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  Carr’s body connected and rebounded with shuddering force. He reached over his head, scrambling for purchase; he found it, his fingers tensing, suctioning to the pebbly texture of the Cube’s wall. He tucked his body and rolled backward, coming to a crouch that straddled a right angle, his ankles and knees tilted awkwardly as he fought to keep his shoes gripped to the surface.

  Uncle Polly shouted, “Get out of the corner!” just as Manon sailed at him.

  It happened very fast. Carr ducked a blow and came back up with a high-low jab and a cross punch that smashed into Manon’s face above his left eye. The man reeled, and Carr stepped in for another punch. The sharp angle of the wall threw him off; it was like fighting on a steep scree, and he misjudged the placement of his foot by a fraction. The magnetic pull of his grippers slid him down too far and his punch grazed the tip of Manon’s chin instead of connecting with the side of his head. The Reaper’s notorious left fist fired into the split-second opening and smashed into Carr’s jaw with a crack.

  Everything went dark.

  No. No no no no no

  Carr fought the darkness even as it sucked him in like a rocket-plane intake valve. He willed himself to move, but his body was lost to him. He heard, as if from a very great distance, Uncle Polly’s voice, calling his name. It sounded very urgent but faint, as if it were being ripped away by a great wind.

  For some strange and awful reason, it wasn’t Uncle Polly’s face that suddenly became clear in his mind, nor was it Risha’s, or his mother’s, or Enzo’s. It was Mr. R, his pale waxen skin and cold eyes. The specter opened his mouth and his lips moved, saying, “I’ll be watching,” but the words were not audible. They were drowned out by a building roar of noise, a cacophony like the entire Virgin Galactic Center screaming.

  Carr’s vision came back all of sudden, like a light switch being turned on. His head was rolled back on his neck. He hadn’t fallen, of course—there was no gravity to pull him down; he was still anchored by his gripper shoes and his body was floating, limp, like a stalk of seaweed attached to the bottom of the sea. He was watching the upside-down figure of Henri Manon running along the inside walls of the Cube, hands raised in triumph. The noise he’d heard was indeed the roaring of the packed stands, mixed with the far more unpleasant sound of Manon screaming in exultation. Carr blinked; a referee was coming toward him with the aid of mini-thrusters.

  The referee hadn’t declared a knockout yet. The fight wasn’t over. It wasn’t over.

  Move! he screamed to himself. Feeling flooded back into him like an electric current. He reached out and grabbed the wall. He swayed, nauseous for the first time in he couldn’t remember how long, but straightened himself and held a hand up to the referee, who paused, stunned to see him up.

  “Reaper!” Carr shouted. “You didn’t finish the job!”

  Henri Manon whirled around so fast, he almost spun himself off the surface. His jaw dropped, as if Carr were indeed a dead man come back to life. He pointed a trembling finger and shouted to the referee, “He was out! I fucking knocked him out. It’s over, the fight is over!”

  Carr shook his head and was rewarded with a stab of pain through his skull. “It wasn’t called.”

  The referee hesitated, then tapped his cuff and seemed to be consulting with the other officials.

  Manon did not bother to wait. He charged at Carr, who sprang off the wall to evade him. Carr felt slow, rattled, but he could fight; he just needed a few seconds. At the sight of him conscious and moving, the tiers of the stadium erupted in a tsunami of sound that vibrated through the Cube.

  Manon chased him from wall to wall, barking curses like an enraged baboon. Carr felt his body kicking into some sort of secondary reserve, his balance returning, his vision focusing again, the pain in his face no longer noticeable.

  Uncle Polly’s voice, back at normal volume, said in a stunned monotone, “Hang in there, hang in there. Ten seconds.”

  Carr leaped off a right angle and launched himself at Manon’s back. They clinched and spun off the surface, and the bell sounded.

  Back on the deck, Uncle Polly took Carr’s face in his hands. “Stars almighty,” he said. “What happened?”

