THE FALL

The other guy fell to the ground with a guttural groan, followed by the splashy sound of what’s sometimes called a technicolour yawn. I massaged my knuckles gently – they were a little sore.
“You done?” I said, squatting down beside the guy’s head. His eyes opened, saw what must have seemed like the face of the devil looking down at him, and closed again. I raised my fist in triumph.
Don’t feel too bad for the guy; he’s a real piece of shit.
The crowd went ape. “That’s a new bloody record!” said the bookie, counting his fistful of blackpaper. He peeled off a few leaves of the folding stuff and handed it to me. “Good job, kid.”
I nodded. I wasn’t big on conversation then. Still not, under usual circumstances. The bookie leaned over the barricade that separated the fighters from the rabble and wiped a bit of blood out of the corner of my mouth with a cloth. Then he lifted the cloth high and shouted: “Fight blood! Fresh from the fray!”
I hopped the barricade, shrugged on my brown syntho overcoat and disappeared into the crowd. I was always good at that. One of those faces you see everywhere. Not quite so easy these days.

I went home to my pod in the lower barracks and passed out immediately. This was pretty much my usual routine.
I was awoken later – I don’t say the middle of the night because that was when I got in from the fight by the rock – by some poor sap making a go for my billfold. This was less routine, but my response was just as practiced: I peacefully threatened to break his wrist until he agreed to leave me alone, and went back to sleep.

When I woke up I stretched my legs with a quick jaunt to the W.C before anybody else could hog it and stink it out. That was the theory, anyway. I knocked on the door, which had a big sign on it which read: OCCUPIED/VACANT. OCCUPIED was illuminated in red.
“Yeah?” came the hesitant voice from within. I recognised the kid. He’d just got here a couple weeks before. No sense going too hard on him. “Oh, gosh, mister sir,” he said. “I hoped I could get finished before you woke up.”
“Hope is a dangerous thing,” I said. “Sometimes very dangerous.” I cracked my knuckles loudly. This often has a laxative effect on people, and I noted with a sort of conflicted satisfaction that this was very much still the case. “I ain’t gonna hurt you,” I said after letting the kid stew for a while. “Just remember yourself. I don’t like being made to wait.”

The silver bubble of mercury sat impossibly out of the rock wall, defying gravity under the power of its own surface tension. I threw down my electric hammer and whistled. “Disco ball!” I shouted, and a couple of folk bearing a big industrial contraption hustled over. They set it down next to the wall and set a switch on the machine to “GATHER”. A thick, segmented hose emerged from the machine on spindly legs and began sniffing out the mercury with its EM sensor twitching. It locked on, honed in, and soon it was thirstily drinking up the deposit.
“There’ll be a bonus for us come payday, brother!” said one of the hosepipe crew. He clapped me on the shoulder and laughed. “Look out, Metro!”

I sat on the subway shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped car. Everyone wanted to get away from the mine, if only for the one night. But what a night! Metro lit up on Leave Eve when all the roughnecks descended, and the regular folks shut up inside. Then the train emerged from the ground for a moment to arc over a subterranean river, and the rocky, arid land spread out around us with the stars and the planet hanging up above like a baby’s mobile. Somewhere up there on the green-speckled land my parents are buried in a shallow grave.
The train rattled to a slow halt some time later and we poured out as if the train had been upended and shaken out. Metro was optimistically-named – it was less a metropolis and more a very enthusiastic crossroads – but what it lacked in size it made up for in sheer density. Every few feet a door lay invitingly open, hazy pink and blue and red neons advertising whatever bubbling, frothy joys might hide within. I walked past all of these doors as my friends and compatriots filed off to get drunk and get into fights. Amateurs. I reached into my pocket and riffled through my billfold. Where I was going I would need it, and maybe the security of the slim brass knuckles that rested next to them. It was the cold kind of night, and I pulled the coat tight around me as I looked up and saw that I had arrived.

