by Maia Tanith
The arena is still in shadow and a chilly breeze is coming in through the open bars. Mereek moves slowly, sluggishly. For all his strength, he is not fast.
I look hard, but I cannot see the woman who has been caged with him. She must be hiding out of my sight. I hope she is safely out of Mereek’s sight for now, too.
His push-ups completed, he lopes unevenly around the arena, passing in and out of my range of vision. His fighting technique seems simple. Find something and bash it as hard as he can.
He bashes very very hard.
I wave Taark over. “Look.”
He ambles over and joins me at the window. “I see nothing of interest. A stinking lizard man, as you call them.” He turns away again and goes back to sitting on his haunches and staring at nothing.
“He’s slow. Big but slow. And he doesn’t have much of a technique besides bashing things.”
He isn’t overly impressed at my reading of the situation. “As big as he is, he doesn’t need a sophisticated technique. One thump from his fists, or a lash of his poisoned spikes, and you are a goner.”
“But get inside his reach, and you have a chance.”
Taark raises his eyebrows at me, an almost grin on his usually grim face. “Are you seriously trying to teach me how to fight?”
“I’m just looking for his weaknesses,” I say with a huff. “It’s better than sitting in a corner sulking.”
He doesn’t like that. His almost-grin disappears, and he growls at me.
“And stop being a big baby and growling at me whenever I say something you don’t like. Admit it. You are sulking.”
“I do not sulk. Neither do I need lessons on how to fight from a barely grown kitten without so much as a single claw. I am a soldier. A warrior. I have been fighting since before you were born.”
I make a rude noise. He can’t be much older than I am. Thirty, tops. “Then you should be up at the window with me. You should know that it’s a good idea to study the enemy when you have the chance to.”
“I know how Galgogs fight. Rough and dirty. And they fight to win.”
Taark
The kit has a point. I ought to be watching the Galgogs and learning their weaknesses while I can. I am annoyed at myself for not thinking of watching them myself, and my annoyance makes me snap at her. Being confined in a cell is destroying my brain as well as my body.
I should not let my pride get in the way of good sense. I am a warrior. It is time I started to act like one.
As casually as I can, I stalk back over to the window and look out. Mereek is in the middle of the arena, taking wild swings at something. Or someone. Or maybe nothing at all. I can’t quite see well enough to tell.
The kit is right. He is ponderous and slow.
He is also enormously strong though, and he knows it. The trick will be to take him off-guard. Or wear him down with a series of feints until he tires. One on one, face to face in a fair fight, and he will destroy me with a single blow.
I watch him for some hours, until I am confident that I know how he moves.
When Mereek leaves the arena, another of the Galgogs is brought in. Grud, the thief. He saunters casually around the field before suddenly breaking into a burst of speed that few species could rival.
He is far more of a threat than Mereek is, despite the former’s strength. Even I, a trained warrior, cannot match him for sheer speed. He will be the one to watch in the arena. Sneak thief that he is, he would think nothing of darting up behind me and staging a surprise attack.
A nasty thought strikes me. He would be perfectly capable of attacking the women to gain himself an advantage, if he felt the tides were turning against him. After all, if our mate dies, so do we.
It is a dishonorable way to win the fight, and the crowds hate it. Nevertheless, it is within the rules.
For all his speed and agility, Grud lacks Mereek’s pure strength. He may well be desperate or ruthless enough to take the chance of attacking the women, and to hell with the approval of the crowd.
He is out to win his life. No more or less than that.
That makes him the most dangerous opponent of all.
Late in the day, Sharb is brought out. For all his vicious words and violent threats, he is clumsy. Brutal and quick with his knife, but not overly skilled as a fighter.
He clearly does his best knife work on a helpless and terrified prisoner.
The face of his mate will haunt me until the day I die. Such wanton cruelty as he has shown to her sickens and disgusts me to the core of my being.
He may be the least of my opponents, but he is the one that I will take the most satisfaction in killing.
If I may take only one of them with me, then let it be him.
He does not deserve to live.
Hannah
After watching the lizard men train yesterday, Taark is extra-silent today. He paces moodily up and down the cell, pausing every now and then to look out the window.
I try to talk to him, but he only grunts in response.
It’s an effort to get him to talk at the best of times. If I wasn’t going stir-crazy in here with nothing to do, I would give it up as a bad job. He’s clearly the strong, silent type.
I’m almost glad when a couple of guards arrive and peer through the bars to our cage. Anything that breaks up the monotony is welcome.
They are new. I haven’t seen them before.
The smaller guard looks in on us with a worried frown. “Should I leash them both? The female looks harmless enough.”
The other guard spits on the ground. “I ain’t leashing that cat until he’s good and stiff. You heard what he did to the boss man. Sliced his face open right to the bone.”
Beside me, Taark is tense with agitation. If he had a tail, he would be waving it in warning right now.
“Is it time for the Games?” I whisper to him, suddenly scared myself. It is too soon. I don’t have a plan. Am I about to become lunch for one of those nasty lizards?
My only answer is a shrug. Not even a grunt to go with it.
