Alice stood barefoot on the sand.

  She had kicked off her boots near the gate, leaving them in a pile beside the floor manager who had taken her wager and her bag for safekeeping. The man had counted the chips twice, looked at the number on the chit, looked at Alice, and then counted them a third time with the expression of someone who suspected he was being used as an accessory to suicide. She didn't blame him.

  The sand was colder than she'd expected. A damp, subterranean chill that seeped through the soles of her feet and settled into the bones of her ankles. She curled her toes into the grit, testing the give, mapping the texture the way a carpenter might run a thumb along grain. Loose on top, packed hard two inches down. Stiff leather on shifting ground was a death sentence; she needed to feel where her weight was before she committed to a movement.

  The air tasted of iron and rust through the silk of her mask. Above her, the tiered walkways were a wall of noise: jeers, catcalls, the wet sound of hundreds of mouths forming opinions. It was not the appreciative roar that had followed the Turbine. This was something else. Hungrier. The sound a crowd made when it had already decided the outcome and was simply waiting for the entertainment of watching it happen.

  They were looking at a corpse that hadn't had the courtesy to lie down yet.

  Alice tuned them out.

  She ran the arithmetic again. The gamble on the Turbine-Icebreaker match had paid off. While the rest of the Cellar had been swooning over the wind mage's aerial acrobatics, she had put her single red chip, her entire net worth of five crowns, on the stationary target. Four-to-one odds. The Turbine hit the sand and her five became twenty.

  Twenty crowns wouldn't buy a Shadow-Weave Cowl.

  So she had taken the twenty, walked it back to the counter, and bet it on herself. The floor manager's face had done something complicated. The odds were sixty to one.

  If she won, she walked out with twelve hundred crowns.

  If she lost, the money was a learning experience.

  A cold thought, arriving late: I never asked whether there's a no-killing rule in the pits.

  She probably should have clarified that before the gate locked.

  "Hey, girlie."

  The voice was deep and wet and heavy with the particular condescension of a large man addressing a small problem. Alice looked up.

  The Icebreaker was standing at the center line. Up close, the scale of him was obscene. He was not built so much as accumulated, slab upon slab of muscle and scar tissue, the whole mass slick with water or sweat or both, so that the overhead lights slid off him in sheets. His left eye was swelling shut from the Turbine's parting gift. He favoured his right leg. His knuckles were raw.

  He was tired. That was the important thing. Three consecutive matches tired.

  "You got guts," Icebreaker said, wiping a hand across his bruised mouth. "I'll give you that. But I'm spent, and I'm not in the mood to paste a kid across the walls tonight."

  He jerked his chin toward the gate.

  "Forfeit now and you walk out with your teeth. No shame in it."

  The tone was almost fatherly. He meant it, which made it worse.

  Alice studied him from behind the black lacquer. The swelling. The leg. The way his burned hand, courtesy of the Turbine's final desperate heat blast, hung a half-inch lower than the other, the fingers not quite closing all the way.

  "I appreciate the concern," Alice said. The mask flattened her voice, stripped the cadence, left only the words. "Truly. But I plan on winning."

  Icebreaker blinked. The grin that followed was genuine, the helpless, bark-like laugh of a man who had just been told something so absurd his body processed it as comedy before his brain could intervene.

  "Winning." He shook his head. The knuckles cracked, a sound like pistol shots. "Alright. Don't say I didn't warn you."

  The announcer's voice hit her sternum like a fist.

  "The Novice has teeth! The bets are locked! The gate is sealed! Let the slaughter begin!"

  The iron gate slammed shut. The bell rang. The crowd leaned forward.

  Neither of them moved.

  Icebreaker settled his weight onto his back leg, the grin still in place, content to wait. He was a veteran. He had range, power, and the kind of bone-deep experience that only came from years of bleeding on this sand. He didn't need to come to her. She would come to him, or she would stand there until the crowd turned ugly, and either way, he would be ready.

  Alice's mind worked.

  She couldn't outrange him. She could generate heat, real, dangerous heat, but only on contact. Every attempt to throw flame had fizzled at arm's length, the fire dying the instant it left her skin. She was a pyromancer with no projectile. A gun with no barrel.

  She couldn't outrun him. The Turbine had been a blur of wind-assisted speed, and Icebreaker had tracked him like a turret.

  She couldn't outfight him. If he landed a clean hit, her ribs would be powder.

  So don't let him land a clean hit. And don't try to throw what you can't throw.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Do something already!" someone screamed from the upper tier.

  Alice took a step forward.

  Then another.

  She wasn't running. She wasn't assuming a fighting stance. She was walking toward him with the unhurried gait of a woman approaching a shop counter, her arms loose at her sides, her bare feet pressing flat into the sand with each step.

  The crowd noise shifted. Confusion rippled outward from the lower tiers, displacing the mockery.

  Icebreaker didn't attack. He watched her come, his head cocking to the side, genuinely curious. He let her close the distance, yard by yard, until she was inside his reach.

  She stopped. She had to crane her neck to meet his eyes.

  They stood like that for a moment—the mountain and the girl—close enough that she could smell the mineral tang of his element and the copper undertone of old blood.

  "What's the plan, girlie?" Icebreaker asked, looking down the length of his nose. "Begging?"

  Alice's feet were very still on the sand.

  She had been still for several seconds now. Standing in one place. Not shifting. Not adjusting. Perfectly, deliberately still, her weight evenly distributed, her bare soles flat against the arena floor.

  The sand beneath her feet was getting warm.

  "I'm going to punch you in the face," Alice said.

