For a long moment, Howler blinked at her, his eyes as wide as saucers. “Him? Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “This is highly irregular…” he muttered, but she could see the gears turning in his head. You’re injured.”

  “It’s not deep,” she said, showing him the cut on her arm. “The medics can bandage it. Will you announce my challenge?”

  He hesitated for another moment before his curiosity won out. She smiled to herself—the only predictable thing about Linnaeans might be their obsession with fighting.

  “Now hold on just one minute, folks,” he said, his voice booming above the sounds of the crowd exiting the stands. “Ember Whitlock has just personally challenged Ryan Cox, ranked 290th, to a match. Should he accept, they will fight as soon as she is cleared by the medical team.”

  This time, there was nothing to distract Ember from the full force of the spectators’ excitement. The noise was thunderous, shaking the platform beneath her feet and rattling her brain inside her skull. Howler steadied her with one furry hand, a grave look on his face. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Me too, Ember thought privately, but before she could respond someone seized her from below, pulling her down the steps to the arena floor. “What the hell are you thinking?” Instructor Tarek asked, his face flushed and brown eyes narrowed. “You can’t just go around challenging whomever you like, Ember. He’s a hundred ranks above you!”

  “Well, I did,” Ember said, with a half-shrug.

  The falcon reached out as if to shake her. “You can’t. It’s disrespectful to him and the rankers between you.”

  Ember shrugged him off. “I know the rules. It’s up to him if he wants to accept or not.”

  “Of course he won’t! He has nothing to gain. If he wins, you could claim that you were injured from the previous fight, and if he loses, everything he has worked for will be forfeit.”

  “Let’s ask him, then,” Ember said, turning toward where Ryan was elbowing his way down the spiral staircase. He appeared before them a moment later, exactly as Ember remembered him: a lean and scrappy canine, with a coarse black-, white- and tan-mottled coat.

  “Well, this is unexpected,” he drawled, his canines sticking out over his body lip. His disk-shaped ears were pulled back, betraying his irritation. “A little presumptuous, don’t you think?”

  “Exactly,” Tarek said, “I told you, Em-”

  “I’ll have to put you in your place.”

  Tarek froze, looking like he might really implode. “Ryan, surely you can’t mean to accept? I know you coach, he wouldn’t approve of this-”

  Ryan waved a hand in his direction as if silencing him, but he pushed on, desperate. “The proper procedure-”

  Ryan threw his head back as he cackled, a breeze ruffling his shaggy hair. “Fuck the procedure. The whole point of being a ranker is to fight!”

  “Exactly,” Ember smiled. “See, coach? He’s on board.”

  The falcon looked incredulously between them, rendered momentarily speechless, and Ryan sidestepped him to approach Ember. “Get your arm treated,” he told her, eyes gleaming. “I’ll wait.”

  ***

  Ember sat sandwiched between two medics in a state of painful anticipation. She suffered through ten minutes of her arm being cleaned and bandaged; then another five of counting fingers and following a pencil with her eyes. Her back was to Ryan, but she could feel his presence as he stretched and loped about, working the crowd into a frenzy.

  At last, she was allowed to scramble to her feet, and she joined Ryan in the center of the arena. As Howler began the reading of the rules, she allowed herself to remember the suffering her opponent had caused Carn—for it was Ryan, leader of the canine fraternity, who had dared the fox to split off from the group when the rogue was terrorizing Mendel. He was the reason her first friend had lost half an ear, an eye, and something less tangible; but because his transgressions—forgoing the treatment and going out after curfew—were not so different from Carn’s, he had been allowed to return to school for the spring semester.

  Ryan sneered as Howler directed them to bow. “I’ll make sure you’ll never fight again,” he growled, so low she almost missed his words, and Ember no longer had any doubt that he blamed her for his suspension. She gave him a wry smile, daring him to try.

  As they straightened up, Ember activated her infrared vision, laying the canine’s body out like the subject of a dissection. She immediately felt a sense of relief as a map of colors bloomed to life, quickly followed by morbid curiosity: where the colors should have been symmetrical, patches of reds, blues, and purples swelled over his soft tissues seemingly at random. Most shocking was a spidery splotch of red over his abdomen, which reminded Ember of red streaks that appeared on the skin of patients with serious infections. So this is the consequence of forgoing the treatment.

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  Before she could catalog every area of asymmetry, Howler called for the fight to begin, and her attention was temporarily diverted to more practical pursuits. Ryan turned his dark brown eyes on her—that thrilling predator’s stare, like looking down the barrel of the mercenary’s rifle again—and she was taken back to their first-ever meeting in the Greenhouse club, when he had dismissed her like a minor annoyance.

  Her anger and pain had brought her instincts to the surface, and his threat drew them out, like twisting the lid off of a tap. Something electrifying welled up inside of her, setting her nerves aflame, and the world was rendered in crisp detail: the soft thud of Ryan’s footfalls on the packed sand as he circled her; the heat radiating from his body in waves; the whooshing of her own blood in her ears. Her body was not enough to contain the feeling, and she felt it spread out and press down—that elusive lethal aura, coming out to meet Ryan’s own.

