Duck and Weave

Image by Sebastian Fell

Duck and Weave

by D.J. Thiess

“Sunday! Sunday! It’s Sunday and that means it’s Primetime for Crimetime! I’m Bryce Boyd for WFLK The Flock, with non-stop coverage of the best punishments fully licensed under the New Penal Authority…”

Xandra buried her head in her hands to shut out the brassy droning of the announcer, a frat boy with dimples and Kennedy hair, but the first thing they did after her arrest was install a holowire. She could close her eyes and not see his smug face, but if the NPA wanted her to hear something, she would hear it.

“Fifteen minutes, Ms. Dominguez.”

Xandra nodded to the guard, a broad-shouldered Norwegian woman with the most stereotypical long, blonde braid and expressionless brown eyes, then put her head back in her hands.

“Please shut up,” she whispered, but if the Viking woman had noticed Xandra could not tell. How the hell did I get here, she wondered, dragging her feet across the concrete floor of the windowless cell, and, as if in answer, the voice chimed again.

“Our first penitent today is a twenty-five-year-old from Chicago. She was found guilty of engaging in illegal combat sports, and was released early from her sentence of fifteen years’ hard labor in the Space-Y New Bank and Trust Prison on Mars for agreeing to alternate punishment…”

As though that was a choice, Xandra thought. She spent two weeks in the Grok Stocks before she realized it was a death sentence unless she signed on for the enhancement program, but then she might get out looking like a metal octopus. She would take her chances.

Cryo had done nothing to heal her body after those two weeks, and she could feel the scabs beneath her gloves. She tried to focus on them, to shut out the voices with something tactile. She clenched her jaw and eyes, searching for anything other than Bryce Boyd’s voice.

“There is nothing wrong with getting hit.”

Xandra looked up, expecting to see her father. It had been his voice, though he died in the protests when she was sixteen, the year the CLP seized power. Lockup Lagertha glowered silently from her stool just beyond the single pendant light between them. Xandra clenched again.

“There is nothing wrong with getting hit,” her father’s voice again, “Evade, yes, but you will still get hit. Most people fear the pain that comes with being struck, but pain is an excellent teacher. It can teach you quick lessons or slow lessons.”

Xandra visualized him, his soft nose flattened, dark skin rough under stubble, eyes wide and brown. He held training pads between them face-out, like he wanted her to see something in them. She smelled sweat and leather. A wiry thirteen-year-old, she had been drilling combos for an hour until ducking a half-second too late as his left hand caught her behind her right ear. Staggering to one knee, she could not stop tears from welling in her eyes, so she glared around the room at the big men who stopped working their bags to watch her. Their forms were clear, but their faces blurred.

“What lessons have you learned from this pain?” he asked. She stood and wiped her eyes with the back of her glove.

“That you’re a fast son-of-a-bitch with a dump truck for a fist,” she said, her chin jutting forward. The blurred faces in earshot chuckled.

“That’s the quick lesson. What’s the slow lesson?” She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, where is the pain now?”

“Gone.”

“Exactly. Pain teaches us to endure. It teaches us to travel to the future, where the pain no longer is, or to the past where it never was. Now, back to work…all of you!”

They trained all afternoon, bodies squared off and moving in unison, until Xandra could no longer raise her arms. Despite his muscles, her father was the most graceful man she ever saw in a boxing ring, and she copied his every movement, breathing as he had taught her, until she was fully spent. He took her gloves off and unwrapped her wrists, smiling down at her with undisguised pride.

“It’s time,” Brunhilda interrupted. She led Xandra through a door in the darkness and into a long, dark corridor. Xandra felt the tightness in her chest that always came before a fight, so she slowed her breathing and brought her heart rate down, matching her steps. They climbed concrete stairs and emerged into a blinding light. There was cheering in the distance, but if there were a crowd out there, she could not prove it.

“Here,” Vicky the Valkyrie indicated a raised platform that looked like a regulation boxing ring, except the ropes were a good two feet taller than her. At each corner stood an armed guard in the brown NPA uniform, each as expressionless as Sheila the Shieldmaiden, who helped her through the ropes, then left the way she came. Xandra stood under the bright lights like a specimen under microscope.

“Here she is, folks, our first penitent. Meet Alexandra Dominguez!” cheering again, and Xandra noted how Bryce’s voice had quieted. Apparently, the NPA wanted her to hear the crowd frenzied over her demise.

“There is nothing wrong with getting hit.” Too many voices in her head now.

“…stand for the Marine Corps Choral Ensemble performing the National Anthem, followed by the Poughkeepsie Children’s Choir singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers!’”

The stadium quieted and singing began. She clenched again.

