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John puts his fists up across the portal rig from Quinn and tries to remember what an honest boxing bout feels like. Augmented matches are normally won by endurance — harder hits, faster dodges, no breaking until a system finally fails and the pain comes flooding in — and he has none of his usual gear. No chest plating. No skull plating. Six years of being told he was useless on top of the original league fall. But the guard position is still natural, and there had been good days in the ring. He falls into it.

Quinn opens with three light jabs to feel for the rhythm of the fight, then comes in for real — a knee to the chest that John has to block with his bare forearms, plate against plate, the unfamiliar crunch of unpadded augments meeting. John eats hits along his arms and back trying to protect his ribs, catches a jab to the face, and is forced onto the defensive in the kind of dodge-and-back-away footwork that would get a fighter booed in a real ring. Quinn taunts him about the missing platings and the password John has spent years trying to guess — and then mentions, casually, that Ulric never saved the code. He hit a string of random keys to lock John out and forgot them on purpose. John knows immediately it is true. He is never getting his platings back. The hope he has been carrying for six years drops out of him in the middle of the fight.

Quinn presses the advantage. A rib cracks, then a few more solid blows to the chest set John's nanites scrambling. He lands one good kick before being shoved down; he scrambles back to his feet just in time to block a kick to the head with his forearm. Outside, the door rattles — *boss is back, with riflemen; lie down, Johnny*. He attacks instead, takes a broken nose for his trouble, gets bodychecked into the wall, and feels the skin of his arms split as his platings run out of energy to redirect force. He is losing. He has always been going to lose. The old reflex sets in — embarrassed by his art he had quit; mocked at the police academy he had looked for ways out; ordered to fall in the EFL he had obeyed. Always looking for an out. He glances at the portal, thinking he could get through, fetch Ryan and reinforcements, come back.

And he thinks of Ealstan readying to die against the Vikings to defend his family. He thinks of Sefawynn alone in the square shouting defiance at a god. He thinks that maybe his life has not been worth much, but his death could be. He dashes for the rig and slams his fist into the control panel, splitting it open and mangling the buttons, gets one more strike in before Quinn tackles him. Quinn pummels him on the floor — arms, then everything — and the nanites, busy keeping him alive, stop bothering to mask the pain. He lies waiting for the finish.

The door opens. Ulric walks in, frowns at the wrecked panel. Behind him in the courtyard Marshal is kneeling over Ealstan's bloodied body. Quinn apologises — John got a swing in. *No matter,* Ulric says. *Another rescue team will come.* The beacon is still live. And then Ulric mentions, distractedly, that something has gone wrong outside — the Vikings are being pushed back, regrouping on the docks, and *some insane woman is running around writing runes on the doors.* Quinn notes, baffled, *I thought they couldn't write.* John understands then that breaking the machine has not been meaningless. None of this has been meaningless. For once, it has meant everything. He crawls to his feet and puts his fists back up.

Ulric folds his arms — he has always enjoyed a good bout — and lets the fight continue. Quinn urges him again to lie down; John refuses. He needles. *Why did you take my platings, when I'd agreed to the fall?* *You wanted to break me, didn't you?* Ulric doesn't disagree. And John sees something he should have seen long ago: humiliating him hadn't been about him personally; Ulric had broken him at his prime to remind everyone else what he could do. Quinn swings, John dodges and starts pounding kidney-first through the plate, and Quinn flinches — he is starting to feel the pain too. Behind those wide eyes is fear. Even years ago, in a fixed fight, Quinn had been worried that he might lose.

John decides to gamble. He calls up the password screen for his platings and asks Ulric, loudly, what the odds are that random key-mashes will land on the same random keys Ulric used. He hits a string of numbers. The overlay tells him *Password denied* — but his opponents can't see that. He straightens, shakes out his hands, drops into an aggressive boxing stance, and grins. *Now look at that.* Quinn goes immediately on the defensive, believing the platings are live. He is, John reflects, a failed artist, a passable cop, a passable boxer — but a great liar. He gets his hands around Quinn's head and knees him in the face, takes him to the wall, drops him with a body shot. Quinn whimpers on the floor, beaten.

John hauls him up by the shirt and tells Ulric that he has a new door guard. He leans close to whisper a thank-you, asks Quinn to start a new life and give his best to Tacy when he gets out of prison, then throws him through the portal — which Ulric has just brought back online with a manual override, exit-pointed at the Seattle PD station. Then John stamps the override switch into pieces, snatching the beacon from the machine as it dies.

Ulric shoots him in the chest. The round goes in — no plating there after all — and John collapses with his nanites in full panic, the beacon still in his fingers. Ulric steps up and aims at his forehead. *Drop it, Johnny.* *Sorry,* John whispers. *I've learned to fear someone else more than I do you.* *Who?* *The man I used to be.* He squeezes, and the beacon crunches in his fist.

A shot sounds. Ulric gapes at the hole in his chest; the next shot vaporises his head. Behind the falling corpse, leaning bloodied in the open doorway, is Ealstan — gun in one hand, a severed arm with the finger still curled around the trigger in the other, two dead riot-armoured soldiers in the courtyard behind him. *How,* John manages, *did you beat two fully armed and moderately plated modern soldiers?* *They didn't have bows,* Ealstan says, and sinks down beside the doorframe with a tired grin. John cannot help but return it.