  “He nailed me with a left,” Carr said. He only felt bad pain in his jaw when he tried to talk.

  “I could see that,” Polly said. “A clean left, right on the button. How were you not knocked out?”

  “I think I was, but the ref hadn’t called it yet.” Over Uncle Polly’s shoulder, Carr could see Manon on the other side of the deck, gesturing and shouting furiously, and a trio of officials speaking together, their heads bent over a thinscreen.

  “They’re reviewing the footage,” Blake said.

  Scull looked at Carr in undisguised awe. “No one has ever gotten back up after taking the Reaper’s killer left.”

  One of the officials walked over to their corner and spoke to Uncle Polly. “Under ZGFA rules, a knockout is declared when a referee judges a competitor to have been incapacitated for six or more Martian seconds. According to the footage, your fighter got back up after 4.8 seconds, so technically the fight is still on.” He indicated Carr with a jerk of his head. “You need to decide if you want to continue or pull him.”

  “Continue,” Carr said immediately.

  Uncle Polly squatted down next to him on the balls of his gripper shoes and spoke in a low voice only the two of them could hear. “I know how much this means to you. But you took a bad hit. You’re not going to be the same if you go back in there.”

  “I’m not done. The hit didn’t finish me.”

  “This isn’t your only title fight. You’re young, you’ve got time. You’ll get more chances.”

  “Don’t pull me, coach.” Carr took off the ice pack he’d been pressing to his jaw and met Uncle Polly’s eyes. “Please don’t pull me. I can keep going, I know I can.”

  Polly searched Carr’s face with a grim, set mouth, making some fast and silent decision based on what he saw there. Then he stood and nodded to the official. “We’re still in.”

  “He needs to be cleared by the doctor,” said the official.

  The doctor checked Carr’s vital signs. “Just because you aren’t showing signs of it yet doesn’t mean you don’t have a concussion,” he said, shining a scanning light into Carr’s eyes. He whistled. “You’ve got damn good optics,” he said. “They’re still intact and online, after all that.”

  Carr chuckled. He could already envision the ad that his sponsor would get out of this fight, making use of the image of Manon’s fist flying toward the screen. He could even imagine the ad copy they would come up with, something like No other optical implant can take a beating like the new L series from ImOptix.

  The doctor declared him able to fight, adding a caveat about the risk of aggravating possible head trauma. When Carr stood up and made his way back to the hatch, the crowd, which had been shifting and muttering in a rising and falling wave of impatience, roared its unstinting approval. The enormous screens around the stadium closed in on signs being waved in the stands: CARR-Y ME AWAY! RAPTOR-OUS! REAPER=DEAD and I WANT TO HAVE CARR LUKA’S BABIES.

  During the break, the ventilation fans in the walls of the Cube had been whirring, circulating out the hot, motionless air. The inside of the Cube was charged with the harsh scent of mingled ozone, sweat, and testosterone. The disbelief on Henri Manon’s face was matched only by the intensity of his malice. Carr returned the stare without expression. He figured they were even now. He’d nearly won in the first round, and he’d nearly lost in the second. The fight would be decided in these final six minutes. The bull-faced man across from Carr had stopped being Henri Manon, had stopped even being a person, was now only an obstacle to be overcome.

  The bell sounded.

  They came together like dragons battling atop rocky crags, climbing and launching and hitting, smashing into each other an
d grappling in flight, exchanging punishing blows while clinging to the cliffside, heaving with effort and moving at superhuman speed through angles impossible in gravity. They were no longer fighting for the title, or for the money, or for the crowd, or even for pride. They were battling out of primal need, because only one of them could be dominant, and dominance was survival. Dominance was meaning.

  In the final thirty seconds, Henri Manon did what Carr expected and pulled out all the stops, executing flurry after flurry of attack, of acrobatic moves and striking combinations meant to overwhelm his opponent in the final stretch. His cardiovascular endurance was astounding, but Carr’s was even better, and he’d been training extra long rounds for precisely this. If it was going to come down to a judges’ decision, he would put on a hell of a show.

