TEN YEARS AGO:

Lu transferred the Asylum loan credits to the Flock account with that bio-bot ding and Adon could see the dominoes crashing over him. He wanted to scream, to rip Lu’s naivete out of him, but he was shocked, trapped, and betrayed. All he could see was the fear and resignation on Lu’s face, feel his determined grip, and understand that to Lu, here was his only choice, his only solution. But Adon recognized the doubt behind it, the self-hatred, the uncertainty and confusion in his eyes. Adon had seen Lu’s head bowed at the altar of self-deception, believing he would never be enough, never escape, never find freedom, and Adon was his sacrifice paid. 

Adon hated him. He hated Lu then, and he hated him even more when he rode away, pity where there should have been rage, cowardice where he’d promised to keep hope. He had no idea, Adon realized, as Sias yanked him off the ground, pulling him backwards between Mykos and Troy, watching Phaios jumping on the track to follow Lu. Lu had no idea what the Quartet could do, no understanding of Gideon’s ambition, and a surprising amount of faith in the Asylum’s credit system. He didn’t think it was a real transfer, Lu had thought he’d succeeded in a trick, thought he’d paved Adon an escape without him. Adon never hated Lu for the betrayal itself, but for the selfish, unspoken fear he hadn’t shared, the burden he’d hidden, the cowardly arrogance that assumed he knew all possible outcomes as the Flock dragged Adon to the Pits because there was no way to pay off that kind of debt but by gamble, and they would collect the organs after they provided the show. 

Mostly Adon hated that he couldn’t hate Lu more. That he wondered more about Lu’s sudden absences, the fire, the signs he’d missed that had culminated in that unchangeable moment. That he could only wonder and hope that Lu had heard his threat as a challenge, that he’d survived. Adon hid in his irredeemable anger, blanketed from the cold by spite. There were plenty of people to hate in the pits, and Adon filled the gap between how much he wanted to hate Lu and how little he actually could with all the pit-crawlers of Caldera, cowering over bets and fighting to the death after the crowd got bored of chickens and dogs. 

☆

Adon’s cellmate called herself Y and others seemed to fear her, though she was barely alive when he met her. Adon patched her up as best he could because he didn’t want to be trapped with a corpse, and by the smell and wailing cacophony, they didn’t dredge the Pits very often. He told Y stories, his stories, of Aphy and Lu and Mess, and it wasn’t until the swelling in her face receded after two weeks that he realized she was the rider he’d seen get shot at the track. She showed him the ugly scar over her abdomen, still patched with a second-skin graft because no physician had been around to remove the film yet. Adon did it, because her skin was growing over the patch. If she’d been even a day stronger when he did it, she would have succeeded in her attempt to kill him for it. Instead, she helped him tattoo his first tally for almost-dying and taught him the basic uses of a knife: slice, stab, parry, throw. She congratulated him on his first victory and admired the cheap chain trophy like it was a perfect apple or a diamond ring. 

They were careful friends, anticipating death and surviving together where they could. When Adon won, his first king-of-the-hill brawl, Y fixed his broken knife and hung four more necklace chains on his hook for good luck, always keeping the superstitious total odd so they had to win again before getting recycled for parts. Afterwards, she burned a scrap of cardboard, mixing it with oil another guy traded for one of her shivs, and tattooed another tally on Adon’s arm for the second time he barely survived. When she woke to him trying to hang himself by a rope of trophy necklaces, she laughed. She’d tried it too, even braided them together, everyone in the Pits had, and just like all the ones before, Adon’s broke. 

He dropped to the dirt and she hit him in the gut, hissing, “you survive for those who don’t,” then added ruefully, “it’s rude to win a fight then feel guilty.”

“I didn’t win,” Adon cried, “I killed them!”

Y grabbed Adon’s wrist, cranked his arm, then flipped him over her shoulder, throwing him into a cloud of dust and knocking the wind out of him. She leaned on his chest with a knee and leaned close, “you didn’t kill them Doni. They died.” She slapped his face gently and sat back with a sigh, realizing she was attached to him now. “This is not a place of freewill and morals, it’s the Pits. You survive until you can’t. You don’t kill them, the Quartet does. How many might have survived with a med-pod or a good sponsor? All of them. How many would have survived if you died? All of them. It’s a rigged game and you can’t take responsibility now. The audience killed them, their fickle sponsors killed them, the Asylum Sec-Offs killed them, the politicians who let this place exist killed them, but not you. You only survived. Your only responsibility is to keep surviving.” 

