NINETEEN

The send-off by media and fans was something to behold. Gant and his Merkel Media cronies had somehow negotiated with the Valtego city council to close off one whole terminal of the docking hub and set up live streaming holovid projectors connected to zeroboxing fan gatherings all over Earth. The projectors beamed in images of crowds from Toronto, New York, Moscow, New Shanghai, and a dozen other cities, so as Carr and the thirty-one other ZGFA zeroboxers boarded the jumbo-cruiser Infinity, it looked as if the place was packed with tens of thousands of people, all cheering and waving, some with their faces painted blue and green, others holding up signs with slogans like WATCH OUT DOMIES and EARTH HAS LUKA ON ITS SIDE.

The team made slow progress through the section filled with live spectators, hampered by reporters’ questions and fan requests. Xeth Stone and Jeroan Culver, who would be making the journey with them on media passes, slowed it down further by holding on-the-spot interviews with each of the zeroboxers as they boarded.

By design, Carr was the last to get on. By the time he stepped onto the boarding ramp of the cruiser’s passenger deck, he felt as though an hour inside a sensory deprivation chamber would be a nice holiday. He was accustomed to crowds and noise and media attention, but this was a bit much.

“Carr,” Xeth Stone shouted over the tumult, “do you have anything you want to say to your many supporters here and on Earth?”

Carr opened his mouth and then closed it again. He could barely hear himself think. “I just want to thank them, and to ask that they watch and cheer for every man and woman on this team. Everyone has worked really hard for this, so you can expect to see some great fights,” he said. Someone prompted him to turn around and punch his fist into the air for the crowd one last time. Then the airlock doors slid tightly shut behind him, cutting off the noise like a blade.

A crew member, a young Martian man with a lilting Mars Hindi accent, escorted him to the first-class suite. When he reached it, Carr dropped stomach first onto the sofa, barely bothering to take in the surroundings. “Please tell me we have nothing scheduled for the next three days,” he said, voice muffled by the cushions.

“Well … barely anything.” Risha came over and snuggled in on the edge of the sofa, running a hand through his short hair, the heat of her fingers relaxing his scalp.

Carr turned over to face her. The room was large and lavish; it made him feel as though they were about to sail away on vacation without a care in the universe. There had been a time, not long ago, when he couldn’t have afforded a stowage ticket to Mars on one of those plasma propulsion cargo vessels that made the trip in forty days. Now he was in the best suite aboard a fusion jumbo-cruiser that would cover the distance in just over three. Sometimes it still didn’t seem real.

Risha shifted closer and, as if sharing his thoughts, said, “I can’t believe I’m going back. I haven’t been back in six years. Six years … It’ll be so different. Mars is always growing and changing so fast.” She propped her forearm casually on his chest, leaning over him. “My great-grandparents, it took them six months to make the journey. Can you imagine what it must have been like, sailing for so long to reach such a harsh and alien land?”

“Those colonists were tough,” Carr said. “They had to be.” He reached up to touch the dark curtain of her hair, looping a thick strand of it around his fingers. “Does it feel strange to be going back on the other side? As part of the Terran team?”

“I’m not on the Terran team,” Risha chided. “I’m on the Carr Luka team.” Then she fell silent, because they both knew that it had become a meaningless distinction, at least for most people. Not for everyone though; Carr knew he was disparaged by some Terrans for literally sleeping with the enemy, and criticized by others for promoting a spirit of interplanetary animosity. He did his damned best not to read or listen to any of it, but it was hard to avoid it all the time.

Risha shook her head. “It used to be simpler, didn’t it?”

Carr made the shape of a box with his hands. “Two guys go into a Cube. They fight. One of them beats the other. How much simpler can it be? People don’t have to make it more than it is.” They both knew he was being facetious, but he believed it too.

Risha drew a finger down his nose. “That’s why you’re the zeroboxer. And why you need me to think about all that other stuff.”

He shook his head. “That’s not the only reason I need you.” Firmly, he drew her down so she lay next to him, their bodies pressed together lengthwise. Risha was like an instant energy pill. Roused, he pulled her closer, trying to squeeze away the little space between them.

The room began to vibrate as the ship lifted out of dock. Through the full-ceiling windows, they watched the stars begin to move: slowly at first, crawling across their view. The air in the room shifted, and their limbs, then their bodies, started to rise off the sofa as the Infinity pulled away from Valtego’s gravity. An alert ping went off in their room and a voice reminded them to please remain stationary and harnessed during the transition to weightlessness. They ignored it. Above them, the stars turned into streaking white lines, a rushing river of light.

