Victor followed Yrella through the spear forms for the third time, stepping, thrusting, and shouting, “Eyah!” Then he brought the spear shaft around, pushing it with the rear gripping hand, then stepping back, snapping the spear back straight, and moving the spearhead in a small loop. He really didn’t know what the fuck all these moves were for, but he could imagine an enemy before him and did his best to mimic Yrella.

***Congratulations! You’ve learned Spear Mastery - Basic.***

“That did it!” Victor braced himself for the rush of Energy as the tiny golden motes coalesced in the air and then surged into him. He whooped loudly and shouted, “Fuck yes! That never gets old.”

***Congratulations! You’ve achieved level 2 base human. You have 5 attribute points to allocate.***

“Oh, nice! I hit level two, Yrella!” The spear was the third weapon that he’d gained skill with that day; he’d started with bludgeons with Vullu, then Yrella had taken over and taught him some knife fighting skills before the spear. “I have five attribute points to spend, too!”

“That’s good. It seems like your race has similar base properties to mine. The fact that you’re leveling off a few simple basic skills shows you have good affinity, too. Celebrate; your people are stronger than Yeksa!”

“The fuck is a Yeksa?”

“You should hope to find out. With any luck, they’ll throw some Yeksa against you in the pit for your first few matches; I think you could win.”

“So they’re scrubs?”

“They’re,” she looked at him closely, squinted her eyes, then continued, “lesser creatures. They have poor affinity and struggle to gain a few levels in a lifetime.”

“Well, what should I do with my points?”

“Five points spread over several attributes will mean very little in tomorrow’s pit fight. I’d put them all into one - maybe strength or vitality.”

“Hey, you guys have been very helpful to me, and I appreciate it, but I can trust you, right? I mean, like, why have you been so nice? I don't think you’d tell me some bullshit, but I gotta ask.” Victor braced himself for an angry reaction, but Yrella just smirked.

“We aren’t altruistic.” She nodded to Vullu, who was slamming his fists into a wooden post. “Vullu and I get some time knocked off our sentences for each win we get, and if we help out new fighters, we get a little bit of time knocked off if they win.”

“Ahh, damn. Well, thanks for letting me know.” Victor had a sudden thought, “Hey, so you guys have set amounts of time you belong to Boss,” he gestured to the big red man who was berating one of his employees in the far corner of the exercise hall, “but what about me? I don’t have a fucking sentence I’m serving. Am I trapped here forever?”

“That’s a good question, Victor. I’d focus on solving that problem after dealing with the more immediate issue - you have a pit fight tomorrow, and you’re level two without a Core.” She twirled her spear between her two hands, making it dance between them as she spoke. Victor frowned but didn’t argue. He called up his status sheet and decided to dump all five points into strength. Maybe it would let him break a hold or squeeze someone’s neck just that extra bit that would make the difference.

A wave of Energy flooded through his body after distributing the points on his status screen, and he took in a deep breath, stretching with his arms held out wide, arching his back as the tingles flooded through him. When it passed, he flexed his biceps, and they definitely popped a lot more than they used to. “Fuck yes!” He had very little body fat, even before he was summoned, but now, with his strength jacked and after a workout, his muscles felt and looked pumped like never before. Yrella snorted.

“You’re still just a baby, don’t go getting full of yourself. Some of the monsters in here,” she gestured around the warehouse, “would kill you just for the way you look.”

“Oh, like they’re fucking racists or something?”

“Racist? Yes, I suppose plenty of Shadeni hate other people just because they’re different, and I have bad news for you, Victor: you’re more different than anyone I’ve met.”

“Um, I didn’t want to be rude, but is that what your race is called? Shadeni?”

“Yes, that’s right.” She knelt to pick up the spear that Victor had dropped.

“Well, I mean, it’s not really true that I’m the most different - I mean, we have different colored skin, but I don’t have furry legs and hooves like old Vullu, there.” He nodded at the goat-man, who had stopped punching the wooden post and was unwinding the cloth strips around his knuckles.

“Don’t be so literal, kid. I meant there’s no one else like you in this world, as far as I know. C’mon, let’s go turn these spears in. Our time’s almost up.” She handed him his spear, and he followed her toward the equipment room.