“And how long will you survive, Ysmena?” Tiffany sidled up to the bars of the neighboring cell, practically glittering in costume jewelry. She never took them off, her victories welded into her skin, scabbed over and embedded deep into her skin. It was always the ones who were almost free who seemed the most depressed. “What’s the point,” Tiffany pouted theatrically, “I’m just going to kill you next. You’re not special anymore.”

Y gripped her chest in surprise, “was I…” she turned to Adon, matching Tiffany’s dramatics, “special?”

Adon snorted. 

Tiffany kicked the bars loudly, sneering at their smiles and looking Adon up and down, “that one’s only safe until his face is gone, so don’t get too cozy, Y.” She laughed at Y’s snarl, goading, “you’re dog’s cute, but your hope is foolish, you might as well put him down––”

“Oh, go die alone in the shitter, Tiff-rhymes-with-Biff.” Y glowered, flipping her off and turning a shaken Adon away, soothing loudly, “we survive because dying sounds boring. People like her die all the time,” she pointed a thumb at Tiffany, “we don’t want to be like her. We can be better.” None of them believed the noble-death propaganda their sponsors sold them, but Y still fully planned on getting out. She didn’t have any lofty goals like some of the others, she survived and plotted her escapes purely because the guards told her it was useless and she liked proving people wrong. 

Over the next few years, Y taught Adon how to fight and survive, cleaning wounds, encouraging sponsorships with winks and smiles backed by his own kind of quiet charm, collecting chains until their bars were decorated with garlands of braided wreaths, imported by a sponsor to keep the smell out. She tattooed his knuckles with the only words that seemed to draw him ironically away from the edge, till death, and collected the story from him in slow pieces. She added a new tally for every near-fatality, or fa-tally-ty—a joke that never got old because they were so often concussed when she made it, or else Adon was too exhausted to do anything else but laugh, or most worrisome, unconscious and Y was needling the tally in hopes it would prove the almost part true while she waited for him to wake. 

Most of their opponents requested training weights and weapons from sponsors, thinking bigger was always better in a beatdown, but Y’s only joy in life was in educating them and the audience, and then teaching Adon to do the same. She’d cackled for a week when Adon had returned bloody but victorious while the champion Minotaur had been strapped down and carried out, kept from the charnel house only by sponsor intervention. Some of Caldera’s wealthiest elites paid not to see the deaths of their favorites in the arena, so the gunshots were saved for the shower drains. 

Y taught Adon to make his opponents afraid of him before they even saw him, to use reputation and rumor to exhaust their adrenaline, to commit to single lines of attacks rather than the robust pre-planned plays others prepared, honing instinct, reflex, and speed. She taught him to remove the person-parts of himself that might get distracted by false motivations like revenge or taunting, and they spent all their days training, fighting, recovering, writing sponsorship thank-you notes in exaggerated Grounder dialects they didn’t speak, and requested traditional Wells peanut-butter crackers neither of them had ever eaten, all for the image. 

Adon mourned his own warmth, focusing on all the cold, hard parts of himself Lu had gifted him. He didn’t even cry when the bleary eyed doctor sewed his ear back on, though several tears came with the needle. He did cry when Y ripped it back off after another cut, an infection, and a sponsor freeze due to illegal firearms smuggled in a sponsored cake that had resulted in five Sec-Offs dead and a number of Pits fighters they never revealed. No one mourned them, but Adon held a funeral for the tip of his left ear, Y named it Igor and they buried it in a hole near the bottom left post of their caged cell. 

Four weeks later, they dug around to see what was left, shocked to find it had disintegrated completely until one of the guards pointed out they were digging around the wrong post and brought them pity-ice that did nothing for their matching concussions. They used the ice to make a pool of mud, throwing it at Tiffany and laughing at her tantrum until they were tossed into isolation then returned to a new cell along the stadium wall with no ear buried in the corner. They carved the name Igor in a powdery brick and prayed to it like a god before each fight. 

Adon only thought of Lu in his sleep, demanding he survive miserably. Sometimes he stubbornly dreamed of meeting Lu again, spotting him beside Gideon in the crowd when they brought in the Asylum prisoners and their guests. Always, in his head, he killed Lu, and always, in his head, Gideon laughed, and always, when he woke, he was crying. 

