by Ana Mardoll
There's a scraping sound, metal against stone, and the temperature of the room sharply dips. I still hear Miyuki stirring behind me, but otherwise the room is deathly silent; I realize with a shiver that the girls are holding their breaths. A sibilant voice issues from the direction of the doors. "You girls didn't call for me. Should I be angry." It's not a question; there's no uptick in the silken voice.
"That one has only just begun to stir, Master. This one is still asleep. We did not wish to bother you." The voice is the girl who questioned me, but her tone is softer now, deferential with a touch of simper.
I hear the whisper of heavy cloth on stone, and an encroaching chill raises bumps on my arms. There is a long pause, the silence heavy in my ears. I have to force myself to breathe normally and not hold my breath. "This one is awake," the strange voice murmurs, the tone still utterly without inflection.
"No, Master," the girl contradicts, almost chirruping in her denial. "Her eyes are closed, see?"
"Her eyes are closed because she is pretending," the voice says. "Diamond, this is why you would be useless in the Arena; you are a fool. All girls are. Now let me work."
She's already saying "yes, Master" in that high little-girl voice of hers, shot through now with contrition, when a hand grasps my throat. I cough violently for air at the sudden assault, uselessly jerking against the ropes that bind me. My eyes fly open and I find myself staring into the face of a horror I have no name for.
The creature she called 'Master' stands eight feet tall. His hand encircles my neck and lifts me high into the air. He's shaped like a human—two arms, two legs, a torso—but there the similarities end. He's paler than white, the color of nocturnal grubs who have never seen the light of day. He holds me level with what I would call his head, except it looks nothing like a head should. Bald and hairless, with a wide slit cut in parody of a mouth, and two tiny red-rimmed holes set in a flat expanse where a nose ought to be. There are no eyes, not even the shape or suggestion of eye-holes, yet I know the creature is staring at me even as I stare wide-eyed back at him. Around the edges of his head jagged hooks of ugly metal protrude from his skin, as if a canvas was meant to be stretched over his face for painting.
I would scream but there is no air. I can't kick or fight against the ropes; I can barely breathe because of the pressure around my throat. I'm going to die. I've been kidnapped by aliens and I'm going to die. I don't want to die here! I suck a thin thread of air through my nose, struggling not to pass out.
The creature tilts his head as though studying me, but there's nothing kind about his curiosity. "Yes," he murmurs, his lips barely parting to allow the whispering hiss to escape. "She was worth the wait. Powerful spotters are so hard to acquire. This one will see to the edge of my arena once she is awakened. Diamond, you will take good care of this one."
"Yes, Master," she agrees, her eyes obediently downcast. "And the other one? May we keep her? I know the boys will like her; did you see her pretty freckles?"
He spares the tiniest of glances for Miyuki. "Common stock. No rare talent to develop. Hardly worth the expense to keep. Easier just to eat her." He pauses. I have to fight for every breath I take while he remains frozen with me still dangling in his iron grip. "If you think the boys will like her, I will allow it."
Eat her? Keep her? My eyes fly to Miyuki, taking in how wan she appears on her slab, trussed up in red rope that looks so much like blood in my swimming vision. Miyuki, are we going to die here?
Memories swirl through my mind, fast and frightened, the last flash before I die. I drove us to the bar. I'd wanted to see Timothy in a neutral place where we wouldn't be able to talk about anything heavy, where there'd be no chance of going to bed with him again until I'd sorted out my feelings for Miyuki. I'd trusted him, cared for him, and he turned around and kidnapped me and my best friend. No, not just my best friend. She's the girl I care most for in the world, the person I live with and love and made love to.
I should have told her, I realize. When she said she loved me at the bar, I should have said it back to her. I should have told her I meant it. I'll watch her until death comes, I decide, even as my vision swims sickeningly again.
Yet death doesn't come. There's a pulling sensation in the back of my mind, a strange draining like the swirl of water in an emptying tub. It's a sleepy feeling, reminding me of lazy sunny days when I would spend the summer with—
With?