Carr reached for a handhold to secure them in place, floating entwined. The room was well designed: rounded furniture, tastefully textured walls, thoughtfully placed handholds and guide-rails, magnetized tabletops, drawers and closets. True, it didn’t make the best use of the wall and ceiling space, but by keeping everything oriented in one direction, it ensured any planet rat could handle this place.

Taking his time, like a man about to enjoy a fine meal, Carr tugged off Risha’s shirt. He released it with a flick of his wrist and it drifted off, silky lemon yellow sleeves waving a slow goodbye as it swam away from them. Risha pulled off his top and sent it chasing lazily after her own like an errant lover. The heat of her breasts pressed against him set Carr’s heart churning, brought the blood to the surface of his skin. His liquid tattoo wings darkened and raced across his back and shoulders, down his biceps, inked feathers unfurling as if ruffled by a nonexistent wind. She ran her hands across them and bent her lips to his shoulder. Her fingers laced into his.

“Look at us,” she said, holding up their forearms, side by side. “We’re so different.” His arm was hard and defined—a light, sallow, olive hue covered with thin, dark hairs. Hers was smooth and soft as a baby seal’s, the color of dark tea, and iridescent.

“We’re not different,” Carr said. “We’re alike.” He kissed her neck, and the line of her jaw, and pulled her mouth to his.

Her feverish lips sent a wave of fire down his torso into his groin. He marveled that after more than a year together, she still excited him so easily. Before Risha, girls had been like key lime pie—something to be craved, and indulged in on occasion. Always somewhat alien. Risha, though, who was alien, down to her engineered DNA, understood him better than anyone except Uncle Polly. He would not be who he was today without her, he knew that. She had given him his wings.

It occurred to Carr, then, that if he won this tournament he would ask her to marry him.

Once they were engaged, she would move in with him and he would give her whatever she desired. They might be young, as even Uncle Polly sometimes reminded him, but that didn’t matter. Carr had always been precociously single-minded about what he wanted, and he wanted Risha. He knew he always would. He would prove to her how serious he was. The idea filled him with happiness and lust and terror.

Risha read his racing heart only as arousal and smiled, pushing against him weightlessly and straddling his hips.

Carr’s cuff vibrated and played its usual chime in his ear. He cursed and looked down at his arm, intending to decline it, then saw who it was from. His rising passion died like a flame doused with ice water. “It’s my mother,” he said.

Why was Sally calling him now, of all times? He’d messaged her dutifully to let her know he was leaving Valtego. He’d sent her more than enough money to move out of her shitty apartment and find herself a nicer place. He had even asked Enzo to check up on her and make sure she did so. He wanted to ignore the call, but Risha had already pulled away to let him take it, her warmth now frustratingly absent as she drifted, topless, to the stocked mini-bar.

Carr jabbed his cuff. “Mom,” he said, “I’m on a flight right now.”

Her voice was so distant and tinny, time-delayed by the growing distance to Earth, that he scrolled up the receiver volume on his cuff display as high as he could just to hear her. “I don’t want to bother you,” she said. “I know you’re busy. But Carr … ”

She sounded so worried, he pulled himself back down to the ground just to have a surface under his feet. “What’s wrong?”

“A man came around asking questions about you. A detective. He wanted to know who your donor was, and which geneticist I used, and how you got into zeroboxing, and all sorts of things.” Sally’s voice was speeding up, climbing. “I didn’t tell him anything. Well … maybe a little, but I don’t think I said anything wrong. Oh, I hope not. I said that if he was going to keep questioning me, then I wanted a lawyer, but he just waved it off and left.”

Carr felt as though the whoosh of blood in his head was drowning out the faint sound of his mother’s voice in his receiver. “You did the right thing,” he said in a monotone whisper, pulling further away from Risha’s earshot. “All he has are suspicions. That’s all.”

“I looked him up afterward and found this news story from last week. Wait, I’m sending it to you right now. I don’t know what it means, but maybe … ” (crackle of static) “ … prepared … ” (more static) “ … a lawyer … ”

A crazy, desperate thought flashed through Carr’s mind. He was speeding away from Earth, putting vast amounts of space between himself and Detective Van, and Rhystok, and Terran law. What if he didn’t go back? What if he just kept going?

“I can not deal with this right now, Mom. I’m fighting in the biggest-ever zeroboxing tournament next week. We’ll talk when I get back, okay?” He let out a tense breath. “I just need to get through this. We’ll figure it out later. Soon. Okay?”

