New Revenge

Holed in a barn ten miles off town, the largest underground fighting ring in the west claimed its victims night after grueling night. If your horse was stolen, your farm burned, your gun turned against you in threat, you might find yourself drawn into the lull of the ring, might find yourself ensnared by the money. You might find yourself crouched on thin sand, over bloodstains, yours, or not.

Rue wasn’t like them.

She hadn’t wandered into the ring one lonesome night. She hadn’t been threatened by a rogue group of bandits. She’d never owned a house. A horse. A gun, even. The only weapon she had ever possessed was a knife, from her father.

She had been born into the ring.

Born to fight.

And she wasn’t even advantaged physically. Not a blessing of luck or a testament to a long line of strength and perseverance. She was always sick. Always having caught something from the other fighters. Her throat burnt when she breathed. Her lungs rasped. No, she was small, half the size of any other fighter, a foot shorter than some. Her fist a walnut to their orange.

Her training was different, better, her father, Alcaeus, said. A training plan that could enable even the most disadvantaged to win. He loved it more than anything. The Alcaeus girls, they called his trainees. 

Who better to test it on than his own daughter?

Night after night she fantasized about leaving and starting her new life, but her dreams always stopped at one crucial point, the point after she escaped, when she looked forward. There was nothing there. The ring was all she had ever known. All she had ever been. She was rooted here. She couldn’t leave like the others when they won their prize, when they’d entertained enough to fight their way back into society. No. She was the ring. It was all she had ever been.

She would die in that ring.

So when her training partner, Agafya, had approached her with a plan of escape–not just of escape: she planned to bring the entire ring down–Rue had brushed her off at first, but that lure of safety dangling in her green eyes, that lure of something other, had eventually drawn her in.

They had needed to distract Rue’s father, one final time. Get the ring going. So Rue faced her final opponent. 

He was so large he cast a shadow so vast that she could not escape it. His arms were wiry, hairy trunks and his chest was probably twice the width of hers. Rue ducked beneath a heavy swing and–

All her training suddenly left her as he towered over her. She couldn’t breathe. She forgot the plan. Forgot Agafya was coming. She could only see her dreams, all the dreams where she had died in a fight. She became aware of the sweat clinging to her face, the sand stuck between her bare feet, the pain in her throat when she breathed. She always dreamed of a big man clocking her in the head. Always her father screaming at her, not in sadness, but in anger. 

For she had failed him, and disgrace befell her castaway name. 

The beast lunged at her. She froze against the rail. The crowd roared but she barely heard them over her uneven heart-beat.

Pressure points–

She jammed her elbow into his. His arm buckled, and his fist opened, but his arm had too much momentum, and he still slapped her on the shoulder. She flew into the rail and collapsed. Her cheek glued itself to the sand and the wood beneath it pricked at her as her breathing became the only thing in her world.

The sound of a thousand hooves, the hooves of the police horses, froze the barn in a perfect recreation of a ring fight.

“Sheriff!” someone cried. 

Agafya had tipped off the police. Now she came with fire to destroy the barn in the chaos, once and for all. 

The man she had been fighting fled.

When Rue tried to wipe her tears they smeared across her face with streaks of sand and dust, and got in her eyes. The sorrow stuck to her. It stung.

Time to go. Time to create that new life, finally. A part of her, deep down that forbidden part of her she hid from Agafya, wished the ring would survive, so she wouldn’t need to live the life she hadn’t even yet imagined.

The smell of sweat stuck to everything and everyone as if to brand them all to this night. 

A fire sprouted from the east wall. Agafya. The fire spread up to the roof, and the barn began to smolder, and the ring began to burn, and burn, and vanish. 

Vanish like it had never even been.

Like she had never even been.

Rue glanced wildly around for her father. He was the leader of the ring, so the sheriff would be after him. A part of her wished he’d survive. She spotted him shoving out the front door, immediately throwing himself onto a horse, and riding off. Gone. Gone with her left to burn with his ideas. It was kind of poetic, she supposed, for she was his idea too.

She looked for Agafya. She had to stop this. Something about the ring had to stick. She glanced at grains of sand adhered to her palm and began to sway, thought of her knife pressed into her ankle, always in her sock, drawing a thin scar.

She collapsed.

“No!” Small hands slipped beneath her armpits. “I got you,” Agafya panted. “Stay with me Rue! Stay with me! We’re so close. We’re almost out.”

The smoke of the burning barn stuck to the walls of her throat and clung to her voice box so it was always heard through her speech. “Agafya please–save...them…”

Agafya ignored her.

“The horses are over here,” Agafya said, her voice almost drowned in the clamor of the crowd and pistol-fire. “I’ve contacted the inn. We’ll figure out what to do next from there.”

