Blood Sport Read online

  “Isn’t it under tight security?” I asked.

  “Sí. It is. But the corazón runners are allowed through without having to stop for a security check.”

  “Heart runners?” Rafael asked. “What the frag are they?”

  Fede’s breather hissed for a moment as he took a deep breath before answering. My cyberear picked up that his heart began to beat more rapidly. “When an ollamaliztli player is seriously injured and cannot continue the game, he is rushed into the stadium’s first-aid rooms, where the team doctors and MedíCarro attendants tend to him. If he dies before he can be stabilized for transfer to a hospital, the MedíCarros remove his heart. They send it by runner to the teocalli, where it is offered up to Huitzilopochtli by the attending priests in ceremonial sacrifice. The wound in the chest of the player is sealed with a layer of synthetic skin, his body is sent off to the hospital morgue as usual, and no one is the wiser.”

  My mouth gaped open behind my breather. “How do you know all this?”

  “It happened to a teammate of mine—a very good friend whom I had known since we were both boys, playing ollamaliztli together in the streets,” Fede said. “I broke both legs in a game at the Tenochtitlán stadium and had passed out from the pain. But I regained consciousness just in time to see and hear what happened to Lorenzo down in the first-aid room. The MedíCarros let him die. One of the paramedics wanted to try to revive him, but the other said that the priests had insisted on a heart that day, that the game was almost over, and that my friend was already near death and was the best candidate. And so they waited until Lorenzo’s heart had stopped beating, then cut it out and ran it up to the temple. I was shocked, but pretended I was still unconscious. I knew that what I had seen and heard would cost me my life.”

  Fede leaned forward, eyes glittering with intensity. “I am just one man, and cannot stop the killings. Until now I have only been able to use the pesos I make on tickets to anonymously help the families of those who were killed. But now you are giving me a chance to pay back those who were responsible for Lorenzo’s death. I don’t care which of the priests is your target. I want to help. And not just for the nuyen.”

  I could see, in Fede’s eyes, something of what I was feeling. He had watched a friend die and now felt guilty that he had not been able to summon up the courage to try to prevent that death. At the time, he’d had every reason not to act—it would have been impossible for Fede to rescue his friend while he himself was lying in shock on the verge of unconsciousness, with two broken legs. But the debt weighed heavily upon his soul, nonetheless. Now, years later, he wanted a chance to make good.

  I realized, in that moment, that was driving me to chase down Domingo Vargas. I felt the same sort of guilt over Mama G’s death. Even though I’d taken reasonable precautions and had no way of realizing the danger she was in, I still felt responsible for her murder. I knew that it was all tied up with my guilt over not having visited my own grandmother years earlier on the night she lay dying in hospital. I’d had a good reason at the time—an impossibly heavy workload at Lone Star—but had tortured myself with guilt over not going to her bedside to bid her farewell ever since. Somehow, illogical though it might be, bringing Domingo Vargas to justice would lay the ghosts of both my grandmothers to rest.

  Rafael had also been sitting in silence, listening to Fede’s story. His brow creased in a frown, and his eyes narrowed. Then he nodded slowly to himself.

  “I know who you are,” he told Fede in an awed voice. “You played pro court ball with the Tampico Voladores. The game you’re talking about was the exhibition match that kicked off the 2051 season, the one in which Lorenzo Nanchez died of a ruptured spleen. You won that game by forcing Juan Toro to touch the ball with his hand and forfeit a point, then drove the ball into his end zone. Toro was so slotted off at you that he slammed you against the wall, breaking both of your legs. We thought you were out for the season, but you came back two months later with cybernetic limbs—the ones that enabled you to leap up and slam the ball through the hoop in the third game of the semi-finals in 2055, winning the game with just ten minutes and thirty-six seconds on the clock. That was a fragging brilliant move—although I agree with the officials’ decision not to let you play in the ollamaliztli finals, on account of your enhancements. But at least they let you remain the honorary captain of the team, even if you were benched for all five—”

  “Whoa, Raf,” I said, cutting off the flow of sports trivia. “Slow down. What are you trying to say?”

