THE SLAVE

JET STOOD OVER a sunlight-speckled pool of crystal-blue water, staring down at a vibrating reflection of herself in a long, flowing, yet somehow form-revealing dress.

Stone urns, taller than herself, stood at the four corners of the room, filled with palm trees that rose to breathtaking heights––or so they seemed to Jet, being used to the twisted scrub trees and mutated pines from outside the Green Zone. The tree trunks and branches rose up through the open slats of the slanted, wooden roof, made all the taller from being planted indoors.

Jet could feel wind on her face... it felt like real wind.

She heard birds, saw their wings expand forward and jerk back as they flitted from tree to tree in looping trails. All that motion and life lived in the background, though.

She heard people here.

They splashed in the water on the other end of the pool, chattering amongst themselves in skag languages she remembered from the pits. They sounded happy, although their voices remained subdued, almost soft-spoken. Jet wondered if, like her, they remained forever conscious of their place inside the hierarchy of this home.

Still, they didn’t seem at all afraid.

She smelled the faint whiff of smoke as some of them indulged in hand-rolled cigarettes they must have bought at the market not far from the main house. They gossiped about people whose names sounded vaguely familiar to her, although she couldn’t tie anything concrete to those names in her head... politics, sporting events, theater, other slaves who shared similar duties with her inside this house. She’d been educated in famous Nirreth names, at one point or another... she could recite bits and pieces of that knowledge even now, but her mind remained curiously blank when no one needed anything of her.

She encouraged that blankness whenever other Nirreth were present.

Trazen taught her ways to do that... ways to appear uninteresting to others of his kind.

But now, being more or less alone, she fought to think. She felt a vague urgency to try harder on this day. More of an urgency than she’d felt for what seemed like months... even years of time spent in this bland beauty with its slow-moving days and nights. Jet fought the effects of Trazen’s venom even now, trying to grasp pieces of who she was again, to remember who inhabited the body she wore.

The effort fatigued her, but she didn’t stop.

Eventually she felt tired, however, and significantly less content.

The latter told her that her efforts to get past the venom were probably working. Even so, she had only marginal success. Despite the hours that had passed since she’d last seen him, she just had too much of Trazen in her system still. While that fact alone wasn’t at all unpleasant, she couldn’t really connect to him in any real way either, which just left her blank.

Jet felt clear enough to have the occasional emotional surge.

Fear, anger, desperation, frustration... grief.

Her mind flickered over events, memory. Laksri. Anaze. Anaze’s father, Eamon Richter. She remembered seeing Laksri fall...

She would be running in the Rings that night.

The thought startled her.

She hadn’t run in the Rings in weeks... months, maybe. Even so, when the thought crossed her mind, floating between those blank spaces, it felt true.

It felt true enough that it returned to the forward part of Jet’s mind again a few minutes later, trying to become meaningful to her, perhaps out of an animalistic desire for self-presevation.

She had to survive. She didn’t know why anymore, not precisely, but the desire burned there, fierce inside her chest.

Of course, Trazen might not let her.

He might not let her survive.

He might keep her too stoned to do anything but provide an amusing spectacle for a few minutes... maybe an hour, if she was lucky, before some giant space lizard gutted her for the enjoyment of the masses. She couldn’t guess Trazen’s probable motives or actions any more now than she could before he owned her, though. Even as close as Jet had been to his mind in the last few months––in theory, at least––she didn’t feel any closer to understanding the Ringmaster himself. Everything about him was a contradiction. Everything she felt on him belied everything she’d ever been told about him... everything she knew.

Even so, she couldn’t let herself believe for even an instant that he would hesitate to dispose of her once he grew tired of her. Whatever the venom might have done to her, she couldn’t let go of that knowledge... not even for a minute.

Perhaps he’d already grown tired of her.

Perhaps that’s what this Rings match was truly about.

Even now, Trazen’s people––minus Trazen himself, of course, due to the obvious conflict of interest as her official owner––would be sitting at virtual displays, designing and refining elements of the maze they would force her to run that evening. Jet knew from Trazen’s mind that they would be laughing over pieces of it––laughing and arguing about how to make it harder, how to confuse her and spin her around, blindfolded, while things tried to kill her.

