Arena (2 page)

I
opened my eyes.

White. Everything was white. They say in death, you'll be surrounded by a white light. Now, lying in the pod's shimmering opal core, I realized yet another irony. Win or lose, coming back to life always felt a bit like dying.

I reached for my neck and felt clean, smooth skin. A slow breath passed through my lips. Of course. Why would I expect anything else?

The speakers beside my ears crackled, and a voice cut through the pod's silence.

“And Ling's the last one out. Team Defiance just got crushed. What a match.”

I wrenched the speakers off and punched the pod's innards. Pain retaliated, shooting up my arm. Real pain.

The thread-thin wires stuck to my face, neck, and arms detached and crawled away, scuttling across my skin like insect legs. The egg-shaped pod cradling me hissed and opened, its double doors sliding back from the center. As the lids retracted, the bright lights of the pod room poured across my face and into my eyes. I sat in the pod, blinking away blue and purple stars.

Despite my eyesight, or maybe because of it, my other senses took over. The air, so chilled and sterile, stung the back of my throat. It mixed with
the scent of industrial cleaner and cold nothingness. But my hearing trumped them all. The soft beeping of the computers, the hissing of the other machinery, and the yelling. Lots of yelling.

“What the fuck was that?” Nathan's voice. “You were supposed to have my back. We lost because of you.”

“No.” That was Derek. “You were supposed to have my back.”

My teammates. Or so I'm told. Just like the arena, with its digital fields and towers, it seemed our cooperation only existed in the virtual world.

“Kali.” Another voice right beside me, feminine and musical. Hannah. A halo of her strawberry blonde hair appeared between the lights. Long, slender fingers closed around my arm and shook, as if it would help my eyes somehow. “Kali, they're fighting again. Can you do something? I already tried.”

I sighed and pulled myself out of the pod. My feet touched down on the metal floor, as smooth and clear as glass. Everything inside the cylinder-shaped room of the virtual pod center was either white or a shade of gray. White pods, monitoring stations, computers, and screens. Gray floors and walls and accents. Nothing but clean lines, metal, and glass. From the past to the future in a blink.

My vision phased between blurry and clear as I pushed myself to the center of the room, where Derek and Nathan stood toe to toe. Both were dressed in the jumpsuits we're required to wear when we plug in. Stark white, just like the inside of the pods, as if the connection to the virtual world had to be immaculate.

“You had one guy to take out. One,” Derek said, holding up a finger for emphasis. “If you can't handle that, maybe Lily should fight with me.”

The five-foot-nothing blonde slunk against the far wall. Other than her pod suit, Lily was a mirror image of her virtual avatar. She twirled a finger through her pigtails and narrowed her eyes at Derek but kept her back pinned against the wall.

Nathan scoffed. “Haven't you seen her stats lately? She has twice the kills you do.”

Standing so close, the two of them were like the opposing halves of a yin-yang symbol. Derek's dark skin and features versus Nathan's pale
complexion, blue eyes, and light brown hair. Opposites in coloring and exactly the same in everything else. Same height, same muscular build, same alpha-male personality. When Clarence had assembled the team, he certainly didn't make sure we all got along with each other.

Derek waved him off. “Whatever. It's Hannah's fault, anyways.”

“My fault?” Hannah exclaimed, taking a step forward. “You two were long dead before they came after me.”

The programmers, who sat at the workstations behind the pods, stood and peered around the monitoring screens at the scene. One simply stood, started packing up, and shook his head, as if the scene in the middle of the room was nothing more than the same show stuck on repeat.

“It was no one's fault,” I said. “They left one to guard their tower and pushed in with four. No one fights like that. We were unprepared.”

Nathan nodded at Derek. “No. It was his fault. He went down first.”

Derek pointed a finger back at Nathan. “Like you had nothing to do with it.”

“We were all unprepared,” I said, raising my voice over theirs. “We lost one. Get over it.”

What the hell was I saying?

