The pod felt smaller when she returned.

  Beatrix stood in the center of her pod and looked at everything she'd accumulated in six years of scavenging. A lot of junk and a few valuables. The Drake-Hansen Rapid-class speeder. Two functional Garner generators. A bunch of tools, equipment, spare parts.

  This was her life. And she was about to sell all of it.

  She started with the expensive items. The plasma cutter went into one pile, worth maybe three thousand if she found the right buyer. The scanner array she'd rebuilt from three broken units went into another. Magnetic anchors that had saved her life more times than she could count. A backup thruster assembly. Spare parts still in their original packaging.

  Around 11,200 credits in total.

  Eight thousand short.

  She stared at the numbers for a long moment. Then she opened the drawer containing her personal effects. Her mother's red scarf, red as a warning, patched with love and desperation, stained with the ghost of old blood. It smelled like safety. Like a time when the worst thing that could happen was a scraped knee, not a dying brother and a military AI eating her nervous system for fuel. A printed photo of the three of them, her, Dante, their mother, taken before the sickness. A few data chips containing her mother's books, her music and Dante’s Grind collection.

  Worth nothing to anyone but her.

  She loaded everything into her bag and closed the drawer.

  Bodhi's locker. She still had equipment stored at his shop. With the stuff there, she could have the money for Kivi, maybe. Not enough to close the gap, but closer.

  The Stygia Contract sat in her HUD, glowing softly. She had read the section of the Prize money. One million credits for winning the First Circle. More than enough for Dante's treatment.

  She didn't install it. Not . First, the core.

  Beatrix grabbed her pack and started loading equipment.

  Umbra-3's market was a river of desperation that flowed in a crooked circle. Beatrix waded in, her life tucked into a worn-out bag, and began to sell it, one piece at a time.

  The easy things went first. The plasma cutter she'd used for six years, worth three thousand if she found the right buyer. She haggled hard, the numbers scrolling in her HUD like a countdown ticking toward zero. The buyer tried to talk her down to twenty-five hundred. She walked away on principle, found another stall, got twenty-eight hundred. Money now was worth more than pride later.

  The magnetic anchors went next. She'd pulled them off a military salvage three years ago, back when she and Dante still worked as a team. They'd saved her life in the Fearless, caught her when gravity forgot which way was down. The buyer, a young scav maybe seventeen, held them like they were made of gold.

  "Whoa," he breathed. "These are Titan-class."

  "They're reliable." She didn't mention the lives they'd saved, the times they'd been the only thing between her and the void. That wasn't part of the sale.

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  He paid without haggling, probably his entire savings. She watched him walk away, remembering when she'd been that young, that eager, that sure good equipment would make the difference. Maybe for him it would.

  The scanner array she'd rebuilt from three broken units. The backup thruster assembly. The good reel line. Her speeder. Each sale was an amputation, cutting away pieces of the scavenger she'd been. By the time the afternoon cycle dimmed to evening, she was down to things that shouldn't be for sale.

  She pulled out her EVA suit, the backup one Dante had modified for her two birthdays ago. He'd added extra joints for flexibility, reinforced the weak points she always wore through first. It still had his signature on the left shoulder, a tiny cartoon face sticking its tongue out.

  "Hundred and fifty," the vendor said, barely glancing at it.

  "Two hundred."

  "For a patched suit with amateur modifications?" The woman shook her head. "Hundred and fifty's generous."

  Beatrix ran her thumb over Dante's signature. In her HUD, the countdown kept ticking. Not Dante's medical deadline, that was measured in weeks. This was faster. More immediate.

  "Fine."

  The payment transferred. Another piece of her life converted to numbers in an account.

  She looked at the nearly empty bag. One item remained. Her mother's scarf, red as blood, patched with mismatched fabric, stained with old blood. It smelled like childhood, like safety, like the time before everything went wrong. Worth maybe fifteen credits. She put it in her neck, defiantly. Some things weren't for sale. Not ever.

  Beatrix checked her total.

  Still short.

  She stood in the market's fading light, surrounded by strangers spending money she'd just taken from them, and felt the weight of mathematics crushing her. Every calculation led to the same conclusion. Every path ended at the same door.

  The Stygia Contract sat in her HUD with its promise of the big credits. Prize money for winning the First Circle: one million.

  Standing in the market's fading light, she pulled up the contract again. Virgil had underlined some of the important clauses.

  She read it twice. Three times. The implications crystallized. Anyone who attacked a registered fighter would have a fifty-thousand-credit bounty placed on them. Instantly.

  It was a leash. A control mechanism. A way to ensure fighters made it to the arena alive instead of getting murdered in alleys by rivals or enemies or anyone with a grudge.

  But it was also a weapon.

  She kept reading. The contract was forty-seven pages of legal language that all said the same thing in different ways: once you signed, you belonged to the Grind. You fought when called. You fought where told. You fought until you won or died, and the only people who could release you were the same people who'd built cages out of debt and desperation.

  Her mother's voice, five years dead:

  "I'm not," Beatrix whispered to the empty market. "This is different."

  The lie tasted like smoked rust.

  She closed the contract. The deficit in her account glared at her: ?1,753. The countdown glared brighter: 25:32:18.

  One path. One terrible, stupid, only path.

  But before she walked it, there was one last goodbye she couldn’t avoid.