  Rafael waved a hand at Fede. “This is Emilio Ibanez, the captain who led the Tampico Voladores into the ollamaliztli finals of 2055. If it wasn’t for his scars I’d have recognized him right away. He was on all the sports tridcasts for years.” Fede’s cheeks rose behind his breather and I realized that he was smiling. His former popularity explained why Fede hadn’t had his scar tissue removed. It was indeed a mask.

  Rafael continued: “Ibanez was the only captain of a winning national finals ollamaliztli team to escape the curse of Huitzilopochtli. He disappeared in—”

  Fede’s laugh startled us both. “Curse? Oh carnal, do you believe everything you hear? That’s just a story, told to explain away the murders of the ollamaliztli players.”

  My professional curiosity was immediately piqued. “Murders?” I asked. I took a wild guess as to motive. “Is someone killing ball players to influence the outcome of future games? With the amount of nuyen that’s wagered on ollamaliztli, I can see why.”

  “Betting? Oh no,” Fede answered. “What do a few pesos matter, compared to magical power—mana from the gods themselves? The national finals are all part of an ancient magical ritual—one that predates even the Aztec empire. That’s why they try to duplicate the ancient game as much as possible, with no metahumans and no cybernetics permitted.

  That usually leaves only physical adepts as competitors. And they make the best sacrificial offerings. They’re juiced with mana.”

  He sighed and looked down at his legs. “I didn’t escape Huitzilopochtli’s curse—I was unworthy of the god. The cybernetics had depleted my life force. And my presence as honorary team captain meant that another captain—one who could be consecrated to the sun god by the priests—could not be named in my place. Even so, when our team won the nationals, I knew the priests wouldn’t let me live. And so I fled from the tlachtli, rather than attending the victory celebrations. I nearly died at the hands of the fire elemental they sent after me.”

  He paused to slide a finger under his breather and scratch his scarred cheek. I shuddered as I imagined the pain he must have suffered from the elemental’s attack, and wondered how Fede had managed to escape being roasted. But that part of the story could be saved for another time.

  “I’m alive today, but at the cost of the thing I loved most,” Fede continued. “I’ll never play ollamaliztli again. Instead I hide behind this mask of scars the elemental gave me, selling tickets to games that are still nothing more than a means of supplying the priests with sacrificial victims for their foul magic.

  “I can’t prove what I know, nor do I understand what is behind it all, but I can tell you this. None of the national team captains died by accident, or from natural causes. They were either killed by priests of the Path of the Sun, or by people who wanted to prevent these candidates for sacrifice from falling into the hands of the priests. In either case, the official reports on their deaths were lies.

  “I started to put all of this together after Chucho Chamac died in 2051. He was a natural athlete and a strong swimmer. Even if it was true that he had fallen off the yacht during the victory celebrations, there was no way he would have drowned. And then when the polici'a report blamed the deep wounds in his chest to an eagle that fed on his corpse, it just didn’t scan.

  “I knew what had happened to my teammate Lorenzo Nanchez during that exhibition match—how the paramedics had let him die and then cut out his heart—and knew that someone must have wanted Chucho’s heart in the same
way. The drowning was all a cover-up. When I started asking questions, I found more and more to disturb me. That’s why I knew I had to escape after our team won the 2051 national finals.”

  Rafael let out a slow whistle. I must admit that I, too, was surprised at Fede’s story—although it fit with what we’d learned so far. This year, it seemed, the cultists were the ones who were interested in sacrificing the winning court ball team captain. They didn’t want his heart—they wanted his head, which they believed would trigger the end of the current era if it were severed from his body and placed in an itzompan on the day Four Motion. Judging by what we’d heard the blood spirit Nezahualpilli say, only the priest Domingo Vargas knew the location of the itzompan. My guess was that he had double-crossed the cultists, and planned to make the sacrifice solo. But if all went well for us tomorrow, he’d never be able to use that information.

  I was surprised at Fede’s candor. By telling us about his past, he was showing us that we could trust him. A person doesn’t share that kind of confidence—doesn’t break cover after two years of hiding—with someone he is planning to betray. But I had to be sure. And so I asked the obvious question.

