Someone said, “Here,” and tossed him a towel. Venture fumbled to catch it and looked up, blinking the sweat out of his eyes. Dasher Starson.
“You have quick feet. Quick hands. I’ll bet they’re really something when you’re not spent. Your timing needs work, though.”
“Timing,” Venture repeated through cracked lips. He’d meant to say thanks. But it was too late to correct himself. Starson was already striding away from him, across the mat.
“Hurry up!” Parker said. “Before the water’s gone.”
Venture staggered over to a bucket. Someone had thrown up in it. He shoved it away before his own stomach could add to it, and grabbed another one. He scooped the last handfuls of water up and sucked it down, but it wasn’t enough. It felt like there would never be enough.
CHAPTER TWO
Venture held his shirt in one hand and probed gingerly at his bare ribs with the other, at the place he’d been injured years ago. His sixth day at Champions had finally come to an end, and it pained him to move, everywhere. It hurt to the touch, everywhere. But there, that place on his ribs, the pain was especially sharp. Were they broken again? It was the sort of thing his trainer ought to look at. He laughed silently, humorlessly at the thought of that. Parker would enjoy giving him a good jab right there.
Venture’s aching, fight-swollen fingers fumbled with his clothes. He shuddered as he peeled off his shorts and tugged on his long underwear. Even with all of them packed in here close, it was still so cold. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this weak. The back of his throat felt thick and sore, and he was certain he’d be sicker soon.
As he tucked his sweat-wet clothes between the mattress and the edge of the bunk above his, hoping they’d dry out some by morning, he bumped his arm on the bunk and winced. His forearms were covered with bruises from holding them protectively against his head. By the time the older fighters had come to beat up on them today, he hadn’t had the speed of thought or motion left in him to avoid the punches that came flying at him.
On the bunk across from his, Lance sat, arms limp at his sides, too tired even to try to hide the tears forming in his eyes. Venture hesitated, took a step closer to him, but Lance jerked away and lay down on his side with his back to him.
Venture turned back to his own bunk, pulled his knit hat on, wrapped the rough woolen blankets around him as tight as he could, and lay down and prayed that sleep would take him soon, that everything would get better, soon.
Venture jolted upright and rammed his sweaty head on the wooden frame of the bunk above him. But that bump was nothing compared to the painful squeeze of his dream. He felt as though he’d taken a punch in the gut. He couldn’t breathe. In spite of the cold, the blankets were suffocating him. He flung them off, got out of bed, and began to pace the creaking narrow strip of floor between the bunks, arms crossed behind his head, chest heaving, talking silently to himself about what was real and what was not, what was now, and what was in the past, trying to loosen the clench of horror, to explain to the terrified part of himself that the pulsing darkness was just the stuff of dreams.
“What’s the matter with you, Vent?” Nick muttered sleepily.
Every one of his roommates was not only awake, but each one was staring at him from his own shallow bunk. Their breath puffed toward him in clouds of steam against the frigid air.
“You should’ve heard him, yelling for his mother!”
“No way!”
“Yeah, I heard him, too,” said one of the boys from Frost’s. “What’s the matter, Vent, never been away from your mama?”
Oh, no.
How much of what he dreamed had been out loud?
“Everybody shut up and get back to sleep!” Parker barked at them. “We’re running an hour before daybreak.”
There was a rustle of blankets and a creaking of the wooden boards beneath them as the other boys lay back down on their straw mattresses. Venture continued to pace. He needed to feel the floor under his feet a little longer, smell the cold mustiness of all of the guys and their many-times-sweated-in clothes all packed together.
You’re here. You’re at Champions.
But it had seemed so real.
It was real.
“Everybody! That means you, Delving!”
He just needed to be awake a little longer, a little longer so he knew for sure, so it didn’t come back. If he lay down now, it would come back; he knew it.
“Delving!”
Venture jerked his head in the direction of Parker’s bunk, and in that instant, he was fully awake, fully aware, and fully humiliated. He turned away from Parker and looked at the smirking faces on either side of him. Venture shot a look of hot contempt along the bunk rows on each side of the room as he strode to the door. He opened it, then slammed it shut behind him. Parker ought to understand that he just needed a minute. A minute to himself. Just one minute without people watching him, picking him apart.
He sagged against the wall, slid down it until he was sitting on the rough wooden floor. The heat deserted him and his sweaty body felt cold and wet. He shivered, then wrapped his arms around himself. It hurt his mat-burned elbows, but he hugged himself just the same. It was so cold.
Now that those guys had seen his weakness, they were going to devour him. And the worst part of it was, he didn’t even know whether he cared anymore. Whether he could stay here, like this.
What am I going to do now? Earnest
, he tried to summon him with his thoughts,
what should I do?
The door to their room opened and Parker stepped out. He closed the door behind him with menacing deliberation, then stood before Venture with his arms crossed.
“You disregarded a clear order, Delving. And then you slammed that door.”
“Just give me a minute, all right?”
“I hear you’re a bondsman. That true?”
Venture stiffened. Did they all know now? “Yeah,” he said, “it’s true.”
