We fled into the pitch-black jungle that surrounded the City of the Apes, angling north. My lovely passenger, unable to see or hear, clung to my back and trusted I wouldn't drive us into quicksand or the edge of a ravine.

I didn't stop running until my Stamina bar was blinking red, about five miles at a flat sprint. The journey had been made on instinct alone, and when we stopped, I realized we were in a different biome. The surrounding forest was much rockier, drier, and less humid. It was also noisy as hell. Dinosaurs bellowed, apes chattered, birds shrieked and whooped in the towering eucalyptus trees that soared above and around us. The sounds ricocheted through the bark-draped branches, but there was no one and nothing to be seen. There was, however, a lot to smell.

‘Let's see here...’ I muttered to myself, absently sniffing around the base of one of the enormous trees. ‘Eau d'Legion Number One, tastefully aged. And... oh, wonderful. That's T-Rex piss.’

"What are you doing?" The girl leaned around my head and signed with one hand, her expression quizzical.

I froze as the question sunk in, because I was, in fact, busily sniffing the marking scents left by half a dozen dinosaurs and several Legions. My jaws were parted, upper lip curled back over my teeth, all nostril vents flared.

‘Just, uh, checkin' my pee-mail.’ I replied telepathically, snorting out a cloud of acrid air. "You know. Normal human man stuff."

[You have identified new creature: T-Rex.]

[New creature discovered: Terror Bird.]

[You have identified: Dire Wolf.]

[New Legion identified: Painspore (Lesser Legion)]

[New Legion identified: Whip Horse.]

'Lord, please spare me a fight with whatever the fuck a 'Whip Horse' is.' I dismissed the flurry of system notifications, turning my snout and scenting for water. When I found it, I followed my nose down a series of small, crumbling dusty cliffs to a gurgling brown river.

The girl practically vaulted from my back when she spotted the water. She ran to it, skidded to a stop in front of it, and greedily scooped and drank with her hands. With her weight off my back, I was suddenly aware of how worn out, strung out and sore I really was. There wasn't a single meter in my HUD that wasn't below 30%. Groaning, I made my way to the riverbank and flopped down like a tired dog.

The girl's shoulders hunched as I came into her peripheral view. She turned to me, scowling with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. "How come you speak sign?"

"My younger sister. I think." I dropped my chin to the tops of my paws. "Can't remember anything else about her, but I know she was deaf. She learned ASL as a kid, and I must have learned it with her. Her name was Sam, too. Hell of a coincidence."

"Coincidence?" The girl signed back. She looked confused.

"Well, your name's Sam, right? Sam Seven-Lives?"

Her expression dropped. "Oh. No. No, I'm not Sam. Sam was my... uhh... she was my Vigiles. Kind of like a sergeant."

The way her face flickered and her fingers fumbled told me that Sam the Vigiles hadn't just been her sergeant. She might not have even just been her 'friend'.

"Sam was the lady who enslaved the Runtina? Kaya?" I asked.

The girl's brows furrowed. "She was Kaya's trainer. She didn't enslave him."

"I thought that's how this place worked. Human Gladiators enslaving Legions like me so they can go punch god in the face, or something like that."

She blinked a couple of times, then turned away with an expression of real sorrow.

"Most of the people here are like that," she signed, after a pause. "Sam was different. But she's dead now. They ninered her on that fucking altar."

"Niner?" I cocked my head.

"As in, they killed her over and over to burn through her remaining lives. You know: perma-killing. It’s just the slang around here." The girl hunched into herself, staring over the water. Crouched in her skimpy rag bikini, she looked as fragile as spun glass. Her skin was covered in mud and blood, her brilliant white hair snarled with filth. I kind of wanted to give her a hug.

"I know I sound like a broken record, but I’m real sorry about your friends." I wrapped my tail around my body and let out a wheezy sigh. “What's your name, kid?”

Bright, wary eyes darted toward me. "We'll talk after a bath. I need to wash this shit off and repair these clothes."

"Knock yourself out." I gestured generously toward the water.

Her eyes narrowed to luminous slits. "That means I have to take them off."

I heaved a much heavier sigh and pushed myself back up, causing a fresh wave of dull pain to spread through my head and the overworked muscles of my chest. "Okay, while we're working together, let me get something straight. You're a human woman who is maybe - maybe - a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. I am a one-ton venomous murderbeast, and if you were to look under my tail and behold the glory that is the USS Battleship Reaper, you'd be crossing yourself and asking for an old priest and a young priest. Let me state with absolute certainty that we are in no way, shape or form, physically compatible. Your virtue is 100% guaranteed with the special Chastity Plan at the Bank of Noodles, okay?"

“Dear lord.” The girl ground the heels of her palms against her eyes for a couple moments. "Fine, okay. Just... don't look, alright?"

I made a show of getting up, turning around a couple of times, then flumping back down to the ground with my back turned to her and my paws over my eyes.