“I don’t know–”

“Now is really not the time,” Agafya snapped. Firelight gleamed in her eyes and she stood so tall despite being so short, and the building burned behind them. The fire licked and climbed and devoured, and no one in that building was safe. There’s no going back now. “Come on.”

“We’ll figure it out?”

“Of course! Hurry up!”

They barreled into the stables and lifted themselves onto a horse. The beast shot free of the crowd and fled into the night. The barn faded from a bon-fire to a torch to a matchstick, to nothing. 

Free.

They reached the inn hours later.

“Did you see Alcaeus?” Agafya asked.

“He escaped,” Rue mumbled. She teased the knife still embedded in her sock. “I saw him ride away…”

“We need to go after him,” Agafya tried again to scrub the soot and dirt from her face. It never came off all the way. “We can start tomorrow.”

“You want…to kill him?”

“He ruined your life! My life! What if he starts another ring? We all know he will. Another ring, another school.” Agafya had begun to pace. 

Rue curled in on herself. The fighting ring was gone. Everything was gone. What was she if not a ring fighter? Could she be anything else?

“I don’t care,” she hissed, then turned round as more tears stained her face. “I…we’re free. We have no idea what we’re doing with our lives right now. We don’t have the capacity!”

Agafya stalked to the window. She closed the curtain, and locked the door. The light flickered overhead. Finally she turned back to Rue. “You know he’s coming back for you, right?”

Rue studied the knife in her hands. Her father had given it to her years ago, when she had still thought the ring was the coolest thing in the west, before her friends had died and she’d seen blood gushing from broken temples and broken necks. Since then, the tip of the knife had broken off. She didn’t know where the other piece had been. It couldn’t be fixed.

Just being in the ring had broken it.

She tucked it away.

“You don’t think we’ll have peace,” she tested, “until he’s dead?”

“You’re his protege! I could probably slip away but you? Never you.”

Rue put her face into the chair. It scratched the bruises blooming on her cheek, still so fresh: “Then why do you want to kill him?”

“He killed my friends.” Not a lick of emotion in her voice.

Rue looked up at her training partner. A ray of moonlight broke through the edge of the curtain so that shadows doomed half her face to harsh angles and slanted brows, while the moon illuminated tear-paths down the opposite cheek. When she turned towards Rue the shadows began to creep across the blue. Rue scrambled up. She half-expected Agafya to start yelling at her, to throw her to the cops outside, despite the way her wide eyes pleaded and her lips were half-parted as if to sob. 

Would Agafya turn her over to the sheriff?

If her father found her she would die in a ring-fight. If Agafya deemed her unnecessary she might turn her over.

The only way to be truly safe was to be alone. No one could betray her. No one could leave her. But she had never been alone and connections, good or bad, had their roots in her. She could follow them until she found a way to untangle herself. Maybe then she would know what she was, other than a ring fighter.

“Okay,” she said, a little heart in her voice. “Let’s do it.”

After weeks of sneaking through the sheriff’s office and stealing records and tracking down accomplices and checking all the hideouts, Rue had known of, they found her father huddled in a clearing in the middle of the forest, hiding from the sheriff who hunted him to lock him up for running the ring. He’d lay low for a while then change his name. Come back with new money. Make a new ring, probably. 

Rue and Agafya prepared for their ambush tucked beneath a nearby tree. 

A deep-rooted panic had begun to take hold of her chest, the further she got from the fire, the closer to killing her father, the closer to ending all of that had to do with fighting, all that she had been taught to value, taught to be. And nothing new stood out to her. Nothing new.

A lady had donated Rue and Agafya new shirts when she’d seen them walking down the street one day, and then she’d left without asking for anything in return. For days Rue had watched for the men that must be following her, that kind old woman only a trap, but they had never come. She couldn’t believe it.

Couldn’t believe there was anyone that didn’t want to fight her.

And that made her want to throw herself back into the ring. At least she belonged there.

“We’re really going to kill him,” Rue said as she sharpened her knife.

Agafya said. “It’s what he deserves.”

Rue swallowed. “What if we don’t?”

“We’re not changing the plan now.” 

Rue searched within herself for some part that believed things would get better, that she could move on, and she held it lightly in her hands as she followed Agafya towards the clearing where Alcaeus slept. The trees hid Agafya completely in shadow. She held her gun up before her face; if someone had tried to look at her straight on, they might not even have known it was her.

Rue had a gun in her belt but she didn’t touch it. 

Wind hollowed and the high rustle of leaves scuttled above. Agafya peered into the clearing, where smoke drifted from burnt out coals, and a ten stuck like a dark blob into an already blackened forest.

And there was a figure there.

Standing. 

A gun glinted in his hand, pointed at them. They had kept low, their breath restrained and footsteps light and quiet, like they had been taught to do in the ring, but he still heard.