For a long second, he wondered if he’d lost the connection. The background interference, like a crackly wind inside his ear, made him want to claw his own receiver out of his skull. He realized he was literally bouncing off the wall in agitation, the hand wrapped around the wall grip pushing him off the surface, pulling him back, off, and back, off, and back.

Finally, Sally’s voice, sounding small and vulnerable, said, “Okay. Later, then. Good luck with your fight, Carr.”

“Mom … ” he started, but this time the connection really was gone.

He closed his eyes and dropped his forehead against the wall just as his cuff received the news item Sally had sent. He pulled it up.

Famed Musician Sues Parents,
Reveals Enhancements.

World renowned composer-performer and musical child prodigy Jaymes Wang, 16, who was admitted to the hospital last week after a botched suicide attempt, has filed a civil suit against his parents, Marissa and Austyn Wang, for intentional genetic harm. Wang claims that his parents illegally enhanced him as an embryo and squandered most of his money, which they had claimed to be saving in a trust. Wang has composed for orchestra, film, and the Olympics, and his performances regularly sell out concert halls. Wang also accuses his parents of being connected to a wider scheme of criminal enhancement, although Detective Ruart Van of Genepol declined to give further details, stating that an investigation was in progress.

“What’s wrong?” Risha asked, coming up beside him. “Is your mother all right?”

Carr swiped the text off his cuff display. “It’s nothing,” he said. “She’s just having a hard time adjusting … to the new house … and reporters asking her questions.” He shrugged. “Nothing my brandhelm needs to worry about.”

Risha regarded him silently, the space between her eyebrows wrinkling. “I know Terrans still hold the antiquated idea that their relatives might reflect badly on them. As if genes are unchangeable.” She laid a hand on his chest. “I hope you know you can tell me anything.”

“I know.” Lying to Risha, to her open, concerned face … A sour wave of shame hit Carr in the back of the throat. It was the worst part of all this, of what he was and what he’d done. Just a few minutes ago he’d been imagining marrying her. Suddenly, the idea seemed light years away. How could he possibly marry Risha without telling her? He would have to tell her. Soon. Tell her everything.

The thought made his stomach fold in on itself. But even if he told her, he couldn’t ask her for that kind of commitment, knowing what he did: that one day, maybe soon, he might break her heart, force her to watch the police lead him away or read about him as an item in the news-feeds, just like Jaymes Wang.

He didn’t know how he could cope with that. But he couldn’t lose her. Until then, he couldn’t lose her.

“Let’s go and check this place out. I’ve never been on a jumbo-cruiser before,” he said.

With thirty-two zeroboxers, their coaches and cornermen, Gant and several other ZGFA corporate types, Risha and the rest of the Merkel marketing team, and the invited media, the privately chartered flight was comfortably full. The small on-board gym was always busy, and two sizable rooms had been converted into training spaces, surfaced with magnetic sheeting to create jerry-rigged Cubes. The walls and dimensions felt all wrong, but it was better than having nothing and wasting the three-day journey while their Martian opponents trained.

In the close quarters, Carr felt like just one of the guys again, for the first time in a long while. He’d gotten used to other zeroboxers going a little quiet when he entered a room, even older, bigger ones, even ones he trained with. They treated him either with a kind of wary awe or with too much cheerful backslapping and loud talk, as if to prove his stardom didn’t mean anything to them. Knowing they were now all fellow Terrans competing on the same side instead of against each other changed things. He could hang out with them almost the way he used to. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.

“I’ve been wearing a cooling top all day for weeks,” Adri “the Assassin” Sansky commented over a training break that had begun with a comparison of their respective supplement formulations. Carr hadn’t seen Adri in months, and he was pleased to learn she was now the top-ranked Terran female midmass fighter. “That’s what I’ve heard is the hardest thing to get used to in the domie system. The cold, and the thin air.”

“It won’t be that bad,” Carr said. “They’re bringing the oxygen in the Cube up to Terran levels, and they negotiated the temperature halfway—a little too cool for us, a little too warm for them, so they figure it’s fair.”

“They have home advantage,” she said, picking compulsively at the edge of her glove. “Every little bit helps.”

Carr couldn’t blame her for being worried. The WCC had a larger and stronger pool of female zeroboxers than the ZGFA, and no one really expected the eight Terran women to win; just to not lose too spectacularly.

“I’m betting you girls will deliver an upset for the highlight reels,” DK said encouragingly. “Save some glory for the guys, yeah?”

