He was holding a hypodermic glowing with swirling stormtech. I could smell it: sweet and syrupy and cloying. My mouth watered for it, even as a wildfire of fear spread through me. An animal growl tore out of my throat as I struggled furiously against their hold on me. My muscles flexing, legs quivering, my body kicked into hypergear, unable to think about anything except getting away from the stormtech.
I froze solid once the Jackal poised the hypodermic over my eye.
‘Let me explain something to you, Reaper.’ In my vision, the thin needle was a pylon of glistening steel, as if already protruding out of my eye-socket. ‘This stormtech is going in you, one way or another. It can go in your chest. Or it can go into your eyes. Totally up to you. Me, I’d be happy to make a little experiment of it. I mean, have you ever seen what happens when you shoot stormtech into a Reaper’s eyes? Keep struggling like you are, and we’ll send you to fight blind.’ The sharp, nanometal edge of the hypo seemed to gleam. The stormtech jerked hard in me, and I barely managed to ground myself in place. One muscle twitch could be all the excuse he needed. ‘Or we send you down there with a fighting chance of making it out alive. Your choice, Reaper. Your choice. What’s it going to be?’
My eye was still on fire from the Jackal’s thumb. I imagined the unspeakable agony of the metal rod stabbing down into both my eyes, stormtech flooding down into my brain like acid. Whatever damage it did, my own body would ensure it wasn’t enough to kill me. I’d survive long enough to feel every second.
Had to play along.
I allowed myself to ease into the flowing channel of my body’s urges, fighting back the instinct to struggle. I nodded towards the hypodermic. ‘Say it.’ The Jackal’s eyes dissected me. Watching everything. ‘Go on. Say you want it.’
‘I want it,’ I growled between gritted teeth.
‘Louder,’ the Jackal said.
‘I want it!’ I choked out.
‘Louder!’ the Jackal roared in my face.
‘I want it!’ I roared back.
‘Yeah, you do.’ A stabbing motion and a blinding pain. I looked down to see him jerking it out of my chest. ‘People bet a lot on these fights,’ the Jackal said as my shackles were removed and I was hauled up and thrown onto the platform. Panting so hard it felt like I had a breach in my lungs, clawing and sucking all the oxygen away. My head bent down, I watched tidal waves of furious blue charging up my breastbone. Couldn’t move, couldn’t think. The world twisted in nightmare kaleidoscopes, faces smeared along the colours. His voice stretched, rushed towards me like a head-on collision. ‘The fights get boring pretty quickly. But seeing a Reaper high on stormtech fight? Well, we’ve all got money on you. My bet is four rounds at least. Try to stay alive that long.’
The platform jerked as it lowered me into sweltering darkness, then tilted, rolling me onto the gritty sand of the arena. Between matted strands of my hair, I watched someone being cleared away, leaving a gory furrow in the dirt. I gulped for air, the world swaying around me as I stood on shaky legs. How much had he shot into me? I’d cracked myself open to the stormtech so recently that there was nothing to hold back this fresh surge. I felt it roil through me, hardening like cement around my bones. Already building my body back up.
I blinked up at the audience high above me. A mix of aliens and humans, locals and travellers, casual onlookers and arena veterans, all waving their digi-cards high in the air as one bloodthirsty crowd. When they saw me and the bands of stormtech, they roared their approval. They’d be frantically upping their bets, pounding their shibs and ordering their Rubixs to calculate the odds. Trying to predict how long I’d last.
I had only one way out of here alive.
I couldn’t fight the stormtech.
I embraced it. Closed my eyes and felt the heat from the high-intensity floodlamps sear my skin. Drank in the enhanced noise, the smell of blood, the cheers. Pulled the fresh, livid stormtech closer to me, fed it all my fear and worry. Soaked up its strength, just as I had when our troop-transport swooped closer to the muddy frontlines of the battlefield.
When I opened my eyes again, I was ready.
24
Blood Hounds
A sea of white noise. Two hundred, three hundred pairs of eyes staring down at down at me, drones equipped with cams jostling for the best angle. They didn’t care where I was from or why I was there. They just wanted to see me in action. I rolled my burning shoulders, the stormtech ripping up my throat and preparing me to fight for my life.
I was spotlit in the middle of a ruin. The arena was designed to resemble the bombed-out remnants of some dockyard or hangar bay. A hellscape of chairs, crates, platforms, terminals, workstations, and smashed objects were lodged in the walls and floor at haphazard angles, thin paper barricades walled up around me. Concrete and metallic chunks that had been smashed and strewn across the sandy floor were, on closer inspection, only some flexible, semi-hard material. These lunatics had turned this place into the re-enactment of a warzone.
My attention moved to my opponent. A huge man with a cinderblock head who was bulging with knotted muscles. His grin withered at the sight of my stormtech but was instantly restored as he lunged forward, punching me square in the gut. I flailed backwards, the world tilting, as he followed up with a devastating blow, just under my ribcage. At the damage, my body seemed to jumpstart into action. Cranking through me like internal machinery turning fully operational. The stormtech coalesced throughout my body, tightening hard against me and flooding to where I’d been struck, the pain being stamped out