Not helpful.
And not very comforting either. I think I am about to pee myself.
The guards are talking in low tones to each other. Eventually they reach a decision. They raise their scary-looking guns and point them both at Taark. “We’re here to take you to the arena to train,” the smaller one says. “If you make a single aggressive move towards me, I’ll detonate you and drag the woman there by herself. Understand?”
To train? Not the Games themselves, then. Relief courses through my veins, and I feel light-headed and giddy.
I’m not going to die today. I still have a chance to live.
Taark nods stiffly, though his face is a mask of fury. “I understand.”
I don’t share his anger. Let them threaten me with their nasty guns and see if I care. I stand by the door, anxious to get out of the cell. Now that I can see my way out of here, even just for a few hours, it feels like the four walls are closing in on me and suffocating me until I can’t breathe.
Training in the arena sounds safe enough. It’s a change, anyway. And it might pose some chance to escape. Unlike this cell which, try as I might, I cannot find a way out of. It is harder to get out of than the hardest Escape Room I’ve ever tried to crack. Of course, those are designed to be a fun challenge to crack. The cell has not been designed with fun in mind. It’s been designed to be impossible to get out of.
Unless there is a guard on the other side with the keys in his hand to let you out.
The thought lights up in my brain, Maybe the guards are the weakness we will need to exploit, not the cell itself. They are bound to have weaknesses and vulnerabilities we could make use of. The difficulty will be in finding out what they are.
The guard unlocks the door and pulls it open in a single quick movement. “Out,” he orders.
I bounce up and down on my feet. I’m delighted to be getting out of here. “Thank you,” I say with extreme gratitude. I can’t s
ee any harm in buttering up the guards now. It might be helpful later on.
The guard doesn’t look impressed. He just stares in silence at my breasts as I walk past him, groping me with his eyes, and adjusting his privates as he does so.
Men, I think with disgust as I pass through the door, taking care to avoid brushing up against him. Even male aliens are no better than humans. And plenty of them are worse.
His lecherous gaze makes me feel violated. I wish I had thought to bring the blanket with me to provide some sort of covering, but odds are the guards wouldn’t let me take it out of the cell anyway. And I wouldn’t want to lose it. The cell can get pretty cold when the suns set.
Taark follows me, and the larger guard walks directly behind him, the pointy end of the detonator pointing straight at his neck. Taark’s every body movement is calm and controlled, but I know that he has only leashed his fury, not buried it. It is still there, lurking close to the surface.
I follow the smaller claw-man down the corridor and out through a side door into the open air.
Sunshine. Fresh air. I had almost forgotten what they smelled like.
I take a deep breath and fill my lungs with cool, crisp air. It smells different from the air at home. There is no scent of freshly-mown grass or car exhaust. No curry that the family in the apartment next to me was always cooking.
Instead the air has a vaguely metallic tang to it. A sweet, slightly spicy smell, and dust. Lots of red dust.
The training ground is strewn with it. Already my bare feet are covered.
Taark nudges me from behind and I realize I am standing right in the middle of the doorway.
I move to one side and he comes to stand beside me. “What now?” I whisper to him as I look around. My stomach drops as I realize we are in a huge arena, in a circular area surrounded by rows upon rows of seating that stretches up so far that I can barely make out the top. “Is this really the training ground? Or are some lizards going to jump out at us now?” The mere thought was turning my stomach to jelly. I looked around me nervously, half-expecting some nasty lizard to materialize at my elbow.
The taller guard waves at us with his scary-looking gun. “Now you train.”
I look around again. “With what?” I channel my inner Kardashian and give a spoiled princess whine. “There are no treadmills, no weights, no yoga instructors. Nothing that you would find in even the most down-market city gym. What am I supposed to do?”
Taark glares at me as if he cannot believe my stupidity.
I give him a sweet smile back. “Trust me,” I mouth out of the corner of my face where I am sure the guards cannot see.
The guards look bemused at my antics. “Do whatever the hell you like,” one of them growls at me.
I shrug. “In that case I will go for a walk.” I hold out my hand to Taark. “Are you coming?”
He takes my hand and moves away from the guards with me.
“Look at the mighty Taark, led around like he’s a pet by the weakling,” one of them sneers.
Taark’s face grows tighter than ever with anger, but he does not react.
Taark
I follow the kit as she skirts around the edges of the arena. “What was that all about?” I mutter as soon as we are out of earshot of the guards. They have retired back into the corridor that runs along the edge of the arena, locking us in the pit.
“I want to look in all the windows. Maybe I will find the others who were taken with me,” she says. “Delia and Faye. Maybe one of them is here.”
I do not follow her reasoning. Neither of them will be in any better situation than she is. Most likely they will be worse off. I am no white lion, but I would bet that I am a considerably nicer cellmate than most of the criminals and gutter scum that are locked away here to fight. “For what purpose?”
“Maybe they know something that could help us all. We are stronger together,” she replies stoutly. “They will help me if they can, just as I would help them if I could.”