  Manon kicked off the wall and swung for his face. Carr went sideways, up and over, and landed behind the Reaper, who had already repositioned. He grabbed Carr’s kick as it flew toward him and threw the leg sideways, aiming to send Carr into an uncontrolled spin. Carr pushed his whole body into the momentum, every muscle straining with the effort of creating force without the aid of gravity. He threw his standing leg up to follow the first in a blinding spin kick, his body laid nearly horizontal.

  Manon’s reflexes were a little slow. It had been a grueling first and second round, and he wasn’t accustomed to an opponent who was still this fast at the end of the third. Carr’s heel connected solidly with the side of the man’s head.

  They went flying apart, propelled in opposite directions. Carr caught the Cube wall with the ball of one foot, then fingertips. When he righted himself, he saw Manon floating, motionless. The force of the kick had even hurled the man’s feet free of magnetic contact with the surface.

  It took a second for the realization to sink in. He’d won. With nineteen seconds left on the clock in the third round, he had won.

  He made himself count six slow seconds in his head.

  One. Two, three, four. Five. Six.

  Manon did not move. He wasn’t going to snap back to consciousness after a knockout blow. He wasn’t like Carr.

  The referee, the same one who’d nearly declared a very different outcome earlier, reached Manon and checked him. He gestured, declaring a knockout.

  A wave of emotion broke over Carr’s head and engulfed him like an ocean. A shout exploded from the pit of his stomach and burst forth from his lungs. He launched himself off the side of the Cube, somersaulting wildly in the air. He kicked off another wall, then another, then ran a full circle up and around the whole inside surface, whooping and screaming. His jaw hurt, and his head hurt, and everything hurt, and he didn’t care—it was all wonderful and ecstatic. He felt as though he might burst into flames at the subatomic level. He couldn’t contain everything he felt inside the limited space of his own body.

  The blue outline of the hatch flashed open and he shot through like a hawk in a dive, grabbing onto the deck and clinging to it with hands and feet, pressing his forehead to the surface, dizzy with exhilaration. He heard Uncle Polly’s wild hollering, his cochlear receiver automatically turning the volume way down so his coach’s shouts didn’t rupture his eardrums. Then the hollering was live, right over him, and Uncle Polly’s arms were lifting him and locking him in a tight embrace. Scull and Blake were clapping him on the back and shouting as well, and the stadium had turned into one giant pulse of motion and indistinguishable noise.

  The referee brought him to the center of the deck. He was alone; Manon was still unconscious, being checked now by the doctor. Hal Greese filled his ample frame with air; his voice boomed out across the Virgin Galactic Center, to be carried through Valtego and across space to every city on Earth and beyond, to the settlements of the asteroid belt and the colonies of Mars: “The winner, by knockout, and the new Lowmass Champion of the Universe, the Raptor … CARR LUKA!”

  Carr saw, at the edge of the deck, emerging from the shadow of the hall, Risha’s tall, slim figure. Trembling hands pressed to her mouth, she went to stand beside Uncle Polly, who put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. Risha’s eyes, fixed on Carr, were bright with pride, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

  Every camera came to rest on Carr’s bruised and battered face. The referee brought over the thick belt, emblazoned with the ZGFA logo and the carved shape of the Cube in metallic relief. He held it up and released it, and it floated, weightless, like an object from the heavens. Carr began to cry. The referee pulled the belt out of the air and placed it around his waist, and Carr tried to say something in thanks, but he had no voice.

  All his life, he’d wanted this moment. Now he had it, and it was even better than he’d imagined. It was as glorious as a thousand stars being born. It was worth every minute of training, every hurt, every moment of fear or self-doubt, every drop of sweat and blood. It was worth his mother’s fateful, misguided choices. With grateful certainty, he knew it was worth being what he was. It was perfect.

