“Nice of her.” My own voice grew cold. “Where’s Kadmin?”

“In due time, Mr. Kovacs. In due time. You know, when I was told you would react this way and give yourself up for the lieutenant, I confess I doubted it at the time. But you fulfill expectations like a machine. Was it that that the Envoy Corps took away from you in return for all your other powers? Your unpredictability? Your soul?”

“Don’t get poetic on me, Carnage. Where is he?”

“Oh, very well. This way.”

There was a brace of large sentries outside the cabin door that might have been the two from the cruiser. I was too jangled to remember clearly. They bracketed me as we followed Carnage along claustrophobic corridors and down listing companionways, all rust-spotted and polymer-varnished metal. I tried vaguely to memorise the path but most of me was thinking about what Carnage had said. Who had predicted my actions to him? Kadmin? Unlikely. The Patchwork Man, for all his fury and death threats, knew next to nothing about me. The only real candidate for that kind of prediction was Reileen Kawahara. Which also helped to explain why Carnage wasn’t quaking in his synthetic flesh at the thought of what Kawahara might do to him for co-operating with Kadmin. Kawahara had sold me out. Bancroft was convinced, the crisis—whatever it had been—was over, and the same day Ortega was snatched as bait. The scenario I had sold to Bancroft left Kadmin out there as a private contractor with a grudge, so there was no reason why he couldn’t be seen to take me down. And under the circumstances, I was safer disposed of than left alive.

For that matter, so was Kadmin so maybe it hadn’t been that blatant. Maybe the word had gone out to bring Kadmin down, but only for as long as I was needed. With Bancroft convinced, I was once more expendable and the word had gone out again, to let Kadmin be. He could kill me, or I could kill him, whichever way the luck turned. Leaving Kawahara to clean up whoever was left.

I had no doubt that Kawahara would keep her word as far as releasing Sarah was concerned. The old-style yakuza were funny about that sort of thing. But she had made no such binding promises about me.

We clambered down a final staircase, a little wider than the rest, and came out onto a glassed-in gantry over a converted cargo cell. Looking down, I saw one of the arenas Ortega and I had passed in the electromag train last week, but now the plastic coverings were off the killing ring, and a modest crowd had assembled in the forward rows of each bank of plastic seating. Through the glass I could hear the sustained buzz of excitement and anticipation that had always preceded the freak fights I’d attended in my youth.

“Ah, your public awaits you.” Carnage was standing at my shoulder. “Well, more correctly, Ryker’s public. Though I have no doubt you’ll be able to dissemble for them with the same skill that convinced me.”

“And if I choose not to?”

Carnage’s crude features formed a simulacrum of distaste. He gestured out at the crowd. “Well, I suppose you could try explaining it to them in mid bout. But to be honest, the acoustics aren’t of the best and anyway…” He smiled unpleasantly. “I doubt you’ll have the time.”

“Foregone conclusion, huh?”

Carnage maintained his smile. Behind him, Pernilla Grip and the other synthetic were watching me with the predatory interest of cats in front of a birdcage. Below, the crowd were becoming noisy with expectation.

“It has taken me a while to set up this particular bout, working on nothing more than Kadmin’s assurances. They are anxious to see Elias Ryker pay for his transgressions and it would be quite hazardous not to fulfill their expectations. Not to mention unprofessional. But then, I do not think you came here expecting to survive, did you Mr. Kovacs?”

I remembered the darkening, deserted street called Minna and the crumpled form of Ortega. I fought the stunblast sickness and raised a smile from old stock.

“No, I suppose I didn’t.”

Quiet footsteps along the gantry. I fired a peripheral glance towards the sound and found Kadmin, attired in the same clothing as I wore. The spacedeck slippers scuffed to a soft halt a short distance away, and he cocked his head at an angle, as if examining me for the first time. He spoke gently.

I smiled grimly. “If you want to lose a fight, talk about it first.”

“But she was younger in those days.” Kadmin smiled back, perfect white teeth against the tanned skin. “Barely out of her teens, if the introduction to my copy of Furies got it right.”

“Harlan’s World teens last longer. I think she knew what she was talking about. Can we get on with this, please?”

Beyond the windows, the noise of the crowd was rising like surf on a hard shingle beach.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Out on the killing floor, the noise was less uniform, more uneven. Individual voices sawed across the background like bottleback fins in choppy water, though without applying the neurachem I still couldn’t pick out anything intelligible. Only one shout made it through the general roar; as I stepped up to the edge of the ring, someone yelled down at me:

“Remember my brother, you motherfucker!!!”

I glanced up to see who the family grudge belonged to, but saw only a sea of angry and anticipatory faces. Several of them were on their feet, waving fists and stamping so that the metal scaffolding drummed with it. The bloodlust was building like something tangible, leaving a thickness in the air that was unpleasant to breathe. I tried to remember whether I and my gang peers had screamed like this at the Newpest freak fights, and guessed that we probably had. And we hadn’t even known the combatants that flailed and clawed at each other for our entertainment. These people at least had some emotional investment in the blood they wanted to see spilled.

On the other side of the floor, Kadmin waited with his arms folded. The supple steel of the power knuckles banded across the fingers of each hand glinted in the overhead lighting. It was a subtle advantage, one which wouldn’t render the fight too one-sided but would tell in the long run. I wasn’t really worried about the knuckles, it was Kadmin’s Will of God enhanced response wiring that concerned me most. A little over a century ago, I’d been up against the same system in the soldiers the Protectorate had been fighting on Sharya, and they’d been no pushover. It was old stuff, but it was heavy-duty military biomech, and against that Ryker’s neurachem, recently fried by stun-bolt, was going to look pretty sick.

I took my place opposite Kadmin, as indicated by the markings on the floor. Around me the crowd quietened down a little and the spotlights came up as Emcee Carnage joined us. Robed and made up for Pernilla Grip’s cameras, he looked like a malignant doll out of a child’s nightmare. A fitting consort to the Patchwork Man. He raised his hands and directional speakers in the walls of the converted cargo cell amplified his throat-miked words.

“Welcome to the Panama Rose!”

There was a vague rumble from the crowd, but they were bedded down for the moment, waiting. Carnage knew this and he turned slowly about, milking the anticipation.