“Are you sure you don’t want to look further?” Bifur asked and jogged to catch up to Master Eli. The hopeful glint in his voice carried over the harsh winds that had picked up in the last few minutes. 

“For the last time,” said Eli, his voice louder than Bifur’s, “I am happy with the little Earthling who dropped a wee pack of Zvioks on his own. He was also exceedingly cheap.”

Vor dragged the crate holding the unconscious Earthling in question, and he had to stop and tug it over lumps of rocks lying invisible in the sand as a new storm started to pick up. 

They needed to get back sooner rather than later. The storms on this planet carried glass on its winds, and he had no desire to be torn to shreds only a few lengths away from the safety of the shuttle. 

His two betters were already barely visible up ahead.

Dammit. 

The crate caught on another rock in the sand, and he grunted and hefted it as the Earthling inside it began to kick and knock the crate around. 

He should not be awake yet, he thought.

Razor-sharp shards of glass raked against the exposed skin of his arms and tore at his shawl. He cursed, but the words were ripped away by the wind, and his keen ears could only vaguely hear Bifur yelling for him ahead. 

Damn this place.

He reached down, wrenched open the lid of the decrepit crate, and simply pulled the man out and slung him over his shoulder. He was bigger than Master Eli, but smaller than the rest of the gladiators. 

Too small, he thought. Terrible choice.

He jogged the last stretch to the ship, where both Eli and Bifur were holding the doors open for him to squeeze through. It had been significantly easier than dragging the crate, except now he was covered in the same stinking filth as the Earthling. 

Damn it! 

He could not win with this.

They slammed the doors shut behind him, nearly catching his tail, and he took a deep breath of slightly less horrid air. 

“Toss him in that cell there,” Eli said with a wave of his hand as he pulled and pushed on various levers and buttons around the cargo hold. “You get him hosed down, and I’ll get us out of here before we get stuck in this storm for the next two days. God only knows what Crayton is doing to my ship while we’re gone. The quicker we’re back, the better.” 

What kind of God do Earthlings pray to? He wondered.

Vor ignored his squirming and tossed the Earthling into the small cell like a sack of grain, where he coughed, rolled over, and went limp.

Bifur’s brow furrowed. “He shouldn’t be awake yet,” he muttered, then huffed in that snorty, feline way Krassi people tended to do, and pulled the hose out the wall. “Let’s get rid of that fuckin’ stink, shall we?” He said and turned the hose on full blast. 

The man jerked awake and threw himself back up against the wall while trying to protect his face from the sharp spray of the hose. 

Vor almost laughed at the sight. 

How did this pathetic, pale, squirming creature take down four Zvioks on his own? They must have been ill or injured, and he had been briefly blessed by whatever God the Earthlings prayed to. Either way, even he could see how terrible an idea this would be for all of them, and he was considered the dumb one of the group, but not quite as dumb as Gladden, whom everyone mostly ignored. 

Their privileges and punishments were shared. If they all did well, they all benefited; if one of them performed poorly, they all suffered for it. 

Vor took note of how Bifur seemed to be taking out his frustration on the acquisition itself, because he kept hosing the Human down with the harsh spray long after he was free of the grime of Old Trov12. 

Unlike the hot, stinky water back down there, this water was ice-cold and clean; at least clean compared to the water of his old home. 

Bifur finally stopped, and the man, now wide awake and sputtering, proceeded to run his hands over the wall, the floor, then the wall again until he wrapped his hands around each individual bar surrounding three other sides of the cage.

“Is there something wrong with him?” Vor asked as the little man pushed himself up into the corner, his hands outstretched onto either wall around him. 

“Undoubtedly,” Bifur said with a heavy sigh, then turned the hose on Vor and blasted him next until he was soaked through, freezing, and clear of the stink. Bifur cut the spray, and Vor rubbed the water out of his eyes and squeezed it out of his hair, only for Bifur to turn it back on and soak him again.

“Why!?” Vor choked through a mouthful of water. He only heard Bifur’s laughter as an answer, and he turned around to take the harsh blast against his back.

The Elder was messing with him and wouldn’t stop until Vor stopped squirming. He’d noticed Bifur liked to torment them for fun, but thus far, it had not been cruel.

Just annoying. 

Vor had to fight not to snap at the Elder in retaliation. He had grown used to the hot water on the main ship, and the cold spray brought back sharp memories of his… well, his entire life, at Master Baranth’s training house. 

Bifur barked out another laugh and put the hose away just as the shuttle rumbled to life and almost immediately pitched to the side and tossed them all off balance.

