Sweat slid down her trembling thighs, and she held herself up, trying to keep as much pressure off her shoulders as possible, but sacrificing her knees. 

Her hands had been shackled behind her back and chained to the ceiling of her iron-barred cage. On her knees, surrounded by so much iron, it was a precarious and painful position to have woken up in. 

This shouldn’t be real, she thought, replaying the events of earlier.

Logic said it was all real, and somehow, the idea of these strange creatures and her existence among them didn’t send her mind spiralling into a tailspin of insanity. 

She felt sane. Out of place, in pain, sleep-deprived, exhausted, confused, terrified… but sane. 

It was all too real to be a dream.

She’d heard stories about their governments having had contact with extraterrestrial species when she’d been in the regiment, but both she and her brother had always passed it off as just stories guys told each other. 

She’d never paid much mind to any of it in the way of reality. 

The U.S government had even had public hearings years back confirming their contact with aliens, but nobody had paid it any mind because the U.S had always been filled with nutters. 

But now she was here, listening to things that should not exist… But did.

As real as the pain in her shoulders. 

She had taken a lot of drugs since she lost her eyesight. Prescription and non-prescription alike, keen on having dreams as lucid as possible so she could see colours, and things, and places, but this wasn’t that. 

This was real. 

She was surrounded by non-human entities. 

She was chained up in a cage, wearing what she’d worn to bed, however tattered they were now. 

And she couldn’t explain how or why, but it felt like a long time had passed. 

How much time? 

Had it been a long time since the men in the arena had knocked her out, or a long time since she lay down in her bed at home and gone to sleep with Evelyn?

Where’s my family? 

Her thoughts were interrupted by the man, no, creature, to her left, who shuffled around in his cage and spoke to her in a language she could not understand. The syllables were definitely syllables, but they didn’t follow a linguistic pattern of any language she had ever encountered. 

He gently bumped the bars between them with his fist and spoke again, so she turned slightly in his direction. The gentle tones of his voice suggested his words were kind.

The man, or creature, to her right, however, was not kind. 

Listening to this entity had been what made her realise there were people here with multiple arms, because there was only one living creature in the cage to her right, yet there was one hand gripping the bars between them, one gripping the bars above them, one gripping the bars to his right, and the last was busy at work between his legs for quite a while

It didn’t take a genius to understand how, why, or what, was happening there. She was a woman, and by what she could smell and by what common sense showed her, she was one of, if not the only, female in this rocky room. 

Rocky, because the sounds that came back to her were echoey and uneven, insinuating uneven walls and a cavernous height. The floor under her knees felt like rock, not shaped concrete, but raw rock.

So, by logic, it was a cavernous room with a row of cages on this side and a mirrored row of cages on the other side, based on what she’d been hearing for the last half hour or so. 

She had been trying to listen to anything but the guy who sounded like mouldy carbonara pasta to her right… literally anything. 

Please, lord, god, all-powerful being… please do something to stop this… 

As if on cue, the tall double doors to the far left of her position burst open with an echoing bang. The sounds reverberated off the tall, cavernous walls, and three people entered the  Room of Cages.

No, she corrected herself. Four people. The last was exquisitely quiet, but his clothes shuffled as he moved behind the other three.

Of the others, one she recognised, as his massive feet slucked onto the floor with each heavy step. It made her envision a creature with elephant-like feet covered in mud. 

He spoke with a baritone voice that was smooth with occasionally harsh syllables.

The other two creatures, however, were different. Both moved with quiet, human-sized steps, and one of them, the lighter one, smelled distinctly… Earth-like. 

Earth… 

Home. 

They started with the first cage on the other side of the room and moved from cage to cage, one by one, inspecting them like cattle…

We are cattle, she realised. We are the product. 

It all became crystal clear in an instant. The fight out in the stadium… no, the arena, wasn’t for pure entertainment; it was a cattle auction. Everyone here was a product being sold off. 

Extraterrestrial slavery. 

It made sense in a demented, insane sort of way, but it was the only logical conclusion she had come to. 

She listened to them move from cage to cage and speak in languages completely different from what the man on her left had spoken. The guy to the right sat there, frozen and terrified. The smell of his fear was unmistakable.

Many things, it seemed, were universal.

Good. 

Her shoulders screamed in protest, and her thighs trembled uncontrollably, but she held on as best as she could and focused instead on the movements of these two newcomers, particularly the one that smelled… human. 

He was the only familiar thing here, and while his words were distinctly foreign, the sound of them was entirely human… normal…. Home. 

Be human, she thought. Be my kind. Help me.

They moved quickly from cage to cage, talking and walking, wasting little time, and it didn’t take long to get to her. 

They stopped in front of the wanker who remained frozen, his four arms still gripping various iron bars and the three free men continued to converse amongst themselves. The fourth never spoke and moved quieter than anyone else she’d experienced here so far.

But him… the human… she heard… no, felt… him turn his attention to her. The man with elephant feet was talking about the four-armed guy and patting his cage, but the human had eyes for her, and he interrupted the much larger creature with a few gruff words and received an annoyed grunt in response. 

A moment later, the chains holding her arms up behind her body released, and she fell to the floor in a heap. 

If she could speak, she would have yelled, but she couldn’t.

However, the strain on her shoulders was gone, even if the pain remained, so she could manage. 

You’re trained for hardship like this, she thought.

It took maneuvering, but she shoved herself up into a sitting position until she could get her hands, still bound behind her back, positioned in a way that she could slide them under her butt and get herself into a sitting position with her hands in front of her…

It wasn’t much, but it made her feel more dignified.

The human spoke up quickly. “Gough’k.” 

“Rouk’le,” Mr Elephant-foot responded. 

“Gough’k!” The human repeated

Mr Elephant hmm’d and haa’d a bit before finally letting out a hefty sigh.

“Egh’t,” he said, and the two clasped hands. The human’s five-fingered, normal hand smacked into a much larger, thicker, tougher-sounding hide. 

The human turned back to look at his new acquisition. 

“Well, well, well,” he said in English … No, not just the English language, an English accent. 

Is he British, too?

That startled her so much her face dropped before she could stop it, and he let out a small, whispered laugh. 

“Qui audet adipisctur,” he said. Latin. 

Who Dares Wins. 

It was tattooed on the outside of her right wrist. She’d gotten after she’d been forced to retire from the service when she’d lost her eyesight.

“Isn’t that interesting?” He said a moment before she heard the click of her collar and the electrifying sizzle, a split second before it went off.