The last few months played back in my head. Hours of training, grinding against weights until my muscles screamed. Endless battles in the virtual world, ripping my sword through any foe the programmer could muster. Weeks of preseason gaming, where no team could touch us. All that training, all that effort, and we had lost. No. Big. Deal.

Pffft. Even I didn't buy that.

Derek took a step closer, as if to challenge Nathan. The muscles in Nathan's jaw flexed.

“Get out of my face,” Nathan warned.

“What are you going to do about it, Nancy?”

Nathan shoved him. Derek gripped his collar. They both pulled back to punch. I wedged myself between them and fisted a hand in each of their suits.

“Walk away.”

They glared at each other, but neither threw a strike with me in the middle.

“Hey.”

I tugged on their suits to get their attention. They dropped their arms, but neither looked down.

“Come on. We have a press conference.”

I released my grip and walked toward the exit. Only two sets of footsteps followed. I turned back. Lily and Hannah halted on my heels, while Nathan and Derek remained in the center of the room, still locked in a staring contest a pace apart.

I tossed my arms up. “You need a room, ladies? Let's go.”

Derek left first, head high, like he'd won. Nathan lingered, burning holes in the back of Derek's head. After releasing a shaky breath, he followed us to the exit.

Navigating the steel tunnels of the facility, I led the team to the double doors marked
PRESSROOM
. A guard manned either side. With bulging necks, tattooed arms, and ex-convict vibes, they were intimidating enough to make a group of Marines piss themselves.

“They're chomping at the bit,” one of them said. “You ready?”

He looked right at me, as if I spoke for the entire team. I glanced back at my four teammates. Guess I was the one in front. I nodded at the guard.

“Go for it.”

They opened the doors, and reporters poured out, like water from an open floodgate, jamming their microphones in our faces. Christ, were they trying to stick them up my nose?

“What happened tonight?”

“Has Team Defiance finally met its match?”

“What does it feel like to lose?”

Security wrestled them back enough for us to squeeze past single file to the stage, which was backdropped by an oversized banner reading:

VIRTUAL GAMING LEAGUE
2054 RAGE TOURNAMENTS

We sat overlooking the sea of journalists and cameras. First Lily, then Derek, followed by Hannah, Nathan, and me. The way we're told to sit. The men between the women, short framing the tall, dark features mixed with light. Balance. Cohesion. Like this, we looked like a team.

Image is everything.

Cameras clicked and flashed, throwing lights across the stage. A middle-aged man walked up to the podium beside us, his shoulders nearly as slender as mine. Definitely not security. He tapped the microphone and waved a hand, appealing to the crowd of reporters to hush. A new emcee. Great. Another face, another name.

The roar of the crowd dulled down to murmurs and whispers.

“It'll be an open floor tonight,” the emcee said. “I'll call on you one at a time. And I mean, one at a time. Now . . .”

The reporters threw their arms in the air as they waved, shouted, and teetered on the edges of their chairs. The emcee pointed to a man in the front row. He stood.

“Jeffrey Stout,
L.A. Times
. As a heavy favorite team in the competition, do you feel that the pressure to excel got to you tonight?”

“I don't speak for everyone,” Hannah said into her microphone, pursing her lips, “but it's the pressure that makes me excel.”

She winked at the reporter. He faltered, mouth hanging open, then managed to sit down and make a few notes on his tablet. The commotion started back up until the emcee pointed to a woman in the center. She stood, straightening her skirt.

“Kelly Martin,
Sports Illustrated
. Your opponent beat you in record time. How does that make you feel?”

“The Death Match is only the end of the preseason,” Nathan said. “It just gives
us
a new record to beat in the tournament.”

More shouting. The emcee picked another.

“Steve Trainor, ESPN. Now that your loss in the Death Match landed you in the losers' bracket, how can you guarantee to your fans and sponsors you won't suffer another like this one?”

“We train,” I said, pressing my lips tight against the microphone so
I'm heard above anyone else. “We work harder than we did before. We challenge each other and ourselves. Next time, we'll be ready.”

