VALE

Chapter 2

The second fight paid two hundred.

The third paid two hundred and fifty, because the man Riker put down was apparently someone people had been paying to watch win for the better part of a year, and Hector understood instinctively that an upset had its own market value.

By the end of the second week Riker had six hundred and eighty dollars, a bruised rib that didn't affect his breathing, and a small but unmistakable reputation in the three-block radius around Hector's.

He filed the court paperwork on a Tuesday morning, standing at a laminate counter in the family services building while a woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain processed his forms with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had processed ten thousand identical forms and expected to process ten thousand more.

"Address?" she asked without looking up.

He gave her the halfway house.

She typed it. "Employment?"

A pause that lasted exactly one second.

"Self-employed," Riker said.

She typed that too without comment, which told him she'd heard stranger answers and stopped caring sometime around the previous decade.

He walked out with a court date — five weeks away — and the specific tight feeling in his chest that came not from fear but from the awareness that five weeks was both too long and not nearly enough.

---

The underground circuit around Hector's had a rhythm to it that Riker mapped in his first two weeks the way he'd mapped every new environment since he was a teenager — quietly, completely, and without appearing to pay attention.

Thursday nights were the public fights. Arranged bouts, known participants, a crowd that ranged from twenty to fifty depending on the card. Hector ran these with the low-key authority of a man who had been doing it long enough that the local precinct had apparently decided it wasn't worth the paperwork.

But there were other nights.

Riker first noticed it on a Wednesday — a different quality of foot traffic through Hector's front door. Fewer regulars. Men he hadn't seen before, dressed without the particular carelessness of the Thursday crowd. These men had the deliberate blankness of people who did not want to be remembered.

He mentioned it to nobody.

The following Wednesday he stayed late under the pretense of working the heavy bag, and watched through the cracked interior window as Hector led four men through the back and down a stairwell Riker hadn't previously noticed — a door behind a shelving unit that held ancient boxing equipment and one broken speed bag that hadn't been touched in years.

He didn't follow. Not yet.

He filed the information away in the same mental space he'd used for seven years to track which guards changed shift when, which inmates were connected to which, and which walls in which corridors had blind spots in the camera coverage.

Survival literacy. The only education that had never let him down.

---

On the third Thursday Hector pulled him aside before the card started.

"Someone asked about you," Hector said.

Riker looked at him. "Who?"

"Didn't give a name. Asked how long you'd been fighting here, where you came from before." Hector's expression was carefully neutral — a man relaying information rather than interpreting it. "I told him I didn't discuss my fighters."

"What did he look like?"

"Like someone who could afford to be standing in a place like this and had chosen to do it anyway." Hector paused. "That kind. You know the kind."

Riker knew the kind.

"What did you tell him about where I came from?"

"Nothing." Hector met his eyes for the first time in the conversation. "I told you. I don't discuss my fighters."

There was something in the old man's voice — not warning exactly. More like the particular care of someone placing a fragile object down gently.

Riker nodded. "Appreciate it."

He won his fight that night in two minutes flat and went back to the halfway house and lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about a man who could afford to be anywhere choosing to stand in Hector's back room asking questions about a fighter nobody outside three city blocks had heard of.

He thought about that for a long time.

---

The mediator's name was Patricia Osei and she had an office on the eleventh floor of a building downtown that smelled like carpet cleaner and filtered air. She wore a gray suit and had the calm of someone professionally trained to sit across from people in pain without absorbing it.

Riker sat across from her on a Wednesday afternoon in a chair that cost more than everything he owned.

"The purpose of today's session," she said, "is simply to establish communication parameters between you and Ms. Vega going forward, and to discuss the framework for supervised visitation pending the court date."

"Understood," Riker said.

She looked at him over her notepad with the brief involuntary assessment people always gave him in formal settings — the gap between how he looked and how he spoke, which still surprised people, which he had learned to simply let happen.

"Ms. Vega has indicated she is not opposed to visitation in principle," Osei continued. "Her primary concern is stability and consistency. Can you speak to your current living situation?"

"Halfway house in Denton. I'm working. I'm saving." He paused. "I intend to have a permanent address within sixty days."

A number he had no current basis for. But a number he believed in the way he believed he could win a fight before it started — not from evidence but from a quality of will that evidence eventually caught up with.

Osei wrote something. "And employment?"

"Self-employed," Riker said again. Getting comfortable with the phrase.

---

He saw Iris for the first time on a Friday.

Supervised. One hour. A family services room with a table and chairs designed to be neither comfortable nor intimidating and achieving both somehow. A woman named Carla sat in the corner with a notepad and the professional invisibility of a skilled observer.

Sandra brought Iris in at two o'clock exactly.

Seven years old. Dark eyes. Her mother's cheekbones and something around the jaw that Riker recognized from old photographs of himself at that age. She was wearing a yellow raincoat she hadn't bothered to take off and carrying a backpack with a cartoon rabbit on it.

She looked at him the way children look at things they have been told about but never fully believed in.

"Hi," Riker said.

Iris considered him for a moment with a gravity that seemed too large for her face.

"Mom said you used to live with us," she said.

"I did. When you were very small."

"I don't remember."

"I know."

She pulled out the chair across from him, climbed into it with the unselfconscious efficiency of a child who made such calculations constantly, and set her backpack on the table between them like a small neutral territory.

"Do you know any card games?" she asked.

Something shifted in Riker's chest — quiet and tectonic.

"Yeah," he said. "I know a few."