It was a physical blemish of shame over the exhibition match. Kai heard the ghostly laughter of the people after him in the streets the next two days. He shunned his haunts, the repair-shop to which he had been bequeathed by his grandfather like a tomb rather than a refuge. He had put Rusty Rex on the workbench with the broken plastic and wearing tape as a mute charge.
There are those toys that are born as broken.
The words of Juno had a ring in his head, a torturous, inhuman mantra. Still another voice, gentler, flavored with intellectual interest, broke through the din every time he had got to a point where despair was approaching.
It adapted.
It was the observation which Mira had made, and upon which he had been clinging with desperate hands. It was little, but it was a glimmer in the total blackness of his failure. A flicker that was the result of a defeated, ill-considered hope, brought him to a rusted service door, which was at the back of a busy noodle stand in the industrial quarter of the city.
This was the Gutter Circuit. No announcers, no shiny chrome arenas, no adoring crowds. The smell of ozone and bad fried food and unbathed ambition was thick in the air. The "arena" was a roped off area of a converted warehouse floor, weld-scarred, and oily. The audience were a rag-time lot of gamblers, hardcore fanatics of Toybounders, who had fallen on bad times. It was where you were fighting, not to gain glory, but to get those credits which you could scrape out of the purse of a winner, just sufficient to pay the rent a week.
It was perfect.
"Name and Relic?" A squat, sunken face, at a temporary registration table, grunted, without raising his eyes beyond his datapad.
"Kai. And Rusty Rex," said Kai, but he said it tighter.
The male looked at the toy that Kai held in her hand with a curled lip. "Right. Entry fee is fifty credits. Pay up front."
This was it. The point of no return. Kai gave me the dirty bills, his last bit of savings. The man stamped a holographic band on his wrist and threw a thumb towards the holding area. "You're in the first bracket. Do not break anything of value. We ain't got insurance."
This holding pen was a small area that was segregated by a chain-link fence off the main floor. Kai leant on it, and was watching the game in progress. It was an ugly, simplistic fight between a spiked car toy and a dragon plush which exhaled actual, albeit anaemic, flames. It was not a graceful art form, it was a street fight that Juno was in.
"A bold choice."
The sound was deep, and echoed and bounced theatrically with a metallic tone. Kai looked to see a man who appeared to have drunk up all the neon light in the room. He was slim, broad-shouldered, and wearing a specially designed pilot jacket of luminous panels and simulated military insignia. A smooth Gundam-style mech, his Relic, the Titan Gear Fortress, was erect on his shoulder and was looking around the room with contempt.
A relic of such... historical interest... into a modern battle field, the man went on, with a rather scornful smile on his face. He was Mecha Lord Barrox, and as the rumors went, he was the obvious favourite to make it in the whole bracket. "It's almost poetic. A reminiscence of a past age of inferior engineering.
Kai made no reply, but only squeezed Rex tighter.
Barrox bent over and spoke in a kind of mock-confidential tone. And here, scrap kid, I will give you some advice. Give up even before the match starts. Don't turn your little museum-piece into a permanent land fill. My Titan Gear Fortress is a weapon of war, and not a toy to be played by children who cannot afford the real ones. He clucked to rights, and made a melodramatic gesture. And dealing with that... and being dealt with in that... tape-tied way... is an insult to the very art of Toybounding!
A buzz sounded before Kai had time to make a reply.
"Kai vs. Grime-Spitter Goro! To the arena!"
The first opponent that Kai faced was a huge man who wielded a Relic resembling a compactor in a junkyard with legs. It was unattractive, yet it exuded coarse, bruising strength.
The battle was what Kai failed to do with Juno. It was desperate, and anarchic and most ugly. There was no rhythm, no style. Goro in his Relic merely charged, endeavoring to pound Rusty Rex into powder. Kai was working by pure panicked instinct, and Rex scramble and scramble, the taped leg threatening to give way with each struggling step.
Stop running and fight you little pest! Goro roared.
One of the wild swings of the arm of the compactor struck the arena wall and freed a loose heavy spring of a defective hydraulic mechanism with which obstacles had been erected in some former contest. In between them the spring clathed to the floor.
That one-second battle instinct, the one which saw the turn of the battle like a chessboard, at last came into action in Kai. He was not thinking of adaptation or resonance. He was considering survival.
"Rex, now! The spring!"
It was not a cool name command. It was a raw, screamed plea.
Instead of springing at the Relic of Goro, Rusty Rex sprung at the spring. It was covered with a coiled metal with small hands that carry a small sword. The action by Rex contravened the design itself, however, as the product of the dodge he employed forced the spring into the main joint of the compactor the second time around.
It was a hideous cry of agonized metal. It clutched the arm of the compactor, and twisted its own limb into a useless pretzel. It fell, out of balance and crashed on the ground, throwing sparks.
the warehouse was still a moment silent, and then broke into an indescribable commotion of shouts of approval and rage on the part of those who had bet against him.
The referee was bored and called the match. "Winner: Kai."
Kai was puffing to himself, with his heart pounding against his ribs. He recalled Rusty Rex. It was still worse battered, however; and in its hand it held the crooked spring, which was welded to its arm like an industrial, rough knuckle of brass.
He glanced at Barrox who was standing on the sidelines, with his previous smirk changed by a half-smile of inquiring interest. It was not in his mind a respect, but the cold curiosity of a scientist when he is watching a strange new specimen.
Kai didn't care. He gazed down on the uglified, yet still more ugly Rusty Rex. He had won. It was an untidy thing, it was a chance thing, and it was likely an accident. But he had won.
The humiliation of his defeat in public was still there all right, but now it went along with something new, something hard and sharp. It was a grimy hope, a dissenting, rebellious hope, that had been fashioned in the Gutter Circuit. He was not a sculptor like Juno, or a genocide like Barrox.
He was the Scrap Kid. And perhaps, perhaps, that was all.