Dec's hand moved to his back pocket, feeling for the tell-tale bulge of the luminite packet contained within. All around, spectators jostled for a better view of the fight 'ring', marked with a length of rope on the silt-dust earth. They were in the old port—inland from the new one, where boats used to be able to dock before the river mouth dried up. Stacks of abandoned shipping containers provided cover from surveillance cameras, while portable floodlights had been attached to four-wheel-drives and parked around the gathered crowd.

Dec closed his eyes to relieve the tension headache that had grown more insistent since the night before. The police wouldn't bother them. Their stance on the street-fights was well-known. If Nocturnals wanted to kill each other in unfettered melees, that was their choice. The less they 'knew' about the fights, the better, in their opinion.

It was because of this that Dec was fairly sure Montague's bot wouldn't follow him here. There'd be too much paperwork if it did.

"If yer lookin to put yer sols on the fight, Red over there'll take yer money."

Dec's eyes flew open. The man who'd spoken smelled distinctly of petrol and leather, and his smile exposed great black cavity gaps between his teeth. He looked over to where 'Red' was seated atop a pile of rotting two-by-fours—auburn eyebrows pulled low over his forehead, hands deep in his pockets, fondling his cresols.

"I'm just here to watch," Dec said, removing his own hand from his back pocket and folding his arms over his chest.

"What about yer girl? Doesn't she wanna get in on the betting action?"

Dec prepared to give the guy a warning shove. "That's my sister. And no, she doesn't."

The man backed up and raised his hands. "Please yerself, mate. Just sayin. If me back pocket was full like yours, I'd be puttin me money on Chook."

Despite himself, Dec stood on his toes to get a look at Tommy's opponent. Chook was a stout man of Tommy's age, but shorter by at least a head and top heavy like a bulldog. He wore black and red high-tech skins, which matched his sweat towel and water bottle and gripped the hard muscles of his thighs. He bounced on his toes and cracked his neck while his trainer sprayed water on his face and into his mouth. A brood of spectators clustered around his side of the 'ring' and hollered colourful insults between their hands. Insults meant as encouragement in the Smackdown world.

"I heard TJ was pitched to win because of Chook's shoulder injury," Mel said to the man, using Tommy's preferred street fighting name—TJ short for Tommy James.

Dec stared at his sister. Since when did she know anything about Smackdown?

"Who? You mean Blackpoint?" the man said.

Dec wondered what Tommy would think of spectators calling him Blackpoint after his home suburb instead of TJ. He'd probably be furious.

"How many Smackdowns does he have under his belt?" the man continued. "Four? Chook's got ten. And he's a grappler. Ain't no way a striker can beat a grappler."

"Come on," Dec said to Mel, grabbing her elbow to drag her away.

Mel resisted. "TJ's got the reach and the footwork. He's fitter than Chook too."

The man raised his eyebrows. "Darling, fighting's a bit like sex. You can be as fit as you want, but you can't beat experience."

This time, Dec really did drag Mel away by the elbow.

The man cackled.

"I told you this wasn't your scene," Dec said as they wound through the crowd to find a spot on a stack of old tyres to view the ring. When Mel didn't answer, he followed this up with, "Someone should've stayed home to look after Adele."

Mel snapped, "By someone, you mean me, right?"

It was Dec's turn to not answer. Of course he'd meant Mel. He had important business to discuss with Tommy about Lazar and he didn't know how he was going to do it with Mel there.

Mel said, "Mum'll be fine. She was stable when we left. That usually lasts about a week."

Let's hope so, Dec thought, though Mel did have a point. The one and only good thing about Adele's illness was its predictability. After a bad episode and a two week stint in the hospital, she was relatively stable for at least a couple of days with the help of her medication, a cocktail of tablets that eased her anxiety, controlled her unquenchable thirst and stymied the hallucinations. She would most likely spend the night on the couch in front of the projector, which they'd locked to the safest channel they could think of—Atunda Play. A station for children. Then, she would sleep.

Dec turned his attention to the fight at hand. From his elevated position, he could see Tommy and Janet on the far side of the ring, backed by a significantly smaller, less vocal group of supporters. While Tommy assumed a warrior stance, his arms tensed at his sides, body squared, glaring at Chook. Dec could tell he was nervous from the twitch of his temple, which was visible every now and then when the crowd parted and the floodlights shone through. Tommy's threadbare gym shorts hung slack on his waist, making his legs look even longer and skinner than they already were. He took a swig from a silver hip flask while Janet slapped his bare arms and chest. Dec wondered if the flask contained water. Or whether it was water mixed with luminite.