“Then you ought to know a thing or two about following orders. Maybe if you’re given sole responsibility for the privies, you’ll remember your place in this world.”
“Is that what I deserve for how hard I’ve worked?”
Parker laughed. “You don’t deserve to be here at all, you worthless bastard pile of waste! You’re not even worthy to be a point-fighter. I don’t know how you ended up here, but I can guess how you got to be bonded. Your whore mother abandon you?”
“My mother’s dead. What did your mother do to you to make you like this?”
Venture saw it coming—Parker’s foot, boots on—for what purpose other than this—aimed directly at his face. He reacted swiftly, instinctively, and caught Parker’s boot heel and scooped it toward him with such force that Parker was pulled up, his body horizontal to the floor. He landed hard, flat on his back. Venture had stood up as he pulled the threatening foot out from under Parker, and now he let it go and leaned over him, almost disbelieving what he’d done. He looked down on Parker, still silent, the wind knocked out of him. Now was Venture’s chance to speak.
“What did you think, that I was just going to sit here and let you break my nose?” He was loud, and doors cracked open. Boys peered, blinking, into the narrow, shadowy hallway. “If you start something with me, you’d better be prepared to finish it. Do you understand, Parker? You’re not my master. You’re paid to help me, to help all your boys. If you want some more, then get up and have at it.”
He folded his arms and stared down at the still immobile Parker, who could only glare at him and cough.
“Yuh.” He tried to speak, but his voice was weak, his breath still shallow.
“That’s what I thought.” Venture’s words reverberated up and down the hallway.
He turned back to his doorway. The boys stood there, gaping. They parted to let him through, and he climbed into his sweat-damp bunk, pulled the blankets up, and turned toward the cold, bare wall, feeling strangely calm. The others rushed back in after him and crowded around.
“Vent, Vent, by the gods, what did you do?” Lance said.
“Go to sleep,” Venture grumbled.
Oh, my God,
he thought
, is there any help for me now?
“He laid him out! He laid him flat out!” Nick laughed deliriously.
Venture, still facing the wall, couldn’t help half a smile.
“How’d you do it? Did you punch him in the face? Kick him where it counts?” someone said.
Venture sat up. “I don’t want to talk about it. Now all of you get off my bed. Back off. I’m tired.”
The boys took a couple of steps back, but kept staring at him. He knew it was ridiculous, the idea that he could just act like nothing happened, like the hallway wasn’t full of commotion, and turn around and go to sleep.
“Oh, man, do you hear that?” Lance said.
“What?” Nick tilted his head toward the door.
“It’s Fisher! Fisher’s up!”
“They went and got Fisher?”
Venture threw his covers back and swung his legs over the side of his bunk. Whatever was going to happen to him wasn’t going to wait until morning. Fisher himself was coming for him. He couldn’t change what he’d done now. This could be his last night here, and he wasn’t sure anymore whether he wanted it to be his last or not.
“It’s been nice knowing you, Vent,” said one of the boys from Frost’s.
Everyone but Venture jumped when Fisher threw open the door and let it crash into the wall.
His fiery eyes darted from one to the other of them. Following the stares of the boys, he spied the likely culprit. “Get up!”
Venture rose immediately, determined to keep it together and appear unintimidated.
“Sir?” he said, with the ease of a servant accustomed to taking orders.
“Get out here.”
Venture’s stomach lurched. For an instant he was sorry. He was so sorry, not for what he’d done to Parker, but because he’d chosen to come here, and now he was never going to see anyone he loved again.
“You get in a lot of trouble, boy?” Fisher said once he had him in the hall. Parker was waiting out there, arms folded, scowling.
“Only when my trainer tries to kick me in the face.”
Fisher whacked him hard across the chest with his forearm, sending Venture crashing into the wooden wall. The whole building shook with the impact, and Venture bent over in pain. Fisher glanced at the open doorway to the dormitory room, then grabbed him by the collar, twisting Venture’s shirt tight around his neck.
“Come on,” he said through gritted teeth.
Fisher dragged him down the hall like that, muttering about how he deserved the wrath of Felsan, the god of pain and death. Parker followed behind them, silent. Whenever Venture resisted, the shirt tightened around his neck, and darkness crept in on his vision. Venture reached up, grabbed a fistful of fabric, and ripped it. His vision sharpened and he took a deep breath. But Fisher didn’t miss a step. His hands were big enough that he easily gripped the back of Venture’s neck, his fingers pressing in below his ear on one side, his thumb on the other, cutting off the blood flow to his head. Venture stopped resisting, but Fisher kept him on the verge of passing out the whole time, only releasing the pressure whenever his body started to go limp.
Fisher took him out the door, not to the half-sheltered breezeway between the new fighters’ dormitory and their training room, but into the open winter night, through a foot-deep layer of crunchy snow that stung Venture’s bare feet, to a side entrance of the massive, robust stone building that was the heart of Champions Center.
Fisher tossed him inside, onto the hard stone floor. Then Parker shut and locked the heavy oak door behind them.
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