“Sure, just for you. I’ll try not to steal all the thunder.” Adri rolled her eyes but smiled at DK’s pep talk. “Back to practicing those damn corner reversals.” She grabbed her squeeze bottle of supplement shake and floated off, leaving Carr and DK alone.

An awkward moment of silence descended. DK cleared his throat. “Blake says his arm is doing okay. He might be back in the Cube in a few months.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“Just thought you might want to know.”

“Yeah. I did. Thanks.” Carr searched for something else to say. A part of him wanted to extend the olive branch to his old friend; the rest of him was too proud to hear anything of it. DK looked good; he’d put on mass to compete with bigger fighters and he was carrying it well. For the first time, he and Carr would be in the same division. When the media had brought this up with him one-too-many times, DK’s response had been more sarcastic than typical: “Yeah, I’ll finally be in the same division as the guy you all won’t stop asking me about.”

Carr glanced over briefly. “So … ”

They were rescued from further conversation when everyone’s cuff flashed the new audio message alert at the same time. Carr picked it up and the ship’s captain, sounding a shade agitated, advised them all that there would be a five Martian-hour delay in their arrival at Surya station, due to “border issues.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” DK wondered aloud.

“It means,” Gant said, pulling himself into the room with a scowl on his face, “that politics are getting in the way. Listen up everyone!” He waited for the zeroboxers in the room to give him their attention. “Last night, the Martian Council of Settlements declared it would be suspending Terran mining and export licenses in retaliation for Earth withholding terraforming technology. After the news reached Earth, protests in front of Martian embassies turned violent, and now Mars is considering moving its diplomats to Luna.” He made a pah noise of frustration and disgust. “So, in short, we’re showing up at a bad time and are being held up for no good reason.”

“The WCC won’t cancel the tournament, will they?” someone asked.

“Are you kidding? If anything, they’ll promote it even more heavily. Martian Airspace and Customs is denying us surface rights, though. We’ll be allowed to land on Surya, but that’s it. Anyone hoping to go to the planet to visit Olympus Mons, or the Valles—sorry, you’re out of luck.”

When they finally docked, half a day late, they were met by a welcoming committee that included the mayor of Surya, the city-station tourism director, the president of the WCC, a contingent of Martian zeroboxers, and a handful of reporters. Gant and the rest of the big shots greeted each other with Martian x-shaped handshakes: right hand to right hand over top, left to left underneath. Carr looked out across the rest of the docking hub’s plaza in amazement. He had never seen so many Martians before: men, women, and children, dressed in such different clothes, many of them pausing to watch the arriving Terrans with curiosity and wariness.

Carr took a step forward and nearly lost his footing from putting too much force into it. Of course—Surya’s lower artificial gravity was designed for Martians. The air was cold and dry, like the inside of Gant’s office. The decorative plants adorning the public plaza were nothing like the lush, broad-leafed, bright green ones he’d grown up around, but hardy-looking things with thin needles or bulbous bodies, descendants of species from the far northern deserts of Earth. Only now did it strike him that he’d really left home altogether, traveled beyond Greater Earth orbit for the first time in his life.

In the midst of much chatter and introductions, Carr found himself shaking hands with the line of Martian zeroboxers and matching them to the video footage he’d studied for the last few months. Suddenly he was looking into the face of Kye Soard, with his fight-flattened nose and shaved, lumpy head.

For half a second, neither of them spoke. A feeling passed through the air between them—the animal recognition one good fighter has upon meeting another. It had already begun: the measuring, the flickering gaze taking note of size and stance and the way the other man moved.

“So you are Luka,” Soard said. “The best of these earthworms, yes?” He had a Southern Highlands accent that Carr couldn’t place. Argyre? Hellas? His Martian geography was sketchy at best. Soard clapped a hand on Carr’s shoulder with a force that straddled the line between friendly and aggressive. Carr forced himself not to tense, not to yield the mental edge. They were within a couple of kilograms of each other, Carr knew, but Soard was more stretched out. He probably had at least a fist’s length advantage in reach. He looked … Carr searched for the right description. Efficient. His body looked efficient. “Welcome,” Soard said. “We will show you a good time! Then send you back home in pieces, my friend.” He grinned with a condescending, cheerful menace that suggested he was joking, and not joking.

Carr was surprised to discover that he liked and disliked the man in equal measure at once. “Or maybe I’ll be taking a bit of domie hide back as a souvenir,” he said with an equally threatening smile, then moved on to shake the next man’s hands.