Or, perhaps, just shocked her into unconsciousness.

Whatever they did, Jet suspected the bottom line would be to humiliate her.

Trazen would instruct them to make the mammal with the sword finally and irrevocably irrelevant. They would insure that Jet no longer posed a political or social threat to any Nirreth who occupied a position of power. Jet’s status as the face of a new humanity––a humanity that might be viewed as somehow deserving of equal treatment with the Nirreth, or at least of empathy in their plight as a conquered race––would be erased.

This would be the first match Jet ran since they’d murdered Laksri.

Laksri.

His face swam in front of hers, that small smile he often wore on his dark mouth.

Jet felt his features fading already though, growing indistinct, less immediate. She fought that loss, but it confused her, too. She had to struggle against the venom to even understand her own feelings, much less what to do with them. The venom had been a blessing in some ways for that too, especially in those first few weeks, when all she could feel was anger, hatred, loss, grief, rage, desperation. There’d also been silences––indifference, coldness, wanting to die––a mental and emotional disconnect that somehow upset her more.

The venom smoothed out the edges of all that.

It made it hard to feel enough about any of it to want to do anything drastic.

Like kill herself. Or kill a bunch of them.

Or try to kill Trazen, which likely would have only gotten her killed.

Even now, she struggled to feel... about the match, about Laksri, who hurt so much to think about in those first few weeks that she swore she couldn’t breathe most of the time.

She’d been a captive through most of that, on the Nirreth home world of Astet. It had been Trazen who pulled her out, rescuing her in a sense, although she didn’t know how to feel about that, either.

She didn’t want to think about those weeks in that cell on Astet at all, really.

Some of the scars remained. She’d counted them on her skin one night, until Trazen showed up and stung her enough times that the exercise felt pointless.

Trazen, her new owner, didn’t want her thinking about Laksri, either.

He would push her mind off the topic each and every chance he got, whenever they were directly connected. Jet didn’t know why he cared. He’d won, hadn’t he? Laksri was in the ground. Some part of her even wondered why Trazen didn’t relish more in the pain he’d caused her by killing him.

If Trazen felt her questions though, or her doubts, he didn’t deign to respond.

As a result of these two things, Jet’s own grief and Trazen’s resistance, she had developed the habit of avoiding any thought or mention of Laksri with her mind, no matter how much that avoidance hurt. After a few weeks in the Ringmaster’s home, it felt almost as if the topic burnt her, whenever she circled close enough to touch it.

Was that love?

Jet supposed it might be.

She really didn’t have anything to compare the feeling to.

Perhaps it would be different if she had something to compare it to.

Either way, Laksri was dead. Nothing Jet thought or felt about him now would change that. Nothing about Laksri’s death would help her avoid the same fate for herself. His death contained no lessons to be learned, no insights to be gleaned for her own survival, much less the survival of anyone else Jet loved.

She still didn’t know where Richter held her family.

Trazen used that image of her brother, Biggs, to screw with her head on her last Rings run... but she had no idea where he’d gotten it. For all she knew, he hadn’t gotten it from Richter at all, but from some record the Nirreth kept of human skags that no one bothered to tell her about. Or they could have Biggs here, in some locked dungeon inside the Green Zone.

They also could have shot him in the head, before she even did the run.

The thought made her feel sick.

That sickness confused her, then brought a paradoxical lift and sharpness to her mind when she realized what it meant.

It struck her with a dim surprise that she felt the clearest she had in weeks... months, perhaps. The clearest she could remember since the Retribution match on Astet, and those horrible weeks in the interrogation cells. Her thoughts grew clearer still, every passing moment she stood there, sickeningly clear... but she still preferred that clarity, even with the pain it brought. Being able to think her own thoughts again affected everything she could see around her, the way all of it appeared, even down to watching the water lap against the edges of the white marble close to her feet, sending shimmers of light and shadow to decorate the walls.

