17. Darkness #3
I didn't ask why. I threw myself forward out of his arms, shoulder rolling me over the glittering mat, and the first breath went down my crushed throat rough and burning, and it was the best thing I had ever swallowed. I came up on one knee, whooping air, and looked back.
Norte stood over Deadlock with the broken neck of a beer glass in his fist.
Gray hair. Blood on his knuckles that wasn't his.
Deadlock lay flat on his back under him with red threading out of his scalp into the mat, arms loose, out cold.
And a folded map on a compound table came back to me, beers sweating rings onto the wood, and the older man's voice, gravel-slow: You get in trouble in there, you look for gray hair. I'll already be moving.
"Told you." Two words, same gravel, and he wasted nothing else on the moment.
His eyes crossed mine for half a second and then he was moving again, off toward the far ropes, because the boxer had Mateo by the hair, the kid folded and one-armed under him, knees swinging at his face while Mateo caught what he could on the good forearm.
Norte hit the man from the side at a dead run. Fist, fist, dragging him off by the collar, fist, and he kept them coming after the man's legs quit, hammering him down into the mat and making sure of it. I turned away and left him to his work.
The air kept coming back. So did I.
Looking at my people had nearly gotten me killed. Looking at my people was also the only reason I was breathing. Both things were true at once, and twenty years of fighting alone had only ever taught me the first one. The crew wasn't a weakness.
The crew was why there'd be a version of me walking out of here at all. Deadlock was down.
Trenza wasn't up.
She lay on her side ten feet away, curled around herself, coughing wet, her loose hair fanned across the mat through the drifting dust. The fog hung low over that whole side of the ring, gray and slow, torn open where bodies had moved through it, and the man walking toward her came out of it a piece at a time.
Big through the shoulders. His own face was a mess, one brow split and sheeting red down his cheek, so she'd made him pay coming in.
He was taking his time now, a man walking up on something that couldn't run.
Nearby, one more of them had climbed in on her side, and so had Cuervo, and those two were locked up trading punches, shoulders rolling, Cuervo's guard tight, neither man able to spare her a glance.
I had one to spare.
I went without a sound. No shout to warn him, no stance he could read, a dead sprint through the dust with everything the night had left in my legs, and by the time his eye caught me at its corner I was already off the mat and turning.
The spin came around whole. My hips whipped through, my right shin arrived at his temple before his arms had climbed halfway, and I felt everything I'd loaded into the tornado kick go through the bone.
His head went sideways with the kick and his body followed it down, all at once, loose everywhere, and he hit the mat and didn't put out a hand to catch himself.
I knew what I'd felt. His skull had cracked under the kick.
I didn't care.
I put myself between Trenza and the rest of the ring, right foot back, hands open at my sides, and across the mat the last of them jumped back out of Cuervo's range with his arms up, eyes jumping man to man, doing his math.
Cuervo didn't chase. He crossed to my shoulder instead, breathing hard through his nose, one eye already puffing, and planted himself at my side.
"Sorry we took so long, hermano." He rolled the shoulder of his jab arm, and his voice came out level even now. "Three hundred people shoving for the door, and every one of them between us and this ring." I nodded once. My throat wasn't ready for words yet.
The boxer looked around at what was left of his side.
Deadlock flat on his back with glass around him.
His kicker gone over the ropes. Norte kneeling on the third man's arms, still driving his fist down into a face that had stopped moving under it.
Two of us standing side by side in front of the woman he'd come to finish, and behind us, out in the fog, the sound of the Phoenixes tearing through his people.
If he wanted to run, this was the moment for it, and I watched him find that same math.
He never got the chance.
His feet left the mat backward. Both of them, ripped out from under him at the ankles, so fast his arms flew up and his face met the mat with all his weight behind it, and I knew the move before I saw the man.
Both hands hooked behind the ankles. I'd heard what that move did to a skull on concrete.
The mat gave him what concrete wouldn't, and he came up off it roaring through a broken mouth, pushing to his hands, and the shadow that had done it was already in the air above him.
It dropped out of the fog with both knees aimed down.
The weight landed square between his shoulder blades, and the roar cut off in the middle, all at once.
All the air in the man left through one open mouth.
His head jerked up, his legs lifted off the mat behind him, shaking, everything in him pulled tight for one long second, and then all of him let go at once and settled flat, and that corner of the ring went quiet under the dust.
Chills ran down my spine, one bone at a time. I'd slept beside the man who could do that.
Out past the ropes, the fog had new sounds in it.
The crowd was gone, and the sounds that had replaced it were deeper.
Men roaring, the thud of bodies meeting concrete, boots, breaking wood, and once, close, something that whistled and landed wet.
The Phoenixes were inside, and Gravedigger's people were finding out what that meant.
Ghost came up off the body already scanning, head sweeping the ring twice on his way to his feet, and then his eyes found me and he was crossing the mat at double speed with his mouth already going.