After several minutes of splashing, I felt a small wet hand tap the end of one tentacle. When I looked up and around, the girl was there, squatting behind me on the balls of her feet. Now that she was clean, I couldn't help but noticing how cute she actually was. There was a proud, deer-like quality about her. Her chest was little more than a faint swell under her ragged cutoff tank, which made her collarbones, long neck, and elegant jaw stand out all the more. Her skin was currently a pale, unearthly pink, lips flushed from the cold water. Her eyelashes were pure white, like a fringe of frost around her wide-set eyes, which were an unusually intense blue. Cute wasn't the right word, now that I thought about it. Unearthly? Yeah. That worked.

"Thank you, by the way. For helping back there." The girl paused signing, and wrung her hair out. It was still a little brownish from the creek water: in a place like this, there wasn't much she could do about that. "Other than Kaya, I've never met an intelligent Brute before."

"No worries," I said. "Sorry about Kaya. He seemed like an okay dude. Deer. Deer dude."

“He was.” The girl's mouth twisted down in momentary grief. "It's how this place is. Everyone here is always climbing on top of each other as they struggle to get out of the Jungle, tearing each other down. Sam was too nice for this place, and she knew it. Kaya did too, I think. If he'd had more of his humanity... if he'd been able to communicate like you, things would have been different."

"He seemed pretty damned human to me." I stretched my forelimbs out in front of me and arched my back, groaning in pleasure as my spine popped. "You were talking to him. He kind of talked back."

"Kind of. Kaya could understand voiced speech, but he couldn’t reply. Voice or sign or psionic, it didn't matter. Whoever he was on the outside, the Delta Society took that away from him. Left him more like a smart animal, you know?"

I thought back to Dmitri's letter, how he'd said he'd asked the 'Society' to let me keep my faculties so he could torture me. "Guess I got lucky. Anyway - you got a name? Doesn't have to be your real one, but I’m already tired of thinking of you as ‘the girl’."

She chewed her lip for a moment. Finally, she lifted her chin. "Everyone here calls me Angel."

I looked her up and down. "Yeah. I can see that."

"They all say that, too." The ghost of a smile passed over her mouth. "What about you? You got a collar on. You have a name to go with it?"

I struck a heroic pose. "Noodles."

Angel blinked a couple of times. "What?"

"His Radiance, M.T Noodles the Fourth," I replied proudly. "PhD."

Angel flashed me a look of disbelief. "You're a Reaper Nemesis, one of the most powerful Brutes in the entire game, and your name is NOODLES?"

"M.T Noodles." I finger-signed the first two letters for emphasis. "The fourth. Friend-shaped people can skip the titles; those are for formal occasions, like bat-mitzvahs or pit fights. You can just call me Doctor. Doctor Noodles."

Angel stared. In wonder, I assumed.

"The M.T stands for Murder Tentacles," I added, in case there was any doubt.

"I..." she fingersigned the first letter, pinching the bridge of her nose with the other hand. "I take the 'intelligent Brute' stuff back."

"Okay, I'm not really a doctor. I WAS a cop, which means I definitely didn't have a degree and probably ate crayons in highschool. But c'mon: who needs a piece of paper in a frame when you've got all this?" I stood up on my back feet and flexed all six upper limbs like some weird Hindu god. "Welcome to the gun show, baby."

Angel tried really hard to glare at me, but lasted maybe two seconds before she cracked up. She broke down into her hands - giggling, at first, then wild howling laughter. She lost her balance and fell onto her ass on the dirt.

"Was it really that funny?" I tilted my head.

She sobbed. Half laughter, half tears. "No."

While Angel worked her wiggles out, I dropped back to all fours and padded over to the water's edge, stuck my head down, and tried to figure out how to drink. It was more difficult than it really needed to be. When I tried to suck the water into my mouth, it went up my nose instead. This caused me to sneeze. A lot. After the burning stopped, I awkwardly mlem-mlemed with my tongue, hurling water all over my own face in the process.

When I turned back, Angel’s hiccupping laughter had faded. She sat with her knees drawn to her chest, eyes reddened from a mixture of grief and released tension. She shook her head as I sat down in front of her.

“We can’t stay here. This is no-man’s land,” she signed. “We’re not even ten miles out of Pigs territory. If we’re going to survive this, we need to get back to Hope.”

“What-where is Hope?”

“Fort Hope. It’s a place.” She paused to sniff and rub her nose with her arm. “The Iron Centurions’ forward base on the border.”

Iron Centurions? Border? I squinted at her. “Look, just so we’re clear, I woke up here less than six hours ago with no idea where I am, who I am, or what the hell is going on. The only thing I had to go off was a lecture from Chorus and a letter from the crazy son of a bitch who murdered me. Or had me murdered. I'm not sure."

Angel frowned. "A letter?"

"Yeah. Like a message in my Inbox," I said. "From some guy named Dmitri. Don't suppose it rings a bell?"

"Afraid not." Angel shook her head. “Weird that you’d wake up with a message.”

"Damn. Well, first he killed me, and now he's after my baby sister and anyone else I cared about. So, don't suppose you're from Seattle and remember having a brother? Big? Brawny? Stunning good looks?"

"I'm from Texas, down near the southern border. And I'm an only child. Sorry." She shook her head.

