The hidden camera was smaller than a matchbox, a matte-black rectangle that fit in Leo's palm like a secret.
It had come from a man named Viktor Lisko, a disgraced investigative journalist who now ran a barely-legal news blog called "The Ashford Lantern" out of a basement apartment on Gresham Street. Viktor was fifty-something, with nicotine-stained fingers and the hollow-eyed intensity of someone who had seen too much and forgotten none of it. He had been fired from the Ashford Courier seven years earlier for running a story about police corruption that the city had successfully buried. Now he chased shadows and sold information to whoever could pay.
Leo had found him through Oleg, the laundromat bookmaker, who knew everyone in Ashford's underground economy. The introduction had cost Leo two hundred crowns and a promise that he would owe Oleg a favor someday—a debt that made Leo's skin crawl, but desperation had long since overruled caution.
"You want to spy on the Colosseum," Viktor had said, not a question. He was sitting behind a desk piled with newspapers and old coffee cups, his eyes glittering in the light of a single desk lamp. "Do you have a death wish?"
"I have a missing kid and a department of family services that's shipping children into a blood sport ring," Leo replied. "I need proof. The kind of proof that can't be ignored or dismissed."
Viktor had laughed at that—a dry, rasping sound. "You think proof matters? I had proof. Documents, recordings, sworn testimony. The Courier killed my story because one of their board members played golf with the police commissioner. Proof is only as good as the people willing to believe it."
"Then help me find people who will believe it."
The journalist had studied Leo for a long moment. Then he had reached into a drawer and produced the camera. "This is military surplus. Veridian Special Forces used them for covert surveillance before they were decommissioned. Audio and video, twelve-hour battery, transmits to a receiver up to half a mile away. If you can get close enough to record something incriminating, I can make sure it reaches the right hands. Not the police—I know better than that. But there are people in the Attorney General's office who owe me favors. People who still care about the truth."
Now, three days later, Leo knelt in the darkness of the ventilation shaft outside Sam's cell, the camera clutched in his bandaged hand. His latest fight was in four hours—against a man called Brick, whose reputation preceded him like a storm front—but he had arrived early, slipping away from the locker room while the other fighters were warming up.
"Sam," he whispered through the grille. "Are you there?"
The boy's voice came back immediately, as if he had been waiting. "Leo. I found something. The guard station—they left the file cabinet open during shift change. I grabbed what I could."
"Can you slide it through?"
A rustling sound. Then a manila folder appeared at the base of the grille, pushed through a gap barely wide enough to accommodate it. Leo pulled it into the shaft and opened it, using a penlight clenched between his teeth.
The folder contained a stack of documents: transfer orders, medical records, a photograph of a child—not Sam, a different child, a girl with braids and a missing front tooth—and a single sheet of paper that made Leo's blood run cold.
It was a purchase agreement.
"RECEIPT OF TRANSFER," the document read. "The undersigned acknowledges receipt of Subject #447 from the custody of the Veridian Department of Family Services, transferred to the care of the Colosseum Athletic Association for purposes of specialized training and development. Transfer fee: 15,000 crowns. All rights and responsibilities for Subject #447 are hereby transferred in perpetuity."
At the bottom were two signatures. One was illegible, a doctor's scrawl. The other was crisp and precise: Graham Felton.
"They're selling them," Leo breathed. "They're buying children from the state and making them fight."
"Not all of them," Sam said, his voice barely audible. "Just the ones nobody will miss. Foster kids who've been bounced around too many times. Kids with no families to look for them. Felton flags them in the system, marks them as behavior problems, then transfers them out before anyone notices." He paused. "The ones who can't fight... they go to The Kennel. I don't know what happens there. But I heard one of the guards say that the Colosseum is the lucky option."
Leo forced himself to keep reading. The documents were a trail of breadcrumbs leading into an abyss: case numbers, transfer codes, budget line items disguised as "off-book welfare placements." The same codes, he realized with a jolt, that Samuel Brooker had identified in the VDFS memorandum. The same cipher. The same conspiracy.
"Sam, I need to record all of this. The camera will capture the documents, but I need your testimony too. Can you tell me everything you know? Everything you've seen?"
A long pause. "If they find out—"
"They won't. I'm going to get you out of here. I promise."
"People always promise."
