1. Olivia #3
There is no sun, so far as I can make out.
As for the color blue? Forget it. It’s gone on holiday.
There is just this — this heavy, glowing, ashy atmosphere pressing down from above while the ground glows up from below, and in the middle distance the volcano dominates everything, massive and constant and indifferent, rumbling at a frequency I feel in my teeth rather than hear with my ears.
It must be what having a mother-in-law is like.
I take one step away from the pod.
Then another.
Then three things happen very fast.
THOOM!
A pod strikes maybe fifty yards to my left with the same almighty crash mine made, sending up a spray of rock and ash.
THOOM!
Then another, to my right, closer.
Fuck! Is one of those things going to freaking land on me?
THOOM! THOOM!
Then two more in quick succession, landing in an arc around me like I'm the bullseye on a target I didn't agree to be placed on. The impacts shake the ground. The ash disturbed by each landing drifts outward in slow grey plumes.
And then the doors open. At the same time .
I should run. Every functioning neuron I have is sending the same message: run, Olivia, run right now, pick a direction and commit to it. But my feet don't get the memo in time, and for three full seconds I just stand there watching the pods open and the males emerge.
It is undoubtedly the single most tactically stupid thing I've ever done — okay, maybe not ever but certainly done today — and today consists of a genuinely competitive pack.
Oh, holy shit.
They’re actually bigger outside the pods.
The glass must have warped them somehow because earlier, they'd registered as large but containable, the way a spider in a jar is manageable. Out here, with nothing between us, they are simply ginormous.
They move differently too, not the contained frustration of a creature in an enclosed space but the full, unrestrained physicality of something that was built for exactly this kind of environment. One foot — or claw in some cases — hits the ground and they are immediately, completely present in it.
No stumbling to be seen. No adjustment period. It’s almost like… like they've done this before.
Or maybe they’re just not clumsy bastards.
Two find each other before they find me.
I don't know which two monsters right now. And it doesn't matter. What matters is that one second they're both upright and the next they're not, because whatever passed between them in that first moment of eye contact apparently required an immediate and unfettered violent response.
There's no posturing, no circling — just impact. Savage, claws and mass and sounds I can only describe as a scream, though they could never come from the throat of a human .
They crash into each other and fall to the ground before getting back up again. It is absolutely terrible and I cannot look away, which is a problem because while I'm watching them I'm not watching anything else.
One tears the other open like it’s a packet of fucking peanuts.
I see it happen. I wish I hadn't, but I see it — a single decisive movement, devastating and efficient, and then it's over, and the one on the losing end of it is?—
Gone.
No body. No blood left behind. No trace. Between one blink and the next, he simply isn't there anymore.
Death triggers immediate removal.
The voice hadn't been speaking in abstractions. I file that away in the part of my brain that's still functioning like a nurse — observe, record, respond — and take one step backward.
I don't get a second step.
The one that finds me first is the largest of them.
I clock this in the same detached, this-information-may-save-my-life way that I clock everything in the next three seconds: massive, wider across the shoulders than seems structurally necessary, moving with a frenzied energy that's different from the focused savagery I just witnessed.
Where the fighters had been precise, this one is hungry — less about winning and more about having, which is its own distinct category of terrifying.
He covers the distance between us before I can process that he's moving toward me.
I try to run. I genuinely try. My body gets about halfway through the correct sequence of motions — weight shift, push off, go — and then he's there and the attempt becomes irrelevant.
He pins me against the ground with a thoroughness that makes my efforts at resistance feel almost charming by comparison.
“No! Please! Don’t! I shouldn’t be here! I shouldn’t be here!”
The rock beneath me is hot and sharp and his weight is extraordinary.
I fight anyway because that's what you do — that's the only thing you do — you fight and you make noise and you make yourself as difficult as possible for as long as possible because the alternative is not something I'm willing to think about right now?—
He's not interested in my objections.
His eyes are a flat, pale yellow, and they don't look at me the way another person looks at you — not even the way a very angry person looks at you. This is different. This is the look of something that has categorized me.