"Shit." I dropped my head. Even my tentacles sagged. "Well... as much as I hate to admit it, I've got no damn idea what to do from here. Guess I'm going to have to reach the Fourth Realm and choke this piece of shit until he gives me my memories back."

"Wait: the Fourth Realm?" Angel's eyes bugged.

"Yeah." I pulled up the letter and scanned it, refreshing myself on the crazy. "'If you're reading this, you've arrived in Arcadia, the Fourth Realm of Survival of the Fittest.' That's what he said."

Angel pressed her lips together in a thin line. "Then Dmitri has to be one of the champions of the game. The Fourth Realm... lord help us. There might only be five players who’ve reached the Fourth Realm, and they're all Sponsoreds."

I dropped down to the soft ground, and tucked my paws under my chest. "Meaning...?"

“There are two types of Gladiators: sponsored gladiators and everyone else. Sponsoreds are people who, for one reason or another, have people on the outside who paid for them to be here and who support them like an Esports crew. They’re usually still alive, and jack into Survival of the Fittest using full immersion rigs. Everyone else is brought here as meat for the Sponsoreds to torture on camera to drive up ratings and earn prizes." Angel sat back as well, crossing her legs. "Sponsoreds are bad news. They run everything here, and some of them are backed by the Society. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet this Dimitri guy is a Delta Society member who comes here to get his rocks off. A lot of people probably pay him to watch him do it, too."

"The Delta Society," I repeated. Dmitri had mentioned a Society, capital S. "The rabbit hole deepens. Tell me what you know about ‘em."

Angel shrugged uncomfortably. "All I have is a name. The guys who sent me to this hell... they stood outside my VR pod and mentioned them half a dozen times. They didn't think I'd hear them. They were right, but I can lip read. So fuck them."

"Who uploaded you?"

Angel's chalk-white skin flushed a deep, angry red as she scowled. "The Crimson Knights. Mexican cartel."

The name rang a faint bell somewhere deep in my memory. Nothing specific - only that I must have known about them, enough to know they were some bad dudes. "Take it you're not a Sponsored. What else do you remember? It might be important."

“Hell no, I'm not Sponsored." Angel's hands slashed on each sign, expression stormy. "As for memories… mine are sporadic. Everyone here has their memories amputated to some extent. But I remember… some stuff. More than most people, maybe because the bastards who uploaded me didn’t know what to do with my brain.”

My eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“The admins use the language centers of the brain to hunt down and remove memories the Society doesn’t want you to have. I’ve been deaf since I was born. I can sign ASL, LSM and Signed Spanish, plus I voice and lip-read English and Spanish. They removed all my voicing memories and the Signed Spanish ones, but they left my ASL and LSM-associated memories intact. I don’t think they knew what they were looking for.”

My heart sunk. LSM stood for Lengua de Señas Mexicana, Mexican Sign Language. Most hearing people thought of sign languages as being like the dominant spoken language of any given region, but with hand signs. That was mostly not true. Sign Languages were their own thing, with unique grammar, vocabularies, and word order. As far as I could tell, I’d grown up tri-lingual, but I didn’t speak LSM – which meant my Sam hadn’t, either. It was the mother of all serendipitous coincidences that I, the brother of a deaf woman, had run into a second deaf girl in this place. Or was it?

“Well, now you know how I ended up here," I said. "How about you? This cartel grab you off the street or something?”

She glanced at the sky, as if looking at one the unseen cameras that followed us everywhere. "I don’t want to talk about it right now. Not here. Not after what just happened.”

“No worries.” I yawned and smacked my jaws a couple of times. “I get it.”

“Thanks. Anyway, we’ve been talking too long as it is. We… well, I need to get to Fort Hope and tell the Captain what happened to the training camp.” Angel paused to push herself up to her feet. “If you don't want to come, I'll start walking. But if you do come, Captain Targent might know more about the Sponsored you're looking for."

"Oh yeah?" That perked my interest. With the Sam lead exhausted, my only chance at solving this mess - and maybe avenging my untimely death - was dear, sweet Dimitri.

"Sam told me that Targent has been here for a while," Angel signed. "Longer than most gladiators. She never said much about him, but he knew for sure that he has Patrons, which means he has contacts on the outside. If he's nice and we get into his good books, he might be willing to ask some careful questions. That’s a big ‘if’, but I'll do my best to help you learn what we can about this Dimitri guy. It's the least I can do."

Rumbling to myself, I looked back toward the river. “How far is Fort Hope from here?”

“Hang on.” Angel opened up her HUD. I saw the ghost of the holographic screens spread out in front of her face, but none of the details of what she was reading. “A long way by foot. About eighty kilometers.”

Kilometers? My brain farted on the conversion. “Uhh… what’s that in miles?”

“I don’t know. Fifty miles? Too long to run.”

I scoffed and stuck my chest out. For the time being, I chose to ignore my half-full Stamina bar. “Excuse me, but M.T Noodles the Fourth is more than able to run fifty miles. The question is, will YOU be able to survive me? I am the fois gras of Legions, far too rich for the coarse palates of the hoi polloi.”

Angel massaged her brows for a moment. “You. You are my punishment from God.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I replied. “Now, get on, loser. We’ve got a marathon to run.”