Office buildings, particularly skyscrapers, have empty offices, whole floors bare of anything but forgotten cubicle partitions and paper with context. These emptied rooms are bad omens, signs of lost profit and found pink slips. Employees keep their distance except when moving in or scouting personal territory for coffee-break trysts or card games.
The skyways connect these buildings, straight halls of glass high above the streets. At the highest stories of the buildings, where upper management roosts, there is a ruthless, professional, well-dressed sense of competition, martial in its self-control and aggression. The offices here are spartan, rich, and ordered. They are dojos of the self, of capitalism. They are shrines of success.
In the break rooms sit pregnant vending machines, boiling coffee-makers with towers of styrofoam cups, egg-clutches of donuts and crullers. The sink dips beneath the counter, showing the weakness of water even as it cleans silverware.
Vast public spaces hang in the body of the buildings, beautiful and chrome. Potted plants, blue light and white gently mingling, waterfalls and statues, all smooth and calm and telling you gently to continue on out of their non-place and to where you mean to go. A place to wait, to release the compression of small rooms out into the space, to talk low and surreptitiously to other men in suits, women in the same, black phones flipping up.
It was in a smaller space like that, in a building like that, where the Blue Suit Tribe watched the duel. The space was closed off: renovations to the skyway, a floor of recently empty offices, huge metal logo and name still hanging above the receptionist's desk. Everything curves, except the Blue Suit Tribe. Their hair was black and long, tied back in ponytails like samurai. Each wore a blue suit of deep blue that was almost dark, straight lines and subtle pinstripes, a uniform. There was something to the cut of the cloth, as though the shape of a karateman's gi had struggled against the tailoring of a CEO and lost, but not died. On the back of their wrists they wore brass bars three fingers thick bolted to straps of black leather. They are all of them tall enough that none of them seem tall amidst the others. From a distance, it cannot be seen whether they wear masks of protean, colorless faces, if their faces are blurred near featureless by the strange light, or if their faces are so similar, so mouthless, so white and eyeless, socketless.
(Two of them of fight, one young, around twenty if you went by his build, twenty five by his posture. The other is older, solidly in place in his world. His shoulders are a little broader, his featureless face a little wider, his posture is that of the acceptance after confidence. They fight. Legs and arms and heads whip round, strike out. They dodge, duck, maneuver, but there is no pause, no brief moment of sizing up defenses, only constant movement. The older one, or the one that seems older, knocks his knucklebones against the jaw of the other and the other goes down, falling sprawled to the dark green granite of a tiled floor. )
(There is a slight pause as the Tribe looks down at him, disappointed less by the lack of success and more by the failure of this fighter. One of them ) strips him of the brass bars at his wrists, unexpected, sending a piece of fear through him as he lies on the floor. They each walk over him, polished leather bruising and snapping, leaving him not just beaten, but broken. And they leave. (And his face is human now, or the mask is gone, or the light has shifted. And he lays there, destroyed, breathing like a stock-market suicide as he falls from the world.)