There were summers, I remember those. Mama would drive me out to the country to spend two weeks with—
I can't recall. I feel a quick spike of fear, but it fumbles and slips away into the drain, there and gone again in a flash. The hazy nothingness spreading through my mind brings a numbing calm that deadens where it touches. Why should I be afraid of a silly little thing like a memory not existing? Certainly there's nothing fearful about the gentle soporific whirl in my mind, lulling me down into a warm darkness.
My vision clears for just a moment and I see a pretty girl with short dark hair and a splash of freckles on her fair face, lying bound in red rope on a slab of sandstone. She's staring blearily up at me with soft hazel eyes, though I'm not sure if she sees me. I smile at her, wishing to be polite, and think we might get along if we came to know each other. Then the inviting darkness drags me down and takes my vision with it.
Chapter 4
Keoki
I groan, the sound a dry scratch in my throat, and clench my eyes tighter shut against the intense sunlight beating down on me. It's the middle of the day. Did I fall asleep? I have a fleeting feeling that this is bad, but I'm not sure why. My head pounds with a dull thudding pain, and all my thoughts seem fragmented and incomplete, as if I've been smashed into a million pieces and put back together poorly.
My hands move at my sides and I feel the familiar brush of sand beneath my fingers, but the sand is wrong. It isn't soft and rounded like sand should be but rather rough and crumbly, the grains too large and strangely fragile. When I pry my eyes open to look—squinting against the sun and ignoring a low roar rumbling in my ears—the grains clinging to my skin aren't the soft pale buttermilk color sand should be. Instead, my hands are dusted in a dark burnt ocher flecked with tiny crystals that catch the light. I stare at my hands and the strange sand coating them, and try to work out how I know these things.
I know what hands are and that these are mine, and I know what sand is and that this sand is wrong. The knowledge came when I felt the coarse texture under my fingers and opened my eyes to see the tiny particles on my skin. Information flowed to me freely as though it were always inside me, just waiting to pour out. But what I don't know is how I know these things, or where the information came from in the first place. I don't remember being taught any of this, and I can't imagine where you would go to learn that sand should be soft and yellowish-brown rather than rough and burnt-golden.
In point of fact, I don't remember anything before waking just now. There's a darkness in my mind where the jagged thoughts come from, but poking at that mental spot sets off a throbbing ache behind my temples. I wish I knew if that were normal, and if everyone else feels this way. I assume there's an everyone else. I don't remember ever meeting another person, but I can't be the only one in existence, can I? But where are they? And where am I? I pull myself up to a sitting position in the rough sand, squinting against the blinding brightness that fills the sky and glints off the crystalline ground.
I'm in some kind of valley. Sheer mountainous walls enclose the area on all sides, framing the land in a vast oval of towering stone. The ground beneath me is unwaveringly level, smooth sand stretching in every direction without the slightest hint of a slope. All around me, giant spires stab up through the sand at random intervals, jagged fingers of sandstone reaching five times my height. Sloped wooden platforms wrap around the spires like ramps, leading up to the top and supported by thin sun-bleached poles.
A loud clatter sounds in the distance behind me, the screech of something solid scraping stone. I
whirl to face the noise, but the sound is drowned out by a deafening spike in the rumbling roar which has been filling my ears since I awoke. Like the sand, the low rumble had felt vaguely familiar while still being entirely wrong, and I had set aside the wrongness of it until I could get my footing under me. Now the roar rises to an unnatural crashing pitch that builds on itself without dying, and I realize that the cacophony is coming from the cliffs that ring the valley.
I bring a hand up to shade my eyes, peering at the dark walls surrounding me. I hadn't bothered to study them before, dazzled by the sun and more interested in the strange spires. Now that I take a moment to let my eyes adjust, I'm surprised to see movement blanketing the walls: colorful shapes throbbing with living vibrancy in time with the frenzied roar. People, I realize, my breath catching at the sheer number of them, exploding the population of my world from one to thousands. It's everyone else.