The Human gripped the bars for dear life, Bifur staggered over and slammed the door shut, and Vor stripped off the soaking cloak and head wrap. He liked them and had never owned anything like it, or owned anything of substance, really, so he tried to ring them out as well as he could while holding his balance on the rocking shuttle, but gave up when it tipped upwards, and he fell backwards onto his arse.

They were travelling into the atmosphere, and the small ship shuddered and screamed under the pressure; the sound inside the cargo hold became a thundering hum that drowned out even the thought of words. 

Bifur and Vor both held onto whatever leverage was within arm’s reach until the force of acceleration lifted, and all three bodies slowly lifted into the air as gravity dissipated. 

A sign they had entered the small planet’s outer atmosphere and were moving into space itself. A notion Vor still didn’t entirely enjoy or fully comprehend. He’d grown up on a planet with dirt beneath his feet, and the few space flights he had taken, he had been put into cryo sleep beforehand.

His new master had a very different way of doing things.

Vor had learned, in the first trips he’d taken in the shuttle, to hold on tight during this part, otherwise you’d fall hard when the ship’s gravity kicked in. Bifur knew as much as well, but the Earthling, evidently, did not. 

Bifur laughed as the Human’s body rose up inside the cell. His arms flailed, and his breath started to come in harsh gasps and coughs.

Panic. He was panicking. 

Vor knew that feeling all too well: the shortness of breath, the inability to breathe, to think, to react… 

“Hold on to the bars, idiot!” Vor yelled in Common, but it did no good; the human did not have a translator in his head like the rest of them did, and wouldn’t know Common if he really was fresh from Earth, and Vor didn’t know enough of the Master’s English yet to speak it. He could understand it to a point, but speaking it was difficult. The words felt strange in his mouth. 

The human continued to scramble in midair, his arms not reaching the bars until an audible clunk reverberated through the shuttle, and they all slammed down to the floor. 

The Earthling landed flat on his face, and Bifur barked out another laugh and stood up to dust himself off. 

“First time on a shuttle, I assume,” he said in Common, but the man did not answer or bother to push the hair from his eyes, nor wipe the blood that poured from his nose. Instead, he pushed himself back into the corner and gripped the bars. 

Bifur banged on the cage. 

“I asked you a question,” he said in English, which he spoke remarkably well. “Is this your first time in a shuttle?”

The Human looked at Bifur, but didn’t answer. He was still breathing hard, and his knuckles were white with the force of his grip on the bars.

“Get up,” Bifur barked, getting frustrated. “It’s good you’re awake. That means you can talk. So talk.” 

Vor finished wringing out his cloak and slung it over some crates to dry in the hours it would take to get back to the main ship, and watched. It was not his place to get involved until he was told to. It was not his place to ask questions or even speak unless prompted. 

He should not have said anything before, but he had grown comfortable in Bifur’s presence in the short time he’d been part of this new training house.

That was how he had been raised, been trained, to behave and conduct himself. In the short few months he had been aboard The Helgafell, however, he had found these strict rules that had been beaten into him to be… irrelevant. Bifur seemed to dislike his quietness. Master Eli was always chatting and seemed perturbed by any lack of response.

He found the dynamic… challenging.

“You try my patience, Human,” Bifur snapped, a growl laced in his words. “You will learn quickly that I dislike repeating myself. Behave this way with the Master, and you’ll get the shock again. No need to remind you what that is, do I?”

The human gritted his teeth, gripped the bars, and pulled himself up. He was much worse for wear than Vor had thought, every patch of exposed, pale skin with either black with bruises or red with wounds, and he was soaked to the bone and shivering uncontrollably. 

He had seen better men come out worse from lesser battles, so, that was something, he supposed.

From bar to bar, he moved around the cell until he came to stand in front of Bifur. He reached out with one hand and touched the Elder’s chest, then moved upwards, and Bifur, oddly, allowed it. 

At first, he looked shocked at the audacity to lay hands on an elder, but Vor watched him stare down at the human with anger, then confusion, then something else he couldn’t read. 

Bifur grabbed the human’s hand and pulled his arm through the bars until he was banged against them. He reached in and ruffled the human’s hair roughly, then grabbed the slip of a tunic, looked down and cursed, his voice echoing off the metal walls of the cargo hold with a deep, roaring reverberation. 

The sound made Vor’s blood run cold, and the human jolted, but Bifur held firm.

He grabbed the human’s face and tilted it upwards, twisted it this way and that, snarled and shoved the human back so roughly he stumbled and fell against the back wall. 

Bifur spun on his heel and charged for the doors, but turned back and pointed at Vor, ire wrought across his face. 

“Don’t touch it!” He barked, his eyes alight with anger and… something else Vor did not understand.