Zeroboxer (13 page)

Uncle Polly was right; Manon came out full force, not easing back as Carr had seen him do in previous fights. Perhaps he understood that Carr was something different, not someone easily outlasted and pummeled late in the third round. After the way the first round had almost ended, the Reaper wasn't keen to go airborne or grapple, and he gave up on throwing when he saw that Carr seemed immune to disorientation and could twist his body nimbly enough to turn the momentum of most throws to his advantage. The round quickly became what was called in zeroboxing parlance “a wall brawl.” The two men exchanged rapid and brutal strikes, each aiming to do damage and wear the other down, then broke apart to climb, and leap, and scramble for superior angles before warring again.

Carr bent his knees, anchoring his feet and waist firmly so he could throw power into a flurry of attacks—face jabs, body shots, uppercuts. A couple of them broke through, but then Manon was not there—he leaped to the adjoining wall, his body suddenly perpendicular to Carr's, his fist delivering a roundhouse punch that connected as an uppercu
t. Carr's head snapped back. He imagined his teeth had gone through the roof of his mouth and into his sinuses. Eyes watering fiercely, he dropped his hands to the wall he was standing on, pulling his head out of range, and shot his legs out sideways in a double kick aimed at Manon's head. The man slid aside neatly and caught Carr's ankle, pulling him down and smashing him into the other wall as if he were swinging a large log into the ground.

Carr's body connected and rebounded with shuddering force. He reached over his head, scrambling for purchase; he found it, his fingers tensing, suctioning to the pebbly texture of the Cube's wall. He tucked his body and rolled backward, coming to a crouch that straddled a right angle, his ankles and knees tilted awkwardly as he fought to keep his shoes gripped to the surface.

Uncle Polly shouted, “Get out of the corner!” just as M
anon sailed at him.

It happened very fast. Carr ducked a blow and came back up with a high-low jab and a cross punch that smashed into Manon's face above his left eye. The man reeled, and Carr stepped in for another punch. The sharp angle of the wall threw him off; it was like fighting on a steep scree, and he misjudged the placement of his foot by a fraction. The m
agnetic pull of his grippers slid him down too far and his punch grazed the tip of Manon's chin instead of connecting with the side of his head. The Reaper's notorious left fist fired into the split-second opening and smashed into Carr's jaw with a crack.

Everything went dark.

No. No no no no no

Carr fought the darkness even as it sucked him in like a rocket-plane intake valve. He willed himself to move, but his body was lost to him. He heard, as if from a very great distance, Uncle Polly's voice, calling his name. It sounded very urgent but faint, as if it were being ripped away by a great wind.

For some strange and awful reason, it wasn't Uncle Polly's face tha
t suddenly became clear in his mind, nor was it Risha's, or his mother's, or Enzo's. It was Mr. R, his pale waxen skin and cold eyes. The specter opened his mouth and his lips moved, saying, “I'll be watching,” but the words were not audible. They were drowned out by a building roar of noise, a cacophony like the entire Virgin Galactic Center scream
ing.

Carr's vision came back all of sudden, like a light switch being turned on. His head was rolled back on his neck. He hadn't fallen, of course—there was no gravity to pull him down; he was still anchored by his gripper shoes and his body was floating, limp, like a stalk of seaweed attached to the bottom of the sea. He was watching the upside-down figure of Henri Manon running along the inside walls of the Cube, hands raised in triumph. The noise he'd heard was indeed the roaring of the packed stands, mixed with the far more unpleasant sound of Manon screaming in exultation. Carr blinked; a referee was coming toward him with the aid of mini-thrusters.

The referee hadn't declared a knockout yet. The fight
wasn't over. It wasn't over.

Move!
he screamed to himself. Feeling flooded back into him like an electric current. He reached out and grabbed the wall. He swayed, nauseous for the first time in he couldn't remember how long, but straightened himself and held a hand up to the referee, who paused, stunned to see him up.

“Reaper!” Carr shouted. “You didn't finish the job!”