“Where is the pain?” her father asked.

“Here,” she gasped, pointing at the upper left side of her ribcage, then glanced over at her opponent. Fourteen like her, but short and stocky. Some redhaired Irish farmer from DeKalb, bailing hay and eating steak every day. Xandra looked back at her father’s blank stare. “What?”

“No. Where is the pain?” he asked again. She almost reached for her ribs again, then waited for his lesson. “The pain won’t last. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, you’ll wake up and the pain will be gone.”

“Okay, I’ll fight this girl next week then,” she wheezed, but he only stared. “Fine. What do I do?”

“Win with this,” he pointed to her temple, “slow your maldita breathing and calm your mind. Become future you…or past you but get the hell out of now. Stick and move.”

The bell sounded and something clicked inside her. That was the first fight Xandra found the flow. She had heard other fighters describe it before, but this was the moment she finally found it. She did not transcend the pain— every movement was fire—but pain became only a small part of the greater whole she had become. She moved outside her mind, became a thinking body, a moving mind. And she knocked out Patty McPugilist in the third round.

Now, years later, she did not remember every detail. She did remember the two broken ribs and how she had mocked her father every day for a month afterward.

“Right below the tetas, Papá, that’s where the pain is,” she said, trying to embarrass him. And he had flushed at first, then laughed and shrugged. Then one day he smiled broadly and replied simply, “What tits?” Asshole always got the last word. God, she missed him.

The touch of hands on her body brought her back to the present.

“…okay, punishment fans, it’s almost redemption time! Let’s get our first penitent ready…”

The guards removed her robe, leaving her in nothing but a small pair of shorts. The intense lights of the stadium beat down on her like a refracted sunbeam from the magnifying glass of a neglected child. Feeling the scrutiny of the unseen masses, Bryce’s voice was extra crass in her head.

“What a shameful display of vanity!? Look at those muscles. All those wasted hours to look like some pagan gladiator…”

The crowd booed and hissed, while the guards resumed their posts at the corners.

“Aaaaaand let’s meet our volunteer. Dr. Alesha Jones was Professor of Sociology at Ignatius University. She’s best known for her groundbreaking study of west coast biker gangs, for which she lived two years with the Demon Screamers. The study found her in a Mars Prison, however, after she participated in a contract killing. Now she’s paid her debt to society and has returned to work for the NPA. Welcome, Dr. Jones!”

From somewhere opposite Xandra came a nightmare assemblage. Not a steel octopus, but a twisted mass of human flesh, grey metal, and fur. She walked on eight machine legs like a bionic spider, though the thorax was clearly human. The arms, however, were far too long and hairy to be human, with two sets of joints, bulging muscles forged in the cold of the Mars penitentiary, and capped with red boxing gloves. The floor of the ring shook as the Martian stepped over the ropes.

Well hell, Xandra thought.

She had seen the rich DeKalb girl one more time, at least what was left of her. Xandra was only thirteen days into her sentence in the Grok stocks, though it felt like a decade. Her muscles had grown, even if she still felt heavy from the artificial gravity field. Her lungs were heavier from the arsenic and lead runoff, but she barely noticed the cough over the constant cycle of hymns and sermons the prison piped through their holowires. “Ne plus ultra! Look no further than your miserable lot” it was saying. She remembered the sermon as if it were yesterday, because that was when she saw Saoirse O’Slugger.

She was three lines away, lines that stretched miles in either direction toward the red horizon and just happened to be working brine hoses in Xandra’s quadrant. With all six of her arms—if you could call them arms. They were not the muscles of the farm girl that had nearly knocked Xandra out with a body blow, but elastic silver tubes, made prehensile with jagged pincers at their ends. They maneuvered the hose in a sickening mechanical rhythm. Her torso was like an iron lung Xandra had seen once in a museum, and below the legs were thick, disjointed metal stumps. Only the redhaired face remained unmodified, although it in no way resembled the alert face that had ducked all but Xandra’s last cross. It was after the bell rang, the unconscious face on the mat, blank and distant. “The heavens belong to God” the sermon droned in her ear, though she could have sworn she also heard her father’s voice say “Stick and move.” Something snapped inside her. The work, the sermons, the vacant look on the cyborg’s face…this was her end if she stayed. Some technocrat’s vision of the perfect worker, somehow reduced beyond even the body of a slave to a bodiless, mindless state. Xandra took the alternate punishment the next day.

“It looks like our would-be gladiator is going to get her chance to be treated like one. The NPA has ruled that, for her crimes, this penitent will square off with someone truly devout and reformed in a one-on-one match, no holds barred. At last, it’s Primetime for Crimetime!”

