I find the red collar in seventeen minutes.
He's roughing up a merchant against a wall, bored about it, picking his nails between shoves.
I tap him on the shoulder. He turns around.
I hit him hard enough in the jaw to knock a molar loose.
He stares at me. His tongue finds the gap where the tooth was.
"Do you," he says slowly, "have any idea who I work for?"
"Yeah," I say. "That's why I hit you."
The three other red collars who step out of the gambling den behind him don't ask questions. Neither do I.
I stop fighting after the second punch.
* * *
The cage swings.
I come back to myself to the sound of a thousand people screaming and the smell of blood and industrial chemicals, and below me, through the iron bars, is the Sump-Pit arena.
Alchemical floodlights so harsh everything looks bleached. Sand dark with old blood. Stands packed floor to ceiling with Graft-Gang members and their invited guests, all of them drunk, all of them betting.
There are five other people in the cage. Four men and a woman. Canvas rags, desperate faces. Debtors, all of them.
"First time?" The woman is staring down through the grate, arms crossed. Skinny, black hair, a jaw set like she's made a decision and isn't revisiting it.
"Yeah," I say.
"Don't run," she says. "It likes it when you run. Makes the crowd happy and it gets messy when the crowd's happy."
I look at her. "You've been in one of these before?"
"My father owed them money. I was the collateral." She glances at the LeMat on my hip. "That real?"
"Very."
"Good." She nods at the arena below. "There are four gates. East tunnel leads to the street stairs. Just in case."
The cage drops.
* * *
The Goliath steps into the light and the crowd goes insane.
It's everything the name promises. Ten feet of muscle wrapped in bone spurs that punch through its own skin from the inside, veins lit up toxic green.
Its eyes are two blown-out black saucers. It doesn't roar. It just looks at us and starts moving and that silence is scarier than any roar.
It kills three debtors in under a minute. Fast and terrible and the crowd screams for each one.
I stand in the center and watch the gland.
Each kill swells it visibly, a pulsing sac behind its lower left ribs pumping GADX-147 harder and faster.
The Graft-Gangs want the adrenaline maxed before slaughter. So do I.
"Hey." The woman is still next to me. Still alive. She's got a piece of rebar from a broken cage strut in both hands. "You have an actual plan or are you just standing there looking philosophical?"
"Watching the gland," I say. "It's almost at peak."
"The thing that's about to charge us?"
"That's the one."
She makes a sound that is not quite a laugh. "Fantastic. Brilliant. I'm so glad I ended up next to you."
The Goliath looks at me.
"There it is," I say.
"There what is," she starts, and then it charges.
I let it come.
I wait until the last possible moment and then I drop and slide under the swinging fist and put two rounds into the bone plate over its lower flank.
The plate cracks but holds. It pivots and kicks me and I go sideways and hit the sand hard enough to see white.
Up. Move.
I put the third round directly into the crack. The plate blows off.
Two seconds. I drive the Extractor into the exposed flesh, find the gland, pull the trigger.
The pneumatic hiss. The glass barrel flooding blue.
The Goliath's legs fold. It comes down like a building and the impact shakes the whole arena.
Above, in the glass booths where the bosses watch from velvet chairs, somebody screams into a speaker.
"He stole the gland. Kill him! Kill that man!"
The gates open. All four of them.
The woman is next to me with her rebar, eyes wide, chest heaving. "You got it?"
"Got it."
"East tunnel," she says. "Now. Run."
We run.