Henri Manon whirled around so fast, he almost spun himself off the surface. His jaw dropped, as if Carr were indeed a dead man come back to life. He pointed a trembling finger and shouted to the referee, “He was out! I fucking knocked him out. It's over, the fight is over!”

Carr shook his head and was rewarded with a stab of pain through his skull. “It wasn't called.”

The referee hesitated, then tapped his cuff and seemed t
o be consulting with the other officials.

Manon did not bother to wait. He charged at Carr, who sprang off the wall to evade him. Carr felt slow, rattled, but he could fight; he just needed a few seconds. At the sight of him conscious and moving, the tiers of the stadium erupted in a tsunami of sound that vibrated through the Cube.

Manon chased him from wall to wall, barking curses like an enraged baboon. Carr felt his body kicking into some sort of secondary reserve, his balance returning, his vision focusing again, the pain in his face no longer noticeable.

Uncle Polly's voice, back at normal volume, said in a stunned monotone, “Hang in there, hang in there. Ten seconds.”

Carr leaped off a right angle and launched himself at Manon's back. They clinched and spun off the surface, and the bell sounded.

Back on the deck, Uncle Polly took Carr's face in his hands. “Stars almighty,” he said. “What happened?”

“He nailed me with a left,” Carr said. He only felt bad pain in his jaw when he tried to talk.

“I could see that,” Polly said. “A clean left, right on the button. How were you not knocked out?”

“I think I was, but the ref hadn't called it yet.” Over Uncle Polly's shoulder, Carr could see Manon on the other side of the deck, gesturing and shouting furiously, and a trio of officials speaking together, their heads bent over a thinscreen.

“They're reviewing the footage,” Blake said.

Scull looked at Carr in undisguised awe. “No one has ever gotten back up after taking the Reaper's killer left.”

One of the officials walked over to their corner and spoke to Uncle Polly. “Under ZGFA rules, a knockout is declared when a referee judges a competitor to have been incapacitated for six or more Martian seconds. According to the footage, your fighter got back up after 4.8 seconds, so technically the fight is still on.” He indicated Carr with a jerk of his head. “You need to decide if you want to continue or pull him.”

“Continue,” Carr said immediately.

Uncle Polly squatted down next to him on the balls of his gripper shoes and spoke in a low voice only the two of them could hear. “I know how much this means to you. But you took a bad hit. You're not going to be the same if you go back in there.
”

“I'm not done. The hit didn't finish me.”

“This isn't your only title fight. You're young, you've got time. You'll get more chances.”

“Don't pull me, coach.” Carr took off the ice pack he'd been pressing to his jaw and met Uncle Polly's eyes. “Please don't pull me. I can keep going, I know I can.”

Polly searched Carr's face with a grim, set mouth, making some fast and silent decision based on what he saw there. Then he stood and nodded to the official. “We're st
ill in.”

“He needs to be cleared by the doctor,” said the official.

The doctor checked Carr's vital signs. “Just because you aren't showing signs of it yet doesn't mean you don't have a concussion,” he said, shining a scanning light into Carr's eyes. He whistled. “You've got damn good optics,” he said. “They're still intact and online, after all that.”

Carr chuckled. He could already envision the ad that his sponsor would get out of this fight, making use of the image of Manon's fist flying toward the screen. He could even imagine the ad copy they would come up with, something like
No other optical implant can take a beating like the new L series from ImOptix.

The doctor declared him able to fight, adding a caveat about the risk of aggravating possible head trauma. When Carr stood up and made his way back to the hatch, the crowd, which had been shifting and muttering in a rising and falling wave of impatience, roared its unstinting approval. The enormous screens around the stadium closed in on signs being waved in the stands:
CARR-Y ME AWAY!
RAPTOR-OUS!
REAPER=DEAD
and
I WANT TO HAVE CARR LUKA'S BABIES.

During the break, the ventilation fans in the walls of the Cube had been whirring, circulating out the hot, motionless air. The inside of the Cube was charged with the harsh scent of mingled ozone, sweat, and testosterone. The disbelief on Henri Manon's face was matched only by the intensity of his malice. Carr returned the stare without expression. He figured they were even now. He'd nearly won in the first round, and he'd nearly lost in the second. The fight would be decided in these final six minutes. The bull-faced man across from Carr had stopped being Henri Manon, had stopped even being a person, was now only an obstacle to be overcome.

