5. Scales of Blood

The laboratory on the third floor of the old marine engine works was bathed in the cold blue glow of forensic lights when Dorian stumbled through the door. Isla Voss was already waiting, her equipment arranged on a steel table like surgical instruments before an operation. She took the gloves from Dorian without a word, her face set in the focused stillness of a scientist who understood exactly how much depended on the next few hours.

Lena Mathis locked the door behind them and drew the security grate across the window. Outside, the Eastpoint District was silent, its warehouses dark, its streets empty. The city seemed to be holding its breath.

“How long do you need?” Dorian asked. His voice was hoarse, his throat raw from exertion and the adrenaline that was only now beginning to fade.

“Two hours for the preliminary panel. Four for confirmation.” Isla was already cutting into the lining of the first glove, her scalpel steady, her hands moving with the precision of long practice. “Go clean yourself up. You’re dripping blood on my floor.”

Dorian looked down. The cut above his eye was still seeping, and his knuckles had split open again, the wraps stained crimson. He walked to the small bathroom at the back of the laboratory and stood over the sink, letting cold water run over his hands until the basin was pink. The mirror showed him a face he barely recognized: bruised, swollen, the left eye beginning to purple, the cheekbone scraped raw.

But his eyes were clear. He had done what he came to do. The gloves were in Isla’s hands now, and whatever they revealed would either be the proof that brought down the Albatross Society or the failure that buried him alongside Vincent Mathis.

When he returned to the laboratory, Lena was sitting in a corner, her arms wrapped around herself. She looked smaller than she had in the sedan, diminished by the weight of waiting. Isla was hunched over a mass spectrometer, her glasses reflecting the machine’s pale light.

“Talk to me,” Dorian said.

“The residue is fresh,” Isla said without looking up. “Applied within the last twenty-four hours. The compound is consistent with succinylcholine chloride, pharmaceutical grade. But there’s something else.” She turned from the machine, her expression troubled. “There’s a secondary compound. A bonding agent I haven’t seen before. It’s designed to slow the absorption rate, to delay the onset of symptoms. Whoever formulated this didn’t just want the fighter to die. They wanted him to die at a specific time. A specific moment.”

“During the fight,” Lena said, her voice hollow. “When everyone would be watching. When the cameras would be rolling. When no one would question that a punch killed him.”

“Yes.” Isla removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “This is sophisticated work. The bonding agent alone would have required a pharmaceutical laboratory to produce. Street-level dealers couldn’t make this. This came from someone with training. Someone with resources. Someone connected.”

Dorian thought of the Albatross Society, its membership list that included judges and politicians and business magnates. A pharmaceutical laboratory was well within their reach. “Can you put it in a report? Something that will hold up in court?”

“I can. But it won’t be enough.” Isla gestured at the gloves. “This proves the gloves were tampered. It doesn’t prove who tampered them. A good defense attorney will argue that Brick himself applied the compound, or that someone in the locker room had access, or that the gloves were contaminated after the fight. Without a chain of custody, without witness testimony, without a direct connection to the Stewart family or the Albatross Society, this is just a chemical finding. Powerful. Suggestive. But not conclusive.”

“The red ledger,” Lena said. “Vincent’s recording mentioned a red ledger in the server room. If we can get that—”

“The server room is in the Stewart estate on Meridian Hill,” Dorian said. “Armed guards, biometric locks, a fail-safe that wipes the drives. And I just stole evidence from their championship fight. By now, Caspian Stewart knows I’m not just a fighter. He’ll be expecting me to try something.”

He pulled out the blueprint Hawthorne had given him, spreading it across Isla’s steel table. The estate was a sprawling compound, its grounds dotted with guest houses and gardens and a private security barracks. The server room was in the main house, in a sub-basement that had originally been a wine cellar. Access required passing through three checkpoints, each with its own security protocols.

“Hawthorne said he has a contact inside the household,” Dorian continued. “Someone who can get me in. But the server room key is a biometric token. It’s worn by Caspian Stewart himself. I’d need to get close enough to take it.”

Lena stood and walked to the table. She studied the blueprint for a long moment, her finger tracing the path from the estate’s service entrance to the main house. “Caspian Stewart never misses a victory celebration. After every championship fight, he hosts a party at the estate. The Albatross Society members attend. It’s their ritual. They drink, they congratulate each other, they review the betting ledgers. He’ll be there tonight.”