Beca threw her arms around me as soon I stepped into the foyer. It was decorated red, with wood – real wood – all over.
“Shut your mouth, silly,” said Beca, giggling. She was wearing a pale gold-coloured minidress that sparkled when the light caught it, which was always, so she seemed to be lit from within and cast tiny starlights on the walls like a planetarium.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s a really nice dress.” Idiot. She laughed again.
“You’re so sweet. Come on, Mr Argento is waiting for you.”

Argento was a broad-shouldered, balding, emphatic man in his fifties, but nearer to sixty now, and he smiled wide when he saw me. At the round poker table were three other players: two men and a woman, who nodded to me quietly.
“You must be this kid I’ve heard about from Mr Greene,” he said, gesturing to our bookie who was sat in the conversation pit on the left side of the room. He waved to me and gave a thin smile. “And our very own Beca speaks very highly of you also?”
“I’m very flattered, sir,” I said.
“Flattered though you may be, flattened you most certainly are not,” he said with a chuckle. “You’re a tough kid. My operation might have uses for a tough kid, uses that pay in more than just mining company blackpaper.”
“I’m listening,” I said, casting a sideways look at Beca as she stepped down into the conversation pit and served Greene with a delicate glass of fizzing wine, the lines of the dress drawing my eye down her legs. It was having the same effect on Greene.
“I’m a popular man, you understand, kid. A whole lotta people want favours from me. Not so often they want to do me a favour in return. We understand each other?”
I nodded. “Debt collector. Not my style,” I said tersely.
Argento laughed out loud, an unpleasant sound. “Nothing gets past you, kid! You know your own mind, and I respect that. No bull.” He walked behind the big desk at the back of the room and opened a drawer. “Why exactly is it ‘not your style?’”
“Don’t fight those that haven’t signed up for it,” I said. Still sunken in the conversation pit, Greene had reached out, and his hand was now resting comfortably on Beca’s thigh. I walked over to the edge of the pit. “Everything alright here?”
The pit made him look so small as he pulled his hand back. “Just peachy,” he said, looking up at me. “Right, doll?”
“Sure is,” said Beca, and I couldn’t see if she was telling the truth. I looked back to Argento.
“Finished, kid?” he said. “I get it, you don’t like to see some greaseball getting his fingerprints on your girl. Well if you come work for me, I can promise you my boys will never touch her again-”
I felt his nose break the first time I hit him, and then I hit him again so that the blood streaming down his face made it hard to speak. I grabbed Beca’s wrist.
“Oh my God!” she said.
“Come on! We have to get out of here!” I growled, pulling her towards the exit as the poker players got to their feet, realising what had happened.
“Get him! Somebody get him!” snarled Argento, blood bubbling on his lips with each word.

Out on the street in the red glow of the neon, Beca pulled her hand away from mine. “What the hell?” she said.
“Was I supposed to let him do that to you?” I grabbed her again as she started to walk back towards the house. “What’s your problem?”
“My problem is you just punched my boss in the face after I specifically recommended you!” she answered. “I’ll be lucky if I’m just out of a job!”
“You’re not going back in?” I said.
“Of course I’m going back in! You’ve seen my career options down that pink street leading to the subway stop!” She shook me off again and looked at me in disgust. “You can’t solve every problem with your fists,” she said.

I cracked my knuckles and went through my pre-fight stretches. Greene wasn’t here for this one. I doubted I’d see him again.
My opponent was a tank of a man, but that just meant I had a speed advantage. I ducked under his guard and delivered a one-two-three to his ribs that should have left him struggling to breathe. He absorbed it without slowing down.
Then it was his turn; he swung a giant fist and all too late I saw the glint of silver on his knuckles. A face in the crowd stood out to me suddenly, among the baying mob. Bandaged, an ugly splint straightening out a broken nose. Argento was staring at me, with eyes that carried so much anger. I didn’t feel the moment the giant’s fist struck, though I’m told it was spectacular to witness.

To me, it was like a light being gently switched off.

YOU IDIOTS! HE WAS SUPPOSED TO DIE IN THE RING!