  PART TWO

  OUT OF ORBIT

  FIFTEEN

  Carr set his cuff against the entry reader and the door opened. His hand around Risha’s wrist, he tugged her along after him. “Don’t look yet,” he said. “Not yet. Okay, now.”

  She opened her eyes and gasped. He grinned, and wound an arm around her waist. “What do you think?”

  “The view … it’s incredible.” She walked slowly toward the floor-to-ceiling windows that filled one side of the apartment’s living room. The sun was shining across the side of the Moon, illuminating a beautiful, barren white landscape of snaking canyons and vast craters. Where the sunlight faded into darkness, there were twinkling clusters of light—the lunar stations at night. Beyond the vista, Earth shone distant in all her slowly rotating blue, green, and white magnificence.

  “You can see Mars too, sometimes,” he said.

  She turned in a circle to take in the rest of the apartment. It was orders of magnitude bigger and nicer than his old place, but he hadn’t gone crazy. A good chunk of his title winnings had gone toward settling bills, including some pricey nanos and brain scans (good news: no sign of chronic traumatic encephalopathy yet), as well as a payment to the best pediatric doctor in Toronto on behalf of the Loggins family. Then, with decidedly mixed feelings, he’d sent the rest to Sally.

  He’d called her after the fight, like he’d promised. “My darling, my baby boy,” she’d said, sniffling with proud tears, and Carr, with the belt around his waist and flying high on endorphins, had said, “We did it, Mom. It’s okay, we did it,” and only later questioned what he’d meant. He’d only called Sally twice in the four months since then, and they’d talked about nothing important. He couldn’t figure out whether he wanted to be angry, grateful, or forgiving toward her, and trying to reconcile all three was confusing.

  The influx of sponsorship money, luckily, had given him more than enough cash to play with when searching for a new place. This two-story unit in the Palisio One (Leave Earth, Come Home) was the second place he’d seen. Fantastic view, prime location, and express bus service to the Virgin Galactic Center, meaning fifteen minutes door-to-Cube. He was sold.

  He tried not to think about how he could have gotten the place next door, an even larger suite with a jacuzzi, if it weren’t for the twenty percent of his earnings that disappeared whenever he made a deposit to his account. As Mr. R had promised, he’d received a message with no return coding, just simple instructions for setting up a direct transfer. He’d ignored it for a few days, and it had shown up again. The third time, it came attached to a copy of his damning genetic profile. A week before the title fight, he’d swallowed the vile taste in his mouth and done as Mr. R demanded.

  Carr shoved aside the unpleasant memory. Risha was wandering through the rooms, running her fingers across the built-ins, checking out the kitchen appliances and the entertainment room, clucking with approval at the artificial intelligence upgrades. H
e followed her with hungry eyes. “There’s plenty of closet space in the bedroom,” he reminded her. “And an extra key, so you can always stay the night. … Or, you know … every night.”

  She paused and glanced over at him. “You’re suggesting I move in with you?”

  Carr shrugged, smiling. “It’s a big place for one person.”

  The corners of her lips rose in a sly expression. “You’re a bit young to be settling down.”

  She was obviously teasing him, but he couldn’t help wrinkling his nose. “People said I was a bit young to be a title contender too.”

  Risha closed the pantry door and came back to him. “No one is saying that now.”

  He gave up resisting and kissed her, working his hands under her shirt and over her breasts. “This is definitely not settling,” he said. He was still faintly amazed she let him handle her so wantonly. An extremely vivid and deliciously explicit memory from the previous night made his insides shiver.

  Sex with Risha … it was the most amazing, most wonderful part of being champion. Not that those two things were connected; they weren’t. But they felt like they belonged together. Risha was too devastatingly sexy for anyone but a champion, Carr decided. He admitted he’d started out as overeager as a kid standing on the deck before his first fight, but, as was the case with any physical skill he tried, he got better fast. It was all a matter of practice. A lot of practice. There was no such thing as too much practice, after all. Risha had opened up a part of his brain and lit it on molten fire.