The bell brought Xandra back to the present and the spider woman moved toward her, snarling contempt. The human head had short, buzzed hair, but this face, too, had a thousand-light-year stare, eyes sunken, face euthymic, nose twisted and broken. Cold, distant, still lost in the atmosphere of Mars.

She studied the face a moment too long and felt air move as she just ducked a massive arm, then pivoted away. The spider was fast, inhumanly fast, but Xandra was good. She came again, testing her considerable range, but Xandra sidestepped in close and delivered a one-two to the body, then wove back out to safety. The body felt real enough, which was good, because she probably could not reach the face.

They danced for a minute. Then Jones feinted left. Xandra recognized it and tried to spin away, but one of the metal legs came down on top of her foot and pinned her, the sharp tip threatening to crush bone. She tried to pull away, but the metal leg held her fast as the massive right hand of her opponent caught her just below the ear. Lights flashed in her vision and she staggered back. There was an overwhelming whine as her consciousness teetered, and she was vaguely aware of falling into the corner.

“The pain is here, Papá,” Xandra said, holding her father’s lifeless hand in one of hers, the other over her heart. He lay peacefully in his casket, face smooth in peaceful repose. Tears slid off her nose and landed on his wrist. Through wet eyes the bulky men around her blurred even more. Why weren’t they working their bags?

In her confusion, and in the distance all around her, she could hear screaming, but far away. It was not here, not now, but definitely Xandra’s voice. From the same distance came another.

“Oh, that’s a hit. Jones has her on the ropes now. Working the body…that has to be a broken rib!”

“Where is the pain?” he was still in his casket, face frozen in a kind smile, but Xandra could hear him clearly. A scream rent the air again, high and strangled with spit and tears as grief finally got the better of her. Bulky forms pushed closer around her, and each of their faces were Bryce Boyd’s. “Stick and move. Duck and—”

She lunged at the Bryces, swinging wildly. But they weren’t there, they weren’t now.

“Looks like this one has some spirit left in her! Dominguez is off the ropes and swinging, but she doesn’t have the reach of Jones, and it’s only a matter of time until—OH! She tried to clinch up and…yes, that’s a broken arm!”

Giant men, nameless faces of her childhood who passed through her father’s gym, learned to be better people from him, surrounded her now. They held her fast until she stopped swinging. Xandra wrapped her arms around one hulk and the tears flowed. She could not stop them if she wanted. Again, she became a pure connection of mind, heart, and body, now stripped to its most basic and sorrowful state.

“What is this pain’s lesson, mi hijita?” his voice again above the screaming, which had lost some of its intensity.

“Papá, I am beat,” she sobbed into a black suit, “I’m not just losing, I’m broken.”

“That is only the quick lesson.”

“What a clobber!?! Not going to the gym anytime soon! I don’t know how she is still on her feet, but that’s the bell for the first round!”

Xandra fell to the ground in a heap.

“What’s the slow lesson?”

She was thirteen again, staring at the training pads, her head ringing. No that wasn’t ringing. It was screaming, but far away now.

“I don’t know, Papá,” she said through tears. Wait, that wasn’t right, she thought, she had not really been crying that day, one of the happiest days of her life. Everything was changing.

“Yes, everything changes. That’s a good lesson,” he said as if she had spoken aloud. “But it is not this lesson. Have you lost a bout since I died?”

“No.”

“And why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” he held the pads between them as if the answer was in them. She jabbed and slid left. Ducked under and changed stance, weaving out of his reach, searching for the flow. The reason was right there…why she kept fighting, why she kept winning, and why she had finally been caught.

“Sorry for the delay, folks! This one passed out on us, but we have our doctors nearby to keep penitents alert and alive. Okay, back to the action and OH! Mama! Jones comes out swinging. I don’t think our would-be David is going to take Goliath this time. She’s on the ropes again, taking blow after blow. It won’t be long now!”

“The pain is not here, not now. Go to the future…go to the past, just go.”

That was it. She ducked. His hands came at her, but she evaded. Her own hands flew as well, striking the pads in rhythm. Pain stabbed her in the ribs, but the pain was not here. She jabbed and danced, and the whole time her father’s face was in front of her, smiling and resting, swinging his massive left and forever asleep.

This pain became part of something greater, part of a fight that would never happen again, but one that she would never stop fighting as long as she lived. Out there were voices and pain, but she rode the flow to a time that had been before, to the long highlight reel her father left her. She had won this fight—not physically, but she would live. The CLP would make sure of that. But to her winning and losing, life and death, were now one and the same, and all else was movement, was dance. A constant sticking and moving.

“Duck and weave,” he said through his smile, and all else went silent.

END