Leo pressed his face against the metal grille. In the dim light, he could see Sam's eyes on the other side—dark, hollow, impossibly old for a child's face. "I'm not people. Remember?"
Something shifted in Sam's expression. Then, very quietly, he began to speak.
He spoke for nearly an hour. About the night Felton had come to the group home and told him he was being moved. About the van ride to the textile mill, blindfolded and handcuffed like a prisoner. About his first fight, against a man three times his size, and how the crowd had laughed when he cried. About the other children who had come and gone—some to the ring, some to The Kennel, some simply disappearing without explanation. About Vesna Mirovich, who kept meticulous records and spoke of the children like inventory. About the patrons who placed bets on how long a child would last before they broke.
Leo recorded every word. The camera's tiny light blinked steadily, capturing the documents, the grille, the darkness beyond.
When Sam finished, his voice was hoarse and his eyes were wet. "Is that enough?"
"It's enough." Leo tucked the camera into his jacket pocket. "I'm going to get this to someone who can help. A lawyer named Brooker. He's fighting a case against the Department of Family Services. He'll know what to do."
"And you?"
Leo hesitated. "I have to fight tonight. If I don't show, they'll come looking for me. And I still need the money for Lena."
"The woman in the hospital."
"Yes."
Sam was silent for a moment. Then he said, "There's a man coming tonight. A patron. His name is Argus Croft. He's the one who owns the Colosseum—the real owner, not the front people. He comes once a month to watch the fights and collect his money. He'll be in the private box, the one with the tinted glass. If you can get a recording of him..."
"How do you know all this?"
"Because I listen," Sam said. "It's the only thing I can do. Listen and wait. The guards talk around me like I'm furniture. They don't think I understand what they're saying." A bitter edge crept into his voice. "They think I'm stupid because I'm scared. But I'm not stupid."
Leo wanted to say something reassuring, something hopeful. But the words wouldn't come. Instead, he reached through the grille and took Sam's hand—a small, bony hand, cold as Lena's had been in the hospital bed. They stayed like that for a moment, two people in the darkness, connected by nothing but desperation and the thin metal bars between them.
Then Leo pulled back and made his way through the shaft toward the locker room.
—
The fight against Brick was supposed to be different.
Leo knew it the moment he climbed into the ring. The crowd was larger than usual, the energy more electric. The private box with the tinted glass was occupied—he could see figures moving behind it, silhouettes that watched without being watched. And Vesna was standing at ringside, her clipboard clutched to her chest, her slate-gray eyes fixed on Leo with an expression he couldn't read.
Brick lived up to his name. He was built like a furnace, all dense muscle and scar tissue, his face a ruin of broken bone and calloused skin. He fought with a methodical brutality, absorbing punches that would have staggered lesser men and responding with blows that felt like being hit by a truck.
But Leo was faster. He circled and jabbed, slipping Brick's haymakers and landing combinations that opened cuts above the big man's eyes. Blood flowed freely, turning the canvas into a slick, treacherous surface. The crowd roared with every exchange, their voices blending into a single hungry sound.
By the fifth round, Brick was slowing. His punches came wider, his footwork sloppier. Leo saw his opening—a left hook that would land clean on the chin, that would end the fight and add another five thousand crowns to his growing fund.
Then he caught movement in the tinted box. A hand signal. A raised finger.
And Vesna stepped forward, her voice cutting through the noise of the crowd: "Patron's prerogative!"
The bell rang, but it wasn't the end of the round. It was a pause. A consultation.
Leo stood in his corner, chest heaving, his gloves dripping with Brick's blood. Vesna climbed through the ropes and approached him, her heels clicking on the canvas.
"The patron has a proposal," she said, her voice low enough that only Leo could hear. "Your next opponent will be the boy. Sam."
Leo's heart stopped. "What?"
"There's a buyer. A foreign gentleman, very wealthy, very discreet. He wants to see something... unique. A child against a rising contender. The boy has been losing too much lately—his value has dropped. But a fight against someone like you, someone the audience has started to believe in... that would be quite a spectacle." She tilted her head. "If you win, the purse is twenty thousand crowns. More than enough to cover the rest of your partner's surgery."
"You want me to fight a child."
"I want you to put on a show. The outcome is predetermined, of course—the patron wants the boy to lose dramatically. You're to make it look good, then finish him in the fourth round. Not permanently. The buyer wants him alive for the private event."
