I CAN SEE HIS MUSCLES go slack once he gets a good look at me. I’m guessing he’s a guy. With the suits there’s no real way to tell, but it doesn’t matter anyway. We can politely hash out pronouns after I’ve won. This is going to be harder than I thought. I don’t need any special considerations just because I’m a girl. Most of the guys don’t care, but there are a few from the more isolated colonies who hold on to ancient beliefs about inferiority or some crazy idea that I need them to protect me. I can tell by 712’s reaction that he’s the kind of guy to throw this match, and if he does, we might be here all day. The captain adds overtime if it’s a draw—he doesn’t believe in ties, only winners and losers. He’ll want to show that girls can take as much punishment as the guys. That’s my worst-case scenario. Most likely I’ll end up in the infirmary or in an artificial coma, neck deep in nanigel while my muscles are rebuilt. Who has that kind of time?
712 is frozen for a beat or two before he begins to bounce again. He’s warming up those fatigued muscles after two previous fights, and I notice that he’s favoring his left foot. There may be a weakness there I can exploit. I stand stock-still while I continue to look him over. He’s tall. Thin, but covered in lean muscle. If he doesn’t knock me out in the first minute, I may be able to run him down, let his fatigue topple him without a hit.
“712, 675, this fight is judged on hits, deflections, and total knockout. You have four minutes on the clock in ten, nine…”
The adrenaline begins to build and I can’t keep still. Suddenly I’m on beat with my opponent. He’s hopping from foot to foot, totally in the zone. The mat changes from yellow to green and rises six feet in the air to keep interference to an absolute minimum. The buzzer sounds and I go for it. Two layouts, a tuck, and a half twist. It’s showmanship and requires more grace than aggression. He’s surprised—I know because I’m able to get in three quick jabs to the side of his right knee and a kick to his shin before he thinks to retaliate. He doesn’t hold back, either. His hook rattles me, and I see double before my vision sensors recalibrate. It takes longer than it should, and he has time for another shot, but he doesn’t take it. He should have. I would have.
“Visual acuity seventy-six percent,” my helmet tells me.
I run at him and hit the mat on both knees, avoiding his swing. I’m small enough to bend back and suffer only the slightest hit from his fist. I’m in the perfect position for me to home in on his weak spot: his ribs. My hits aren’t as powerful as his, but they are effective, and I can hear his anguish when my jab connects with his body. He tumbles back several feet and nearly falls off the edge of the mat before he catches himself. I hop up and back away quickly.
He twists and groans between short panting breaths. He tries to straighten and folds almost immediately. He looks like a wounded animal, and there’s no way for him to make his pain end other than to go through me. I’m squat, moving, both hands in front of my face, ready, but I’m thinking more about him than myself and I don’t move fast enough. In seconds he’s got me off my feet and over his head and, smack, my back is on the mat.
“Visual acuity thirty-two percent.”
I can’t breathe. Every ounce of oxygen has been knocked out of my body. My mouth opens and closes like a fish, but no air is coming in. Fire builds in my chest, and I’ve lost control of my arms and legs. Two beats later I gasp, and sweet air fills me again as 712’s helmet comes into focus right above me.
“Seven, six, five…”
They’re counting my knockout. I can’t be knocked out. I wriggle, I squirm, and somehow I make it onto my knees as I try to crawl.
“Three, two…”
At the last second, I stumble upward. My back is on fire and my legs are filled with stone. He’s returned to his corner, but he doesn’t look much better. 712 is no longer hiding the fact that he’s got a broken rib—maybe ribs, plural. One hand is holding his side protectively as he keeps the other balled into a fist right in front of his jaw. There’s still time on the clock. Hits don’t matter now. It’s about survival. If I attack him this time, he’ll have to come at me hard. Maybe knock something loose that isn’t so easily repaired, and I don’t have much left in me for hits. I need to run the clock. I can’t win, but I can move around the mat and hope for the captain’s mercy. 712 is limping, but he’s already shown that he’s unwilling to decimate me in a head-to-head battle… which gives me an idea.
“Helmet, give me a capoeira rhythm. Berimbau. Mid-tempo,” I mumble beneath the plastic lens in front of my face.
“Berimbau. Received.”
I fall into the ginga, the sweeping left-to-right rhythmic dance of capoeira. My opponent stops moving. For a moment I think maybe I’ve misjudged him, but it only takes a second before he falls into the rhythm with me.
Two minutes on the clock.
We start easy with a meia lua de frente, a kind of half-moon frontal kick. I swing with my right leg, foot flexed, and he mirrors with the left. We try again, moving closer together so that the movements are a pantomime of a real fight, where we come within a hair’s breadth of touching each other. He can’t hear the same beat that I hear in my helmet, but it feels like he doesn’t have to. He’s in the moment with me. One breath, one heartbeat, one sliding parry after the other. Armada, a kind of spin kick. Esquiva lateral into esquiva baixa, he kicks out, his long legs nearly toppling me over as I bend and almost kiss my right knee, arms stretched out like bird wings.
“Increase tempo.”
The berimbau speeds up and so do my movements. Without a word, 712 follows me, arms, legs slicing through the air with the kind of grace you can only be born with and matching me so smoothly it’s like we’ve been doing this for years. It’s fluid. We aren’t an orchestra; we’re the metronome. A feeling, deeper than déjà vu, sends a shiver across my skin, and a twist in my gut erupts like a bomb. I fumble. Just long enough for his foot, which was in an arc above my head, to come crashing into the side of my face. I fly before hitting the mat with a thud just as the buzzer sounds. Match over.
The mat decompresses, and I’m suddenly surrounded by people.
“Visual acuity ten percent.”
I see a face, blurred but too familiar to be a stranger, fading into the crowd.