Kane didn’t want to talk about the pit, so he changed the subject. “I see you have your fingers back.”
“Yeah,” Cutter said, tipping his head as if to admire them. “It’s a halfway decent patch job. But I’ll probably lose them in the next game, so I’m not getting attached.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Get it? Attached?”
The bad joke prompted Kane to study Cutter’s pupils, which were wide enough to reveal how much Gold the medics had given him. He recalled the conversation he’d overheard about building up a resistance to the drug. What would happen when the inhalers didn’t work on him anymore? How would he compete without the rush?
The door opened, and his boss walked inside. He jerked his head toward the hallway and told Cutter, “Back to the dorm.”
Cutter patted one of Kane’s legs through the blanket. “See you around, kid.”
After he left and shut the door behind him, the boss gripped both hips and watched Kane as if he didn’t know what to do with him.
“How much trouble am I in?” Kane asked.
His boss laughed without humor. “Almost as much as I’m in.” He rubbed the back of his thick, beefy neck. “We really mucked up opening night for the casino.”
“But I forfeited.”
“That’s not how it works. The last man alive is the champion. When you didn’t finish Cutter, you threw a wrench in the system. Then I made it worse by interfering”—he pointed at Kane’s neck—“and telling my men to seal off that wound. Now there’s no clear winner, so the casino had to freeze the payouts while they decide how to break the tie.”
“Cutter should be the winner.”
“That’s what some people think. Everyone else says it should be you, since Cutter was half-dead already. Either way, it makes Zhang look like he can’t handle his business. That’s bad for both of us. He’s not the most forgiving guy.”
A chill gripped Kane’s stomach. If Ari Zhang had sold Renny’s girlfriend into slavery as punishment for a picked pocket, what would he do to someone who’d humiliated him in front of an arena full of spectators? Could the mafia track down Cassia or his mom and make them pay for what he’d done?
His boss gave a sarcastic huff. “The only reason you’re alive is because, for some ass-backward reason, the guests are still crazy about you. That stunt you pulled made you look even nuttier than when you attacked Nicky Malone. No one will shut up about it.”
Based on that, Kane knew how the casino would break the tie. “They want a rematch.”
His boss didn’t say yes, but he didn’t deny it, either. “Listen, I hate to do this to you, but I have to let you dry out. The Gold won’t work until we lower your resistance, so as of today, you’re cut off.” His gaze moved to the floor. “I won’t lie, kid. This is gonna hurt. The medic wants to keep you here so he can monitor your heart and restart it if it stops.”
Kane’s lips drifted apart. Was his addiction that bad?
“Hang in there,” his boss said, then turned and strode toward the door. “I’ll see you when it’s over.”
During the next week, Kane learned that hell wasn’t a mythical place designed to scare sinners into good behavior. Hell was a state of survival in which suffering never ended. That was the real punishment—constant pain. His nerve endings screamed from one sunrise to the next with no interruption in torture. The only relief came when he died, though it didn’t last long. The medic restarted his heart and apologized. He said he could sedate Kane during the withdrawal, but Ari Zhang had told him not to.
This was a lesson, and Kane learned it well.
He improved the following week, when his symptoms lessened to the same ones he’d felt on Batavion. It struck him as funny, how at the mining camp he’d wished for death to take away his agony. Back then he hadn’t known the meaning of the word.
A few days later a team of workers came to haul his limp body out of bed and drag him to the washroom for a shower. As the men wrinkled their noses and scrubbed him down, he noticed they were Whiteshirts, not medics, which told him his lesson was meant to be shared. Rumor would spread about what he looked like after two weeks with no inhaler—gray-skinned and trembling, his once-bulging biceps now atrophied to half their size—and the workers would think twice before disobeying.
He certainly would.
When his boss came to see him, Kane could’ve hugged the man if his arms were strong enough. His boss’s familiar face and duck-like waddle reminded him of how invincible he’d been in the dorm. He would give anything to feel that way again.
“How’re you holding up, kid?”
Kane locked eyes on the golden tube strung around his boss’s neck. A distant voice of reason whispered that the drug was the reason for all his suffering. If he used the Gold again, he would never be free of it. But that voice was quickly muffled by the screaming of every living cell within his body. He needed a breath of sweet air. He would do anything to have it.