Page 72 of Ghost’s Awakening

I hopped back. Two short steps and a small bounce, the way you back off a man to line up the finish. Every eye on the floor watched me measure him.

"NOW!!" I screamed it at the mat, at the back of Renzo's head, loud enough to strip my throat raw. It was the signal, and to the seats it was a fighter screaming at a man he was about to finish.

Out of the corner of my eye, Trenza and Mateo came over the ropes.

Two bodies. Hands on the top rope, up and over together, a woman with her hair flying and a kid who'd finally put down his beer, and they hit the mat on my right and were already running. Behind them the enforcers moved. I saw two of them come off the ring steps with their hands out, and they were slow. They'd stood at ropes all night watching a crowd drink. Nobody had told them the crowd could run.

"Get them off the mat!" Harlan, from the foot of the steps, at a volume I'd never heard out of him. "Get them⁠—"

Screams came up out of the seats, sharp and confused. I was already running. From my side, straight at Renzo, while Trenza and Mateo came at him from theirs.

Mid-stride, I looked up.

The cable. The mic on the end of it, fifteen feet up, swaying in the heat, and Renzo under it. A foot to the right of dead under. Close enough.

I jumped. My right foot came down on his back between the shoulder blades, and he held. His arms locked and shook under my weight and he held, and I drove off him, and Trenza was already there. Her hands were laced in front of her at the waist, and my left foot hit her palms. Mateo caught my right foot in both hands as it came off Renzo's back, and I steadied myself with a hand flat on top of his head, and then the two of them drove.

"Go!" Mateo, under me, through his teeth.

"Up, cook!" Trenza, from under my left foot, and the scream came right behind the words. It tore out of her at a size the room wasn't ready for, and her hands rose with it. Past her chest, over her head, her whole back and both legs straightening under me in one shove, and Mateo shoved up under my other foot with both arms and his skull grinding into my hip, and I sprang off the two of them, and the ring dropped away.

Everything went quiet in my head. Three hundred people screaming, and I couldn't hear one of them. The lamps were beside me instead of above me. I was going up past the top of the ring posts, into the dark up under the beams where the mic hung, and my right arm was already out, my hand open, reaching, and there it was. Small. Silver. An inch past my fingers, and then, at the very top, where there was nothing left in the jump, an inch inside them.

And past it, above it, the mezzanine. The open panel. Gravedigger stood at the rail with his square handheld in his fist, looking at me. Straight at me, a man in the air fifteen feet over his ring, and there was nothing on his face. Nothing I could read. He didn't lean, and he didn't lift two fingers off the rail. He watched.

My hand closed on the mic.

Then my whole weight hung off it. Something up in the beams cracked and gave, the pulley letting go, and the mic stayed in my fist with thirty feet of cable paying out behind it, and I came down, feet first, and hit the mat in a squat with my free hand flat on the plywood and a coil of black cable dropping around me.

The mic was warm from the lamps. I turned it on its side, and there, under my thumb, sat a slider, the on-off switch, pushed to the off end.

I flipped it the other way.

"—out of the ring, get them—" The announcer's voice, still coming through the horns off his own handheld, cut off in the middle of the word, because the building squealed. A live mic, switched on under a roof full of horns, and the horns heard themselves. One second of microphone feedback, high and thin, shrieking out of every one of them at once, and three hundred people flinched from it with their hands halfway to their ears, and it was the best sound I'd heard in four months.

The mic worked. It had never stopped working. They'd hoisted it into the beams and flicked it off and left it there, because who was going to climb fifteen feet of air to reach it? Nobody had bothered to cut the wire. Somewhere down that cable sat Nolan's tap, the ears he'd hidden in the line, and that squeal had just gone straight into them. Past Nolan, in the dark, was Ghost, waiting on the word I'd been saving for him.

I stood up, and the crowd was gone from my head. Trenza and Mateo were at my sides and the enforcers were coming up the steps and over the ropes, and I couldn't see any of it. The whole warehouse had gone down to one man at one rail. I looked up into his small dark eyes, and I lifted the mic, and I gave him every word slow, so that nobody in that building, or outside it, could mistake a single one.

"The answer is still no, you little Gravebitch."

17

DARKNESS

GHOST

The green meter jumped.

It had sat flat on Nolan's screen at nothing for three hours, one dim bar in a dark room. Now it slammed to the top of its little window.

"That's the mic!" Nolan's hand was already moving, one switch, the feed off his headphones and onto the net, and his voice cracked in the middle of the whisper. "It's live—somebody turned it on⁠—"

A squeal tore through every earpiece on the block, high and thin, a live microphone coming on under a roof full of horns. The squeal died. The wire filled with crowd noise, hundreds of voices at once, and through all of it came the one voice that mattered.

"The answer is still no, you little Gravebitch." My head ran on channels, twelve of them on a bad night, all trying to take over each other. Every single one went quiet.

Caleb. Close against the mic, steady, each word laid down slow so that no man in that warehouse could claim he hadn't caught it. He wasn't talking to us. He was saying it to Gravedigger's face. The whole club had spent two weeks braced for a signal, guessing at what the word might be, and whatever any of them had guessed, it wasn't that. It wasn't Gravebitch through the horns with another no stacked on top of every no that had come before it.