No Contest

The woman’s knee pounded into her gut, and Anga felt a cannonball of pain, but she channeled it into action. She slammed the heel of her palm into the woman’s chin, then snatched at the flag. Teeth chips came out with it.

The crowd saw it all on the big screen and erupted happily. Anga glimpsed her last opponent skating at her hard, coming in for the kill, and Anga did a logroll. She pushed herself to her feet with a muffled shout and saw her attacker bearing down on her. Anga dropped low again and her attacker tripped over her, crashing heavily to the ice. Anga skated powerfully after her, but the next tremor hit at that moment. It was a big one. The ice shaker was up to its highest setting. Huge portions of the ice rink shattered to powder or buckled like broken sidewalks. Anga put on the brakes, but not before a crack in the ice snagged one of her skate blades and sent her crashing down.

Somehow her opponent had used the opportunity to get back to her feet. The green-flag bitch was coming right at her, and Anga’s heavy abdomen felt ready to explode. She propped herself up on her arms and tried to stand but her leg gave way and she was totally helpless.

But then, just as disaster seemed unavoidable, the tide turned again. The green-flag skater made a shocked face, and Anga saw the woman’s skate blades sink into the ice as if they were red-hot. She didn’t have time to think about why.

The woman’s skate locked up in the ice, and she flopped onto her face. Anga leaped off the ice like a frog and grabbed the dangling green flag. The woman grabbed the flag herself and attempted to wriggle away, but Anga shoved herself into the air and down again—a classic body slam. The green-flag woman opened her mouth reflexively, her breath left her with an ugly sound and Anga had the green flag.

She had won. The green-flag woman was hacking and gasping, and the woman with the shattered teeth was crawling off the ice with a trail of blood behind her. The crowd was ecstatic.

Anga barely noticed it. Her gut was gonna erupt any second. As she skated to her box, she saw her manager waving frantically. It was the hand signal indicating she should do the line.

Anga stopped on the ice. Her sickness looked like disdain and toughness to the crowd and to the cameras. She sneered at everyone and everything around her.

Only she knew it was to keep her from being violently ill right then and there. She stared at the nearest camera and bellowed, “Who’s next?”

The crowd loved it.

“I guess you’re a star,” the man in the dressing room said. Under other circumstances Anga might have been interested.

“I don’t care who you are or what you’re doing here, just don’t stand between me and the john.”

“Not so fast,” the man with the dark eyes said, stepping between her and the door to the washroom. “We wanted to ask you about the meet.”

“We?” Then, for the first time, Anga noticed the small Asian man against the wall in a robe of some kind. The old Asian regarded her as he might regard something spoiled in the refrigerator.

“How did you manage to win out there?” the younger one asked.

“I won because I’m the best,” Anga snapped.

“No, that’s not it.”

“Get out!”

“There were ice-skating blades getting hot all over the place. A little here, a little there, just to throw off the balance or slow somebody. Then at the end there, that last lady got the full treatment The ice melted right out from under her and tripped her up. How did that happen?”

“You’re lying,” Anga snapped.

“So you don’t know anything about it?”

“It didn’t happen,” she insisted.

Anga was in too much gastrointestinal distress to lie effectively. She really didn’t know about the sabotage on the ice. Remo allowed her to push past him and beeline for the lavatory. He and Chiun slipped out in a hurry and made their way to the Anga Meridorsku team equipment locker, where the Waifs were storing away equipment for the next day’s event.

The four of them were cast from the same mold, all tiny and wiry, and on the verge of being attractive when not snarling, which was seldom.

“Congratulations,” Remo said by way of greeting. “How’d you trip up the competition?”

The smallest Waif tossed a metal box into a steel storage cabinet. The sound was loud and grating and Remo smiled, ingratiating. She took up a position in front of them, arms folded, snarl growing more intense. “What did you say?” she demanded.

“Just wondering how you did the little trick with the hot skates. I have to hand it to you—it worked great. The lady from the Irish team went in up to her knees. She never knew what hit her.”

“You saying we cheated, pretty boy?”

Remo was wearing his happy face. People who snarled, he knew, became very agitated around smiling happy people. “And you did it well,” he added generously. He held one flat hand over Chiun’s head, then moved it over the Waif’s head. “Hey, Chiun, she’s actually shorter than you.”