Rusti rolled the tuft of fur between her fingers, again and again.

The smell was animal. 

Feline. 

But the voice had been… Australian? Somewhat. To a point. Australian adjacent. 

That couldn’t be right; he had a snout. 

It was a feline that stood on two feet and spoke Australian English. 

That’s not real. 

The fur stuck to her wet hands said otherwise. 

You’re dreaming again. 

The pain blooming across her body begged to differ. 

Cat people aren’t real. 

She was literally a cat person… of a different sort. 

That’s different. 

No, it wasn’t. 

You’re from Earth. 

Yes, she was. 

You’re not on Earth anymore. 

No. She wasn’t. 

Memories slid into place from the previous three days. The smells. The sounds. The ten-foot-tall beings that tried to kill her in a sandy arena surrounded by spectators. 

Time spent in a cage, surrounded by creatures who made no biological sense, unless they weren’t human. 

The chittering vocals, the clicking legs, the elephant-sized feet … it was all. 

Real. 

It couldn’t be a dream, because she could still see in her dreams. She could also sometimes see hallucinations in the blackness that had become her vision since the incident. 

The irony wasn’t lost on her that her inability to see what was happening was the most definitive proof she had that it was real. 

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and repeated the exercise until her heart rate came down, the shivering that was more adrenaline than cold lessened, and she took in the world around her. 

Occam’s Razor said that the simplest explanation was often the best one, and the simplest explanation was that she wasn’t on Earth anymore. 

She’d already come to this conclusion before, lost consciousness, then woken up in the same situation, in a different location. 

Different people. 

Gone was the bug with the hose, and the weird man with four arms. Now there was an Australian lion man, and another, much quieter one. 

She’d almost forgotten about him. He’d said only a few words, and of those, only a few had been in very broken English. 

He was so quiet, she could scarcely hear his breath. Had she not already known he was there, she might not have noticed him at all. 

That wasn’t normal. 

Not for her. 

Not for her kind. 

The only people who could hide from her like that were her own kind, and he wasn’t that. 

Was he?

She curled her toes against the cold, metal floor. It was rough, but in an old, once-smooth-now-worn kind of way, and relatively clean, minus the water and mud that she was still covered in.

If it even was just mud. 

Disgusting. 

The air smelled fresh and clean compared to the thick stench of the cave, or the arid heat of the sandy stadium, but it still smelled of metal, machinery, oil, and other scents she struggled to compare to anything she knew.

The thick bars surrounding her made for a perfectly square cage that was far more spacious than the cages she had been stuffed in before, and cleaner, but the space between the bars was too small for her to fit through. But she wasn’t exactly fairy-shaped. 

Eve could slip through them without issue; she was normal-sized. 

Evelyn. 

The thought hit her like a punch to the gut.

Before she’d woken up in a cage, she’d gone to sleep in her bed, and Eve had been beside her. Her wife had been with her, so where was she now?

Back in smelly cages? 

Somewhere else?

Dead?

Dead?

Was she missing memories between being home with her and being here in hell?

How much time had passed between then and now?

She rolled the fur between her fingers again to keep herself focused on the now. On the reality. She couldn’t afford to go through another mental obstacle course to reach the same conclusions for a third time. 

What happened to Eve?

What happened to Luddy?

Her twin had been staying in the guest room of their shitty rental in Nevada. Did he wake up to find both of them gone? Or in a cage? Or did they wake up and find her gone? Shuffled to the other side of the galaxy. Or universe? Where was here? How much did she know about space? 

Not much. 

The closest habitable planet that they, Earthlings, knew of was Alpha Centauri something, but where was that? She knew about as much as anyone. They had a base on the moon, and that was the extent of humans’ space travel. 

And this was a ship. It didn’t move right to be a plane, but if they had the technology for space travel, then they could build fancy planes, surely?

She’d floated before. Zero gravity. But now there was gravity. So where were they going? Did they stay in the atmosphere of the alien planet, or were they in space? Were they going to another planetary location, or a space one? 

It may have stank, but she’d breathed the air on the planet without technical issue. She could breathe here. Oxygen. 

Oxygen was important. The Australian-Cat-Man breathed oxygen.

The man. The human one. He’d spoken British English and knew Latin. He was from Earth. He would know the answers to all of this. 

He also bought her from a bug and put her in this cage. 

She reached up and touched the shackle around her neck. It had shocked her before. The skin was still fiery sore, but then, most of her was sore, and bruised, and tired… So tired. She realised her muscles were still trembling, but maybe it wasn’t all adrenaline anymore. 

Exhaustion, more like. She couldn’t remember ever feeling this tired and worn down, and she’d been in the military. Deployed overseas. Dealt with two brothers.

The shackle, or choker? Collar? Whatever it was, it was snug around her neck, and she could feel the iron inside of it intuitively. It was made of smooth, hard material that still moulded to her neck. 

So a very fancy collar. 

Shock collar. 

It was taking her too long to think things through…

The softest brush of… something, on the other side of the room, caught her attention. The other man. The quiet one. 

“Do not touch it,” he said. Each word was slow and careful, and in an accent she’d never heard before. If she had to describe it, she’d call it a weird cross between Slavic and Nigerian, but that wasn’t right either.

She stopped touching the collar, but he said nothing else. 

Simple guy. 