I turn in a circle to see them, so close to me and yet too high to reach. The cliff walls are set with tiered ridges for sitting and standing, each row placed further back and higher up so everyone has an unobstructed view of the valley where I stand. The people clustered on the ridges look more comfortable than I feel down here, and I wonder if I could get up there. Only then do I notice they're all turned towards me, clapping and cheering. This feels oddly right, as though I've seen a crowd arranged in rows on rising seats like this before, yet I don't understand why they're all so pleased. Have I done something good?
The lowest row of the nearest wall is close enough for me to see the expressions of the people there. One of them, a girl with hair so vibrantly orange I think she might actually be aflame, leaps to her feet and excitedly waves a scrap of red cloth—some kind of pennant, I realize, the word entering my mind without any context. I study her eyes for some kind of clue, only to realize she's not actually looking at me. It's hard to tell from this distance, but I think she's looking at something behind me.
Turning to follow her gaze, I get the briefest glimpse of the thing before it bowls me over: golden-brown shale coats its legs and arms like armor while stone shards form the jagged shape of what might be a head, if you were flexible on the whole needs-to-be-round concept. Then its massive weight slams into me like an oversized fist and I'm sent flying. I hurtle through the air and everything is a blur of dark cliffs and bright sky until gravity reasserts itself and I skid through the rough sand, raking deep scrapes into every bit of exposed skin and ripping my clothes.
My vision swims while I crouch on my hands and knees in the sand, sputtering for breath. What was that? I drag my gaze up from the ground, shaking my head until the world stops spinning, but when I get a good look at the thing I don't know what to call it. No identifying words come flooding forward, though I can name the individual pieces: stone, rocks, jagged, brown, wrong. It's a creature, a monster, roughly human-shaped and yet thoroughly inhuman. Yet I can tell those words aren't unique to this thing; it's a monster because I don't have any better words for it.
And it's running towards me, I realize, fresh panic spiking through my blood. The creature rushes me in a heavy lumbering gait, its long arms swinging with each thudding step. One impossibly huge fist pulls back to strike again, and my hands scramble uselessly against the sand, trying and failing to push myself up.
I need to run, dodge, roll, anything to get away, but time slows in preparation for the blow and I know it's too late. The monster is too near and too fast, and my mind is still sluggish, not yet recovered from that first heavy hit. If the incoming punch is anything like the last one, I'm pretty sure it'll put me down and out. Am I gonna wake up in a different valley and do this all over again?
"Hey!" There's a shout over the roar of the crowd, the sound coming from my right side; out of the corner of my eye I see a blur of fast movement in the direction of the call.
I blink and almost miss it: a guy with shaggy black hair, decked out in some kind of leather armor, speeds between me and the creature. He crouches low to grab a handful of sharp sand which he hurls directly into its face. The crowd roars in approval and the monster stumbles back, shaking its head and clawing at rough clumps of sand streaming down the jagged rocks comprising its face.
My unexpected savior skids to a halt next to me, pulling me to my feet with a quick jerk on my arm. "Wake up, newbie, before you get yourself killed; nobody's gonna save you out here!" he yells. He barely glances at me, his gaze firmly fixed on the creature. His words aren't technically a true statement, given that he's just done exactly that, but the gist is received loud and clear.
"Uh, thanks," I manage, my own attention pretty equally occupied by the angrily roaring monster. It still claws at its face, but I have a feeling this reprieve won't last forever. "Do you have any pointers on the whole staying-alive thing?"
I spare a glance at him, searching his face for answers or at least some spark of recognition. He's paler than me, his skin fair with warm undertones. Straight black hair spills over into dark eyes so unreadable they seem almost sorrowful in their emptiness. Bits and pieces of him seem familiar to my rattled memory, but the overall whole is a blank to me; if I knew this guy before, I don't know him now.
He snorts at my question, as if it were the stupidest thing I could ask. "Get a weapon," he advises, then turns on his heel and kicks off at a sudden run.