Maybe it was the impending match.

Maybe Trazen had let her mind clear for that.

Maybe he wanted her to win, now that he owned her. Or maybe he wanted her to feel more pain when she lost. With Trazen, there was no way to know really.

Oddly, neither of those things felt wholly true, however.

She couldn’t have explained why, but she could feel that Trazen wanted her clear on this day for his own reasons... unrelated to the Rings.

Or incidental to the Rings, perhaps. Peripherally related.

Jet’s puzzlement deepened as her mind fought to think through the reasons why this might be. Winding her way through threads that still tied her to Trazen’s mind, Jet’s own thoughts fought to untangle them, like antibodies fighting off a disease even as she tried to comprehend that disease and what it wanted.

As she did, emotions started to ratchet up her heart rate and breathing.

Jet forced herself to focus on the immediate first. Physicality. The present moment. She had to start there. What was physical was immediate. Moreover, it should help with the rest.

Deliberately, Jet raised her eyes, looking around where she stood.

She knew this place.

She remembered walking these halls with Trazen. She remembered his three, long, jointed fingers pointing out rooms, speaking to her through her mind and skin, his thoughts wrapping hers like a warm blanket.

This is an atrium, Jet... you may come to this room whenever you wish. You may come to any room in my house whenever you wish, with the exception of my private work spaces, which I will show you. If you wish to go into one of those, you must ask me, Jet... do you understand?

She understood.

Looking at the room that Trazen called the atrium, she remembered something else.

The other humans called this place the baths.

It was some joke that hearkened to history, to a period in the distant past of Earth. One of the other slaves had been a history teacher back in his settlement. He was old enough to remember the world before the Nirreth. The other slaves called him “The Professor.”

Blinking, Jet stared down the length of the room, trying to focus her eyes now that they felt like hers again. She tried to assess this place, to make sense of it without Trazen’s mind filtering her own impressions.

The room appeared almost as large as the bare bones of the Rings arena.

White, marble columns lined the enormous wading and swimming pools on either side of the walls’ rectangular length. The high-ceilinged structure and its touches of artistry reminded Jet of the compound of the Nirreth Royals, which had been filled with these strange combinations of ancient human art and civilization sprinkled through with architectural touches and technological achievements from the Nirreth.

Jet recognized pieces of this room’s style from the picture books in Chiyeko’s lighthouse near Vancouver, B.C. Perhaps those were the time periods the Professor had been joking about when he named the space “the baths.”

Rubbing her face with the heel of her hand, she stared down at the water, trying to decide if any of that was important. Jet knew little of the past civilizations of her own people.

What little she did know wouldn’t help her here.

She focused on a group of maybe eight humans on the deeper end of the pool, their Nirreth-style shirts pulled up to their waists, their Nirreth-style leggings discarded as they hung their bare legs in the cool water. A few swam, back-stroking or side-stroking or simply treading water as they talked and laughed with those sitting on the pool’s edge.

They tried to befriend Jet, when Trazen first brought her here.

Well, some of them had.

The Professor had. So had a woman Jet could see now, with long brown hair, who swam with the others, laughing with a wide, full mouth.

Even with the friendly ones, Jet avoided their smiles and intrusive-feeling questions. She couldn’t have said why exactly... other than a general disinclination to get close to anyone after what had happened over the previous months. The Professor had been kind to her, though.

So had that woman.

Some approached Jet more like a rival, however.

Those ones appeared to be more focused on Trazen, and on the Nirreth and the Nirreth world in general. They seemed to sense something different in her position with Trazen too, which made their smiles appear more predatory than not. Some came at her with a jealousy that Jet could feel tangibly, on her very skin.

The sentiment might have struck her as sickly humorous if she hadn’t so clearly felt the smugness that lay behind it, a sense that the other slaves had seen this before with Trazen, and knew exactly how it would end.