A chartered bus ferried them to the hotel where they would be staying. Even the vehicles looked different here, like the bullet-shaped skimmers capable of navigating terrain on the Red Planet. As they drove through Surya, Carr squeezed Risha’s hand. “Does it feel like home at all?” he asked.

“A little,” she replied, staring pensively out the windows at the rounded architecture, the people on the streets, the shops and restaurants advertising different regional specialties: tzuka from West Marineris, Northern Lowlands curry, Tharsian imported ale. “It’s a strange feeling.”

It was strange. Surya Station wasn’t like Valtego at all. It was a real space settlement, a place where people lived. Valtego was Earth’s playground, vibrant with energy and bright lights, but not the sort of place most Terrans imagined staying for more than a week unless you had reason to work there. Most Terrans did not imagine anywhere in the universe to be habitable except Earth. Why would they?

“Damn domie cold,” Uncle Polly muttered, pulling on a sweater. “This place sure has gotten bigger.”

“When were you last on Surya?” Carr asked.

“A long time ago. I was maybe a little older than you. Stopped over on leave for a month after two years on my first mining vessel, the Breaker. Even back then it was a mecca for zeroboxing. For anything zero gravity.”

Risha nodded. “The Martian Space Dance Academy is headquartered here. The WCC, of course. Plenty of weightless spas in the central concourse. Recreational and competitive spacewalking is big here too—I think they have three or four major races a year.”

The hotel was new and luxurious, though the rooms were small by Terran standards. Martians were used to having far less space. Carr stood beside the curved, wraparound window of his room, admiring the view. Phobos, the larger of Mars’ moons and one of the busiest shipping hubs in the solar system, loomed large to one side. On the other, the Red Planet hung like a copper disk against a black canvas. He squinted hard, and his optics focused in as far as they could go until he could make out some of the features of the surface: the enormous craters and basins, the flat plains and deep canyons, the soaring mountain ranges. The great domed cities were mere dots.

Thin wisps of white, like shredded gauze, swirled over the surface of the planet. A nascent atmosphere, nothing like the dense cotton cloud cover of Earth. He couldn’t see them, but he’d been told that thousands of enormous solar reflectors orbited Mars, slowly heating it. Whole tracts of the planet were already murky green with algae and plant cover, fed by the water mines that ran day and night.

“Will Mars really be like Earth someday?” he wondered. “With oceans and forests, and people walking outside?”

Risha came up beside him. Her voice held nostalgia and melancholy. “Who knows? Terraforming is enshrined in the Constitution of the Martian Settlements. Pro- and anti-terraformist politicians are constantly arguing about it. It’s been going on since before my grandparents were born, and it’ll probably still be going on after we’re dead. But whatever Mars becomes, it won’t be like Earth. It’ll be its own thing.”

Carr knew that Martians portrayed their ancestors as courageous and intrepid visionaries, the best and brightest of Earth, the ones who saw the necessity and potential for humankind to evolve and progress to the stars. A more Terran view was that they’d been desperate, enticed or coerced to risk their lives to escape poverty and unemployment and submerging homelands. Which was it? Were they equally true? Did it matter?

“I think,” Carr said, “I can see why Mars gives Terrans the heebie-jeebies.”

“Come on,” Risha said, turning away from the view, “Your first press conference is in an hour.”

Even though Martian days were thirty-seven minutes longer than Terran ones, the week before the start of War of the Worlds went fast. Uncle Polly was unrelenting, as strict about every detail as he’d been before Carr’s earliest amateur tournaments. He kept Carr in thermal clothes and on a strict hydration schedule to manage the dry cold, sent him to get a radiation cleanse, kept track of what he ate and how much he slept. “Can’t risk getting sick or injured now, can you?” he warned at least twice a day.

The Dr. Drew Ming Athletic Mall on Surya was even larger than Valtego’s Virgin Galactic Center. Risha told him it was named after one of Mars’ visionary geneticists. Martians, she said, named things after scientists the way Terrans used war heroes and politicians. Carr and the other zeroboxers spent every available minute getting acclimated to the new stadium. The Martians were there too, and the Cube was constantly occupied in hour-long practice shifts.

Adri gave voice to the generally shared sentiment: “The domies creep the hell out of me.”

“Don’t let them,” Carr said. He looked over at the two Martian women emerging from the Cube, unfastening their gloves and toweling the sweat from their faces. The WCC fighters looked good, all of them fit and preternaturally graceful in null gravity, their otherness highlighted by the sight of so many of them. Most of them treated the Terran visitors coolly, though they complained loudly about the extra heat.

