Blood

His face was a mask of blood. He knew the right eye had swollen shut—on that side the world had narrowed to a single bright slot of light. Across the ring the other man lay sprawled on the canvas like something already dead, and when Pugion saw the cornerman crouch over the body and feel for its life, an ugly calm settled through him.

The arena chanted his name with one voice—Pugion, Pugion, Pugion—falling on him out of the high cheap seats of Glareach like the first rain on a man the heat had scorched half to death. If he remembered right, that was his name. It was the only name anyone here had for him; the man who had worn the other one—the older name, the softer one—was long gone.

The referee kept lifting a hand and slapping it down against the canvas. Counting. The man laid out across the ring did not stir. Not so much as a breath passed through him.

There was the taste of blood in his mouth, constant. He was used to that. He touched the split in his forehead with a glove and understood—so that's where it's coming from. The referee's hand rose and fell again, a slow metronome beneath the roar. Pugion looked around. A man was jogging toward him with a smile blooming across his face, a towel slung round his neck; two more vaulted the ropes behind him.

He tried to remember when he had first met that smiling man. Before the accident, or after—he couldn't fix it in his mind. He had seen that same face leaning over his hospital bed, and he had felt then exactly what he felt now: a cold turning low in the gut, the body knowing something the mind kept refusing to.

A cramp was climbing his left side. His left arm had gone cold.

The referee struck the canvas again.

He remembered the man he had been before the accident. A wife. A little girl. For one unbearable moment he remembered what it was to have everything—and the memory came down on him heavier than any fist had landed all night. He had needed none of this. Not the arena, not the name, not the blood. None of it—if only they had still been alive. If only they had still been here.

Somewhere beneath the noise of the crowd he had long since stopped being able to hear his own screaming. God, but he missed his daughter. As the referee's hand rose once more, that was the only thought left in him.

He had crossed the wrong men. And the wrong men, in this life, take everything. They had taken the only wealth he had ever owned and called it a traffic accident. There had been nothing accidental about it. He knew who had arranged it. He knew why. He had believed, for a while, that he could run—and he had been wrong about that, the way he had been wrong about everything that mattered.

So now he did the one thing he had left to trade. The only thing he had ever truly known how to do was put a man on the ground with his hands, and no one alive did it better. They had learned that about him quickly. They had pointed him at the man across the ring the way you point a dog, and he had not asked the man's name, or his crime, or whether he had a daughter of his own waiting somewhere out in the dark.

As the referee's hand fell, Pugion was telling himself, the way he told himself every time: it should have been me. I was the one who should have died.

This time the referee looked at Pugion with fear as he raised his arm, his eyes flicking around the ring as if begging someone—anyone—for help.

Something was happening. Something terrible.

When the hand came down with that fear behind it, the whole arena dropped into silence. Not a sound. The hands that had been beating the canvas were clawing at the air now, signaling. Pugion leaned forward. The smiling men who had come running for him a breath ago were not smiling anymore; they were staring at him in pure horror.

He knew that look well. He had worn it himself, once, kneeling beside the ones who would not move again. It was the look death leaves on the living. The count had stopped. There was a winner and there was a loser, and no one in that arena believed the loser would ever care about the difference again. Four more men had climbed through the ropes. An announcement was crawling out over the speakers, and not one word of it reached him.

Pugion flinched once more at the taste of blood in his mouth—and this time, when he turned it over, he understood. It was not his own.

In the crowd, a man in a clean dark suit stood watching him, unmoving while everyone around him surged to their feet. Pugion lifted a glove and made the sign. It's done. The man in the suit raised his hat a few inches to show that he understood, and turned, unhurried, to leave.

Pugion could no longer hear the screaming behind him. He took a step. He knew the dead man's wife had reached the body, knew she was bent over her husband and weeping; he could no longer hear her crying either. He went a little farther. No one tried to stop him—and he would not have listened to anyone if they had. A little farther, and the lights stopped finding his face. A little farther, and the crowd was gone from his ears entirely. A little farther still—and slowly, slowly, he disappeared into the dark.