Shoving the other humans from her mind, even the kinder-eyed ones, Jet let her gaze drift upwards, her ears caught by the trilling call of a bird. Brilliant blue and scarlet plumage met her eyes as wings spread, pulling the perfect creature off its perch among vines strangling white pillars that rimmed the wide pool.

Jet’s eyes followed the bird to a ficus tree standing next to one of those oddly alive-seeming pieces of furniture designed by the Nirreth. The latter might have been a chair, or perhaps a table, or even some kind of computer terminal.

The room had an undeniable grace.

The hole in the middle of the ceiling opened up to a blue arc of artifical sky... the same sky created by the dome around Green Zone Hezeret.

In reality, the sky was a darker red-brown color, Jet knew. The air outside the dome hung heavy with pollution and dust from the mountains near what used to be Santa Fe, New Mexico... in what had been the United States of America.

Jet looked up in time to see the dark shadow of a hawk circling in the blue sky above the building, one of the breeds that Laksri told her had been indigenous to this area before the humans wiped out most of their hunting grounds. According to Laksri, that happened years before the Nirreth arrived. He said Nirreth had cloned new birds from bone marrow and DNA specimens pulled from corpses mounted in human museums.

Jet knew she was distracting herself though, even now.

She felt stares on her, whispers. But despite the smug smiles and whispered conversations of the humans with whom she shared Trazen’s home, none of it made sense to her.

Trazen stung her, it was true.

She expected that, when he first pulled her out of that prisoner’s holding block on Astet.

He stung her a lot. He stung her seemingly whenever Jet saw him for more than a few minutes. She’d expected that from him as well.

Yet Trazen hadn’t made Jet his lover.

Despite what the other human slaves obviously believed, he’d never taken her in that way, not once since Jet had been here. He hadn’t done it despite ample opportunity to do so, even as early as the flight back to Earth from Astet. He hadn’t done it despite the knowing looks and even the jealousy of the other humans, who seemed to assume that Jet and Trazen did little else whenever they weren’t visible to the public eye.

He hadn’t done it despite Jet’s own willingness, despite her desperately wanting it at times. She’d asked him, more than once––more than a few times, more than a few dozen times––but he’d declined her requests.

That same venom created an empathy with the male Nirreth that could be unbearable to her at times, especially knowing what he’d done to Laksri, and possibly to Anaze, who she couldn’t help thinking of as her friend, even as her family... even now. Trazen might have killed Anaze, just like he let Richter kill Laksri.

Even so, Jet wanted him. She’d begged him... more than once.

The memory made her grimace.

Even so, the fact that Trazen hadn’t done anything to her sexually struck her as exceedingly odd. Her mind slid around the reality of that lack in confusion, even as she felt the pull of his venom, of that part of her that wanted Trazen still. She felt hurt at his refusal, even now... maybe more so now that she could feel her own emotions clearly.

He hadn’t wanted her. She didn’t know why he hadn’t.

She’d felt desire on him, more than once. She felt that desire as far back as the first time he’d stung her, in the recovery room of the Royal Palace.

Turning over her memories of the last few months, Jet also realized that Trazen hadn’t spent so much as five minutes in her presence where he didn’t have some specific purpose in mind. That purpose had never been intimate. In Jet’s memories, Trazen’s behavior with her never felt anything more or less than completely businesslike.

Usually, that purpose involved him stinging her repeatedly––sometimes as many as five or six times in a row. He often followed those stings with lectures of varying length via the venom, giving Jet news of current events as they unfolded outside the walls of his house.

He spoke to Jet in a matter-of-fact way, politely declining any requests she made for something more intimate from him. He never beat her. He never hurt her in any way at all, although she’d expected that, too. Whether his words pertained to the Royals or the Rings or those events occurring behind the scenes, he’d been nothing but patient and polite.

He also told her a lot, she found herself thinking now... including in areas where Laksri and Richter never bothered to educate her before.

Jet didn’t understand why Trazen told her all of these things.

She definitely didn’t understand why he told her so much after stinging her, when Jet would be almost incapable of forgetting what he’d said. Given the effects of the venom on human memory, he clearly wanted her to remember all of it, but she couldn’t for the life of her understand why. Wanting to please him because of the venom, and in spite of her hurt at his refusals, Jet she did her best to understand everything he told her.

