I think about Anna at her window, watching me walk away. Be careful, she said. Nobody's said that to me in three years. I didn't know how much I needed to hear it until she said it, and now I can't stop hearing it, and it steadies me and unmoors me both at once.
Then I'm called, and I go out into the noise.
The fight itself is nothing. That's the truth of it, the ugly truth I've never said to anyone. When I'm in the ring and I keep the wolf leashed, I'm still faster and stronger than any human I'll ever face, and it's not a contest, it's a performance, a careful piece of theater where I win convincingly without ever letting the thing off the chain. My opponent's a big man, drugged, I can smell it on him, fast in the jerky wrong way the drug makes them fast, and I dance him around the rin