Agafya raised her gun and spun round the tree so that Alcaeus was in the line of fire. Her arm trembled. Alcaeus stepped into the light. He was small and graying, but the gun raised in front of his face hid all of what might have been weak. His steps were firm and soft. His hands didn’t shake. A brown eye peeked a look at Rue, who cowered away, but his gun was for Agafya.

With arms shaking so bad she thought she might faint, Rue pulled her own gun from her belt and leveled it at her father. It sent goosebumps from her hands to her arms to her shoulders. Together she and Agafya stepped forwards. Alcaeus held his ground. Rue tried to flank him slowly, but he pulled another gun from his belt and pointed it at her.

“Don’t do this, Rue,” he said.

Rue bit back tears. She suddenly yearned from the knife she had left back with her stuff. 

Alcaeus blinked at her. “It’s okay. I know you’re confused. But your mother and I have developed this style for years, Rue, years. You’ve been learning it your entire life. Do you really want to throw all this away now? We’re close. So close…”

She sniffed as soft sobs clawed their way up her throat.

She glanced at Agafya.

As Alcaeus had been talking, her finger had tightened on the trigger. Alceaus was focused on Rue. He didn’t see it.

Agafya closed her eyes. Shadow crept across her face, hiding it entirely. The world seemed to slow as she drew a deep breath and her face scrunched and her arms tensed in preparation for the recoil. 

Rue lunged for her father. Fully extended, she was barely close enough to reach him, not close enough to tackle, so she jabbed him in a pressure point on his leg. He crumbled as a bullet whizzed over their heads. For a moment all three froze. Shock spread through Rue’s body and stuck to her veins and lived in the walls of her heart, suddenly. She scrambled between her father and Agafya, who had raised her gun to shoot another bullet, her arms shaking more now, too. 

Nothing but a ring fighter. That was all she had ever been. All she would ever be. All that searching for the new had just led her back to here. Back to fighting and the hitting pressure points.

And a gun was pointed at her head, so she was back to the danger of it.

“Don’t shoot!” Rue cried, arms up. She had dropped her gun. “Please don’t shoot.”

Agafya lowered her gun. “Come on, Rue.” Moonlight glinted off the tears streaming down her face. “Don’t make me do this.” 

“I can’t,” Rue sobbed as she realized someone had to die here. “Please just leave–Agafya.”

Alcaeus stalked around her, his gun pointed back at Agafya. He didn’t look at Rue again this time. All his attention was on Agafya. 

Rue stumbled into her discarded gun. She fell over it into the soil. 

Agafya faced Alcaeus side-on, her shooting arm extended lazily out, her opposite hand clutching the side of her pants. Rue’s father trained both his guns steadily on Agafya, but he spoke to Rue: “Rue…we can finish this. We can finish what your mother and I started–”

“Mom is gone,” Rue said, suddenly. 

If one shot first and the other reacted quick enough, if the bullet didn’t hit someone instantly vital, then they would both die.

It would have to be a perfect shot, so no one fired. A stalemate.

“But her legacy–”

“She’s not dead–”

“Well she is to me…to us! She left us!”

Eventually one would shoot. They both could die. Rue studied the gun in her hand. Her mother was out there. Her mother had escaped. 

“We can start again, Rue,” her father pleaded. “Make a new ring–”

Suddenly the idea of returning made her sick.

Steadily yet quickly Rue raised her gun and shot her father.

Agafya delivered two more shots in quick succession. 

Red exploded from the side of his neck and oozed across the cobblestone. The color from his face drained as he whipped his head around to her, eyes wide and mouth parted as if to scream, but nothing came out. Nothing but a silent whisper into the setting moon. He dropped his gun. Swayed. Rue caught him as he fell and lowered him slowly into his pool of blood.

Blood stained her hands, stained her cotton sleeves and leather pants, stained her shoes and her face.

“Oh Rue.” Agafya pulled her into a hug.

Rue let herself be consumed by it. Let herself fall and fall and fall. Tried to let the ring fall from her mind, too, but it was engraved in her skull, and she couldn’t stop thinking of the blood on the sand of the pit. She thought of her mother, wherever she might be, but none of that was clear.

None of it was clear like the ring had been.

She had killed her father.

She had thought that maybe once it was all over everything would clear up, and her next move would be obvious, but as she stared at her bloodstained hands she knew that would never have been true. She had killed her father. How many people had her father killed? Hundreds. How many more would she kill?

Unknown.

How many more would he kill?

Zero.

Would the ring ever exist again, like it had? No. 

Nothing sprouted into existence, like she had hoped something would. It was possible, she knew, to grow beyond, but the blood stained her hands, and the ring scared her skin: that she would never quite escape.