“Sibyl!”
“Sorry, sorry,” my AI said in a rushed voice. “I installed the latest ad blocker, but the bots down here are the most aggressive in the city. I just need to—there!”
The wall of pop-ups vanished from my vision, and I breathed a sigh of relief. But while offers for discount massage parlors and too-cheap-to-be-trusted firearms were no longer flying at my face, Sibyl couldn’t do anything about the projected billboards floating in the shared AR above our heads, many of which featured Nik’s scowling face.
“Huh,” I said, craning my neck back for a better look at the flickering images. “Guess this fight is a big deal.”
“Huge,” Sibyl confirmed. “Campaigns are running on every platform, and just look at the crowd! According to DFZ CrowdWatch, this is big even for a Saturday, and Saturday is Rentfree’s biggest day.”
I’d actually forgotten that it was Saturday—that’s what happens when every day is a workday—but it made sense to put your biggest fight on the night most people could attend. The tourists here also looked more international than the ones in Loveland. Most of the gawkers there had been Michiganders hopping the border for a night of debauchery, but Rentfree was famous all over the world. Tourism companies marketed it as the place you went to experience the DFZ Underground at its most concentrated, and it certainly lived down to its reputation. The businesses here were so seedy they bordered on parody. One strip club even had a huge neon sign offering a free gun for every hour you spent in the VIP room.
“Charming,” my father said, turning away from the blinking lights to arch a smoky eyebrow at me. “This is the god you serve?”
“It’s not all like this,” I said angrily. “The downside of being a city of free will is sometimes people use their freedom to do shitty, destructive things. Nothing the DFZ can do about it.”
Even as I defended her, though, I wasn’t sure I believed my own words. Every city had bad neighborhoods, but Rentfree was the worst. I’m no prude, but there’s a level of seediness where it stops being dirty fun and starts feeling abusive. Rentfree had always been on the wrong side of that line for me. Case in point, some of the prostitutes working the crowd in front of us looked really young and hella drugged out, and while sex work was a personal choice in a city which held that sacred, that didn’t seem like a good thing.
I paused a moment to see if my god was going to comment, but the place in my head where the city usually spoke remained silent. Frowning in disappointment, I put a hand in my pocket to protect my phone and started working my way into the crowd. Nik’s fight wasn’t due to start for several hours, but you never knew how long travel in a mess like this was going to take. Fortunately, all of the foot traffic was flowing in the same direction, which was the one I wanted.
Good thing, too, because once I was in the mix, I couldn’t have turned around if my life had depended on it. The sweep of excitedly babbling tourists and street hawkers caught me up like I was a leaf in a river. The only choice I got to make was whether I took the elevators or the stairs down to the bottom of Rentfree’s giant urban canyon where the circular arena was nestled like a pearl, its domed surface lit up with giant moving advertisements showcasing the extreme violence that would soon be taking place within. Unlike the flashing ads that still danced at the edge of my vision despite Sibyl’s valiant ad blocking, these images were projected in actual light on a real physical surface, which meant my dad—who, as a floating spirit made of smoke, had no AR—could see them too. From the look on his face, though, he’d rather not.
“Blood sports have always appealed to the masses,” he said as we walked down the brightly lit metal stairwell because there was no way in hell I was trusting my life to a Rentfree elevator. “But this is ridiculous. They just showed a man being decapitated.”
“That’s how it is here,” I replied quietly, suddenly far more worried about what was in store for Nik. “Pretty much anything is allowed in the DFZ so long as both parties consent, up to and including fights to the death. It’s what gives the Underground arenas their competitive edge internationally.”
“Arenas,” my father said, his voice surprised. “You mean there’s more than one?”
I nodded. There were plenty of places you could pay to watch people kill each other in the Underground, but none were as famous or as big as the one we were climbing down toward. I generally stayed away from the industry because yuck, but after Nik had mentioned his past the last time we were here, I’d done a bit of research, and apparently the Gameskeeper’s Arena was an institution. It was as old as Rentfree itself, and its fights were broadcast all over the world, or at least to the countries where livestreams of people being disemboweled weren’t illegal.
That international appeal was one of the biggest reasons anyone down here made money. The arena crowds dwarfed the Night Lot’s pull, and according to the numbers Sibyl had just pulled up in response to my curiosity, they spent a lot more. Standing in the middle of a fight-night rush, I could totally see why. Everyone down here, no matter their age, was acting like a college kid on Spring Break. I was pretty sure my dad and I were the only sober ones in the whole place, including the street vendors. Seriously, everyone we passed looked drunk or high or both.
Given our