  The canine’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly, and then he closed the distance between them in a single bound. He struck at her head and she jerked away, avoiding his fist by a centimeter. His tail whipped, helping him change direction in an instant, and he came at her again from the side. She half-jumped, half-threw herself backward, redirecting his strike with her hand.

  There was no time to recover before he continued his onslaught. He was terrifyingly fast and agile, attacking from all angles at once. His compact muscles generated explosive power, and it was all Ember could do to keep countering, although she took damage even from that. He seemed tireless, too, likely the result of a mutation that granted him larger lungs than a human.

  She slipped to the side of a punch only for his hand to plow right through her guard, seizing her around the neck. The blunt nails dug into her flesh, restricting her airway, and his hot breath fanned over her face. His lips pulled back in a snarl, revealing serrated teeth, and she felt his intent to make good on his promise to injure her permanently. A spike of fear struck Ember’s heart, and out of desperation she clapped her hands over his ears, hard.

  The canine stumbled, and she twisted out of his grip into a strategic retreat. The crowd went wild as she struggled to catch her breath, one hand instinctively coming up to rub where he had choked her. He was stronger than she had anticipated—her superior in speed, strength, and technique—and she had no doubt that her prowess was closer to Cleo’s than it was to his.

  She took a breath, calming her mind. Ryan might be the better fighter, but she had not selected him as her opponent just for the sake of revenge: she knew being off of the treatment would have affected his body condition, and she had the unique skill to find out exactly how.

  The canine was shaking his head, disoriented but recovering fast. She redoubled her efforts with her infrared vision, instinct guiding her to his legs. As he shifted, she picked up on an asymmetrical pattern in his knees; in particular, the region around the right patella was red and yellow while the left was blue and green. She thought back to the human and dog diagrams she had studied in preparation for the fight, identifying the inflamed tissue as the anterior cruciate ligament, essential for stabilizing the knee. If she had to wager a guess, the elevated mutation rate of the bone structure in his knee had outpaced that of the ligament, putting it under stress.

  Her time for planning was up when Ryan refocused on her, his eyes narrowing and a low growl building in his chest. He had been testing her before, but he would want to end the fight quickly now that she had injured him. “That was a cheap move,” he said, “but I suppose that’s all you can manage.”

  She said nothing, bending her knees and lowering her center of gravity in preparation for his attack. He sprinted toward her like a missile of muscle, aiming for her head. She ducked beneath one strike and blocked another, the force of it jarring her arm from hand to shoulder. He was overwhelming her, clearly intending to grab her again, and she had a terrible premonition in which the serrated teeth shredded her neck.

  She pushed herself to feel the earth beneath her feet, a steady grounding force, and let energy build in her leg muscles. When he swung at her again, she darted to the left as fast as she could, following a forty-five-degree angle so that she ended up directly to his side. It was exactly the split-second movement that snakes were built for, and she felt the air itself warp around her.

  The canine’s eyes followed her move, and in an impressive display of control he began to twist around on the spot, his tail sticking out to balance him. But as he replanted his feet, he teetered in place, losing all momentum. His face went slack with shock, and without further ado he crumpled into a heap on the arena floor, one hand clutching his right knee.

  For several seconds, the crowd did not know how to react. A few disbelieving shouts of “Get up!” punctuated the silence, although Ember noticed that Howler said nothing—he, who had watched so many ranked matches, would have recognized such an injury right away.

  At last, his booming voice rose above the others. “In the upset of the season, the newcomer, Ember Whitlock, is the winner of the fight!” he said. The spectators made their opinions known, their tone half-astonished and half-discontented at what they must have seen as an anti-climatic ending. “Make no mistake,” the announcer continued, sounding a little stunned himself, “what you have seen this afternoon was no accident. It appears to me, at least, that Ember detected Ryan’s weakness and set up a situation in which to exploit it.”

  There were some mutterings from the crowd before someone started to cheer in earnest, and then anything else was lost among the mounting roar. Ember sought Corax, pleased to see that he was standing at his full height, both black-feathered hands crossed over the top of his cane as he considered her. She smiled at him, aware of how she must look: her hair wild, her uniform torn, and blood painted across her skin like paint on a canvas. But at last, she had his attention.

  Ryan groaned, turning in the sand, and she spared him a glance. More likely than not, his knee would require surgery, and it would take years to recover his strength if he managed it at all. Taking some pity on him, she knelt by his side. “You’ll put me in my place, will you?” she couldn’t resist saying, and he spat at her in a way that was more pathetic than threatening. She sobered. “Heed my words, Ryan, and have your stomach examined, else you may die before your knee even has time to heal.”

  With that, she stood up, resolving to think no more about him. “Ember!” someone called, and she turned to see a blur of orange fur plowing down the stairs and into the arena, much to the dismay of the nearby officials.

  “Carn, you’re not supposed to be-” she started to say, her words cutting off as he threw his arms around her.

  “That was far too risky, but… thank you. Thank you,” he said, and she heard the tremor in his voice. He bent his head and his soft, black-tipped ear pressed into the crook of her neck. “I am once again in your debt.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, hugging him back even as pain unfurled beneath her skin. “Let us hope that I made an impression on Corax, too.”