“You know this how?”

“Vincent told me. He’d been watching the estate for months before he died. Taking notes. Learning the patterns. The morning after a fight, the household staff changes shifts at six o’clock. The security patrol doubles between four and five in the morning while the party is winding down. For about twenty minutes, the service entrance is unguarded.” She looked up from the blueprint. “That’s our window.”

Dorian stared at her. “You want to break into the Stewart estate tonight.”

“We don’t have another choice. By tomorrow, they’ll know you have the gloves. They’ll know Isla is testing them. They’ll start covering their tracks. Erasing evidence. Intimidating witnesses. If we don’t get the red ledger tonight, we may never get it.”

Isla cleared her throat. “There’s something else you should know.” She held up a small data drive. “While I was running the toxicology panel, I took the liberty of cross-referencing the bonding agent against known pharmaceutical patents. It’s proprietary. Developed by a company called Meridian Biomedical. The patent was filed six years ago and classified as a trade secret. The company’s majority shareholder is a shell corporation registered in the Valmont Islands.”

“The same Valmont Islands shell that funds your laboratory,” Dorian said.

“Yes.” Isla’s voice was very quiet. “Whoever has been paying for my work, whoever has been keeping me quiet and funded and directed—they’re connected to the Albatross Society. I’ve been working for the people who killed Vincent Mathis without knowing it.”

The revelation hung in the air between them. Lena’s face had gone very pale. Dorian felt the floor shift beneath his feet, the ground of his understanding cracking open to reveal a deeper darkness beneath.

“They didn’t just destroy your career,” he said slowly. “They rebuilt it. They put you in this laboratory. They gave you equipment and funding and a steady stream of cases. They turned you into an asset without you ever realizing.”

“They turned me into their blind spot,” Isla said, and her voice cracked on the words. “I thought I was independent. I thought I was working outside the system. But I was inside their system all along. Every test I ran, every result I found—they saw it. They knew what I was discovering. And they let me keep discovering it because they didn’t see me as a threat. They saw me as a resource.”

“Then they know about the gloves,” Lena said. “They know we’re testing them now.”

“Probably.” Isla squared her shoulders, and something in her posture shifted from shock to resolve. “Which means we don’t have until morning. We have until they decide to stop us.”

The Stewart estate on Meridian Hill rose from the city’s highest point like a monument to untouchable wealth. It had been built by Aldric Stewart fifty years earlier, a sprawling neoclassical mansion surrounded by gardens that required a full-time staff of twelve to maintain. The iron gates at the entrance were flanked by stone pillars, and the driveway wound through a half-mile of manicured hedgerows before reaching the main house. Security cameras dotted the property at regular intervals, their red lights blinking in the darkness.

Dorian, Lena, and Isla sat in the black sedan, parked on a side street that overlooked the estate’s eastern wall. It was three o’clock in the morning. The party inside the main house was still going, the distant sound of music and laughter drifting across the gardens. Light spilled from the mansion’s windows, golden and warm, a beacon of celebration in a city that had nothing to celebrate.

“Hawthorne’s contact is a woman named Nadia Lorne,” Lena said, reading from a text on her phone. “She’s been a housekeeper in the Stewart household for five years. She lost her brother to The Pit three years ago—heart failure, officially. She’s been feeding Hawthorne information ever since. She’ll meet us at the service entrance in fifteen minutes.”

“And if she’s been discovered?” Isla asked.

“Then we’re walking into a trap.”

Dorian checked the small bag he had packed: a compact camera, a portable data drive, and the Saint’s medallion that Elara had given him. He was not armed. A weapon would only make things worse if he was caught. His only defense was speed, surprise, and the hope that the Albatross Society’s arrogance would leave them vulnerable.

They left the sedan and approached the estate on foot, keeping to the shadows of the hedgerows. The eastern wall was twelve feet high, topped with iron spikes, but Vincent’s notes had identified a section where the stonework was cracked and climbable. Dorian went first, finding handholds in the weathered masonry, pulling himself over the wall and dropping silently into a service yard on the other side.

Lena followed, then Isla. They crouched in the darkness beside a row of maintenance sheds, listening for patrols. The security guards’ footsteps were distant, rhythmic, following a pattern that Vincent had documented. The window was open.