She tried to remember it all, too, since he obviously wanted her to.

Her mind grew full with names and faces and facts as a result.

He shared the different players of the Nirreth political sphere with her, touching her arms or shoulders or hands to transmit the information from his own memory. He told her who allied with who and which were gaining power, either formally or informally due to their ties to the new First Son, a Nirreth named Isreti who Trazen seemed to think was some kind of ideological fanatic, with a near-religious following.

Trazen told her a lot about that group.

He told her what they believed.

Most of it seemed to hearken back to a quasi-mythological view of the Nirreth “good old days,” when they only enslaved inferior races and ate them. According to Trazen, the society that Isreti and his followers wanted to build required maintaining a strict hierarchy among the Nirreth themselves, with rigidly enforced roles between the castes and clans.

Trazen seemed to think most of it was ridiculous, a made up story that had little basis in historical fact. When Jet tried to press him about this, however, he backed off, evaded, pushing her emotions away, his mind growing curiously blank in the gaps that followed.

After Trazen subjected Jet to these discourses––for what could be anything from fifteen minutes to several hours––he would brief her on the news that pertained more directly to Jet’s own situation. He would tell her what he thought she should expect, in terms of the new Royals’ views of her returning to the Rings. He told her in detail how they viewed Trazen himself and how that might impact her, especially if he were to fall out of favor.

He told her dispassionately that his falling out of favor would always be a risk, but it didn’t appear to be a very large one at the moment, as he’d ingratiated himself with the new Royals by being the one to assist in Richter’s killing of Laksri.

Trazen told Jet details of discussions that had occurred behind closed doors, about the meaning of Jet’s prior relations with Laksri, the likelihood that she would be subjected to more interrogations by the Royal police or even the military board, the status of inquiries into Richter’s whereabouts and that of the other human rebels. Trazen also told her––sometimes in minute detail and by showing her maps––news of the human encampments and skag pits the Nirreth military had destroyed in their ongoing efforts to root out the rebels.

According to Trazen, the search was not going well, at least from the perspective of the Nirreth military. Many of Isreti’s fanatics felt that more drastic steps were required.

Trazen told her that things might grow more openly violent soon.

Whatever Trazen himself believed regarding these different developments, he didn’t really say. He also didn’t tell Jet anything about his own relationship to Richter, or even if such a relationship existed.

The whole thing puzzled Jet... now that she was clear enough to think about it.

It puzzled her a lot.

Trazen spoke to her without looking at her most of those times, without seeming to acknowledge her as an entity different than the furniture or the clothes she wore or the paintings or birds that decorated whatever room the two of them happened to inhabit.

On Astet, Jet spent hours she could not count inside interrogation cells being questioned by Nirreth in the new Royal Police. They had beaten her just about every night during that time. They’d stung her, beaten her––

Jet pushed the memories out of her mind, wincing again.

It was disconcerting to think that Trazen had rescued her from that. At the time, she’d expected more of the same from him.

But that more never came.

He didn’t even share a bed with her, not even to sleep.

She tried to make sense of what had happened on Astet, but so far, her mind came up blank on that, too. Why had Richter killed Laksri? Wasn’t he planning on using Laksri to influence the government of the Nirreth? What changed? What could possibly have changed so much, that Laksri would no longer be of use to him?

Had Richter known Isreti would be taking down the Queen? Had he realized he couldn’t stop that from happening, and taken the opportunity to wipe out Laksri personally?

It was the only explanation that made sense to Jet at all.

“Honorable friend?” a voice queried.

The voice made her jump, a finger of presence in that silence.

Well, not silence––the birds continued to sing, only a little louder than the humans who hung their bare legs in the pool a dozen meters away.

Jet just wasn’t used to people speaking to her. No one but Trazen spoke to her, at least not in the last few weeks. Most of the others who lived in Trazen’s house, Nirreth and human, ignored her now, treating her like an eccentric part of the landscape.

