She knew this was risky. But Calliope had hit breaking point. She couldn’t take another night in that cold, gilded apartment, with its thick carpets and ticking clocks. It was the sort of apartment where she knew exactly what was happening at any given moment, because it all ran with such monotonous efficiency. Even now, for instance, Nadav would be sitting at his modular recycled-aluminum desk to review some contract or message before going to sleep. Livya would be tucked safely into her four-poster princess bed, her room comp whispering SAT questions to her throughout the night for some osmosal learning. It was all so terrifyingly predictable.
As she stepped onto the downTower lift, filled with clamor and conversation—all the messy chaos of real life—Calliope felt an overwhelming sense of relief. New York was still here. It hadn’t gone anywhere.
She switched to the monorail at Grand Central, heading out of the Tower altogether, toward the lower Manhattan neighborhood known as the Sprawl. It was as unlike the sleek, ordered reality of the Tower as night from day; parts of it were still radically low-tech, with warped wooden floors and twisted railings. Church steeples rose into the sky alongside bright holograms.
Calliope glanced back at the Tower as she stepped off the monorail. From this angle it seemed to burn more brightly than ever. Next to it, the half-moon looked alone in its isolated glory.
She paused at the corner of Elizabeth and Prince Street, her eyes closed with deceptive nonchalance. It was almost nine on a weeknight and the streets were mostly quiet. But Calliope could feel the Sprawl’s thrum of excitement—the seething, excited pulse of things young and thrilling and illegal.
She pushed open an unmarked brown door and stepped inside.
A wall of sound roared up to meet her: crowds erupting in screams, the slippery beat of electronic music. Another turn down the stairs and Calliope emerged in a bar, all done up in neons and pulsing LED lights, like some kind of video-game speakeasy. The ceiling was lined in prisms of glass that reflected the garish illumination, separating it into a million glowing strands and tossing it down again. The colors were so vibrant that it almost hurt to look at them.
Calliope didn’t bother getting a drink, though she could have; she was over eighteen. She just lingered in the corner, her eyes flicking expertly around the room. It was crowded, with a mix of nerds, tourists, and others who were simply curious. The afternoon show was meant for children, she knew; but the night performance was supposedly much edgier—and more violent.
Someone sounded a gong. The crowd obediently shuffled through the bar to the stadium beyond, clutching their drinks to their chests. Calliope let herself be caught along in the surge, her hair falling loose around her bare shoulders. She was wearing a strapless silver dress and boots, and had even sprayed a temporary inktat patch on her tanned cheek, just for fun. It would leave a sticky film over her face for several days, but the effect was worth it.
The stadium smelled like popcorn and grease. Calliope sank eagerly into her seat and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, to study the ComBots—Combat Robots—waiting around the room. A team of handlers huddled near each of them, clutching tablets as they engaged in last-minute system checks. Calliope caught a surreptitious movement in the corner of her eye and smiled. Probably bookies, recording under-the-table bets. ComBattles might not be illegal, but gambling on them assuredly was.
ComBattles were an expensive and arguably illogical sport, like racing cars used to be—how wasteful to build these sleek, elaborate bots, only to let them tear one another apart. Calliope wondered what it was about humans that made them relish destruction. This was the modern version of gladiatorial fights, or bear baitings, or reality television. For whatever reason, people loved watching things explode.
She hadn’t been to a ComBattle in years, not since the time Elise took her to one in Shinjuku. She wasn’t really sure why she’d come here tonight. Perhaps the loud anonymity of it seemed reassuring. This was as far from the Mizrahis’ world as she could get.
Calliope let her eyes drift to the boy sitting next to her. “Did you bet on one?” she asked. For some reason the words came out in an Australian accent.
He looked around, startled, as she might be talking to some other, better someone lurking behind him. “Oh. Um, the three-headed snake,” he said after a moment.
“That thing? Mine will crush it,” Calliope declared, knowing that her voice would forgive the insult. Calliope’s voice—soft and purring, with that seductive accent—had always been her secret weapon. It allowed her to say anything she wanted and get away with it.
White teeth flashed against ebony skin as the young man smiled. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a gambler.”
“And why not? Where’s the fun, without a little risk to spice things up?”
He nodded, conceding the point. “Which did you bet on?”
“My money is on that scaly thing,” Calliope fabricated, pointing toward a robot that was half lion, half dragon. Little whirls of fire emerged from its gullet.
There was something whimsical about the battle bots, despite their ruthlessness. It was against international regulations to make robots that resembled people; and in America, it was also illegal for robots to resemble real animals. As a result, the ComBots became something almost otherworldly. Calliope saw a dinosaur, a fanged unicorn, and a winged tiger that sizzled with electricity.
“Care to up the stakes?” the guy asked and held out a hand. “I’m Endred, by the way.”
“Amada.” It was a name she’d used back in Australia. Easy to remember. “What did you have in mind, exactly?”
“Loser buys dinner?”
Calliope hadn’t come here to run a con. God knows she didn’t need anything off this guy; she could buy her own dinner, now that she had access to Nadav’s money. And yet . . . for her, it had always been as much about the thrill as it was about money. That eager breathless sensation of living on the edge, of knowing she was pulling off the impossible. That was what she wanted from Endred—attention, adventure, a night of being someone else, rather than the excruciatingly boring character she’d been playing these past eight months.
“I never say yes to dinner without drinks first,” she told him, with an inscrutable smile.
“Done.”
The stadium went suddenly dark and erupted in wild screaming as the first two ComBots faced off.
It was the dinosaur against her lion-dragon. Calliope reached beneath her seat for her glowstick and waved it in the air, shouting like everyone else until her throat was ragged, watching wide-eyed as the dinosaur and the hybrid creature began slashing at each other. They breathed fire; they shot small ballistics; they lunged forward and then quickly fell back. A pair of commentators narrated the action in a guttural, excited mix of English, Mandarin, and Spanish. Strobe lights flickered overhead. She felt Endred’s gaze heavy on her and couldn’t resist giving her head a proud toss.
The dinosaur’s barbed tail slashed at the hybrid. Calliope jumped to her feet, one hand still wrapped tightly around the lime-green glowstick. “Get him!” she cried out as the lion-dragon’s jaws unhinged—grotesquely wide, wider than a real creature’s jaws ever could—and a torrent of flames erupted from it. The dinosaur stumbled, a gash in its side exposing a bright red tangle of wires. Its arms flailed, as if its computer was short circuiting, and then it tottered to one side and fell still.
Amid the roar of the stadium, Endred looked over at her and grinned. “It seems congratulations are in order.”
“I always know how to pick a winner,” Calliope said provocatively.
Endred waved over a pitcher of a sticky lemon drink and handed her a glass. Down