The service entrance was a plain steel door set into the rear of the main house. It was unguarded, exactly as Lena had predicted. A woman was waiting in the shadows beside it, her uniform neat, her face lined with years of silent service. Nadia Lorne had the eyes of someone who had seen too much and said nothing, waiting for a moment that might never come.

“You’re the fighter,” she said to Dorian. Her voice was barely a whisper. “The one who stole Brick’s gloves.”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re either very brave or very foolish.” She unlocked the service door and held it open. “The server room is in the sub-basement. Take the service stairs down two flights. At the bottom, there’s a corridor that leads past the wine cellar. The server room is at the end. The door is biometric—retinal scan and palm print. I can’t get you through it.”

“Leave that to me,” Dorian said. “How much time do we have?”

“The party will end by four-thirty. The guards rotate at four. You have twenty-five minutes.” Nadia pressed a small key into his hand. “This unlocks the service stairs. Don’t lose it. And don’t get caught. If they find you here, they’ll kill you. I’ve seen them do it before.”

Dorian took the key and stepped through the door. Lena moved to follow, but he stopped her. “Stay with Isla. If I’m not back in twenty minutes, leave without me. Get the toxicology report to Hawthorne. Get it to the press. Make sure the story gets out.”

“Dorian—”

“Promise me.”

Lena’s jaw tightened, but she nodded. “Twenty minutes.”

The service stairs were narrow and dimly lit, the walls lined with pipes that carried water and steam to the mansion’s upper floors. Dorian descended quickly, counting the flights. One. Two. At the bottom, a heavy door opened onto a corridor that smelled of old stone and older wine. The wine cellar was to his left, its racks visible through an iron gate. To his right, the corridor stretched toward a door that gleamed with the cold sheen of reinforced steel.

The server room.

A retinal scanner was mounted on the wall beside the door, its lens dark. A palm print reader glowed faintly below it. Both were active. Both were waiting for a key that Dorian did not have.

He pressed himself against the wall and waited. The minutes crawled past. The distant music from the party filtered down through the mansion’s bones, a faint pulse of celebration. Then, footsteps. Two sets, descending the main staircase. Voices, growing louder.

“—and the betting pool cleared twelve million. A record.” It was Caspian Stewart’s voice, smooth and self-satisfied. “The champion retains his title, the challenger is humiliated, and our guests are very happy. I’d call that a successful evening.”

“The challenger escaped,” said another voice, deeper and rougher. The hatchet-faced man. “He took Brick’s gloves. Voss is testing them now. We have a problem.”

“We have an inconvenience. A small one. Voss works for us, whether she knows it or not. I’ll have her laboratory shut down by morning. The gloves will be recovered. And Mr. Rivet—Dorian Cole—will be dealt with.” Caspian’s voice hardened. “I offered him everything. His sister’s surgery. A future. And he chose betrayal.”

The footsteps stopped directly on the other side of the corridor wall. Dorian held his breath, pressing himself deeper into the shadows.

“What about the sister?” the hatchet-faced man asked.

“She remains useful. As long as she’s in that hospital bed, Cole will do nothing stupid. He loves her too much. It’s his weakness.” Caspian paused. “Have the security team sweep the perimeter. If he’s foolish enough to come here tonight, I want him found. And I want him brought to me.”

The footsteps moved on, fading down the corridor. Dorian waited until the silence was complete, then stepped out of the shadows. His heart was pounding, but his mind was clear. Caspian was going to the server room. And he was carrying the biometric key.

Dorian moved quickly down the corridor toward the reinforced door. As he rounded the corner, he saw Caspian and the hatchet-faced man standing before the retinal scanner, their backs to him. A soft chime sounded as the scanner read Caspian’s eye. A second chime as the palm reader accepted his hand. The door hissed open, revealing a small chamber filled with humming servers and blinking lights.

Caspian stepped inside. The hatchet-faced man remained at the door, his hand resting inside his jacket where a weapon was certainly holstered.

Dorian calculated the distance. Twenty feet. The guard was trained, alert, and armed. A direct approach would be suicide. But the corridor had other doors—the wine cellar gate, a maintenance closet, an emergency exit that probably led to the gardens. He needed a distraction.

