A series of growls and curses escaped him as the pain lashed up his arm and across his shoulder and back. 

His chest too, come to think of it, but the arm was worse off. The scrawny, filthy human hand snapped his right forearm against the bars like a twig … or a thick trunk. Blood gushed and pooled down to spread across the table as he positioned his hand flat and pressed down on it with his left and held tight. 

He let out a long breath, and steeled himself for what he had to do next. 

“Bifur, wait—” 

Too late. 

With a grunt, he pulled his right shoulder back hard and quick, and he watched the bone slide back into the fleshy mess of his arm with a squelch and a crack. 

A snarl echoed through the bridge, and blood flowed freely, but it was as set as he needed it to be until they reached the Helgafell once more. 

Eli held his hands out to his sides. “There is a Compact Biovex right here.” He slapped an interface on the wall behind him, and a panel slid open. Bifur eyed the small, daunting space. Technically, he could fit in it on the gurney and back inside the box. 

“I won’t fit in that,” he lied, and tore off a piece of his tunic to wrap around the nasty gash where his bone had just been peeking out at him. 

Damn that filthy little Human fuck.  

A blind Human woman from Earth. 

He shouldn’t have been surprised. He had watched her dart around that arena and topple both Zvioks and Skael guards alike, and then he’d willingly stuck his hand into the cage.

Stupid. 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Eli huffed and threw a pack of bandages on the table in front of him. “Would it kill you to wait two seconds? Now I have to get you a new shirt. God dammit…” He paced around on the other side of the central table. Technically, it was a large holo interface, but they used it as a dinner table most of the time.

Bifur picked up the bandages and wrapped up the rest of the lacerations she’d ripped down his arm. There wasn’t much he could do about the four long, deep lacerations she’d raked down across his chest. 

How had she done that? He wondered. 

Humans didn’t have claws; they had nails, which were aesthetic at best. The women liked to paint them. 

“I know I said you could not send her back to Trov,” Bifur said and used his teeth to tie a knot tight around his arm. The pain was unimaginable, but it was better than squeezing himself into the tiny Biovex, which couldn’t even stitch him up. They needed the big one back on the ship for that. “But I have changed my mind.” 

Eli paced back and forth, his hands pressed together and tucked under his nose. He’d changed out of his filthy, sandy clothes and now wore black britches with a long, grey, loose-fitting tunic. 

It was a strange style, and Bifur had found it mildly frustrating that the man always wore clothes that hid his physique. 

He wanted to know what kind of man Eli was under those loose, flowy robes and shirts he always wore. 

“I just cannot believe that she is bloody blind!” He yelled, then stopped and slammed his hands on the table, but missed the blood. “Female, I can work with. Blind is something else entirely.” 

“Female we cannot work with,” Bifur retorted. “I am not training a human woman to go to the slaughter in the arena. It’s not right.” He paused for a moment, weighing his next thought, then let it out, because he was a free man now. He had that right. “It is something Crayton would do.” 

Eli flinched and stood straight. “That is not what I intend,” he said. “But she is capable, and I need a fourth. She survived that cesspit; she can be trained. She’s capable.” He pointed at Bifur’s arm. “As she’s proven. Perhaps her eyes can be fixed.” 

Bifur pulled a stool out from under the table and sat down as a horde of tiny robots floated in out of nowhere and began cleaning up the blood that he was still leaking everywhere. He waved them away from him like flies. “I am not sure your Biovex has the capabilities to fix eyesight, but we can try. We can find you another fighter. Take us back to Trov; I’ll stay there until I find you someone suitable.” 

He would do it, too, because he wasn’t doing this. 

Eli let out a long sigh. “We can’t. Even if we wanted to.” 

“What—”

“There’s no money left,” he said. “No credits. I had planned on using what credits I had, coupled with a few trinkets to trade, but I got her just for the credits. I thought she was a bargain because she was human.” 

Bifur thought about it. “You did,” he said. “If they’d known she was blind, they would have either killed her off or sold her for a much higher price for surviving for as long as she did... You could sell her back.” 

He waved his hand. “I’d never get back what I paid. And besides, you were right. If we send her back, they’d tear her apart. If they’d realised she was a woman, she would have been put up in the pleasure blocks instead of the arena from the start.” He turned away. “That is not something I particularly abide by.” 

