The Games

The announcers droned on, oblivious.

The commentary continued for several more minutes. Silas shook his head. How many times did he have to listen to the same two guys saying the same tired lines about a fight he had just watched with his own eyes? He had almost drifted off to sleep when he heard the word “America” and sat bolt upright in bed. Suddenly, he was very much awake.

He felt a cool hand at the back of his neck. She didn’t say “Calm down.” She didn’t say “Relax.” Just that hand against the back of his neck. He wondered how she had come to know him so well in so little time.

Two flags were raised, similar for their use of stars but worlds apart, both geographically and culturally. The Chinese flag beat the United States to the top. Silas wondered if that was an omen.

A swirl of conflicting emotions spun through his head as he waited for the fight to begin. His heart galloped in his chest. He was surprised at his physical reaction and realized it was fear that his body was reacting to. What am I scared of? Losing? No. That wasn’t it. He realized that the emotion he’d feel if the Chinese contestant won was this: relief. He wanted the U.S gladiator to lose. To die. He was rooting against himself.

He looked over at Vidonia and wondered if she suspected. He’d kept it hidden. From her. From himself.

Her dark eyes were unreadable.

His hand slid across the bedsheet to hers, and he turned back toward the screen, concentrating, trying to put conscious thought out of his mind. He pushed himself into his senses, trying to see and hear only, while feeling nothing. It would be over soon. That was his one consolation. One way or the other, it would be over soon.

HAND IN hand, they watched in silence as the China door began its ascent. Silas knew they intentionally programmed the doors to open slowly to heighten the suspense, and he felt a surge of anger at being manipulated so easily. But he pushed that away, too, focusing on the expanding rectangle of shadow.

A striped yellow shape ducked under the rising door and lumbered into view.

It turned its head from left to right, splayed nostrils sucking at the air, eyes scanning the arena. The head was enormous, wide, and vaguely bearlike in conformation. The front of the body, too, was bearlike, broad and hulking, enormously wide at the chest. But the torso was long, and tapered into a graceful striped tail that flickered with excitement.

“Bear-tiger?” There was awe in Vidonia’s voice.

“I think so,” Silas said, then, “Has to be, but there’s something more.”

The bear-tiger sauntered casually around the arena, eating up an amazing distance between each long- legged stride.

“They’ve done something to the limbs,” Silas said.

“I don’t recognize it.”

“Yeah, me, either. They look … extended somehow. We may not be the only ones with a little independent engineering up our sleeves.”

This creature didn’t have the awkward, disjointed appearance of most of the earlier contestants. It looked more natural. Nobody would confuse it with Mother Nature’s handiwork, but it was something you could imagine her giving a kind of begrudging approval to.

By Silas’s estimation, the gladiator probably weighed more than two tons. More than twice the weight of the U.S. contestant. He silently hoped that extra mass would be enough.

Feeling a squeeze in his hand, he looked over at Vidonia, but she was lost in the screen and didn’t realize how hard her grip had become. She sucked in her breath suddenly, and when he looked back at the TV, the United States door was rising.

The bear-tiger reacted instantly, maneuvering off to the side. It settled onto its haunches fifteen yards away, coiled like a spring; Silas could see the cat in it moving to the forefront.

The door continued its ascent, revealing nothing more than a growing rectangle of shadow. The grip on his hand tightened while the tone of the crowd lowered to a rumble, like the idle of a fast car.

Something moved then, a shadow within the shadow, shiny black contrasted against flat emptiness, a color that was not merely the absence of light but something more. Something alive. The idling car of the crowd revved a notch.

And then the gladiator simply stepped into view.

There was a hesitation from the crowd before it reacted, a collective gasp of pulled-in breath.

And then the crowd exploded.

The cheer was deafening.

The bear-tiger stayed in its crouch, eyeing this new strange beast. Silas supposed the upright stature of the U.S. contestant might have confused it. The stance was too human.

The shiny black creature dropped to all fours and bounded toward the center of the arena, away from the bear-tiger, away from the security of the shadowy doorway. Its wings were folded tightly against its back like the carapace of some strange gargoyle beetle.

Silas was barely aware of the commentator’s voice bleating wildly in the background. He supposed the voice had a right to be excited. But the man behind the voice hadn’t seen the creature with the goat, hadn’t seen it take the end of Silas’s finger. The man behind the voice hadn’t seen it with the training robot, or with Tay. He hadn’t seen anything yet.

The crowd continued to cheer. The creature was like nothing they’d expected or imagined. Huge and dark and winged. Vaguely humanoid but massive.

A fallen angel.

Large gray eyes blinked against the harsh lights, looking up at the net that enclosed the fighting pit, then past it to the crowd. Now! Strike now, while it’s still adjusting to the lights. But the Chinese gladiator stayed back, watching, measuring. It had obviously been well trained and wouldn’t be pulled into the fight before it was ready.

The U.S. gladiator did a slow pivot, turning toward the Chinese bear-tiger. The two creatures locked gazes, and for a moment, neither reacted. The Chinese contestant’s predation drive was out in the open now, exposed, naked. It had the thousand-yard stare of a big cat eyeing prey on the open savanna. The glare had weight to it, and an almost incandescent intensity. There was no anger or malice; it was the glint of hunger that shone in the bear- tiger’s eyes. It was the look of a predator making its living. No more, no less. Silas wasn’t sure what he saw in the other eyes, the gray eyes, but he was certain there was more than that. More than hunger.

Something darker. Something angry.

The U.S. gladiator howled then. The head reared back, fleshy snout peeling away from the strange double row of teeth, and it sang out high and strong. The sound reverberated in the expanse of the arena but soon drowned in the howl of the masses that rose to greet it, becoming just another voice in a sea of thousands. Then its mouth closed with a scissor snap, and when it locked eyes on the bear-tiger again, its pupils were sharp black ellipses. Muscles bunched beneath the dark shine of its hindquarters, gathering, gathering …

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The mob.

Marchers shouted angry slogans as they moved through the streets. Cars waited through green lights. Television cameras rolled from the sidelines. The crowd attenuated as it approached the arena, became a line—the amoeboid mass grown suddenly filamentous.

The men with bullhorns prodded the crowd forward. The bright lights of the arena rose above, merely blocks off now, a shape closing in the distance.

Up ahead, the police stood their ground, drawing their own lines. Olympic steps rose at the officers’ backs.

At the final turn, the head of the crowd stopped a hundred yards from the police. But the rest of the crowd filled in from behind, still coming on, like a climbing rope cut from some height, pooling in widening loops as it fell free, gathering strength—a hundred, two hundred, five hundred people. Until the crowd filled the