VALE

The gates opened at 7:14 in the morning.

No one was waiting.

Riker Vale stood at the threshold for exactly three seconds — long enough to feel the difference between the air inside and the air outside, which turned out to be no difference at all. Just air. Just a city that had kept moving for seven years without noticing the gap he'd left in it.

He walked through.

The paper bag under his arm held a wallet with forty dollars, a phone that had been dead since 2018, a watch with a cracked face that still kept perfect time, and a photograph so worn at the edges it had gone soft as cloth. He didn't need to look at the photograph. He'd memorized it the first week inside and spent the next six years and fifty weeks making sure he hadn't forgotten a single detail.

Iris. Two years old. Sitting on a yellow kitchen floor with a plastic bowl on her head, laughing at something off camera.

She was nine now.

He kept walking.

The bus into the city cost four dollars. Riker sat in the back and watched the streets unspool through rain-streaked glass. Seven years wasn't long enough for a city to become unrecognizable but it was long enough for everything familiar to feel slightly wrong — like a song played in the wrong key. Same notes. Something off.

He had a number for a halfway house in the Denton district. A social worker named Briggs had written it on a card and pressed it into his hand with the particular brand of practiced optimism Riker had learned to neither trust nor resent. Just receive.

The halfway house smelled like industrial cleaning fluid and old cooking. The man at the front desk didn't look up when Riker gave his name. Assigned him a room on the third floor. Told him meals were at six and ten and that there was a curfew at eleven that everyone ignored but nobody talked about.

The room had a single window facing a brick wall.

Riker sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the brick wall for a long time. Then he took out the cracked phone, found a charging cable coiled in the bag's bottom, and plugged it into the wall socket beside the nightstand.

While it charged he did three hundred push-ups on the bare floor.

Old habit. The only clock that had never lied to him.

He called the number on the second day.

It rang four times before she answered — Sandra's voice exactly as he remembered it, which surprised him. He'd expected seven years to change even the sound of her.

"Riker." Not a greeting. A bracing.

"I'm out."

A pause. Long enough that he could hear a television in the background and then the sound of it being muted.

"I know," she said. "I got the letter."

"I want to see her."

Another pause. This one different in texture. Not surprise — preparation.

"That's not something I can just — there's a process now, Riker. There are legal arrangements. You can't just call and—"

"I know there's a process." He kept his voice level. He'd practiced this. Three hundred mornings of practicing this exact conversation while staring at a ceiling. "I'm not asking to show up at your door. I'm asking how the process works."

Sandra told him. Supervised visits. A family court date in six weeks. A mediator. Paperwork he'd need to file that required an address, which required the halfway house to count as one. She spoke in the careful measured cadence of someone who had rehearsed this too — just from the other side.

When she finished there was a silence that held seven years of things neither of them said.

"She's okay?" Riker asked.

"She's wonderful," Sandra said. And for the first time her voice cracked — not with grief exactly. With something more complicated. "She's so wonderful, Riker."

He nodded at the brick wall.

"Okay," he said. "I'll file the paperwork."

He hung up. Sat with the phone in his hands until the screen went dark.

Then he went downstairs and asked the man at the front desk where the nearest boxing gym was.

There was no boxing gym.

There was a place called Hector's three blocks south that had a torn canvas bag hanging from a pipe and a back room where men gathered on Thursday nights to hit each other for money. Hector himself was a compact man in his sixties with a scar bisecting his left eyebrow and the particular stillness of someone who had witnessed considerable violence and stopped being impressed by it.

He looked Riker over the way a man appraises used equipment.

"You fight before?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

Riker looked at him.

Hector understood. "Thursday. Fifty if you lose. Hundred fifty if you win. Two hundred if you make it interesting."

"What does interesting mean?"

"You'll know it when the crowd does."

Riker looked around the back room. Concrete floor. Bare bulb. Four men sitting on metal folding chairs watching him with the casual assessment of people who spent their time measuring other people.

"I'll be here Thursday," Riker said.

He was.

The man they put him against was named Truck — not a nickname anyone had given him but one he'd apparently arrived with — and he outweighed Riker by forty pounds of the kind of muscle that comes from hard labor rather than training. He had a way of rolling his neck before he moved that telegraphed exactly what his right hand was about to do.

Riker broke his nose in the first thirty seconds.

Not clean. Messy, ugly, the kind of damage that looks worse than it is and bleeds spectacularly. The crowd made a sound. Truck shook his head, spraying red, and came back harder — which was what Riker expected, what he'd been counting on, because a man who leads with anger leaves his left side open every single time.

Four minutes and twenty seconds after it started, Truck was sitting against the concrete wall trying to remember what year it was.

Hector counted out a hundred and fifty dollars in tens and pressed them into Riker's hand without expression.

Then he said: "Same time next week."

Riker pocketed the money.

On the bus back to the halfway house he did the math. One fifty a week. The family court filing f*e was two hundred and thirty dollars. Lawyer's retainer — a real one, not a public defender — was fifteen hundred minimum.

He looked at the dark city sliding past the window.

He was going to need more fights.