"The private event."
"The Kennel," Vesna said, as if explaining something to a slow student. "The buyer runs a very exclusive establishment. Private fights for discerning clients. The boy will be well-cared-for, in his way. Better than he'd fare in the foster system, certainly."
Leo felt the world tilt. The camera was still in his pocket, still recording. Twenty thousand crowns. Lena's surgery. Sam's life.
"And if I refuse?"
Vesna's expression didn't change. "Then you don't get paid for tonight's fight. And you don't fight here again. And the boy still goes to the buyer—just without the spectacle of a competitive match. His fate doesn't change, Mr. Kovac. Only yours does. And your partner's."
She stepped back, leaving him alone in his corner. The bell rang again, signaling the resumption of the fight, but Leo barely heard it. Brick came forward, and Leo moved on autopilot, his body fighting while his mind raced through impossible calculations.
He finished Brick in the seventh round with a combination that left the big man unconscious on the canvas. The crowd erupted. The tinted box remained impassive.
Leo collected his money—five thousand crowns, not the promised twenty—and walked back to the locker room in a daze. The camera was still recording.
—
Viktor Lisko met him at an all-night diner on Vostok Avenue, a greasy spoon called The Iron Skillet that served truckers and insomniacs. Leo slid the camera across the table, along with the stolen documents from Sam's folder.
"Everything's on there," Leo said. "Sam's testimony. The purchase agreement. My conversation with Vesna. All of it."
Viktor picked up the camera like it was made of glass. "And the buyer? The man in the box?"
"Argus Croft. I didn't get a recording of him directly, but Vesna named him during our conversation. She talked about The Kennel. She talked about the private event. It's all there."
The journalist's eyes were wide now, the hollowed-out cynicism replaced by something fiercer. "This is... this is everything. This is the story I've been chasing for years. The corruption, the trafficking, the way the state just... discards children like garbage." He looked at Leo. "What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to fight Sam," Leo said. "If I don't, they'll take him anyway, and I lose my only chance to be close to him when it happens. But I'm not going to win." He leaned forward. "I need you to get that recording to Samuel Brooker. The lawyer who's handling the discrimination case against VDFS. He has a hearing coming up—a preliminary injunction to stop the department from denying licenses to same-sex couples. If he can present this evidence in court, if he can show that the same department that rejected those women is selling children to a blood sport ring..."
"It could blow the whole case wide open," Viktor finished. "Not just the discrimination case, but the criminal conspiracy. The trafficking. Everything."
"There's one more thing. The detective assigned to Sam's case—Frank Morrow. He's been investigating me. I've seen him, or his people, following me for the past week. He thinks I'm just a gambler, a low-level criminal. He's not looking at VDFS. He's not looking at the Colosseum. He's looking at me."
"Morrow." Viktor's expression darkened. "I know the name. He's old-school. Traditional. The kind of cop who thinks the world was better fifty years ago and everyone who disagrees is the enemy. He won't believe the recording. Even if he hears it, he'll find a way to dismiss it."
"Then make sure he's not the only one who hears it. Get it to Brooker. Get it to the Attorney General's office. Get it to anyone who will listen."
Viktor nodded slowly. "And Sam? How are you going to get him out?"
Leo didn't answer. Because he didn't know. The plan forming in his mind was desperate and dangerous and probably suicidal. But it was the only plan he had.
He stood up from the booth, leaving his coffee untouched. "I have two days until the fight. Get that recording into the right hands. Whatever happens after that... happens."
He walked out of the diner into the Ashford night. The rain had started again—it always seemed to be raining in this city—and the neon signs painted the puddles in shades of red and blue. In the distance, the lights of St. Jude's Hospital blinked through the downpour, and somewhere beneath the streets, in the bowels of a dead textile mill, a boy named Sam was waiting for a rescue that might never come.
Leo pulled his jacket tight and started walking. Two days. Two days to figure out how to save a child's life, pay for his partner's surgery, and bring down a conspiracy that reached into the highest offices of the state government.
In his pocket, his fingers found the crumpled calculation of fifty-seven thousand crowns. He was still eighteen thousand short. The number seemed almost laughable now—a trivial sum compared to the cost of doing the right thing.
But he kept walking anyway, because that was all there was left to do. Walk forward. Keep fighting. And hope that somewhere in the darkness, someone was listening.
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