He found it in the wine cellar. The iron gate was locked with a simple bolt, easily slid back. Inside, the racks stretched into darkness, thousands of bottles gleaming in the faint light from the corridor. Dorian slipped through the gate, found a heavy bottle of red wine, and hurled it against the far wall.

The crash was spectacular. Glass shattered. Wine splashed across the stone floor in a dark tide. The sound echoed through the sub-basement like a gunshot.

The hatchet-faced man reacted instantly. He drew his weapon—a compact pistol, black and efficient—and moved toward the wine cellar. “Sir, stay inside. I’ll handle this.”

The moment he passed the wine cellar gate, Dorian was on him. Not a fighter’s attack, but a mechanic’s: precise, practical, targeting the joints and pressure points. He drove his elbow into the man’s wrist, sending the pistol clattering across the floor. He followed with a knee to the solar plexus that folded the guard in half. A final blow to the back of the skull, measured and merciful, sent the hatchet-faced man sprawling unconscious among the broken glass and spilled wine.

Dorian retrieved the pistol and stepped over the body. The server room door was still open. Inside, Caspian Stewart stood frozen before a terminal, his pale eyes wide with something Dorian had never seen in them before: genuine surprise.

“Rivet,” Caspian said, recovering his composure with visible effort. “I underestimated you.”

“You’re not the first.” Dorian raised the pistol, but did not point it. “The red ledger. Where is it?”

Caspian’s smile flickered back into place. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Vincent Mathis died for it. Your society has been killing fighters for years, fixing the bets, turning murder into entertainment. The ledger has the proof. Names, dates, payments. Give it to me, and I walk out of here. Refuse, and I send the toxicology report on Brick’s gloves to every newsroom in Auberon City. Your choice.”

For a long moment, Caspian simply looked at him. Then he laughed, a soft, genuine sound that was more unsettling than any threat. “You think the toxicology report matters? You think the gloves matter? The Albatross Society has survived worse than you, Mr. Cole. We have judges in our pocket. We have police commissioners on our payroll. We have politicians who owe us their careers. One report, one set of gloves, one dead fighter’s notebook—none of it is enough. The system is designed to protect people like me from people like you.”

“Then give me the ledger,” Dorian said. “If I can’t hurt you, you have nothing to lose.”

Caspian’s smile widened. “Oh, but you misunderstand. The red ledger isn’t just evidence. It’s leverage. Every member of the Albatross Society is in that book. Every debt. Every favor. Every secret. If it falls into the wrong hands, the entire edifice crumbles. Not because of the law—because of the fear. The mutual assured destruction that keeps our alliance intact.”

He reached into his jacket and withdrew a small, leather-bound book, its cover the deep crimson of dried blood. “I’ve carried this with me since the night Vincent Mathis died. I knew someone would come for it eventually. I just didn’t expect it to be you.” He held the ledger out. “Take it. Run your tests. Go to your newspapers. See how far you get.”

Dorian took the ledger. It was heavier than it looked, its pages dense with handwritten entries. The names leaped out at him: judges, council members, police officials, business leaders. The architecture of power, laid bare in ink and paper.

“Why?” he asked. “Why give it to me?”

“Because I want you to understand something,” Caspian said. His voice had lost its amusement, replaced by something cold and absolute. “You are not the hero of this story. You are a mechanic from the Kiln District who stumbled into a world you cannot comprehend. Even with that book, even with your gloves and your toxicology and your dead fighter’s sister, you will not bring us down. The system will protect itself. It always does. And you will learn, as Vincent Mathis learned, that some truths are too dangerous to speak.”

Dorian tucked the ledger into his bag. “Vincent Mathis spoke. So will I.”

He backed out of the server room, keeping the pistol trained on Caspian until he was through the door. Then he ran. Up the service stairs, through the silent kitchen, out the service entrance where Lena and Isla were waiting with wide eyes and shallow breaths.

“Go,” he gasped. “Now.”

They fled through the gardens, over the cracked wall, into the waiting sedan. The engine roared to life, and the estate receded behind them, its golden windows blazing in the darkness like the portholes of a ship that had been sailing untouchable for too long.

By dawn, the story was everywhere.