Snatches of conversation rose between the raucity.

"Whatdaya reckon?"

"Chook'll get him in a clinch, or a sweep within the first thirty seconds. Blackpoint'll tap out in the first minute."

"I'm puttin me money on a straight KO by Blackpoint."

"No way."

"Have you seen his right kick. Deadly. One to the head and you're out."

Mel sidestepped so her arm was pressed against Dec's. He could feel the nervous heat radiating from her skin. Or was it from his nerves? He couldn't tell.

They waited in silence. The moon passed behind a cloud and flickered eerily between the thin wisps of strata. The hot northerly held its breath. The dull ache in his temples increased to a pressurised throb.

Suddenly, music blared from one of the parked four-wheel drives causing the tyres beneath Dec's feet to vibrate. Moonstep music rose above the noise of the crowd and Chook rose on his toes and bounced on the balls of his feet. Tommy clenched his fists and took up a fighting stance.

Without an official declaration, or even a sportsmanlike bump of fists, the fight began.

Tommy rushed Chook with a sequence of jabs to his upper body. Chook, eyes wide, stepped back and dodged to avoid the majority, absorbing one or two against his shoulders and arms without any attempt at a counter strike. The crowd roared and stamped, not having expected the rookie to go out throwing, their fickle allegiance momentarily shifting to Tommy's side in their surprise. Dec watched in horror as Tommy's feet and fists, wrapped in nothing but a thin skein of bandages, struck flesh with a wet, slapping, similar to the sound of the crow bar striking the stray's flanks.

There were rules, apparently, though Dec couldn't decipher what they were. He only knew a few for sure—no biting, no eye gouging, no groin strikes—which seemed to be the only things absent from Tommy's fight. As Tommy drew confidence from the crowd, his combinations became increasingly deadly, targeting the softest, most vulnerable parts of his opponent for a quick victory—neck, ears, clavicle, forehead, bridge of the nose, solar plexus. While most of his blows glanced off Chook's forearms, shoulders, or struck nothing but air, the ones he did manage to land, Chook absorbed with the despondency of a lazy person with a small pebble in their shoe.

"Blackpoint's a bloody spiker trying to take down a buck for mounting rights."

"What a showman."

"He's not watching his weight. Chook'll keep him honest."

The fight surged on long past the expected thirty seconds, with Chook on a defensive back foot, ducking and weaving and trying to stay inside the rope while Tommy showed no signs of tiring. The crowd was a unified roar by now, serving to feed Tommy's intensity. Soon, sweat was pouring off the two men and flicking in the floodlights.

Just as the crowd screamed for a take-down, Tommy landed a kick to the side of Chook's head, splitting open his eyebrow. Encouraged by the sight of blood, he tried to follow this up with another kick to the head, but lost his balance when Chook ducked and rushed his guard, catching him off-balance and throwing him to the ground.

Both men went down in a plume of dust, Tommy's head making hollow impact with the hard earth. The crowd beat the air and stamped their feet.

"Bail him up!"

But Tommy's recovery was as swift as his roundhouse kick and using the momentum of the fall, he managed to throw Chook off before the smaller man could get a grapple on his limbs and lock him down. As he rolled and stood, Dec noticed he was bleeding from behind his ear where a rogue chunk of gravel had taken off his skin. The blood carved a wonky trail through his short, wiry hair and dripped down his back.

Mel found Dec's arm and squeezed so hard, his fingers tingled. He hardly noticed. He was too distracted by the narrowed look in Tommy's eyes, the same one he'd worn when he'd been about to kill the stray.

It was Tommy's turn to absorb a powerful punch from Chook, which he did without flinching. Chook followed this up with a fake hook and a knee to the side, which Tommy did nothing to block. He swayed and blinked. It was as though the fall had thrust the focus from eyes and he was having trouble seeing straight. Sensing this, Chook hunched and went in for a close quarter punch to the gut, and then to the forehead, bending Tommy double, then snapping him back like a catapult.

Just as Chook grappled Tommy to the edge of the rope and got into position to commence his infamous sweep, Tommy regained his senses and threw Chook off by threading his arms and prying them open. In one fluid movement, without even the slightest muscle twitch of warning, he sprung into the air, right hand rising, left extending in the motion of an archer with an invisible bow. His flying punch arced and was set to break on Chook's nose when a floodlight on one of the cars flickered and strobed the gathering in white light. Tommy, distracted, misaligned his punch and glanced Chook's cheek.