Jet turned her head.

She found a Nirreth female standing there, watching her expectantly. A faint smile touched the female’s deep-black lips, reflected in the shimmers of her stone-like eyes. The expression contained the usual Nirreth subtlety. Jet probably wouldn’t have even seen it before living around them, and being stung by them.

“You are ready for the Rings match, Jet Tetsuo, honorable friend of the Nirreth?” the female said, folding her three-fingered hands together.

Jet hesitated.

Glancing down at the floor, she focused briefly on the clock embedded there in the stone. Once she’d concentrated on the space long enough for it to appear, she looked at the time, and nodded. She had wasted over an hour standing her, staring at the reflecting pools, trying to dig her mind out of the venom.

Her life was being scraped away, bit by bit, like a piece of volcanic rock rubbed, chipped and cracked into flakes and grains of sand. Jet didn’t know what month it was, or what season lived outside the artificial blue skies of the Green Zone dome. She didn’t know where Trazen’s house stood in relation to the map of the Green Zone as a whole.

She didn’t know why Trazen hadn’t hurt her yet.

All of this crossed her mind, but she had no idea how fast or how slow.

“I am ready,” she said simply, when it finished.

The female Nirreth inclined her head.

“Drink this,” the blue-skinned female said, her voice soothing, reassuring.

She handed a glass container to Jet, who took it wordlessly.

The liquid inside was a pale green, the color of new leaves.

It never once occurred to Jet to argue with the Nirreth’s instructions.

Still smiling that faint, Nirreth smile, the female watched Jet uncap the bottle, then take a few long swallows from the narrow lip.

She stood patiently as Jet drank the whole thing down to the bottom.

When Jet had finished, the female Nirreth bowed lower, right before turning to walk out of the room, her long, three-fingered hands once more clutched in front of her elaborately-embroidered tunic. Her broad feet moved silently over the stone tiles, a darker blue than the leggings she wore, which more closely matched a lighter version of that domed sky.

Jet let her mind fall back into that familiar static as she followed the Nirreth to the front end of the house. She still held the empty glass container in her hand.

She already knew one of those sailboat-like transports would be waiting for her outside.

Without thinking about it clearly, she fell back into her silent disguise as a slave.

She did it even knowing that Trazen would approve.

JET’S MIND CONTINUED to clear... enough that she started to have emotional reactions.

Real ones.

Reactions that leapt into her with no warning, jolting her awake and jerking her heart rate through the roof, spiking adrenaline through her blood without giving her mind anything concrete on which to grasp. Those reactions came intensely enough that she felt like an entirely different person in what felt like a few hours... before she could remember enough to even make sense of the transition. She went from zombie, venom-drunk Jet to this more wide awake version quicker than she’d ever transitioned out of the venom, even with Laksri.

Even under high levels of stress.

Some of those changes were borderline comforting... reminding Jet of who she was... who she used to be... how she normally thought about things.

Some were downright terrifying as she realized how long she’d been out of it.

Most of the latter reactions felt like a panicked animal response... a lot closer to full-blown terror and fear-of-death than anything approaching reason.

By the time she arrived at the Rings stadium, Jet’s hands were shaking. She was having trouble breathing. She struggled to focus on what was being said around her.

She clutched a glass container in one hand. It was empty now.

That fact didn’t strike Jet as significant until some time later.

Panic continued to rise and fall in her mind... like a delayed reaction... but Jet was getting better at surfing those currents with every passing minute. Even so, she kept hearing gunshots in some part of her mind, along with screams.

She wondered how long she’d been dream-walking exactly. She wondered if some part of her had been broken all this time, ever since she’d seen Laksri gunned down on Astet. The cracks and fissures in her mind could have been covered over in venom all this time, hidden in Jet’s drugged psyche like imperfections smoothed over by a new coat of paint.

She’d still been staring out the window of the trolley-like transport when the sailboat-shaped vehicle began to slow.

Once more, the panic started, and that sharper clarity.

