The butterfly guy moved at the last snarl and then paused right in front of Nat, at the front of the small group of humans. There were less of them now, over half left dead on the sands of the arena. He looked her up and down appraisingly and spoke. His voice was deep, the words melodic and sounded pretty, but when the nonhumans around them broke into dirty laughter, she knew they weren’t.
Plastering a sultry smile on her face, she looked him in the eye. “Sweetheart, I would eat you for fucking breakfast,” she said in her breathiest, sexiest voice. “Wings and all. In fact, I’d rip them off and jam them so far up your ass that your throat’d think it’s on a transgalactic flight.”
His smile disappeared and he snarled something, his wings fluttering angrily. It was only a tiny movement, the manacles around the base of his wing joints not allowing anything more, but she saw the flash of the teeth on the edges as they snapped up.
She smiled. He’d understood her. Awesome. But that presented another problem. They understood her and she didn’t understand them. That was not good.
With more snarling, the lizard guards herded the group of aliens out through the doors on the left. Nat didn’t need to look around to know that the aliens left were the weaker ones. They were herded out to the right as the rest of the guards turned their attention to the humans.
“No! No, no, no!” Nat hissed as they tried to separate her and Melissa. She wrapped her arms around the other woman, but it was no good. The lizards were stronger than she was. The redheaded woman cried out, reaching for Nat as she was torn from her arms.
“No! Where are you taking her?” Nat demanded as Melissa and a group of the others were pushed out of the hall through the left door like the weaker aliens. She twisted as a guard shoved her toward the right, snarling as she got up in his face. “Don’t you fucking touch me, asshole!”
He snarled and the prod sparked, the sickly green-yellow lighting up the stone walls of the corridor. But she was too mad to heed the warning, ducking down to try and come up in his blind spot. He was a lizard, his eyes on the sides of his head rather than the front, which meant there should be a blind spot right under his nose. She balled her fist, going for an uppercut…
The prod hit her in the side and her world exploded with pain. Her lips snapped open in a silent scream as her back arched, what felt like every single one of her ribs trying to flare out away from each other.
Seconds passed—or an eternity, she wasn’t sure which—before the prod turned off and she collapsed to the floor. Forehead on the dirty sand, she gasped, trying to get air into lungs that wouldn’t accept it.
“Fuccccckkkk,” she managed, not even able to fight as the lizard plucked her off the floor with a hard laugh and slung her over his shoulder. His tail waved side to side in her fuzzy field of vision as he walked, and she concentrated on not passing out. He carried her down a corridor and into a cell.
Dumping her on the floor none too gently, he held her down and pressed something behind the back of her ear. She tried to struggle, sure this was it, but a sharp stab into her neck stole the last of her fight.
“What the fuck was that?” she hissed, managing to scramble away from him as he lifted up. He held some kind of injector in his hand, sliding it away into a loop on his belt as he turned and left the cell. The metal door clanged shut behind him before he locked it.
“Asshole,” she muttered, rubbing at the side of her neck. It wasn’t a euthanasia shot then. If they were going to kill her, they’d have done it in the arena. Left them in there until assholes like the butterfly guy and his friends had done the job for them.
Looking around, she located the nearest wall and half staggered, half crawled toward it. Fuck, being hit by that prod had really taken it out of her. She felt like she’d been in the ring for twelve hours straight with the hangover from a three-day bender. All at the same time.
“Best not to get their attention,” a quiet voice said from the shadows nearby.
Nat paused in rubbing her neck and squinted, trying to see into the darkness. This cell was mostly empty. What looked like piles of rags and blankets lay in the corners where the pillars jutted out from the stone walls. The one nearest to her moved and she got a flash of a slender arm and hand.
Something thudded into the dirt by her foot. She looked curiously at a small greyish cube and then picked it up. It was slightly squishy, like a jelly cube, but denser.
“Eat,” the unknown woman said. It was a woman, the voice was definitely female. “You’ll need your strength.”
Nat looked up from dusting the dirt off the cube. “Where am I? Where did they take Melissa? Where does the other door go?”
She heard a slight grunt as the blankets moved. “Forget her. She’ll be dead by tomorrow.”
The next morning Beauty stood in front of the entrance to the pits.
They were a symbol of fear and bloody, brutal violence. Entertainment for some but a death sentence for those trapped in their depths. The only way out was to fight and survive—to win above all else.
And they were remarkably easy to fall into. Conviction of a capital crime on any world would land you here quicker than breathing. If you were really unlucky and the presiding judge in minor cases was crooked, you could end up here as well. Backhanders and bribes were commonplace, and the main way the pit got its fighters. Now, it seemed, they’d graduated up to invasion and kidnap. Oh, they had paperwork. Zero had uncovered transport documents for the shipment containing Marika’s sister. Apparently, all the cargo aboard was gathered in the Hedorian Nebula. His fists clenched at his sides. Any idiot with eyes in his head could see those females were something special. He was surprised the empire allowed it. One look at them and anyone could work out they were Lathar, or at least genetically compatible.
His eyes narrowed as he looked at the gates in front of him. They stood wide open as one of the entrances to the pits. They were never closed. The pits were open to all if you wished to test your mettle against any who came. But once you stepped through, the only way out was to fight and win. You couldn’t leave until you stepped off the sands the winner.
He didn’t step through. Not yet. Instead, he stood on the dirt in front of the gates and looked at them. The Pelv stood on the parapet above, lilac robes fluttering in the slight breeze. He was too high up for Beauty to read his expression. The Pelv as a species were notoriously good at controlling their facial expressions, but he could still read his agitation as clearly as if the being had been standing next to him. He was desperate for Beauty to step through, into the trap once more.
Still, he looked at the gates.
He hadn’t entered the pits this way the first time. When he’d arrived before, it had been as a frightened youngling. Just eight cycles old he’d been convicted for stealing food and a blanket to survive the harsh winter on Kavat. He’d been brought in as a slave. A child. Forced to kill in the testing matches that Marika’s sister had endured yesterday.
If asked, he’d have told people his time in the pits had turned him into a killer. It would be a lie. He’d been a killer long before he’d been a fighter—long before he’d been brought here.
The pits had just taught him how to kill better.
This time, though, he was walking in of his own free will, with the full knowledge of what he would have to do once he stepped past those gates. He would have to fight once again for everything. To get what he wanted, to survive… he would have to kill again.