She lunged. The spine shot toward his face. He didn't dodge. He raised his left palm. The aperture opened. A single drop of clear fluid met the tip of her spine.

Bioasshard Arena wasn't a place. It was a product. The flagship entertainment of the Oligarchy’s pleasure worlds, streamed raw and unedited to a hundred billion viewers. They called it the ultimate sport: two hundred condemned souls injected with metamorphic bio-tech, dropped into a kilometer-square replica of a ruined Earth city, and told to fight, evolve, or die.

He pressed his right hand—the one he’d kept dry, the one with the solvent still beaded and ready—against the base of the fountain. The old stone was laced with the same bio-shard technology that pulsed in their arms. The Arena’s bedrock. Its heart.