“Do you think there’s any way I could get home? I mean, assuming I survive the pit and somehow get free of this place. You think I could find a way?”

“Assuming all that? Sure, why not? Some powerful mages summoned you, but I bet there are powerful mages that can undo it or just help you teleport home. A lot is possible for the higher tier Energy users.” That gave Victor plenty to think about, so he didn’t reply, just silently followed her as they turned in their gear. Further conversation was cut short when they were shouted at by one of Yund’s lackeys to get their asses back to their cage.

Victor was given a hard piece of buttered bread that afternoon, just like on his first day, after they were put back in their cage. As far as he could tell, he was the only one that got this treatment, and Vullu had explained that his low Energy level and lack of a Core meant he had to eat more food than the others to survive. He didn’t argue - he was starving like a motherfucker, pretty much all the time. Their water bucket was filled each day, and they all shared the same tin cup, but Victor also drank more than the others.

The afternoons were the most boring for Victor. Everyone else spent time doing something they called “cultivating.” They sat around meditating and didn’t speak for hours. Yrella tried to explain that once he had a Core, he’d learn how to cultivate Energy to build it up. That might be, but for now, he just had to bide his time, waiting for them to get tired of it so they could talk for a while before lights out. That afternoon proved worse than usual - Yrella and Vullu spent extra time cultivating, apparently trying to squeeze in as much as possible on the eve of Pit Night.

Victor wrestled with his fears and despair. He was good at bluster and bravado and shoving his feelings where he didn’t have to think about them, especially when he had training to do, but here, in the quiet cell, with everyone preparing for battle, he couldn’t escape his mental demons. What was going to happen? Was he going to die tomorrow? Was he going to have to kill someone? Could he? Tucson seemed like a million years in the past when he tried to think of his friends or Marcy or his Abuela.

For the first time in a long while, he thought of his parents. He’d been eight when they died in a car wreck. He’d been in the backseat, but he didn’t remember the crash at all. He remembered them arguing, though. His mom had been yelling, her red-brown hair tied up in a bun, her eyes red with tears. His father’s hands gripped the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, refusing to answer her. That was the last image he could muster up from the depths of his mind. He didn’t remember what they were saying or how the crash had happened; he just remembered his grandma picking him up from the hospital and taking him home. Then there’d been a funeral, and he remembered his aunties talking about how rotten his other grandparents were for not coming.

When Yrella finally stirred and interrupted his reverie, Victor was grateful. He was ready to jump at any excuse to banish the memories, so when she shook her dice, he scooted over in front of her, and they played the simple dice game for a couple of hours before Vullu spoke up and said they should be quiet and go to sleep. Victor groaned, but he was dog tired, so he slid over to his corner and laid down on his side, using his arm for a pillow, and closed his eyes. Sleep came quickly, as it inexplicably usually did in this place, and when he felt Yrella’s boot shaking his shoulder, he hopped up, feeling refreshed, if a bit stiff.

They were given their normal breakfast rotation, but then the routine changed. Yund and his goons gathered up almost all the cage occupants and made them stand shoulder to shoulder in two rows of twenty. Then, Yund moved to the front of the hall, near the big barn doors, and addressed them in a booming voice, “Alright, you worthless slugs! Time to earn your food. Today we’re going to the dockyard, fighting in the Rusty Nail, which means we need to travel. You know what it means when we travel, right?” He paused here, but whatever he’d been hoping Victor’s fellow prisoners would say didn’t come, so he kept speaking, “That means you better damn well be on your best behavior. Urt, Ponda, and I will be quick on the batons, and I swear to the Ancestors that I’ll make you piss blood before I let off the pressure. You get me?”

No one spoke, some of the prisoners shuffled their feet and grumbled, but it seemed that everyone had learned, or inferred, in Victor’s case, that Boss Yund didn’t want anyone to answer his questions. Victor wondered if they were going to be allowed to just walk freely toward whatever the Rusty Nail was. Still, his hopes of sprinting away down an alley were dashed when Yund’s lackeys, Urt and Ponda, came along the line, somehow producing leather belts out of thin air and handing them to each prisoner. When Ponda, the big furry, otter-looking fucker passed Victor a belt, he glanced at Yrella and saw she was already fastening hers around her waist. Victor did the same, noting that the clasp had an iron loop on it.