Adon fought wildly, following Y’s training to survive. He transferred his winning percentages of the betting pools to Aphy’s Asylum credit fee account to cover their house in the Mids because his stipend must have been stripped the second he didn’t register with the Agriculture school. Five years after Lu had pushed him into the Pits, and Adon still hated the Asylum for allowing such illegal transfers, still hated his mom for starting the cascade, still wanted to hate Aphy and sometimes Mess just to make it easy. But he thought of Messenger and won every Pit fight, even the handful he didn’t mean to survive. 

“Pick a new goal, Doni, you’re getting reckless,” Y mumbled, only half awake. 

“What goal?” He shrugged, keeping Aphy and Mess in the Mids was all he cared about, the only way to excuse the blood dried under his fingernails. 

“When we leave,” Y whispered, rolling to face him in the dark, tossing the moth-eaten blanket over both of them despite their hungry fevers, “what will you do out there?”

Adon shrugged, pouting. There was nothing for him inside or out. 

“Make yourself more useful alive than dead, that’s all you have to do. The rest is just surviving. Just like this.” She traced the scabs over his cheek and nose with a frown, “I don’t think you’ll be pretty anymore though.”

She was teasing, and it worked. Adon smacked her hand away, biting back a smile with an eye roll. 

“What did he give you that’s still worth hoping for?” She tilted her head at Adon, tapping his knuckles lightly, desperately trying to remind him of any reason to survive until morning. 

“Nothing.”

“So what is worth till death?”

Adon snorted, realizing what she meant, “love… then payback, I guess.” It was such a Y kind of answer, she couldn’t argue with him. He shrugged her off, wrapping his arms around his knees under the blanket with a shiver. He had fourteen tallies. Fourteen times he’d almost broken his promise to Lu. He sighed numbly at the wall, “he lied to me and I believed him.”

Y nodded sympathetically, tucking her arms behind her head, pulling the ratty blanket over their heads and staring at the pinpricks of light shining through like they were stars, “my brother lied to me. I ended up with his Quartet debt, tried to pay it from the track.”

“Why do they do that?” Adon flopped onto his back beside her, pulling the blanket off her face.

“The debt?” Y shrugged, “credits? Easy marks?”

“No, the lying. The siblings. The family. Why do they trade their debts?”

“Oh,” Y shrugged at the obvious, “sometimes people are just shitty, Doni. You won’t ever understand them because you’re not like them. Just let them be shitty, don’t drive yourself crazy looking for reasons. There aren’t any. You’re just a victim and it just sucks.”

He nodded absently. He didn’t understand his mom, or Aphy, with their easy betrayals and selfish excuses. But he understood Lu. He saw Gideon laugh in the audience, praising Adon’s victories, offering elaborate sponsorships, amused when Adon continued to turn them down. He understood Lu’s panic now, his desperation. Adon filled in the blanks of Lu’s thoughts and never doubted his love, and because of that, Adon couldn’t forgive his stupidity or hate him enough to forget it. 

Y scratched scabs and picked at bandages with a melancholy frown. She faced Adon, cheeks slack with rare sincerity, so often hidden by a sharp pretending smile that scared the others. “We’re going to leave, babe.” She dropped her voice to a whisper, her shoulder falling into his, “if you can’t find a target to move toward,” her expression hardened, then softened with a laissez faire smile, “then decimate whatever of yourself is allowed to be sacrificed until then. We will not walk out freely, but we will leave.”

Adon’s brow furrowed, but he understood. If they didn’t get out soon, she was going to crack, and neither of them could guess what that would look like. 

Another year, they survived. Y took Tiffany’s champion cell, dragging Adon with her while he ran probabilities and kept bookie numbers in his head, a human database of all the internal debts and trades, so the guards protected him, lest their peers forget what was owed between cells and handoffs. 

Some nights, Y wasn’t returned after the noise of the match died out, tossed stumbling at Adon hours later, drugged and smiling. Adon didn’t ask, and Y didn’t tell, but they all knew because of the smell, so when she cried, he curled around her and kept her as safe as he could, both of them frail and fraying and no longer beautiful, desperately waiting for an opportunity, but too broken and exhausted to create one or notice the potential.