I have no such faith in the goodwill of her fellow humans. I believe she would help her fellow captives, yes. But I have no belief they will reciprocate. She is still too young and naive to know how the world really works.
“Besides,” she says cannily. “I’ve been watching the lizards posture out here. I’ve seen how they fight and how they react. If I can get to know their weaknesses, and if the other girls can tell us what they know, it might give you an edge over them. Especially if you do not let them see your weaknesses in turn. You will be able to surprise them more readily.”
“I have no weaknesses” I growl, offended at her train of thought. Besides, I would like to train hard. Now that I have a measure of freedom for a brief moment, I ache to run and jump and leap and claw until the rage inside me is spent.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says sharply. “Everyone does. Even stacked muscle men like you.”
The fresh air and the sunshine have made her snappy. I hiss my displeasure back at her and she holds her tongue.
But only for a moment. As soon as we reach the first window over, she knocks on the wall and stands on her tiptoes to peer in. “Hello?” she calls. “Who’s in there?”
For an answer, a long claw stabs out through the bars, and she jumps back in a hurry. “Faye? Delia?” she calls.
There is no answer.
She hesitates for a moment and then moves onto the next window. “Can you lift me up to see in?” she asks. “I will be good exercise. Think of it as part of your training.”
She learns from her mistakes, this one.
I heft her onto my shoulders, and she sits there, her legs dangling on either side of my shoulders and her groin rubbing against my neck. The smell of her sex so close to me sets my senses on to high alert. My nostrils twitch and I have to tamp down my rising desire.
Knocking on the next window gets her nothing. “It’s empty,” she says with disappointment, as she leans forward to peer inside.
She repeats the process at every window around the entire side of the arena, but there is no sign of her friends. Her shoulders slump a little lower with every failure, with every bark or screech of the feral inhabitants, with every yelled obscenity, and every jab of a claw or talon.
By the time we are done, both my shoulders and my cock are both throbbing. Shaking with fatigue, I lift her off and set her on the ground. It has been more of a workout that she knows.
“Do you think we should go around again?” she asks. “We might have missed them the first time.”
“No,” I say flatly. “We did not miss anyone.” I cannot take her around again. After so many days of captivity, I no longer have the strength to lift her back onto my shoulders. even if I wanted to.
“No, we didn’t,” she agrees. Her voice is so full of disappointment, I can almost taste it on her breath. She absentmindedly brushes away a tear. “I wonder where they are?”
There are a hundred places they could be. A hundred prisons and more in the city, all filled with enemies of the Emperor and his lackeys. They have a nasty habit of ‘disappearing’ people they don’t like. Only the lucky few, like me, get made into a public example. At least my packmates will not be scouring the city streets or medic houses in a vain attempt to find me. They will know for certain that I am dead and will be able to grieve for me without the agony of hope. “Nowhere good.”
She kicks the sand at her feet. “I guess not. I was hoping that I would find at least one of them. I miss my home so much.” Her voice breaks on her last words.
I feel a pang of pity for her and open my mouth to give her words of comfort. Then I turn away before the words can form on my lips.
Caring is weakness. I can’t have weakness if I am to survive these games. And the kit would do well to learn this, too.
“We should go to train now.” I walk towards the center of the training grounds, away from the high windows that have disappointed her so thoroughly.
She pauses for a second before following along behind me
. “So, what do we do for training anyway?” she asks grumpily, kicking at a small stone by her feet.
“Like they said, whatever the hell you want,” I growl back. I’m not her tutor. I’m stuck with her to protect, not by choice. She needs to realize we are not allies. Once the game is over, if we survive, that’s the end of it.
They will probably kill her afterwards, anyway. I’m quite sure they mean to kill me.
I am of little use as a protector. I was not able to save Marfin. What makes the kit think I can save her?
The guards know I have to protect her to survive. They may have laughed when I followed her earlier, thinking she has tamed me. Let them laugh. Let them think I have gone soft for this one. Let them underestimate me.
I stretch in the middle of the grounds, reaching my arms out in front of me and raking the ground with my claws as my back stretches. It feels so good to be out in the sun.
My claws stay extended, and I inspect each one of them for scratches and imperfections. My confinement has not helped them. They are not so strong as they used to be. They used to be hard enough that a sword could not cut through them. Now, if a knife hit them the right way, it would slice right though.
I sharpen them on a rock on the ground until the edges gleam. I need better sustenance if they are to get stronger, but I am stuck eating whatever scraps I am served, and little enough of them, too. I can at least keep them sharp. And the sun will be good for them.
I look over to see the kit watching me.
Chapter Four
Hannah
He is sharpening his claws on a rock and making the most awful sound. Like nails on a chalkboard, but harsher. I don’t see how they could possibly get sharper than they were, but I guess it gives him something to do. He can’t exactly get much time for grooming while he’s a prisoner. There’s not a lot to sharpen his claws on in our cell.
I shudder thinking about being on the receiving end of a swipe from those claws.
He sees me watching and looks up. “Your friends aren’t here. They can’t give you any advice on the weaknesses of the lizard men. You would do well to make use of the time out here.”