  “Why are you telling us all this?” I asked.

  Fede shrugged. “No sé. Maybe it was just time for me to tell someone—and you are the first people who were in a position to believe my story. Maybe I’m tired of being nothing more than Fede, the ticket scalper.”

  He stared at us, his intense gaze shifting between Rafael and I. “I would like to go with you when you leave Aztlan. To have entered the country undetected, you must have connections that I do not. I want to make use of them, to travel with you when you return to El Norte. It if comes to a fight, I can prove myself useful.”

  I glanced at Fede’s powerful muscles and hydraulic-enhanced cyberlegs. He looked even stronger and quicker than Rafael—and I’d thought my burly ork friend was tough. It would be nice to have a little extra backup . . .

  “All right,” I told Fede. “You’ve convinced me. You’re in.”

  Rafael broke into a wide grin. “Chill,” he said, the reverence of a true sports fan evident in his voice. “Domingo Vargas had better watch out. With Emilio Ibanez of the Tampico Flyers on our team, there’s no way we can lose.”

  I wished I could share Rafael’s certainty. But I was still very, very nervous about what was to come. Anything could happen tomorrow. We had to be prepared for every eventuality.

  Even for the end of the world.

  21

  The crowd that filed into the ollamaliztli stadium on Wednesday evening was well dressed and obviously able to afford the outrageous ticket prices for seeing the game live. We’d had to pay out yet more pesos to outfit ourselves so that we wouldn’t stand out. Both Rafael and I had picked up high fashion knock-offs in the Thieves’ Market, as well as designer breathers. Rafael looked quite handsome in his mock Vashon Island double-breasted suit, and I wore the female equivalent—a pants suit in sea-green “silk.” Fede had also dressed the part, and had changed to a gilded, wide-masked breather that hid much of his face. A stylish, floppy-brimmed hat hid the rest of his scars.

  Under our clothes, each of us wore short-sleeved white shirts emblazoned with a passable imitation of the Medf-Carro crest, as well as plain black trousers. Fake ID badges hung from the front pockets of the shirts. The “uniforms” wouldn’t stand up to careful scrutiny, and the magnetic datastrip on the ID badges didn’t hold any information and wouldn’t pass a scanner check. But if Fede succeeded in getting us into the first-aid rooms of the tlachtli, we wouldn’t have to worry about that.

  I had an anxious moment as we had passed through the stadium’s security gates. There were four guards at each entrance, heavily armored and armed with lethal-looking combat rifles and stun batons. They watched with narrowed eyes as the crowd filed through a series of weapon detectors, chemical detectors, and cyberware scanners whose sonic and magnetic imagers sought out subdermal cyberweapons. At least one of the guards must have been magically capable—a stocky, dog-headed spirit stood beside him, its nose quivering as it sniffed the crowd. I guessed that it was somehow monitoring astral space—although I couldn’t imagine what it was looking for.

  None of the guards spotted the fake uniforms we wore under our dress clothes or questioned the bottle of sweetsmelling “perfume” in my cosmetics bag when they opened my purse for a manual search—even though its nozzle had been modified to squirt a stream of liquid rather than a fine spray. One of them raised an eyebrow at the Masked Matador cartoon-character phone in Fede’s suit pocket, but readily accepted his explanation that he’d been forced to use his children’s phone to call in his bets after his own cell phone had broken down earlier that day. The guard popped open the back of the plastic figure but saw nothing suspicious about it and handed it back to Fede with a shrug.

  So far, so good. Now all we had to do was find our seats and wait. We didn’t want to enter any of the restricted areas too soon—the longer we hung about there, the more chance there was of us being discovered. But as soon as any of the ollamaliztli players was seriously injured we could make our move.

  Our seats were high above the playing field on bleachers so steep that I felt a mild vertigo until I sat down. Rafael and I sat and watched as a group of three priests consecrated the field—I used the binoculars I’d bought to confirm that Domingo Vargas wasn’t among them. Fede arrived just as the game began—he’d had a chore to carry out first—and sat three rows up and to my left.