The bell sounded.

They came together like dragons battling atop rocky crags, climbing and launching and hitting, smashing into each other and grappling in flight, exchanging punishing blows while clinging to the cliffside, heaving with effort and moving at superhuman speed through angles impossible in gravity. They were no longer fighting for the title, or for the money, or for the crowd, or even for pride. They were battling out of primal need, because only one of them could be dominant, and dominance was survival. Dominance was meaning.

In the final thirty seconds, Henri Manon did what Carr expected and pulled out all the stops, executing flurry after flurry of attack, of acrobatic moves and striking combinations meant to overwhelm his opponent in the final stretch. His cardiovascular endurance was astounding, but Carr's was even better, and he'd been training extra long rounds for precisely this. If it was going to come down to a judges' decision, he would put on a hell of a show.

Manon kicked off the wall and swung for his face. Carr went sideways, up and over, and landed behind the Reaper, who had already repositioned. He grabbed Carr's kick as it flew toward him and threw the leg sideways, aiming to send Carr into an uncontrolled spin. Carr pushed his whole body into the momentum, every muscle straining with the effort of creating force without the aid of gravity. He threw his standing leg up to follow the first
in a blinding spin kick, his body laid nearly horizontal.

Manon's reflexes were a little slow. It had been a grueling first and second round, and he wasn't accustomed to an opponent who was still this fast at the end of the third. Carr's heel connected solidly with the side of the man's head.

They went flying apart, propelled in opposite directions. Carr caught the Cube wall with the ball of one foot, then fingertips. When he righted himself, he saw Manon floating, motionless. The force of the kick had even hurled the man's feet free of magnetic contact with the surface.

It took a second for the realization to sink in. He'd won. With nineteen seconds left on the clock in the third round, he had won.

He made himself count six slow seconds in his head.

One. Two, three, four. Five. Six.

Manon did not move. He wasn't going to snap back to consciousness after a knockout blow. He wasn't like Carr.

The referee, the same one who'd nearly declared a very different outcome earlier, reached Manon and checked him. He gestured, declaring a knockout.

A wave of emotion broke over Carr's head and engulfed him like an ocean. A shout exploded from the pit of his stomach and burst forth from his lungs. He launched himself off the side of the Cube, somersaulting wildly in the air. He kicked off another wall, then another, then ran a full circle up and around the whole inside surface, whooping and screaming. His jaw hurt, and his head hurt, and everything hurt, and he didn't care—it was all wonderful and ecstatic. He felt as though he might burst into flames at the subatomic level. He couldn't contain everything he felt inside the limited space of his own body.

The blue outline of the hatch flashed open and he shot through like a hawk in a dive, grabbing onto the deck and clinging to it with hands and feet, pressing his forehead to the surface, dizzy with exhilaration. He heard Uncle Polly's wild hollering, his cochlear receiver automatically turning the volume way down so his coach's shouts didn't rupture his eardrums. Then the hollering was live, right over him, and Uncle Polly's arms were lifting him and locking him in a tight embrace. Scull and Blake were clapping him on the back and shouting as well, and the stadium had turned into one giant pulse of motion and indistinguishable noise.

The referee brought him to the center of the deck. He was alone; Manon was still unconscious, being checked now by the doctor. Hal Greese filled his ample frame with air; his voice boomed out across the Virgin Galactic Center, to be carried through Valtego and across space to every city on Earth and beyond, to the settlements of the asteroid belt and the colonies of Mars:
“The winner, by knockout, and the new Lowmass Champion of the Universe, the Raptor … CARR LUKA!”

Carr saw, at the edge of the deck, emerging from the shadow of the hall, Risha's tall, slim figure. Trembling hands pressed to her mouth, she went to stand beside Uncle Polly, who put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. Risha's eyes, fixed on Carr, were bright with pride, and tears streamed down her cheeks.