his helmet. “I can hear you,” said a voice from Baskov’s pocket. Too loud.

Baskov turned the knob. “Just stand there and look pretty. Don’t do anything unless I explicitly tell you. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” the voice came again, softer now.

“Do nothing.”

“Yes, I hear you.”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Yes, I hear you.”

The flags were at the top of their poles, and the crowd was on their feet. Inside the skybox, people shifted toward the windows, jockeying for visibility. The glass was soon blotted with gawkers, except for a two-foot gap on either side of Baskov, where no one dared encroach.

Voices in the skybox grew louder, faces pressed to glass, staring down.

Baskov had been here, at this moment, many times. He watched the faces. There was a unique thrill that pervaded these nights—even Baskov felt it—that stretched back through time to something older, more basic. The Romans had only discovered, not invented, it. When all the artifice fell away, what remained was this: two living creatures trying to kill each other. It was nothing less than the original sport.

A few weeks from now, the other Olympics would begin. Men jogging in tracksuits. But this now—

—this was the real shit.

The noise of the crowd spiked. They knew it, too.

Baskov smiled.

Distant movement, and down in the pit, a door began to open.

SILAS SAT on the bed next to Vidonia, their eyes locked on the TV. A graphic of the French flag flapped in the lower-right corner of the screen.

The spectacle of it washed over them. The beautiful fucking spectacle, tens of thousands of people on their feet.

It was a science competition, Silas reminded himself. Not some competitive athletic event. It was surreal—a science competition that hundreds of millions of people would watch. There was only a single rule: no human DNA.