Iris couldn’t touch them. No matter how she stepped, lunged, cut and slashed, they dove and scampered away. They rolled through the sand, slipped around her attacks, and treated her like everything she did was telegraphed from a mile away. All the while, gamblers threw down money. They toasted drinks. They laughed and debauched and showered the arena with curses and cheers.

Iris had heard of the Phoenix Project. Everyone who had grown up in America had. It was the twenty-second century Manhattan Project, and from the struggle she was having, she knew exactly which fruit of that labor she was facing, the Future Sight Protocol. An immensely powerful predictive algorithm that could so nearly predict the next seconds of combat it was the same as seeing the future, if it had enough training data fed to it. The Shermans had been videotaping all of her fights. They had all the training data they could have wanted.

Even humans without reflex enhancement could contend if they knew each of her attacks. Everything was mapped out in their vision for them like ghostly warnings. Move this way, jump there, duck. They were rolling around her like they had invincibility frames.

She had to make a decision, but really, the Shermans made it for her. Every moment she wasted playing with the gladiators, another incarnation of Fauxnir regenerated out in the wild and had to be struck down. People were dying to protect their homes and families.

Her gut twisted, a vestige of flesh still in her brain. The gladiators weren’t looking at her with hatred, but with fear. Cold sweat mixed with fresh blood. They breathed ragged, they strained their bodies to the limit. They nearly whimpered as her micro-blade sliced the hairs from their bodies. “Fuck!” she screamed. “Fucking God damn it, you people are awful. You’re monsters. They must have cut your damned souls out when they put you in your fucking HAB units.”

Adam and Amy Sherman lost the smug smiles from their faces. The levity melted from them. Their gazes went cold and mechanical. Adam rose. “You know, perhaps you’d make a better toy after we take you out of your jar. I think it’s about time we have your head cut off. You’ll make a better asset after rehabilitation, don’t you think, Dear?”

Amy Sherman turned up her nose. “Perhaps we should have her in a maid bot for a few months first?”

One of the cybernetic gladiators hacked his machete forward, slamming it at her throat while his comrade cleaved for the middle of her back. The instant before contact, Iris cranked her reflexes to the max. It made time slow to a crawl. Even with all the enhancements of the augment suit, it almost felt like she became a prisoner in her own body; but, it leveled the playing field. She could move faster than they could predict.

Iris showed them how to use their mouths in a fight. While the one blade slammed into her armor plating on her back, she caught the first with her teeth. The steel shattered as she chomped through, shards gouging through her cheeks as she turned up the heat in her micro-blade. When she turned it on the gladiator, she watched in agonizing slowness as he realized what had happened, as he panicked to jump away, and as she cleaved through his metal arm. The prosthetic went flying. The nerve response sent nothing but pain as the man went down howling.

She spun, cutting a crescent through the air. The tip of her blade caught the other gladiator in the face. She left a burn straight through his nose. He had seen it coming, but had been unable to pull himself free in time. Blood burst from his nostrils and pain brought tears to his eyes. For that moment, no amount of precognition would have been enough. Iris drove her fist into his chest and launched him across the arena. He broke the fencing and collapsed, either unconscious or dead.

Half the crowd cheered her for having done it. Clearly, they had bet on her and won, and in no way saw that as her being closer to cutting their heads off to put a stop to their war. Iris scanned them, not their harlequin faces of woe and joy, but for the autonomous systems of defense. The cameras first, then the depths of shadows. She checked every EM frequency she could, looking for sentry turrets, for robotic guards. She didn’t spot any save the serving staff, and for a moment she had a nightmare vision of mentally imprisoned workers charging her in a human wave.

The Shermans instead attacked her psyche. They pulled up a map on one of their big display screens. Where there had been a rapid fire updating list of betting odds, there was a city map. Iris blinked, dialing her mind back to human speed as she recognized the layout of Fort Helsinki. A red dot blinked, moving just down the street from Iris’ apartment.

“I think now we can simply demand your surrender?” Amy Sherman proposed, and glanced at her husband. “What do you think?”

Adam nodded. “I think the show has gone on long enough.”