“Mine,” he snarls.
He pins my wrists above my head with one hand. Hell, he could do it with a couple of of his sausage-sized fingers if he wanted to.
I buck against his weight and get nowhere.
His other hand moves across me with a horrible, deliberate focus — running a palm down my ribs, my waist, with a possessive certainty that makes my skin crawl.
He dips his head and inhales — actually inhales, scenting me, a long slow breath against my throat — and the sound he makes is satisfied in a way that turns my stomach completely over.
"Get off me?—"
His hand finds the collar of my scrub top and I feel the fabric pull taut.
Then the seam gives — not torn, just stretched past its tolerance, a small catastrophic surrender of stitching — and I twist as hard as I can.
I manage to get one hand free and drive the heel of it into whatever part of his face I can reach, which turns out to be directly below his eye socket.
I might as well be an ant. It doesn't stop him, it doesn't even slow him down, but it clarifies something for me very quickly: this is not a situation I am getting out of through strength.
" Stop, " I say, and my voice comes out harder than I expect it to. "Stop. I said stop. No means no! "
His fingers curl into the fabric of my pants and he begins to pull them down.
I whimper. Terrified. No! This can’t be happening! This can’t be happening!
And then he pauses. Looks back over his shoulder. But it’s down he should be looking. The ground opens up beneath him.
A lava geyser erupts directly under his body with a force that I feel through the rock under my back.
A concussive crack that's more pressure than sound. He screams but it’s cut short as, in the same instant, a surge of electricity rips through the air, the kind that makes your hair stand up and your fillings ache.
Both these things happen to him simultaneously and the result is immediate and complete.
He's gone.
I just stare at the space he was just a moment ago.
The lava retreats back into the crack it came from. The electricity dissipates. The rock is scorched in a perfect circle around where he was kneeling.
Arena enforcement is not guaranteed in all circumstances which apparently means it's sometimes guaranteed. But if punishment is dealt, it shall be immediate and severe.
I don't know what the difference is between the circumstances that get intervention and the ones that don't, and that is a problem I will need to solve if I'm going to survive whatever this is.
Then the volcano reminds me it exists.
The eruption, when it comes, is full-throated and enormous — a column of fire and gas punching skyward from the summit with enough force that I feel the shockwave roll across the platform like a weather event. And in its wake, the debris.
Molten rock, chunks of the mountain itself, ejected in high arcs and descending across the platform in a wide, indiscriminate pattern.
The first one hits maybe thirty yards away and the impact sprays sharp fragments of superheated rock across the ground in a radius that reaches my feet.
The second lands closer. Somewhere in the middle distance, one of the males roars.
I get up.
My hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking in that post-adrenaline way that doesn't care how much you tell it to stop.
The ash is in my throat and my knees are bleeding from the rock and the air is so hot it feels like breathing through a hair dryer.
Another piece of molten debris hits the ground fifteen yards away and the impact kicks ash into my eyes.
I stand in the middle of it all. I turn in a circle that feels impossibly slow and take off.
I have no cover. No weapon. No plan.
The volcano rumbles again, long and low, the kind of sound that comes from somewhere so deep inside the earth that the earth itself is the instrument.
I have never been more afraid in my entire life.
And I run.
The ash hits me the moment I clear the scorch mark — a wall of it, fine and grey and everywhere, clogging up my throat before I've even taken three steps. My eyes water instantly.
The sky is orange-black and the air tastes like the inside of a furnace and the ground under my feet is actively trying to fucking kill me. And none of that matters because standing still is even freaking worse!
And so, I run.
The platform's surface is treacherous in ways I'm still learning. Black volcanic rock, ancient and fractured, slick with a film of ash that looks solid until you commit your weight to it.
I learn this the hard way twice in the first thirty seconds — a slip, a scramble, a split-second recalibration — and each time I recover I'm a little faster, a little more brutal about where I put my feet. There's no grace in it. There doesn't need to be.