at the torso, dropping low to ensure that his foot made solid contact.
Grant’s kick slammed Domi just beside the breastbone, and she staggered backward, the wind knocked out of her. She looked down as she drew a calming breath, and saw that she was just one footstep away from the edge of the circle that she had marked out before Grant arrived.
“Not laughing so much now, huh?” Grant goaded as he centered himself and walked warily toward her.
“Don’t worry,” she said, smiling, “I’m still laughing on the inside.”
Grant stopped in his tracks, just outside of the range where Domi might reach him, and a wide smile broke out on his face. “And just what is that supposed to mean?”
Domi thought for a moment and shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seemed the thing to say.”
Kane’s voice drifted over to them from the doors to the redoubt. “Blah-blah-blah,” he said, heckling. “Are you kids going to talk or are you going to fight? I came here to see blood, people,” he added, ensuring that they knew he was kidding by his tone.
Grant gave him a sneer before turning back to his tiny opponent. “You want to finish this?”
She nodded. “Ready when you are.”
Kane had stepped over to the edge of the circle, a little behind where Domi was trapped. He punched a fist into his hand and began counting them in. “This is it, people,” he announced, “Beauty versus the Beast. My money’s on Beauty there, but don’t take offense—I’ve known him a lot longer than I have you, Domi.”
“Har-har,” she responded, not looking back, taking a step closer to Grant. In a flash, Domi had spun her body, swinging first her left leg and then her right in Grant’s direction, repeating the action as he skipped back to avoid her kicks. Grant slapped her legs away from his face as he continued backward.
Grant timed Domi’s movements in his head, and suddenly his arm shot out and he grabbed her right ankle as it swung toward his face. Not expecting the move, Domi overbalanced and tumbled to the hard-packed ground, her momentum pulling Grant over with her.
Together, the pair of fighters slammed into the dirt, with Grant spinning to avoid crushing Domi’s birdlike frame beneath his massive build.
“You okay?” he asked her after a moment, letting go of her ankle.
Lying prone on the ground, Domi peered over her shoulder down the length of her body at Grant’s concerned expression. His vest was darker now, she saw, where sweat had pooled between his pectoral muscles. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she told him. “Thanks.”
Grant eased himself off the ground and stood over her, offering her one of his huge hands to help her up.
“Aren’t you going to finish me off?” she asked, confused.
Grant shook his head, pointing to the ground at his feet. “I stepped outside the circle when I rolled.”
Domi took his hand, a sour expression crossing her features. “Yeah, but you did that to avoid hurting me.”
Grant shrugged. “Still counts,” he assured her. “Besides, breakfast is becoming a nagging priority just now. Tough to fight on an empty stomach.”
Domi brushed herself down and watched Grant return to the redoubt and disappear into the darkness of the tunnel mouth. After a few moments, she turned to Kane, still standing at the side of the circle. “Did you want to see me?” she asked him.
Kane shook his head. “Nah, I just came out here to get some peace and quiet. Didn’t realize that fight club was in session this morning.”
Domi smiled shyly, the barest hint of color rouging her pure white cheeks. “You wanna fight?” she asked Kane after a moment.
Kane looked out over the plateau, watching as wispy cotton-candy clouds drifted slowly over the distant sky, before he reached for the top of his shirt and began unbuttoning it. “What the hell, why not,” he told her, tossing his shirt to one side. “But no pulling hair, okay?”
“I won’t if you won’t,” Domi promised him as she walked across to the far side of the dirt circle.
As he stepped into the circle and dropped his body into a fighter’s stance, Kane felt the nagging doubts of the past few days ebb away. It felt good to be alive.
B RIGID WAS BESIDE Lakesh in the ops center while Brewster Philboyd sat before them, tapping at the keyboard Lakesh had attached to the recovered computer. They had spent three days trying to decode the encrypted information, and every false lead had sapped just a little of their enthusiasm for the task.
The question remained: what was stored on the hard drive and would it be worth this effort? Lakesh had one answer, and Brigid consoled herself that his was the wisest way to look at the problem. “It doesn’t matter what’s in the files,” he had assured her. “This is a scientific investigation to find out the truth—that there is something in the files.” In their ceaseless quest to find out what that something was, Brigid wasn’t entirely sure that any of them had gotten enough sleep.
An astrophysicist, Brewster Philboyd was in his midforties and wore black-rimmed glasses above his acne-scarred cheeks. His pale blond hair was swept back from a receding hairline, and his lanky six-foot frame towered above many of the other scientists in the redoubt. Philboyd had joined the Cerberus team along with a number of other exiles from Manitius more than a year before, and had proved to be a valuable addition to the staff. He was the first to admit that he wasn’t a fighter, but Philboyd was as determined as a dog with a bone when a scientific or engineering problem crossed his path. He had stepped in to help with the Grand Forks database when he overheard the exasperated cries coming from Brigid and Lakesh on the second day of attempting to probe its files.
“This stuff was really important two hundred years ago,” Brigid said, “but for pity’s sake, couldn’t they have put a time-sensitive release on the damn coding?”
“There’s every possibility that it’s just as important today,” Lakesh said, chastising her lightly before turning back to the streams of code that whizzed across the screen, seeming to blur into one continuous, green glowing mass after three solid days of watching them flash before his eyes.
“Well,” Philboyd chipped in, “we know that the code is alphanumeric and that it uses uniform block placement to disguise any natural patterns that might be there. Maybe if we drop some of the letters and transpose others…”
“And stand on our heads and rub our stomachs,” Brigid added.
Philboyd scratched at his head absently. “That might help, too,” he admitted.
Lakesh took them both in with a kindly look. “We’ll break it, my friends,” he assured them calmly. “Just let’s all take things logically, one step at a time.
“And the first step,” he added firmly, standing up and feeling the twinge in his joints where he had been hunched over the computer terminal too long, “is to make everyone a cup of tea so we can all retain our sense of focus.”
A few minutes later, as the three of them sat nursing mugs of tea, Cerberus’s resident communications expert, Donald Bry, left his post as the day shift began and came across
