16. Ignite #3
"Fight me again." I gave it to the mat between us with my lips barely moving. "Get me to the middle. Under the mic. When I kick you in the stomach, go down. Hands and knees. I need a step."
"A step." His eyes went narrow over his fingers. "You want me to be a step."
"I want you to be a step."
"You're out of your fucking mind." Something moved at the corner of his mouth, under the hand. "Okay."
I'd planned on watching him take that in.
Chew it. Argue with it. He didn't. Whatever he had left, he put into a low roundhouse from the crouch, his right shin whipping around at my head, and I stood up out of it, and the shin passed under my hip.
I gave ground. Three steps back, a man buying room, and every step of it was for the seats.
Good. Good, Renzo. Get me to the middle. Put me under it.
"You motherfucker!" He came up off the ropes screaming it, raw, his hands up and coming, and blood flew off his mouth on every word. "I'll kill you! I'll fucking kill you!!"
I hoped to God he was acting. His face said he wasn't, and the crowd believed every word.
The sour went out of the room in a breath, and the roar came back, bigger for having been gone, three hundred people watching the Saint come off the ropes with his face in pieces and go after the man who'd done it. Money came back out of pockets.
"THE SAINT'S NOT DONE!" The horns cracked with it. "He is NOT done, ladies and gentlemen!"
"Come here!" Renzo, through the blood, following me with his hands. "Come HERE!"
He drove me backward across the ring. That was the picture from the seats, the Saint pushing Monk, and I let him have it.
I blocked and slipped, giving ground a step at a time, angling as I went, and I didn't look up.
I couldn't. One glance at that cable and every eye in the building would follow mine, and the pair that mattered most was up behind the tinted panel, waiting for me to give the mic away with one look.
So I counted my distance off the ropes instead. Ten feet to the far rope. Eight. The middle of that ring was a dark stain the bleach had never gotten out, and I could have found it blind.
Then he threw the hook. High. A foot too high, a mistake so plain that from an arm's length away it read as what it was, a door held open on purpose, and I ducked under it, turned my hips over, and put my right shin into the middle of his body.
It landed square in his stomach. The shin sank in and stopped against the hard wall of muscle underneath, and his breath left him against my thigh in one warm burst. He folded around my leg.
He groaned, and it was real, because that had been a real kick.
And he went down, the way I'd asked him to.
Knees to the mat, then both palms flat, head hanging, a man on all fours in the center of the ring, and the crowd went up like I'd dropped him through the floor. They wanted the end of it. Now.
I hopped back. Two short steps and a small bounce, the way you back off a man to line up the finish. Every eye on the floor watched me measure him.
"NOW!!" I screamed it at the mat, at the back of Renzo's head, loud enough to strip my throat raw. It was the signal, and to the seats it was a fighter screaming at a man he was about to finish.
Out of the corner of my eye, Trenza and Mateo came over the ropes.
Two bodies. Hands on the top rope, up and over together, a woman with her hair flying and a kid who'd finally put down his beer, and they hit the mat on my right and were already running.
Behind them the enforcers moved. I saw two of them come off the ring steps with their hands out, and they were slow.
They'd stood at ropes all night watching a crowd drink.
Nobody had told them the crowd could run.
"Get them off the mat!" Harlan, from the foot of the steps, at a volume I'd never heard out of him. "Get them?—"
Screams came up out of the seats, sharp and confused. I was already running. From my side, straight at Renzo, while Trenza and Mateo came at him from theirs.
Mid-stride, I looked up.
The cable. The mic on the end of it, fifteen feet up, swaying in the heat, and Renzo under it. A foot to the right of dead under. Close enough.
I jumped. My right foot came down on his back between the shoulder blades, and he held.
His arms locked and shook under my weight and he held, and I drove off him, and Trenza was already there.
Her hands were laced in front of her at the waist, and my left foot hit her palms. Mateo caught my right foot in both hands as it came off Renzo's back, and I steadied myself with a hand flat on top of his head, and then the two of them drove.
"Go!" Mateo, under me, through his teeth.
"Up, cook!" Trenza, from under my left foot, and the scream came right behind the words.
It tore out of her at a size the room wasn't ready for, and her hands rose with it.
Past her chest, over her head, her whole back and both legs straightening under me in one shove, and Mateo shoved up under my other foot with both arms and his skull grinding into my hip, and I sprang off the two of them, and the ring dropped away.
Everything went quiet in my head. Three hundred people screaming, and I couldn't hear one of them.
The lamps were beside me instead of above me.
I was going up past the top of the ring posts, into the dark up under the beams where the mic hung, and my right arm was already out, my hand open, reaching, and there it was.
Small. Silver. An inch past my fingers, and then, at the very top, where there was nothing left in the jump, an inch inside them.
And past it, above it, the mezzanine. The open panel.
Gravedigger stood at the rail with his square handheld in his fist, looking at me.
Straight at me, a man in the air fifteen feet over his ring, and there was nothing on his face.
Nothing I could read. He didn't lean, and he didn't lift two fingers off the rail. He watched.
My hand closed on the mic.
Then my whole weight hung off it. Something up in the beams cracked and gave, the pulley letting go, and the mic stayed in my fist with thirty feet of cable paying out behind it, and I came down, feet first, and hit the mat in a squat with my free hand flat on the plywood and a coil of black cable dropping around me.
The mic was warm from the lamps. I turned it on its side, and there, under my thumb, sat a slider, the on-off switch, pushed to the off end.
I flipped it the other way.
"—out of the ring, get them—" The announcer's voice, still coming through the horns off his own handheld, cut off in the middle of the word, because the building squealed.
A live mic, switched on under a roof full of horns, and the horns heard themselves.
One second of microphone feedback, high and thin, shrieking out of every one of them at once, and three hundred people flinched from it with their hands halfway to their ears, and it was the best sound I'd heard in four months.
The mic worked. It had never stopped working.
They'd hoisted it into the beams and flicked it off and left it there, because who was going to climb fifteen feet of air to reach it?
Nobody had bothered to cut the wire. Somewhere down that cable sat Nolan's tap, the ears he'd hidden in the line, and that squeal had just gone straight into them.
Past Nolan, in the dark, was Ghost, waiting on the word I'd been saving for him.
I stood up, and the crowd was gone from my head.
Trenza and Mateo were at my sides and the enforcers were coming up the steps and over the ropes, and I couldn't see any of it.
The whole warehouse had gone down to one man at one rail.
I looked up into his small dark eyes, and I lifted the mic, and I gave him every word slow, so that nobody in that building, or outside it, could mistake a single one.
"The answer is still no, you little Gravebitch."