It was all Chook needed—the second's distraction. Crouching low, he rammed Tommy in the gut and sent him sprawling on the ground. From there, it was just a matter of locking him down. Mounting him with one leg on either side of Tommy's waist, he let his fists fall in a rain of punches. The crowd cheered, expecting Tommy to tap out. But Tommy, stupid Tommy, took blow-by-blow, his arms and hands wrapped around his face in a feeble shield, hips thrusting up and out, in an attempt to wriggle free.

For a second, Dec forgot where he was. His perception warped and he found himself in Tommy's place, trapped beneath Chook, helpless, hardly able to breathe. And then, he was back in that moment, almost two years ago, when he, himself had been crushed in a similar manner.

It had happened in the aftermath of the massacre. He'd been looking for Tommy amongst the mewling, injured clusters of people when he'd found his path blocked by a huge, balking man, as rotund as he was tall, skin almost as dark as Tommy's. The man had hurled himself at Dec, gripped him around the waist and dragging him into the pavement, moaning as he went. From there, he'd passed into delirium and then into death, blood seeping from his stomach, still warm from the heart, soaking his clothes and making a stencil of Dec's body on the pavement.

It was where his claustrophobia had been born, and his juvenile understanding of the world laid to rest.

Before he could drown in the memory, he was pulled back to the present as cheers turned to boos. Tommy's refusal to tap out had sobered the crowd. Apparently, there was something unsatisfying about waiting for someone to pass out.

The two trainers circled their protege.

"Get up or tap out!" Janet screamed, all musically shredded from her throat.

"Ground and pound," growled Chooks trainer. "It's not over til it's over."

The crowd, remembering where they'd hedged their bets were a combination of mingled outrage for the flickering headlights and impatience for the knock out. "Get it over with! Lights out already!"

Mel pressed her hand to her mouth, smothering a cry as Chook's punches continued to fall and Tommy continued to shield his face and rock from side-to-side in an increasingly feeble attempt to struggle free. When Tommy's arms finally flopped to his sides and his head lolled, Chook's trainer dragged his protege off and raised his arm.

And as quickly as the fight had started, it ended. The crowd exchanged sols and dispersed like smoke on a breeze, making their way back to the train stop that would take them back to the city. Nobody wanted to be present for the fallout. The police would only get involved if there was a fatality, and this fight reeked of it.

Two men in latex gloves, whom Dec assumed were the medics, knelt beside Tommy, poked and prodded his neck and chest, before stretchering him into a shelled out shipping container on the port side of the ring. Red and the cavity-toothed man removed the rope from the ground and took up brooms to sweep away the signs of scuffle. Others produced buckets of water from seeming nowhere and splashed them over the earth to dilute the bloodstains. Everything was left as though nothing and no one had been there only minutes before.

Dec tasted blood and realised at some stage during the fight, he must've gnawed through the inside of his own cheek. Mel was a statue next to him, her arm still pressed against his and the hot adrenaline that had coursed between them at the beginning of the fight, now cold with dread.

Then, with the surety of a silent decision, they pushed their way through what remained of the crowd, approaching the makeshift door of the shipping container. They were stopped by the hand of a medic. "No visitors."

"We're his friends."

"Tough shit. You'll wait outside until we know his condition is stable." And without another word, the medic shut the door and locked it from the inside.

Mel looked as though she might cry. Her face was red, her lips pinched tight with fury. She began pacing, back and forth, back and forth.

"Damn it, Dec!" She slammed the palm of her hand on the side of the shipping container—a burst of fury like Dec had never seen from his sister before. When Dec tried to pull her away by the shoulders, she switched to kicking the door until it groaned and buckled.

Dec stared, unable to move—horror growing more amplified as her kicks went from strength to strength. Never in his life had he seen his sister in such a state. It was always him in the state and her talking sense.

"Mel!" He shouted between kicks. What would she would have said to him? "You're making it worse! How do you expect the medic to help Tommy if you're out here causing such a racket."

His words did not have the intended effect. Instead of calming Mel down, she turned her ferocity on him. "Lay off, Dec! Tommy could be seriously hurt. Or don't you care?"

He was about to answer when the door swung open. This time, the person who stepped out wasn't the medic.