  The playing field lay far below us and was shaped like the letter I, with a long, narrow alley and end zones that jutted out at right angles like the base and cap of that letter. The walls of the alley were close to ten meters high, sloped at the bottom so the ball wouldn’t get stuck in an angle of the wall. A green line at the midpoint of the alley divided the court in two, and the field itself was further divided into quarters, each painted a different color: red, blue, black, and white, the four colors of the Aztlaner “tree of life.”

  Play surged back and forth along this alley as the three-man teams battled it out. Ollamaliztli was an odd-looking game—the players could hit the ball only with their hips, elbows, and knees. They had heavy leather pads strapped over each of these areas, but otherwise wore only a loincloth and a few decorative feathers—most of which lay strewn about the court by now. Aside from having to be careful not to touch the ball with a hand or foot—which resulted in the loss of one point—they had to watch out that the heavy rubber ball didn’t hit them in a vital spot. And the wildly bouncing ball wasn’t easy to evade. Just five minutes into the game, one of the Jaguar players was knocked out when the ball crashed into his temple. As his unconscious form was carried back to the bench for team doctors to revive him with a stimulant patch, one of the Tenochtitlán team’s three replacement players took his place, leaving only two more spares to draw from.

  The game was fast and furious, with each team working to keep the ball in motion. According to Fede, a point was scored whenever a team succeeded in bouncing the ball into the opposing team’s end zone, or whenever the opposing team failed to return or pass the ball after one bounce. Since the game was over as soon as one team scored seven points, I’d thought it would be relatively short. But I’d underestimated the skill of the players. They seemed to have unlimited stamina, to be able to keep running at breakneck pace without pause. Since cybernetic enhancements were prohibited at the national finals level, I guessed that they were all physical adepts—or that they’d been pumped full of adrenal boosters and pain inhibitors prior to the game.

  Above the corporate logos that festooned the walls of the tlachtli, carved stone rings were set into the stonework on either side of the center line. The rings had a diameter about that of a basketball hoop, but were mounted vertically, rather than horizontally, near the top of the wall. The ball—which seemed barely small enough to fit through the ring—had to pass through a ring to score.

  I could see why Rafael had soun
ded so impressed when he recounted the story of Fede having won a game by making a ring shot. The ball that the teams below us were chasing after was made of solid rubber and bounced off the stone walls like a ricocheting bullet. Its trajectory would have to be exactly right for it to ever pass through the ring—the slightest miscalculation and the ball careered wildly off the ring in another direction. No wonder driving a ball through the ring instantly won the game—it was an almost impossible shot to make.

  As the game unfolded the crowd around us roared and cheered, leaping to their feet each time a player succeeded in bouncing the ball past the center line and groaning whenever an end-zone player threw his body in front of the ball to block a point. The spectators seemed evenly divided between local Jaguar fans and supporters of the Texcoco Serpents. And tensions were running high. Three rows below us, a fight broke out between two rival fans. I winced as ACS guards in tan uniforms waded in, using stun batons to zap the unruly fans into submission. One of the men collapsed under the baton’s sting—there was no way to tell whether he’d had a heart attack or had simply fainted. The security guards dragged him away, disappearing with him down one of the corridors that led to the concourse of the tlachtli. The other combatant looked shaken, and meekly sat down again.

  Despite our mission, Rafael was intent upon the game. He leaped, cheered, and punched the air whenever a point was scored, or groaned along with crowd whenever a point was taken away as a penalty. He’d jammed a micro-receiver into his ear—the button-sized radio gave him a play-by-play broadcast of the unfolding game.

  When he’d first insisted on buying the micro-receiver, I’d protested at the expense. As if he needed to be updated on what he could see with his own two eyes. But the microreceiver would be playing a part in our plans—at the very least it would enable us to keep track of the progress of the game once we’d left our seats.

  I was glad that Rafael didn’t have a datajack—if so, he would probably have been as oblivious to his surroundings as the glassy-eyed businessman next to me who was plugged into the stadium’s instant-replay system. The fellow zoned in and out, his eyes glazing over each time he uploaded a simsense replay of a critical moment in the game. Oblivious to everything around him, he didn’t even blink or move his foot away when I accidentally stepped on it.