Chapter 31
The corridor was so narrow the cinderblock scraped my knuckles if I let my arms dangle.
Kang—or whatever version of him this was—moved ahead with feline purpose, one hand always grazing the wall, reading the hum of security in the dark.
When he turned, I matched him, shoes dead silent on the cold poured floor.
He’d bled through the bandage on his left hand; a single dark bead crept down his knuckle, the color lost in the blue-strobe emergency lights.
We turned at a T junction. The prison’s main artery should have been alive with cameras, but I saw only the afterimage of a lens, then nothing. Kang had mapped the schedule, or maybe he owned it.
He stopped at a blank steel door, no signage, only a key panel. The code he entered was slow, fingers deliberate. The lock snicked, and he ushered me inside with a nod, careful not to touch me.
Kang shut the door and turned, finally facing me.
The impulse was immediate: I spun on him, voice edged with frost.
“You vanished for weeks, and then show up to drag me through the block like a sack of contraband? What the hell do you want?”
He flinched, but only at the edges. His jaw was set, green eyes scanning me up and down, calculating. His gaze lingered on my wrists, the way the bones stood out now. On my face, the hollows under the eyes, the ring of bruises still fading from the incident in the showers.
“You’ve lost weight,” he said, deadpan, like it was a weather report.
I laughed, ugly and raw. “No thanks to you.”
He ignored that, or pretended to. Instead, he crossed to the table, leaned on his good hand, and fixed me with a stare that would have frozen tap water.
“You know why you’re here?”
“Enlighten me, Captain.”
He hesitated just long enough to make me wonder if the next words would be a threat, or something worse. “You’re on the next rotation for the pit.”
The word meant nothing for a half-second. Then it landed with the force of a sledgehammer.
The pit.
In the short memory of D Block, there was no story that ended well in the pit.
Every month, Authority chose a handful of inmates—sometimes at random, sometimes as reward or punishment—and threw them in for “observation.” It was a bloodsport, a behavioral study, a social experiment in entropy.
The survivors limped out, changed. The losers disappeared into the concrete.
I swallowed, found my voice. “You’re joking.”
He shook his head. “No. They want you ready in seventy-two hours.”
“For what?”
“For whatever they feel like throwing at you,” he said, and the words were so flat I almost missed the flinch behind them. “Sometimes it’s combat. Sometimes it’s psychological. Sometimes…”
He trailed off, letting me fill in the blanks.
“So I’m supposed to what, just die for their data points?”
He shrugged, the motion tight and ugly. “Not if you’re ready.”
“Is that what this is? A fucking pep talk?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he walked to the far wall, shoved the chairs aside, and squared his stance.
I understood, then.
“Now?”
“Now,” he said, voice stripped of anything human. “You fight me.”
The first move was mine. I lunged, not for his face but for his wrist, trying to torque his body into the table.
He anticipated, twisting so my grip landed on bone, his counter forceful but not cruel.
I used the momentum to feint left, then kicked at his knee, but he stepped inside the arc and pinned me with his good hand to the drywall.
“Again,” he said, voice so close I could feel the vibration in his chest.
I wrenched my arm free, circled. He let me. There was blood under his nails, and I wondered for a moment if it was from tonight or from the last time someone tried this.
“Why are you doing this?” I spat.
He didn’t answer, just waited. I charged, faking a sweep low and then ramming my shoulder into his sternum.
It worked, barely—he stumbled, but pivoted, grabbing my collar and dragging me off balance.
We crashed to the floor, me on top, hands at his throat.
I squeezed, just hard enough to see his face change.
Then his bad hand shot up, digging the thumb into the nerve at my elbow. My grip failed. He rolled me, pinned my chest with his knee, but didn’t press further.
“Again,” he said.
I spat on the floor, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “You think this is going to save me? The pit isn’t about skill. It’s about who Authority wants alive at the end of the day.”
He didn’t blink. “That’s not always true.”
“No?” I hissed, twisting under his weight. “Is that what you told yourself the last time they sent you in?”
He flinched for real then, a pulse of pain or memory or both. For a second, I thought he’d snap my neck and be done with it.
Instead, he got off me, stood, and offered a hand. I ignored it, pulled myself up, fists raised.
The next round was faster, more desperate.
I aimed for his solar plexus, faking high and driving low with my knee.
He grunted, surprised, but didn’t drop. Instead, he countered with a headbutt that missed my nose by a centimeter.
His arms locked around my torso, pinning me against the icy metal of the table.
“You’re better than you think,” he murmured, and for a second the sound was almost tender.
I went limp, let my body sag. He relaxed just enough, and I snapped my head up, catching him under the chin. His teeth clicked; I tasted blood—his, or mine, impossible to say.
We broke apart, both panting, sweat already cutting lines through the grime on our faces.
“This is pointless,” I hissed.
He shook his head, wiped the blood from his mouth, then stalked to the table and pulled something from beneath—two bands of black Authority rubber. He tossed one to me. “Put it on your wrist,” he said. “Left side.”
I did, without thinking. The band was heavier than I expected, with a strange knot of metal inside, like an implanted tracker.
He pressed his own into place, eyes on the floor.
“What is this?”
He met my gaze, and the pain in his eyes was raw, unshielded. “It’s the override. If things go sideways, you’ll feel it—here.” He tapped his own band, just above the pulse point. “Don’t let anyone get it off you, or they’ll trigger the collar instead.”
I remembered the spectacle in the yard—the body in the white smock, the hiss and twitch and limp fall.
“You want me to survive,” I said, not a question.
He nodded. “I do.”
The air between us went thin. For a long moment, we just stood there, breathing each other’s sweat and anger, the only sound the far-off hum of the block’s air system.
Finally, he spoke, voice low and rough.
“Tomorrow, same time. I’ll teach you how to win.”
I almost laughed. “You’re assuming I want to.”
He gave a flicker of a smile, then was gone, leaving the door open behind him.
Back in my cell, the vent hummed. I stared at the Authority band on my wrist, turning it over and over, feeling the weight settle into the bone.
It was the first gift I’d gotten since they put me in this place.
I lay on my cot, counting the seconds, letting the pain in my muscles anchor me to the world.
For the first time in months, I wondered what I’d do if I lived.