Bifur waved the little robots away from him again, but they scurried and whirred and continued their work. At least they were half decent at their job.

“Neither do I,” he said. He meant it. Fighting in the arena was one thing, even with a collar around your neck. It was honourable and honest. Not on Trov; that place was a shithole he’d happily watch burn to ash in a solar storm, but in general. The skin-trade, however, was anything but. 

“I know,” Eli said. “That’s part of why I hired you. That and you’re cheap,” he finished with a smile. 

Bifur snorted. He’d undercut himself, and he knew it. But he was partial to humans and needed work now that he was a free man, because being free cost money, and so did transport across the quadrant. 

Getting to Savarron wasn’t going to be quick or cheap, and working in a Kalvarium House was the only life he knew outside of a tiny farm on a tiny planet somewhere very, very far away … He had no idea where, or even what quadrant… 

“So we just have to work with what we have,” Eli continued, not noticing Bifur’s distracted thought. “Blind or not… She was an S.A.S operative back on Earth. Do you know what that is?”

“I don’t,” Bifur said. Obviously. 

“The Special Air Service was one of the best special forces groups on the entire planet. Military. If she was in it, then she was one of the very best our planet had to offer.” 

“She could not have been very good if she’s blind now,” Bifur said. “How do you know she was in this military? Because of this tattoo?” 

Eli chewed the inside of his cheek. “Well, yes. But how many humans have you ever seen kill Zvioks? Even one of them? Not to mention your arm.” 

Bifur could not argue this point. 

“She’s crazed.” 

“Well, it seems like she might be fresh off Earth, so she’s a little out of her element. We all had an adjustment period…” 

“She’s feral,” Bifur argued. He was grasping because he didn’t want to do it. “Do you see my chest? How do we know she is not diseased?” 

“Your chest and arm are exactly why you’re going to train her along with the others.” 

“I will not—” 

“But not for the arena.” 

That stopped Bifur before he could take a breath for his next argument. Not for the arena? Eli’s coy smile blossomed beneath his yellow beard, and Bifur had learned that  that smile meant the man was scheming like a child looking to steal a treat.

“You have established a Kalvarium House,” Bifur said. “You train Gladiators to fight in the arena.” 

“But not all of the Blood Games take place in the arena,” Eli said. He pulled a chair out and quickly sat down. 

More and more he acts like an excited child with a new toy. 

“I wasn’t going to share this yet, but I may as well. I really have no intention of putting any of them into the arena, as you know it, at least.” 

Bifur shook his head. “Then where—” 

“Everywhere but. There are any number of fights and competitions and tournaments beyond just the life and death fights that you and I are accustomed to. I wanted to start the men in low-ranking cage fights anyway. They don’t bring in as much money up front, but more fights, in quicker succession rather than a big one that could end in death and retraining a new fighter…” 

This was not like any Blood House Master he had ever met before. All of them dreamed of the arena; it was the whole point…  

“You… do not want to fight them in the arena?” He turned the idea over in his head, unsure of how to handle it, because he liked the idea. 

He had watched the previous eight gladiators they held all perish in a single day. He did not particularly want to watch it happen again. He had not been their trainer, but then he wouldn’t have mattered if he was. 

Those men were not prepared. 

“Moments ago you said that putting that woman into the arena would be something that Crayton would do, and it is absolutely something he would do. He also put all of our untrained men into the games and lost them all. I’d rather not lose any.” 

“Then why have a house at all—” 

“For the money, of course,” he said. “And the glory. But one does not have to send the lambs to slaughter for that. I’ve no interest in the arena. I want you to train my fighters to perform well in the cages. In tournaments of ability. In games of wit and stamina. Not everything has to be life or death.” 

He slid his pounding arm off the table and cradled it against his chest. 

How many bones had he broken over the years? Enough that doing so today didn’t faze him. How many wounds had he taken? How many times had he come close to death? How many times had he thought that day would be his last day? How many? 

Too many. 

“You want this for all of the men. All four?”

“Well, three and a woman, technically speaking,” he said. 

“I think there are problems with your thinking,” Bifur said. “I think many will not respect you for this, particularly Crayton. But I like it. If she is not going into the arena, I will consider training her, but only until you can replace her. Or fix her eyes.” 

Eli reached his left hand across the table. “Deal, then?”

Bifur shook it with his left. “If I catch a disease from this, the deal is off.” 

“Deal.”