I stare after him, wasting a few precious seconds to gawk. He's fast, the shifting sand under his feet doing little to slow him down. He makes a beeline for the nearest of the huge stone fingers that stab up through the sand, his feet pounding on the twisting wooden ramp in a hard staccato rhythm as he dashes up the spiral walkway. What in the world is he doing?
Movement nearby reminds me that I don't have time to watch him. I wrench my gaze back to the stony creature, studying it warily. Loose sand streams off its strange body and rough hands continue to claw at its rocky face, but the flailing has slowed and become more controlled. The monster straightens from a crouch and sets its legs in a determined stance, its rocky head turning slowly around as if seeking the source of the most recent attack.
Oh, this probably isn't good. My heart is beating wildly with the need to put as much distance as possible between myself and the monster, but I don't want to draw attention with any sudden movements. I peer at it, wondering how it senses its prey. There are no visible eyes or ears on the creature, nothing but rocks clumped together in a messy heap that shouldn't hold together the way it does. Can it see me, or hear me, or smell me? Does it feel vibrations in the sand, or sense moisture in the air?
I take several careful steps backwards, moving tentatively farther away a few inches at a time. The crumbly ground shifts under me with each step, making it difficult to walk, yet my legs know this feeling. I can do this, I realize. I could run, even. Then its blank face swivels my way and I freeze in place, hardly daring to breathe. I hold perfectly still for a dozen heartbeats while an eyeless face seems to stare at me, then it resumes its slow scan of the valley. Okay, it can't see me. Small comfort.
The crowd is cheering and catcalling so loudly I can barely hear myself think. If I can't creep away, I have a dilemma: run or stand my ground and hide. Running appeals to the fear singing in my blood, but I remember how fast the creature moved when it hurtled into me with a body-blow that sent me flying. As comforting as it is to know I can run on this sand, that ability won't do me any good if I can't outrun this monster.
But if I don't like my chances of running away, what else can I do? There's enough distance between myself and the creature such that it can't simply reach out to grab me, but I won't be able to stay motionless forever. Eventually it will sense me and close the small gap separating us. Maybe I could distract it in some way, like throwing sand in its face again. What did that guy say? 'Get a weapon'?
I look around, but there's nothing here that fits that word, only sand and rocks and sun. I twist my head to find the guy, picking out the nearby wooden platform he'd been running up. He's reached the top and his hands are pa
tting all over the enormous spire as if looking for something. Suddenly his hand snakes into a hole near the very top, and I see the bright flash of metal as he draws out what my mind instantly identifies as a sword: sharp, long, pointy, and meant to be stuck in things.
Before I can wonder what he plans to do with that, he takes off running back down the platform. At the second loop from the top around the stone spire, he leaps into empty space like he thinks he's going to fly, tucks his knees up into his chest, and turns an honest-to-god flip in the air while the crowd roars in sudden approval.
The shale creature whips around at the hard whump in the sand where the guy lands, but as fast as a lick the sword flashes out, reflecting light as it swings. Metal connects with stone in a resounding crash and the creature's head is swept clean off in a burst of tiny rocks and rubble. Underneath the explosive clamor is the ugly sound of metal breaking and the top half of his sword tears off, flying wildly through the air to embed itself in the sand nearby.
I'm pretty sure my eyes are wide enough to pop as I stare at the guy who has now saved me twice. "Hey, thanks, man," I tell him. I'm holding back a grin, feeling light-headed with relief. It's all I can do not to tease him for saying nobody would have my back out here when he seems to be doing just fine on that score. I still don't know where we are or what's going on, but at least I've made a friend.
He doesn't return my smile, though. Doesn't even look at me. His dark eyes watch the headless stone monster while his hands grip the broken sword, panting for breath where he stands. It hits me in a slow way, the thoughts sluggish in my throbbing head, that the monster hasn't fallen down the way you might expect something missing a head to do.
In fact, I realize with a dawning horror as the words oh shit flit across my mind, it's still moving. A fist the size of my own head and covered in rough bulky stone swipes out and catches the other guy right in the stomach, sending him reeling back in pain.