Urt came along then, leading a long, clinking chain. He went down the row, hooking the chain to each prisoner’s belt through the iron loop. When he got to Victor, he reached out and yanked on the belt, making sure it was tight before he slipped the chain through the loop. After this went on for a few minutes, Yund cranked open the big barn doors and led the prisoners, in two lines, out into the dirty street, walking toward the fat, orange, setting sun. Victor glanced around, happy for his first real look at the city, and he caught his breath when he saw the two moons halfway up the sky opposite the sun. One was huge with rings around it, and the other was small and looked almost like Earth’s moon. “Chingada!”

“What?” Vullu asked from behind him.

“The moons. Fucking hell, we really aren’t on Earth, are we?”

“You didn’t believe it until now?” Yrella looked back over her shoulder at him.

“I guess I did, but seeing these fucking moons makes it a little more real.”

“Welcome to Fanwath, runt!” a huge red-skinned man said over Vullu’s shoulder. He was a good foot taller than Yrella, and he had big red spikes growing out of his shoulders; otherwise, he looked like one of her people. Victor just swallowed and turned back to the front, following behind Yrella and trying not to get noticed by any of the other prisoners. He glanced from side to side, noting the buildings and how they were so very different from those in Tucson. Every building was at least two stories high, and they were made from wood and stone blocks. He didn’t see any stucco, nor did he see any concrete. The streets were made of bricks or, he supposed, cobbles. Trees were nowhere to be seen at first, but then they passed out of the shitty neighborhood where Yund’s building was, and he started seeing big tall trees with fucking weird-ass blue leaves. They passed some parks with blue-green grass and some tall stone buildings with actual street lamps outside them, just starting to click on and give off a warm amber glow in the fading daylight; then, they were out of the rich section of town and walking downhill to a more industrial area.

When they crossed through a rather busy square that reminded Victor of a swap meet, something startling happened. A few spots ahead of Victor, one of the other prisoners grunted loudly and hunched over, his broad, musclebound red shoulders flexing with strain, and then he was suddenly sprinting away from the line. Victor saw his ripped belt fall to the cobbles, but as soon as he realized what had even happened, Ponda lept through the air, trails of wispy orange smoke in his wake, and smashed down atop the fleeing prisoner. Victor heard the snap of bones and winced. Ponda lifted the large prisoner with one hand, gripping him by the back of the neck, and dragged him back to the line. The man thrashed and cried out, clearly in pain, but Ponda strode doggedly along as if he were hauling a misbehaving toddler. Ponda produced a pair of iron manacles, hooked one to the man’s wrist and another to the cable connecting all the other prisoners, and said, “Thanks for letting us know you need a collar. Don’t try that again.”

“Poor asshole,” Victor said.

“Yeah, he’ll be stuck now; they’ll collar him or put a mark on him like me,” Yrella replied.

When they went around a corner and turned down another hill, Victor caught his first glimpse of the shipyard and a vast expanse of water. Victor had never been out of Arizona before, and when he saw the setting sun reflecting over the glittering water as far as he could see, he caught his breath and said, “Holy shit, is that the ocean?”

“No, it’s actually a freshwater lake - Lake Beliss,” Yrella said quietly, and Victor could see that she was also taking in the view. “My uncle had a ship and crew and fished out there when I was young.” She sighed heavily. “Maybe I’ll get back out there someday. It’s beautiful out on the water this time of day.”

“Especially if you have some wine and buttered freshwater qrell, right, beautiful?” Yund boomed from just behind Victor. How the fuck had he snuck up on them? Yrella ignored him, but Yund just laughed and walked up the line, jostling or yelling at various prisoners and laughing at their discomfort. They continued down the slope to the docks and then turned to the left, following a crowded wharf street to an even more crowded yard outside a large wooden structure. On the building, above the wide-open doors, a huge rusty metal spike had been mounted, and an equally rusted metal sign proclaimed, “The Rusty Nail.”