More questions. More yelling and shoving. We took turns answering, making sure to stay in character. I sat in my chair, but there might as well have been a robot Kali in my place. There but not really there as the people shouted and the cameras flashed, all a distant echo. Maybe someone would ask what designer I was wearing while still dressed in my pod suit. Or better yet, how
tough
it was to be a woman in a male-dominated sport.

This was my reality.

I eyed the exit doors as images of the pod room trickled into my thoughts. Maybe I could sneak in a few hours of virtual time once this was all done.

“Okay, that's it for tonight,” the emcee called. The reporters jeered and protested.

“No, no. Over here.”

“Just one more question.”

The emcee shook his head, refusing to give in. I tapped my microphone, but it didn't echo back. Already shut off. Couldn't answer if we wanted to.

Always leave them wanting more.

With security's help, we shouldered our way through the crowd to the double doors. The reporters chased after us, ignoring the sign marked
FACIL
ITY EMPLOYEES ONLY P
AST THIS POINT
. Security shoved them back and slammed the doors shut, cutting off the noise and commotion, as if sealing off a gateway to another world. I clustered with my teammates in the hallway, listening to the protests of the reporters in the other room, muffled by the metal doors, like being underwater.

“This is bad,” Hannah said. “We should go out and be seen around the city, so people think we're not bothered by the loss.”

“Fine,” Nathan agreed. “We'll meet in an hour and hit a few clubs.”

Derek stepped forward. “Who made you boss?”

Here we go again.

“Speaking of the boss, what's Clarence going to say about tonight?” Lily
asked. Everyone looked at the tiny blonde, then exchanged glances with each other. My stomach swirled, and I had the feeling mine wasn't the only one.

“Just forget about that for now,” I said. “Hannah's right. We should go out. Together. Show people we're still a team. And if we leave, we can avoid Clarence, too. For a while. Right?

Everyone exchanged glances again and, eventually, nodded in agreement.

“Good. Meet here in an hour.”

—

An hour and some-odd minutes later, I stood between Derek and Nathan, posing for the cameras outside the club. Beyond the towering buildings of the city, the sun was slowly setting, and the heat from the mid-August day still curled through the air. Around us, the paparazzi plastered themselves against the guardrails, elbowing each other and clawing at us, out of reach. The boys wore casual suits, no ties, with several buttons left undone as if they'd started doing them up and forgot about the rest. Yeah. Forgot, on purpose. Every turn flashed another angle of the muscle beneath.

“Kali.”

My name intermingled with the others. I pulled at the chain around my neck, so the yin-yang pendant showed above my shirt.

We all played our parts.

I struck a pose the way I'd been taught. Leg forward, weight shifted to one hip, the same one my hand gripped. Then I tilted my head and let a coy smile complement my slick dress pants and silk top. Conservative. Demure. Movie star.

Nathan leaned close and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Is your face going to crack, warrior?”

I spoke back through my teeth. “No, but yours will under my fist.”

He chuckled, and murmured something that sounded like
saucy
. Hot rage flashed inside my chest. I snapped a quick blow against his ribs. He grabbed my wrist and twisted. A devilish grin filled his face.

The cameras exploded as the paparazzi pushed toward us. The guardrails whined in protest. They whispered among each other, but all were thinking the same thing.
Maybe they'll fight right here.

Nathan turned to the crowd and held up his hands. “My fault. I should know better.”

They laughed, and a voice from the back called out, “She'd pin you in a second.”

Nathan laughed along with them, but leaned toward me and lowered his voice again. “And I wouldn't stop her.”

Heat flashed through me again, but this time, it wasn't in my chest. Opposite the view of the cameras, his fingertips lingered on my lower back and grazed down. My breath hitched before I smacked him off. He winked in response.

I shook my head and glanced at Hannah and Lily on the carpet behind me, also posing for the crowd. Cleavage spilled out of the dress that barely covered Hannah's body, while Lily's pigtails, plaid skirt, and knotted blouse belonged to a schoolgirl about to be expelled. They laughed and waved, and kissed. The camera flashes turned to lightning strikes.