PROLOGUE
Leaving her air-conditioned quarters and stepping into the thick Texas summer night with less than forty minutes before the start of her bout, she begins to run. Humidity and air temperature persist above ninety despite the late hour, and she breaks a sweat before crossing Tank Destroyer Boulevard. Her footsteps hardly make a sound as she jogs the deserted, orderly streets of Fort Hood. Anyone who isn’t already jammed into the fitness center for the monthly smoker has departed for lives off base. In this way she can enjoy the extravagance of being alone with her thoughts.
She’s avoided warming up inside the venue since the beginning of her amateur career, preferring exercise outdoors until the last minutes before being called to the ring. Running clears her mind of all thoughts except those regarding the contest to come, removing her from the crowd’s roar and its profanity. Rain or shine, day or night, she jogs alone at a steady pace wearing the same clothes she will wear in the ring. With this solitary prefight ritual, Hayley Chill prolongs an imperfect control over her world before the chaos and violence to come.
She can remember every fight. Whether childhood brawls back home in Green Shoals, West Virginia, or organized bouts as an amateur fighter since enlisting in the army, physical combat is the fierce memoir of a hardscrabble life. The oldest of six children—her single mother laid low by multiple cancers—Hayley defended herself and her five siblings with savage determination. Losing her first four fights, she absorbed hard lessons with each defeat. Eight victories followed those early routs, a dozen fights in total before graduating first in her class from high school. Hayley has fought as many times as an army boxer and remains undefeated. Tonight, she defends her regimental title.
After thirty minutes of steady jogging, her muscles have become elastic beneath a sweat-drenched T-shirt and shorts. Her thoughts are as measured and orderly as her heart rate. Barely winded, Hayley stops and checks the time on a Citizen Eco-Drive Nighthawk Black Dial watch she took off an army pilot who challenged her to a barroom arm-wrestling match. At her feet is the loose stone and gravel of the construction site for a new PX. Hayley bends down and picks up one of the jagged rocks, clenching her fist tightly around it. The stone’s sharp edges send jolts of pain through her body, acute and clarifying. She maintains the intensity of this clench for ten seconds, then twenty more. Finally, Hayley takes a deep breath and drops the stone to the ground. Studying the palm of her hand with clinical detachment, she sees blood seeping from multiple quarter-inch lacerations. There is nothing to fear. Blood has been drawn. Now she can fight.
Hayley turns, reversing course, and begins running again, faster, in a final push to accelerate her heart rate. Two blocks distant, the concrete-and-glass fitness center crouches under LED vapor-tight lighting.
* * *
HAYLEY, WEARING MANDATORY headgear and gloves, follows her trainer, Master Sergeant Stanley Oakes, as he leads her toward the boxing ring at the center of a raucous crowd of mostly drunken fight fans. Oakes roughly deflects the outstretched hands of Hayley’s supporters, carving a path through the throng with gruff authority. The fighter stares straight ahead, eyebrows furrowed, and fixates on the boxing ring, where her opponent calmly waits.
She leans forward and speaks into Oakes’s ear, loud and firm. “What do we know about the replacement?” she asks as they press forward through the crowd and finally arrive at their corner of the rudimentary boxing ring erected on the basketball court.
Oakes scans a piece of paper given to him by organizers of the smoker when informing him that Hayley’s scheduled opponent had withdrawn. He’s been working the military boxing circuit for enough years to know his fighter has been set up. Her streak of twelve straight wins is celebrated throughout ARSOUTH. A ringer is just the ticket for an upset and the ensuing wagering windfall.
“Marcela Rivas, First Armored Division, Fort Bliss. Two-time Golden Gloves champ from Camden, New Jersey. Straight puncher, like Roy Jones Jr. A lock to turn pro soon as she discharges.”
Hayley doesn’t react, her gaze focused on Rivas dancing lightly at the center of the ring. The Jersey fighter stands six feet, one inch and weighs 145 pounds. Without a hint of fat on her immaculate frame, she is all muscle and pride. Even the most casual, boozed fan can see Rivas is a warrior.
“Don’t wanna bullshit you, HC. This beast could knock out half the men on base. No shame in a forfeit,” Oakes consoles her.
Hayley smirks. Oakes, a natural born worrier, always has had an odd way of motivating a fighter. The crowd erupts as Hayley climbs three steps and ducks under the ropes. Something less than five feet, eight inches and weighing 125 pounds, Hayley is every bit as lean and exquisitely muscled as her opponent, with nearly as much experience in the ring and probably more out of it. Training and prefight ritual have been rigorously observed. And, as always, she possesses an unflinching will to prevail in a just cause, in this case the honor of thousands of men and women in the Sixth Army across the entire ARSOUTH. All these factors must be folded into the calculus of predicting the fight’s outcome.
But Marcela Rivas is pure boxer, destined to win a gold medal in the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics before turning pro, as Oakes predicted. After a stellar professional career in which she suffers only a single loss in eight years, Rivas will be a shoo-in for induction into the US Boxing Hall of Fame. Retiring from the sport that rescued her from indiscriminate poverty, she will buy a gilded multimillion-dollar home on the water in south Florida and raise three daughters, all of whom will also fight professionally one day.
If Hayley has estimated her slim odds in the handful of seconds before the first of three rounds, she doesn’t show it. With clang of bell and howl of the crowd, she moves forward, workmanlike, on light feet and absorbs a fist that seemingly materializes in the void three inches from her face a half fraction of a second before breaking her nose.
* * *
SITTING ON THE stool Oakes has placed in her corner of the blood-spattered ring before the start of the third and final round, Hayley must concentrate to register the words Oakes shouts urgently into her ear.
“One more round, HC! Just keep dancin’! You’ve done better than anyone could expect of you!”
Hayley spits her guard into Oakes’s hand and accepts the water he squirts into her mouth. Oakes starts to work on her nose, stanching the flow of dark blood with a cotton swab soaked in adrenaline hydrochloride and then pressing an ice-chilled enswell to the bruised area. While he works, Hayley stares doggedly at Rivas, who hasn’t even bothered to sit between rounds. The future Olympian is treating the bout as an extended sparring session.
Hayley’s powder blue eyes clock all of this. After the punishment she has sustained, no one could predict Rivas’s eventual induction into the Hall of Fame better than her. If she guts out a final round, ARSOUTH will undoubtedly survive the defeat with pride intact. Amplified by time and alcohol, the tale of Hayley Chill’s valiant stand against the future welterweight champion of the world would be told again and again in barracks and officers’ quarters across the US Southern Command.
But Hayley has no affinity for noble defeat. The notion of coasting to certain failure is an indignity she would never voluntarily swallow. In her entire life, the West Virginian has never backed down before a homegrown tyrant. She fights at full pitch, relentless until victory or defeat. There is no middle ground.