Muffled voices rose, somewhere up and far ahead. If she was in a cage on a ship, then this was most likely the cargo area. Like in a plane. So the human would be above where the cockpit was, since he was in charge. 

Two sets of feet shuffled back and forth, both of them light, or just very muffled since she couldn’t tell how far away they were. There was too much between here and there. Too many walls, levels, things. 

Another brush of something against the floor whispered from across the room. 

He’s too quiet. 

The voices and steps grew louder until a door opened and they hurried down a set of stairs. 

“You are absolutely mistaken. There is no way on God’s green Earth—” and then the door to the cargo hold slid open with a hiss, and both the Australian-Cat-Man and the Human man entered. 

“You!” The human snapped. “Get up. My Eldarre seems to think you’re a blind woman.” 

She didn’t get up. Rather, she let the fur she was still holding onto fall away and brushed her fingers clean. She listened closely now, and let the sounds, the vibrations, the heartbeats, the clothes, their breaths… 

All of it painted a picture in her head and gave her a kind of sight. She definitely relied more on her people’s nature to navigate the world without her eyes, but those senses, her beast’s strength and prowess, felt far away. The iron in the collar was a possible culprit, combined with the thick haze she felt like she was pushing her body through.

She had a privilege, though. 

The privilege of being alive, for one, since the acid had burned away her eyes and a good chunk of her face, but she’d been able to heal enough that her scars were far lighter than you’d expect for the damage, and her eyes had regenerated. Physically. The sight hadn’t returned, but it was better than having two empty sockets, and sometimes she felt like she could see light shifts in her right eye. 

The healers had told her they expected that one to regain vision at some point, even if it was decades away.

Temper your expectations.  

But the loss had heightened her other, already heightened senses, and the way she could see now was more like echolocation mixed with an excitable imagination. 

The man was tall, maybe six-foot-three or so, but still much shorter than she was. Average build for his height. Not overweight, not too thin either. 

She was usually a good judge of height. 

Australian-Cat-Man, however, was much taller than she was. She shouldn’t be surprised, the people she’d killed in the stadium had been pushing nine feet or so. 

This guy was sitting at well over seven feet, because she’d touched his snouty cat face before and she’d had to reach up to do it. 

He rapped the bars. “Up! Don’t make me come in there.” 

She was tempted to make him come in there, but how able was she at this point? Where was she? Where could she go? Could she kill three men in her state? Her thighs started to tremble again, like they were trying to make a point. 

The human, for sure, but the other two?

There had been muscles under that furry pelt. 

“If I have to shock that collar and drag you out, I will,” the Human said. “I’d greatly prefer not to.” 

Her next moment of hesitation was more from the weakness in her legs than stubbornness, or a grandiose idea to antagonise them any further. 

Her body just couldn’t take it. 

Slowly, she pushed herself up against the wall and stood as straight as she was able. The cage was about eight feet tall, eight feet wide. It was basically a small bedroom. She stepped forward and had to grip the bars between her and them to stay steady, so she towered over the Human, but was positively small next to the Australian-Cat-Man.

“You have been cheated,” the Cat-Man said. 

The man was silent for only a breath, but that small space felt like a lifetime. 

“Being a woman didn’t stop her from downing a pack of Zvioks in the arena,” he finally said, far quieter than before. “There are any number of female gladiators that are far more famous than even you, Bifur.” 

“There are,” he said. Bifur. “But they are not humans, and they are not blind. Look at her eyes.” 

Yes, she thought. Look at the blind girl’s eyes. Just wait until they find out what else is broken. 

“Well,” the man ventured. “One eye. The other looks fine.”

She didn’t need her eyes to know that Bifur reached through the bars to wave his hand in front of her face.

Did he have hands or paws?

“I think she is blind in both eyes,” he said. “This is why she moved so strangely in the arena.” 

“What the— No, she’s not—” he blundered. “How did you kill four Zvioks and down a bunch of Skael guards—” He spun on his heel. “God dammit!”

“We should go back,” Bifur said. “We need a fourth on the roster.” 

He ran calloused fingers through his hair and let out a harsh breath in the large space. Rusti kept a firm grip on the bar and willed her body to keep going. 

She could get going. 

She could stay awake. 

She could still fight. 

“I suspect you want me to send this one back,” he said. “I won’t get what I paid for her and you know it.” 

Bifur was quiet, and she noticed a soft whoosh back and forth behind him, and realised the man had a fucking tail. 

Autralian-Cat-Man. 

“They’ll tear her apart if you send her back,” he said. 

“So we can’t send her back.” 

“And we can’t keep her,” Bifur finished. 

The man turned and came back to the cage. “If you’re really blind, how did you survive that arena?” 

She didn’t answer, because she couldn’t, and they were all about to figure it out together. 

He rapped the bars. “Answer!” 

She didn’t, and the tension between the two men flipped to anger. 

They didn’t like being disobeyed, but they also agreed that sending her back to die was a bad thing, even though there was a collar around her neck and she was in a cage. 

She agreed, though; going back would be bad. She needed to stay here, with the Human, and the Australian, and the weird quiet one. 

What had they said before?

Gladiators. 

That stadium was an arena, and she and the others had all been the bloody entertainment. And that was why she was here. 

The iron in the collar was going to be a problem. She could feel the strain it put between her and her beast, like a metaphysical wall. 

“You will answer, girl,” Bifur said. He reached through the bars and grabbed her arm, and she grabbed his.