Chapter 5: The Arena Opens and Lena Arrives Running

The launch platform smells like ozone and money.

I catalog this in the three seconds I have before the floor drops: ozone from the broadcast nodes warming up in sequence along the arena's perimeter, and money because money has a smell in 2041 and it smells like climate-controlled air and fresh polymer and the particular frequency of hum that comes from infrastructure that has never been allowed to fail. Zone 12-Gray smells like damp concrete and cooking grease and the specific mineral edge of water that has traveled too far through too-old pipes. The arena smells like neither of those things. It smells like the inside of a product.

There are twenty-four of us on the platform. I know this because I counted during the staging area wait and I have been keeping count since, the way you keep count in any space where the number of people matters to your continued existence.