Detective Hawthorne had leaked the toxicology report to the Auberon Sentinel within an hour of receiving it. The headline screamed across the front page: CHAMPIONSHIP BOXING GLOVES LACED WITH PARALYTIC AGENT. By mid-morning, the story had been picked up by the national press. By noon, the Auberon Crier, which had spent decades burnishing the Stewart family’s image, was forced to run its own version of the story under the headline: STEWART HEIR IMPLICATED IN FIGHT-FIXING SCANDAL.

The red ledger was the final blow. Dorian had turned it over to Hawthorne, who had spent the morning cross-referencing its entries with open investigations. The connections were undeniable. Judges who had dismissed charges against Albatross Society members. Police officials who had buried evidence. Politicians who had steered public contracts to Stewart Shipping in exchange for campaign contributions laundered through shell corporations.

The arrests began that afternoon. Caspian Stewart was taken into custody at the Meridian Hill estate, his pale suit rumpled, his smile finally gone. The hatchet-faced man, whose real name was Victor Sokol, was arrested in the wine cellar where Dorian had left him, still unconscious among the broken bottles. A dozen other Albatross Society members were rounded up before sunset, their names drawn directly from the ledger’s pages.

But some names were missing. The highest names. The ones that Vincent Mathis had hinted at when he told his sister that the conspiracy went all the way to the top. The red ledger contained mid-level power brokers—influential, certainly, but not untouchable. The true architects of the Albatross Society, the ones who had founded it decades ago and guided its evolution from a private club to a murder-for-profit enterprise, remained hidden behind layers of shell corporations and plausible deniability.

“This isn’t over,” Hawthorne said that evening, sitting in the same booth at the Rusted Anchor where he had first told Dorian about the Society. “We’ve cut off the head, but the body is still alive. The ledger proves the fixing and the murders. It doesn’t prove who ordered them. Caspian Stewart will take the fall—he’s the public face, the reckless heir who got caught. But the real power behind the Albatross Society is still out there. Still protected. Still watching.”

Dorian stared into his glass. He was exhausted, his body aching from the fight, his mind numb from the cascade of events. But beneath the exhaustion was something else: a quiet, stubborn ember of hope. “Then we keep digging. We keep fighting.”

“We?” Hawthorne raised an eyebrow. “Last I checked, you’re a mechanic, not a detective.”

“I’m whatever the city needs me to be.” Dorian finished his drink and stood. “I have to see my sister.”

St. Caelia’s Charity Ward was quiet when Dorian arrived, the corridors dimmed for the night. Elara’s room was on the fourth floor, her window looking out over the city’s sprawl of lights and shadows. She was awake when he entered, propped against her pillows, the Saint’s medallion gleaming at her throat.

“You’re on the news,” she said. “You and some gloves and a red book. They’re calling you a hero.”

“I’m not a hero.”

“You never are, in your own stories.” She reached for his hand. “But you came back. You promised, and you came back.”

Dorian sat beside her bed and let the silence settle around them. Outside, the city was churning with the news of the Albatross Society’s exposure. Investigations were being opened. Careers were ending. The Pit was shuttered, its entrance welded shut by city order. The old ironworks was dark, its floodlights extinguished, its mezzanine empty of the men who had once watched from behind one-way glass.

But the fight was not over. Somewhere in the city, the real leaders of the Albatross Society were erasing their trails, destroying evidence, preparing to sacrifice their exposed members to protect their own anonymity. The red ledger had given the authorities a map of the conspiracy’s middle tier. The true summit remained uncharted.

Dorian felt the weight of that unfinished business pressing against his chest. But for now, in this room, with his sister’s hand in his and the medallion warm against her skin, he let himself rest.

A week later, the trial of Caspian Stewart began at the Auberon City Superior Court. The case was styled Mathis v. Stewart, a civil suit for wrongful death filed by Lena Mathis that ran parallel to the criminal charges brought by the district attorney’s office. The courtroom was packed every day, the gallery filled with journalists and spectators and the families of fighters who had died in The Pit.

Dorian testified on the third day. He described The Pit, the mezzanine, the one-way glass. He described the fight against Brick, the theft of the gloves, the toxicology report that had found succinylcholine in the lining. He described Caspian Stewart’s confession, delivered in the server room with the arrogance of a man who believed himself untouchable.