“You demons,” Iris growled, but she didn’t dare step closer. When she looked at them, she still had her infrared vision enabled, and she saw into them. The circuitry, the processors and artificial muscles, the enormous mass of battery material, their beating hearts, and–

Their brains were only half there. Adam’s on the left, Amy’s on the right.

The Shermans grinned and rose. They strode down from their viewing box and the arena fence opened up for them to step in with her. “Did you think we weren’t keeping an eye on her? You made it obvious to the whole world how important she is to you,” Adam said.

“It’s just due diligence,” Amy said, trampling over the fallen gladiator to circle around Iris.

Iris sucked in breath and let it out. “Do you people even have a way to stop that monster from regenerating? Or did you just unleash a bio weapon on the world, forever? Is it endemic now or something?”

That put a mild stir through the crowd, it drew out some uneasiness in the gallery. The Shermans couldn’t simply ignore it, so for the benefit of the onlookers, they attested, “Like any mono-cultured crop, the Myca-Max is susceptible to engineered disease. The very moment we see a need to bring the project to a close, we will release a virus that will sweep the globe like wildfire, burning out the fungus and leaving nothing but soil behind. Not to worry, no way for it to jump species. It will burn out far too quickly.”

“But not before the monster kills millions of people.”

“Now why would we do that?” Amy asked, the heat of her battery pack rising inside her. The same data surged between her and the relay as had for the gladiators; the Future Sight Protocol synced with her HAB unit. “The point in war is to kill your enemies, don’t you know that? You’re a soldier, aren’t you? You’ve done more than your share of killing too.”

“I’m a human before I’m a soldier. That’s more than the two of you can say.”

The Shermans snickered. “Come on, Miss Haber, join us! Come to the winning side. All you have to do is–”

“Work for genocidal maniacs? Kill innocent people? Protect… this disgusting cesspit?” she asked, sweeping her hand across the casino.

Adam scowled. “I’ve already told you, it’s not genocide. Do not lump me in with that cast of villains.”

“It’s murder!” she spat back at him.

“Murder is what we’ll do to Silvy if you don’t cooperate.”

Iris rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You know,” she said, her words measured. “I always hated that trope, in shows and movies and everything. The good guy capitulating to evil because of a hostage? Because why would you ever trust someone who would take a hostage? I always found spite to be more certain than hope. Know what I mean?”

“And preemptive strikes are safer than mutually assured destruction. Put your sword down, Miss Haber.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Mendel said, his face appearing on one of the television screens. A somewhat guilty looking man fled from the phone he had connected to the screen, and security forces quietly apprehended him, but Mendel was already in the call. Iris could only guess who that man had worked for, and hope that he wouldn’t get killed for it. “But your threat is just a bluff. You’re tracking her with stealth drones. The onboard processing just ain’t good enough, or the fort security forces would have picked them up and popped them. Squirting out a GPS coordinate like that is surely the only thing they’re capable of, not a dynamic track and kill in a crowd. Something like that, it takes a personal touch to guide in.”

Adam scowled and planted his hands on his hips. “You bought someone off, Mendel? Who in the Tribunal caved?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out. We’ve got chrome boys closing in on your bio labs now. You sure you’ve got enough security there to keep us out? Not like you can just torch the place, and by the looks of it, you brought most of your security here to Gamoroh…”

It was Amy’s turn to snarl. “Are yous seriously responding to a hostage threat with one of your own? Do you think this is a game? Did you learn diplomacy from movies?”

Mendel pulled out a cigar, lit it up, puffed and blew out smoke theatrically. “No, I never learned diplomacy, unless reading a few books on the matter counts. I learned war, and how to manage people who are very, very good at it. Ain’t that right, Iris?”

She turned her gaze on the Shermans and broadened her stance. Gripping her blade with both hands, she cranked the heat up until it glowed white. The air became a haze of convection. “So I just have to take them down?”

“That’s right,” Mendel said. “Nothing’s changed. Cut their heads off Iris, just do it at the same time so the other can’t squeeze out a kill command on Silvy.”

“If you’re not going to play ball, then we may as well kill her right now! That’s how hostage taking works, don’t you realize that?” Adam shouted at her.

Iris stopped giving them time to think. She rejected their paradigm and darted forward.