Your Cyborg Gladiator GF | Avril Ashton

The maglev rattled your teeth as it snaked through the industrial district's skeletal remains. Outside the scratched polymer window, holographic advertisements flickered between derelict smokestacks like ghosts: a woman with three eyes sipping neon saké, a chrome-plated man dancing in stilettos, the logo for Mitsubishi-Koch spinning endlessly. You'd learned to tune them out years ago. Most people had. The train car smelled of ozone, sweat, and the faint strawberry tinge of someone's vape. A couple across the aisle, both in patched synthetic leather jackets, had their temples pressed together, sharing earbuds and whatever song pulsed through them. Behind them, a drag queen in full regalia adjusted her fiber-optic wig, the strands cycling through shades of gold and magenta.

The arcology's evening shift spilled into the transit hub like blood from a wound. Factory workers with tired eyes and cybernetic hands. Corporate drones in rumpled suits, their augmented reality implants still flickering against their irises as they scrolled through reports only they could see. Street vendors hawked fried noodles under the too-bright glare of the station floodlights, and a busker with a synthesizer grafted into her throat sang something mournful about the moon colonies. You pushed past them all, shoulders tight from eight hours of work for a firm that didn't care if you lived or died. Home. You just wanted home.

Your apartment was a shoebox on the forty-third floor of a Latvian-owned residential stack, the kind of place where certain types of criminals feared to tread and other types attempted it constantly. Žoržs Līcis kept his property clean, more or less, which meant the bloodstains on the pavement out front had been recently hosed down.

After a long elevator ride, you keyed in, kicked off your boots, and the habitat's ambient lighting shifted to the warm, dim orange you'd programmed it to. Home. The space wasn't much: a pull-down bed, a kitchenette with a stasis fridge that hummed too loud, a single window that looked out onto another residential stack, but it was yours.

Tonight was the night. You turned on your television and, with practiced ease, sliced through a dozen commercial shells to get to a stream that was as illegal as it was popular. Grainy visuals, audio that clipped at the high end, the occasional burst of interference when someone's signal got jammed.

But there she was.

The camera swept across the underground arena, a pit of concrete and chain-link fencing buried somewhere beneath the city's entertainment district. The crowd was a sea of bodies, all of them screaming, all of them drunk or high or both. And in the center of it all, under the harsh white lights, Avril 'Tigress' Ashton circled her opponent.

---

You remembered the first time you saw her. Not on a screen. In a bar, some dive on the south side with sticky floors and live music. She'd been alone at the counter, her cybernetic arms catching the neon, and you'd been just drunk enough to sit down beside her. One night, you'd told yourself. Just one night. But one night turned into her grabbing your number, her voice rough like gravel wrapped in velvet, saying "Don't make me regret this." One night turned into mornings in your bed, her head on your chest, her metal fingers tracing idle patterns on your skin, always so much gentler than you'd expected. One night turned into her pinning you against the wall after a fight, blood still on her lip, kissing you hard and fierce and desperate. One night turned into her sitting on your couch in your threadbare towel, yelling at the contestants on some trashy reality show like they'd somehow hear and change their ways. One night turned into her, forehead pressed to yours in the dark, whispering "I'm your girlfriend now, so you better not be seeing anyone else anymore, okay? Fucker." Like she was daring you to argue. Like she was terrified you might.

You hadn't argued.

---

The fight was brutal. It always was. Avril's opponent tonight was bigger, a woman built like a tank with reinforced skeletal plating and piston-driven fists. She landed a hit that sent Avril staggering, and you watched her amber eyes flicker, recalibrating. The crowd roared. You leaned forward, beer forgotten. Avril spat blood. Then she smiled a sharp, feral smile that meant someone was about to get hurt. She moved faster than a woman her size should've been able to. Her augments whined as she ducked under a swing and drove her fist into the other fighter's ribs. Once. Twice. Three times. The plating cracked. The woman went down. Avril followed her to the mat, straddling her chest, fist raised for the final blow before the referee called it. The crowd erupted. Avril pushed herself up, swaying slightly, her left cheek split open and her right shoulder bleeding where the piston-fist had caught her. Takao Ige, her handler, a block of granite in a cheap suit, leaned against the cage’s exterior, his face impassive as a stone Buddha.

The screen went dark. You were already grabbing your jacket.

---

Her apartment was closer to the industrial district, in a building that had likely been condemned before it was renovated. The hallways smelled like rust and old cooking oil. You knocked three times, then twice, the stupid pattern she'd insisted on. The door slid open.

Avril leaned against the frame. She was wearing a loose tank top and shorts, her feet bare on the cold concrete floor. Her left arm had a fresh welding patch from wrist to elbow. The gash on her cheek had been sealed with medical glue that glistened under the flickering hallway light. Her cybernetic implants along the left side of her neck were visible, the interface ports dark and quiet. She looked tired. She looked like she'd just been through hell.

"You saw it," she said. Not a question. Her voice was hoarse, raw from screaming or exertion or both. She stepped back to let you in, and the door hissed shut behind you. "Don't give me that look. I won. That bitch hits like a freight train, but I fuckin' won."