On the fifth day, Isla Voss took the stand. Her testimony was clinical and devastating, laying out the chemical evidence in terms that even the most skeptical juror could not dismiss. The defense tried to discredit her—her dismissal from the coroner’s office, her unorthodox laboratory, her connection to Otto Fain. But Isla’s answers were steady, her science unassailable.

On the seventh day, the red ledger was entered into evidence. The courtroom fell silent as the pages were displayed on the overhead screens, the names and dates and payment amounts scrolling past in damning procession. Lena Mathis sat in the front row, her eyes fixed on the screens, her brother’s memory burning bright and fierce in the sterile light of justice.

The verdict came on the tenth day. Guilty on all counts. Wrongful death. Conspiracy to commit murder. Money laundering. Racketeering. Caspian Stewart was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Albatross Society, as a legal entity, was dissolved by court order, its assets seized, its members barred from holding public office or corporate directorships.

But the verdict also contained a passage that Dorian read and reread in the days that followed. The judge, a stern woman named Honoria Calder who had somehow remained untainted by the Society’s influence, included a statement in her ruling that cut to the heart of everything that had happened:

“Evidence speaks only when we listen without prejudice. The gloves told a story that should have been heard the night Vincent Mathis died. The ledger contained truths that should have been uncovered years ago. The failure was not a failure of evidence. It was a failure of will. A failure of a system that chose to see what was convenient and ignore what was true. The court finds the defendants guilty, but the court also finds itself complicit in the delays and denials that allowed this conspiracy to flourish. Justice delayed is not justice denied. But it is justice that must answer for its lateness.”

Those words were printed in the Auberon Sentinel the next day, and Dorian cut them out and folded them into Vincent Mathis’s notebook, alongside the dead man’s cramped handwriting and desperate observations. One testament of truth alongside another.

On the day the verdict was announced, Elara received word that a donor heart had become available. The surgery was scheduled for the following morning, performed by Dr. Hesse in the same operating room where Elara had been treated for months. It was successful. When Dorian saw her afterward, her face was pale but peaceful, her chest rising and falling with the rhythm of a heart that was finally whole.

“You did it,” she whispered, her voice thin but steady. “You saved me.”

“We saved each other,” Dorian said.

He did not tell her about the letter he had received that morning, delivered by courier to his apartment in the Kiln District. The letter was typed on plain paper, unsigned, its origin untraceable. It contained a single sentence: The Albatross Society thanks you for your contribution to its restructuring.

The real power was still out there. Adapting. Surviving. Waiting for the moment when the city’s attention turned elsewhere and the old patterns could resume under new names.

But not today. Today, Elara was alive. Today, Caspian Stewart was in a prison cell. Today, the gloves had spoken, and the ledger had been opened, and the city had listened, at least for a moment, to the testimony of the dead.

Dorian Cole walked out of St. Caelia’s into a morning that was bright with winter sunlight, the cold air sharp and clean. He had a sister to care for. He had a job at Harker’s Auto that was waiting for him. And he had a notebook, and a medallion, and a promise that he intended to keep.

The Kiln District rose around him, its smokestacks and tenements and narrow streets unchanged by the trial, unchanged by the headlines, unchanged by anything that happened in courtrooms or newspapers. But its people were still here. Still fighting. Still refusing to be broken.

And somewhere in the city, in a building that was not yet built, on a foundation that was not yet laid, a gym was waiting to be born. A gym where the sons and daughters of the Kiln District would learn to fight not for money, not for death, but for themselves. A gym named after a dockworker who had died trying to tell the truth.

Vincent’s Gym. That was the name Dorian had chosen, sitting beside Elara’s bed in the long hours before her surgery. Lena Mathis had agreed, her eyes bright with tears that she refused to let fall. The settlement from the civil suit—the Mathis v. Stewart judgment that had been entered alongside the criminal verdict—would provide the funding. The city, in its guilt and its grief, had agreed to provide the land.

It would not bring Vincent back. It would not erase the years of corruption and death. But it would be something. A beginning. A place where evidence was not ignored, where fighters were not disposable, where the children of the forgotten districts could learn that their lives had value beyond the odds placed on them by men in tailored coats.

Dorian walked toward the transit station, the Saint’s medallion cool against his chest. He had a shift at the garage in an hour. He had a sister to visit in the afternoon. He had a future that he had not allowed himself to imagine before now.

The fight was over. A new one was beginning. And this time, he would not be fighting alone.