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well that if she really wanted to go to Tanya, he wasn’t going to be able to hold her back. There was also no way that she could know that Tanya had already been hopelessly infected withevil. If the sores that covered her face were not proof enough, she also had the Ouroboros tattoo on her bare right arm. The one that had been accompanied every time he’d seen it by the grinning visage of Mr. Dark.

CHAPTER SIX
    At the lip of the fighting pit was an incongruously plush red velvet couch, facing away from the entrance where Matt and Stacy stood. The couch was flanked by more beefy bodyguards, but Matt could see the back of a familiar white head between them.
    There were three heads in a row sitting on the long, high-backed couch: two close together and one slightly apart. The center head belonged to the white-haired Mr. Long. Someone with lots of bleached-blond hair was sitting close to him, their heads leaning toward each other as if the two were whispering. Someone else was sitting on their right, someone with wispy, thinning hair on a head cocked like a dog hearing a funny sound.
    Bookending the couch was a quartet of thugs, two on each end, big arms crossed. Matt couldn’t see their faces, but he was willing to bet that they were just as corrupt as their compadres in the elevator.
    Stacy’s breath was slowing, her fists unclenching, so Matt took his hand off her chest and gestured toward the left with his chin. She nodded, and the two of them started moving cautiously along the curved wall. As they moved, a second identical pair of steel doors was revealed, exactly opposite the first.
    Soon they were far enough along the wall to see the faces of the people on the couch.
    The white-haired, noseless man sat sprawled back amid the cushions, a hand on his companion’s leg. The blond companion was obviously a fighter, but no one Matt recognized. She had the prominent, Neanderthal brow and steam-shovel jaw of a heavyhuman-growth-hormone abuser. A fading black eye was not the only thing wrong with her face. Creeping corruption had sent out ugly tendrils from the swollen mouse beneath her eye, spreading like a disease all across her face. The white-haired man’s gaze was locked on the fight as he lifted his companion’s hand to his mouth. Instead of kissing it, he licked it, his thick, feculent tongue sliding sluglike over her scab-encrusted knuckles.
    On the far side of Mr. Long was another person whose face was mostly shadowed. That person was wearing a cheap Tapout T-shirt and a bright, toothy grin. The one eye that was visible twinkled with a kind of hideous merriment, making him look like a sex offender dressed up as Santa Claus. That person turned slowly toward Matt, face still teasingly hidden in shifting shadows that fluttered like a stripper’s feather fans.
    He looked right at Matt. And he winked.
    Matt leapt involuntarily back into his own cluster of protective shadows. He didn’t even realize he was gripping Stacy’s wrist until she hissed for him to let her go.
    “Do you know those people on the couch?” he asked.
    “The woman is named Ayla Girgis. Juicer.” She spat out that word as if the word itself were poison. “She’s a bruiser, but her cardio sucks. No stamina. She fights dirty.”
    “And…”
    “And Mr. Long,” Stacy whispered, like he was crazy. “What, you already forgot what he looks like?”
    “Nobody else?”
    She squinted at him as if she was trying to figure out if he was fucking with her.
    He looked back at the couch. The third person was gone. “Never mind.”
    “What now?” Stacy asked.
    “Okay, listen,” he began, but Stacy cut him off.
    “This isn’t any kind of sport,” she said through teeth clenched so hard, Matt thought they might crack. “Look at this. This is like a fucking snuff movie with no camera.” She took a step closer to Long, who now looked like he was trying to fit the blond fighter’s whole fist into his gaping mouth. “And that pig is sitting there