Jet focused out the window and saw a large crowd waiting for her by the back entrance to the stadium doors. The sliding door had scarcely begun to disappear into the opposite wall of the trolley’s frame, when hands caught hold of her, pulling her out of the vehicle.

Most of those hands belonged to Nirreth.

All were surprisingly gentle.

Trazen’s people. Security.

She knew them... each and every face and body... without being able to pinpoint the exact time or place she’d met a single one of them.

They held her firmly in their hands, guiding her out of the trolley and onto the sidewalk, surrounding her with their bulk, tails lashing in a low threat at the pressing crowds. They led her off the sidewalk without opening their ranks, bringing her up a grassy ramp leading to the Rings player’s gates at the back end of the stadium. The crowd pressed up against her and her entourage at once, some human, but most Nirreth and well-dressed.

Media. Fans. Even a few officials.

Jet saw a number of them holding recording devices and microphones as they shouted her name loudly, eager, human-like grins on their midnight blue faces. Jet saw actual humans, too, some of them also holding cameras and microphones and shouting to get her attention. A less-coherent shout went up from the crowd that pressed against a second set of ropes as soon as they saw her, one that soon congealed into a word Jet recognized. The implications of hearing it now, after everything that had happened to her, completely dazed her.

She stopped dead when she first heard it, staring around to assure herself that the voices were real, that they weren’t like the gunshots or the screams.

They were actually happening.

They weren’t just in her head.

Briefly, Trazen’s people let her stop on the upward-sloping ramp. They clustered around her protectively, giving her friendly looks like she’d known them all of her life.

Nirreth security guards for the Rings stood there too, Jet noticed, holding up thick, muscular arms in front of the security ropes, lashing their tails in warning to the fans and the media representatives standing there. Jet could barely make out the faces beyond their broad backs and thick arms, blinded by the lights and deafened by the chants.

“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!” they screamed.

Jet stared at the thickest part of the crowd, lost in the waves of emotion she could see in faces, and in the shouts, screams and chants that grew louder when they saw her face turned in their direction.

“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!”

Tails thumped into walls, feet pounded into the sidewalk. Human hands clapped as mouths shrieked her name, then took up the chant with everyone else.

The chant beat into her skull, bleeding up from the ground and the soles of her feet to travel up her legs, reaching a hotter area of her belly, something Jet hadn’t felt in weeks, months maybe... maybe longer... in any case, not since she’d seen Laksri die right in front of her.

“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!”

Jet held up a fist, even as her handlers attempted to pull her back from the surging and increasingly emotional crowd. When the screams turned ecstatic, the crowd began to shove forward into the ropes and the security, violently that time.

Trazen’s people caught hold of her again, their fear reaching her through their jointed fingers. They began to guide her firmly past the mob, pulling and pushing at her with careful hands, their faces visibly worried even past the dark inscrutability of their Nirreth bone structure and midnight blue skin.

The crowd went crazy when Jet’s fist went up.

Shouting her name and lunging harder agains the ropes, the Nirreth and the humans alike stomped their feet harder, shrieking her name and yelling out, even as those in the background continued their deeper, more rhythmic chant.

Jet didn’t know most of those faces.

She didn’t know them even as well as the Nirreth guards and security personnel who guided her towards the back end of the stadium... yet somehow, in all that surging emotion and those shining eyes, whipping tails and stomping feet, she felt like she did know them.

She felt like she knew every one of them.

She raised her fist higher, letting out a warrior-like call.

The crowd screamed louder in response.

“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI...”

The thumping and those three syllables followed Jet all the way inside.

Even the heavy clang of the metal doors that closed behind her, leaving her in the relative quiet of the corridor leading to the changing and preparation rooms for the match, didn’t manage to cut off their voices and stomping feet entirely.

She was a slave, it was true. She might remain a slave for the rest of her life. But breaking something wasn’t really having it. It was just breaking it.

The thought comforted Jet somehow, although she couldn’t have said why.

More than that, it reminded her.

It reminded her of who she was. Of who she always would be.

No matter how much of her they tried to take away.