“Dust, it’s hot in here,” one of the women exclaimed. “How do the earthworms stand it?” Her eyes were shaped like a cat’s. The skin over her taut abs and small chest was the color of wet sand. Carr had wondered if he’d find all Martian women as alluring to him as Risha, and was surprised and mildly relieved that he didn’t.

On the first day of the elimination rounds, Carr was up early in the draw and handled both his fights easily. The first ended by knockout at 4:05 in the first round. The guy was too nervous, wouldn’t look at him during the staredown. Carr wondered if maybe it was the first time he’d even seen a Terran up close. The second match, two hours later, was more challenging—“the Droid” fought methodical as hell, and kept taking Carr’s ample punishment like he didn’t feel pain, but the judges handed Carr a unanimous victory. He figured he’d been deliberately favored in the match-ups so the organizers could be assured of their star fighters meeting in the Cube for the semifinals.

When he was done, Carr iced his bruises in the locker room, watching the other fights and waiting to find out how the rest of the Terrans did. Scull was packing up their supplies.

“Nice job today,” Carr said, and the kid flushed a little, nodding. Quiet and nervous, Scull was no DK or Blake, but nevertheless he was a reliable, competent cornerman. One that Carr was confident wouldn’t go sour on him because of rivalry. Scull had only three pro fights under him—one win, two losses—and he knew his job cornering the Raptor at War of the Worlds was to stay out of the spotlight by not screwing up.

“Where’s Risha?” Carr asked Uncle Polly. She always came down to see him after his matches. He kept looking for her, but she wasn’t there.

“I haven’t seen her for the last hour,” Polly replied.

Carr called her. Risha didn’t answer. He left a message, but felt unsettled. He didn’t call frivolously, and besides, she was his brandhelm; she would never ignore a call from him. What could be so important right now that she wasn’t here?

After another hour, he began to get irritated and a little nervous. He wound his way through the stadium to the press box, to see if she was up there, and was immediately waylaid by Xeth Stone. “I’m here with Terran favorite Carr Luka,” Xeth said into the camera, “Carr, it’s no surprise that you made it to the semifinals handily. Any thoughts on your first set of matches here on Surya? You’re obviously fighting in front of a less friendly crowd—does that make any difference?”

Carr looked over Stone’s shoulder impatiently. He couldn’t see Risha among the media people or the officials. Too many Martians; it was usually so easy to pick her out of a crowd. “No,” he said, turning back to Stone, “when I’m in the Cube, I just shut out what else is going on out there. I know fans back on Earth are cheering for me, and the rest of the Terran team, and that’s what matters. Being on Surya has been an incredible experience so far, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the tournament.”

He hoped that would satisfy the man, but Stone pinned him down with a few more questions before the bell rang for the next fight and Carr managed to escape back to the locker room. He watched the screens for a while. So far twelve Terran men and three women were still in contention. The preliminary rounds were going to take another couple of hours at least.

He knew he ought to stay until the end. Just because Risha hadn’t returned his call yet was no reason to worry. She was busy with work, maybe dealing with a demanding sponsor or a new media request, and would be back soon. He was just being needy.

On the screen in the locker room, Xeth Stone said, “Here’s what I want to know, Jeroan: is it too early to be calling Carr Luka one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the whole history of weightless combat?”

“You know, Xeth, people love to declare sports legends early. The question you have to ask is: can the Raptor continue to perform at such a high level into his twenties and even into his thirties? Because—”

Carr shut off the screen. He waited thirty more minutes, then threw on a warm shirt and climbed through the back halls to the stadium’s loading zone. Along the way, he told Scull to let Uncle Polly know he’d gone. He took the shuttle bus back out to Surya’s main ring. His cuff seemed to be responding exceedingly slowly (some compatibility issue with the Systemnet access out here, maybe?) and it took a couple of tries to summon a taxi to take him back to the hotel.

“Risha?” he called when the door to his hotel room opened. There was no answer, and at first he thought she wasn’t there. Then he walked into the bedroom.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her thinscreen open on her lap and her head bent over it as if she was engrossed in her work. Then she raised her face to his, and he saw that her eyes were puffy and red from crying, her cheeks blotchy, and her sudden stare laser-sharp with accusation.

He walked over and took the thinscreen from her hands without a word. He saw a page with lines of information, but the first two words told him everything he needed to know: Sequencing Results.

Risha spoke in a whisper. “How could you?”