“Actually, it’s a very popular event,” Sibyl said in response to my shocked thoughts. “There’s always a bum fight of some sort on Saturday nights. Last week they had fifty homeless men take on a single US army battle mage. All the homeless had boxing gloves soaked in colored dye while the mage was wearing a white suit. Anyone who could put a mark on his suit got a thousand bucks while the mage tried to keep them all away with walls of fire. Reviewers called it ‘brilliant’ and ‘the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.’ One man claimed it was ‘like watching a grown man fend off waves of toddlers.’”
That didn’t sound so bad. Dyed boxing gloves weren’t lethal, and you could tone down magical fire pretty hard if you knew what you were doing. “Did anyone get hurt?”
“Oh, absolutely. The official death toll was seventeen with twenty more hospitalized for third-degree burns. Do you want to see the pictures?”
I cringed all the way to the back of my seat. “No! Why would anyone agree to do that?”
“The arena paid all participants,” Sibyl reported. “And the Gameskeeper is covering all medical bills, so—”
“This isn’t about money,” I said angrily. “Seventeen people got burned to death in front of a live audience! How is that even legal?”
“Because they weren’t forced,” my AI explained, flashing up a highlighted section of the DFZ’s extremely short legal code along with an advertisement calling for contestants from the back of the arena program. “See? All participation is voluntary and compensated. There’s actually a waiting list since, in addition to the prize money awarded to the winner, every combatant gets five hundred dollars just for signing the contract. It’s all on the up-and-up.”
I couldn’t believe it. I’d lived in the DFZ for years now. I’d Cleaned closet communities, illegally furbished shipping containers someone had bolted to the underside of the skyways and tried to pass off as condos, and on one very poorly thought-out occasion, a single-wide trailer someone had dumped down a storm cistern. I’d thought I’d seen the worst the city could offer, but this took the absolute cake. If a hundred men and women dressed in tattered vending machine clothes carrying pipes and bricks and other improvised weapons hadn’t been shuffling out into the sand before my eyes, I’d have said this whole thing was anti-DFZ propaganda made up by a sensationalist news team to use as clickbait. It felt too insane to be real, yet here it was. Here I was, sitting in the bleachers while the crowd roared around me, shouting creatively violent suggestions to the thin, bent figures as they took their positions. When the air horn sounded, the audience’s excitement grew to a fever pitch, and I turned off my camera feed in disgust.
I didn’t want to watch this. I understood why it was happening, I just hated that it could. I hated the crowd around me as they laughed and jeered at the desperate people clobbering each other for their amusement. It was barbaric. It was cruel. It should have been criminal, but this was the DFZ. Everyone down in the ring was technically acting under their own free will. A sacred act in this city, which meant there was nothing the DFZ could do. Nothing I could do.
And I hated it.
I hate it, too, my god whispered in my ear.
I knew that, but these were her citizens. They weren’t fighters. They were just hungry and desperate. The Gameskeeper was taking advantage of that. There had to be something she could—
There isn’t, the DFZ said, her sadness so vivid in my mind that tears appeared in my own eyes. I’m not like you, free to choose who you want to be every day. I’m the spirit of a city, the embodiment of how the world perceives the DFZ. I can only be what humans make me, and you made me like this.
I sighed. Her other priests had told me the same thing several times. She’d told me herself, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow. It just felt so wrong that a city who could move entire buildings and snatch dragons out of the sky was somehow powerless to stop something as stupid and cruel as a bum fight. What was the point of being a god if you couldn’t use your power to do what you wanted?
That’s what priests are for, the DFZ whispered through me. We spirits are just reflections, the faces of what humanity deems important, but this has always been your world. Humans are the ones who move magic. The ones who change things.
Perhaps, but I couldn’t change this.
Yes, you can, my god said fiercely. Why do you think I let you come here?
My eyes flew wide. That was why she’d given me the afternoon off? I should have known it wasn’t so I could see Nik. The DFZ didn’t even like Nik because he took my attention away from her. But this made sense. It was painfully obvious that there was something seriously wrong going on here, morally and magically. I wasn’t sure how, but some force had pushed all the city magic out of the arena and replaced it with something awful. Something that smelled of blood. Again, I didn’t know how that was possible, but if what I’d felt before was actually true, if the magic here really did grow every time people screamed for blood, then we were in trouble. Because if there was anything this place had in endless supply, it was bloodlust.
As if to prove me right, the magic chose that moment to spike again, rising with gleeful screams of the crowd like a wave in the sea. When I opened my eyes to see why, my purchased camera feed cut back just in time to show me the last of the homeless