  She threw the right hook. It was steady, square, telegraphed, a textbook shot aimed at his jaw with the kind of wind-up that announced itself from across the room.

  Icebreaker didn't dodge. He snatched her wrist out of the air, his fingers closing around the joint with the casual authority of a man catching a thrown apple. The punch stopped dead, six inches from his jaw.

  "Gotcha," he said.

  The water on his palm flash-boiled.

  Alice dumped everything she had into her skin in the instant of contact, every ounce of thermal energy she could summon, concentrated at the surface, delivered into the thin film of moisture that coated his hand like a second skin. The water didn't warm. It detonated. A violent, hissing eruption of superheated steam that expanded against his flesh with the fury of a pressure valve failing.

  Icebreaker screamed. The sound was raw, animal, torn from somewhere deeper than dignity. He released her wrist as if he'd seized a stovetop, stumbling backward, shaking the hand, his face caught in the cloud of scalding vapor.

  Alice was already moving. She feinted left, a half-committed hook, a quarter-second of bait, and threw herself backward.

  He bit. Blinded, raging, his body running on instinct rather than thought, Icebreaker threw a downward hammer blow at the space she had occupied. It was devastatingly fast. If she had been there, it would have driven her into the sand like a fence post.

  She was not there.

  His fist hit the ground where she had been standing.

  The sound was wrong. Not the flat thump of knuckles on packed sand. A thick, wet, sucking sound, the noise of something plunging into hot mud.

  Icebreaker tried to pull back. His fist didn't come.

  He looked down.

  The sand where Alice had stood—where she had stood still, for those long, calm seconds of conversation, her bare feet flat, her weight even, her mana channeling downward through her soles in a slow, silent bleed—was glowing. A vivid, angry orange-yellow, the colour of a forge mouth. The silica had passed its melting point. The arena floor had become a shallow puddle of molten glass, and his fist was buried in it to the wrist.

  He ripped his hand free with a roar. The glass came with it, viscous, clinging, a glowing sleeve of liquid heat that adhered to his knuckles and tightened as it cooled. The pain was immediate and total. He dropped to one knee, cradling the hand against his chest, steam rising from the cooling slag in thin, frantic wisps.

  "You witch—"

  Alice kicked him in the face.

  It was a mistake. She knew it was a mistake in the half-second between committing and landing. The snap kick was too ambitious, too greedy, the kind of finishing flourish that worked in the training gymnasium against canvas dummies that didn't hit back. She was punishing a downed opponent and she should have been creating distance.

  Icebreaker's good hand caught her ankle.

  The steam hissed where his skin met hers, but this time he held on. He was done flinching. The pain had passed through some threshold into a place beyond caring, and what was left was a hundred and twenty kilograms of furious, injured animal with a grip like a dock crane.

  He whipped his arm upward.

  Alice left the ground. The world inverted. Sand, lights, crowd, ceiling. And then the ceiling was the floor and the floor hit her between the shoulder blades with a force that emptied her lungs in a single, flat bark of expelled air.

  She lay on her back, black spots swarming her vision. Her diaphragm had locked. She couldn't inhale. The sand was cool against her spine, which meant she was no longer near the glass trap, which meant she had travelled some distance, which meant—

  Get up.

  Her arms tried. They pushed, trembled, and folded. She managed a plank for one wretched second before her elbows gave and she was face-down in the grit, wheezing, her fingers twitching uselessly.

  Stupid. Greedy. Stupid.

  A shadow fell across her.

  She didn't need to look. She could feel him, the weight of his presence displacing the air above her, the wet rasp of his breathing, the faint vibration of the sand under his boots as he settled into position.

  "I hate pyromancers," Icebreaker said. The voice was different now. The fatherly warmth was gone. What remained was the low, grinding sound of a man who had been hurt and intended to be the last person standing when the hurting was done. "Look at what you've—"

  Alice's right hand was in the sand.

  It had been in the sand since she landed. Her fingers had curled into the grit while the rest of her body was busy failing to get up, and she had been heating the grains in her closed fist with a quiet, desperate focus, the mana pouring out of her palm in a tight, concentrated burn. Not enough to glow visibly. Just enough to cook.

  She whipped her hand upward and opened it.

  A cloud of superheated sand hit Icebreaker in the face.

  He flinched, eyes clamping shut, but he'd been expecting grit. He'd fought dirty opponents before. Sand in the eyes was an annoyance, a half-second delay, the kind of trick you blinked through and punished.

  He was not expecting the grit to sear.

  The grains bit into his eyelids like sparks from a grinding wheel. He clawed at his face with his good hand, a guttural sound tearing from his throat, and in the second that bought her, one second, maybe less, Alice rolled.

  Not backward. Not away.

  Forward. Between his legs.

  She tucked her shoulder, drove through the roll, and stopped directly beneath him. She looked up. She reached up.

  She grabbed what she was aiming for.

  And she squeezed.

  The heat was not an accident.

  There was a sound. It was not a sound the crowd had been prepared for. It occupied a register somewhere between a sizzle and a pop, wet, intimate, and deeply, fundamentally wrong. The kind of sound that bypassed the ears and went straight to the stomach.

  Icebreaker's eyes rolled white. His mouth opened, but what came out was not a scream. It was a thin, whistling absence of sound. The noise a man made when the pain was so absolute it exceeded his body's capacity to express it. His lungs emptied in a silent, high-pitched exhalation, and his knees unlocked, and the mountain fell.

  He hit the sand face-first. He did not move.

  The silence lasted one heartbeat. Two. Three.

  Then the Cellar came apart.