Chapter 4
THRUM
AMARA
“AMARA!” A VOICE shouts from the hallway.
With a sigh, I abandon my fresh cup of tea and stick my head out of the Nurse’s Room door.
“Pack supplies for a gladiator,” Yuxta says.
“What kind of supplies?” I ask, tucking my still-wet hair over my ear. Solta took pity on me earlier and let me clean up. I even got a fresh dress and a pair of shoes. I think it was more for her benefit than mine, but at least I’m clean.
Yuxta gives me a confused stare, so I clarify, slowly. “Who are the supplies for, and what’s wrong with them?”
“A big cut. He is Vhorathi. Losing a lot of blood.”
Vhorathi … never heard of them.
I duck back into the Nurse’s Room, grab a med-bag, and start looking for the correct sedative in the cabinet. There’s no vial labeled “Vhorathi”. Of course.
Frowning, I pop my head back into the hallway. “Can you repeat the species name?”
“Vhorathi.”
Ok. That’s exactly what I heard before.
“What’s the name of the home planet?” Maybe the vial is mislabeled?
“Vhorath.”
Very original.
I duck back into the Nurse’s Room and almost collide with Solta. “Gah!” I shout, surprised by her sudden appearance.
“What species did he say?” she asks calmly, her dark eyes and square pupils soft and unfazed. I repeat the name, and she sighs knowingly. “We do not have sedatives for him.”
“We don’t?”
“We do not. Grab what supplies are needed and give them to the guards. They will handle the rest.” With a single graceful stride, she returns to the table and her datapad.
“Wait, so he has to sew himself up?” I ask, walking around the table and back into her line of sight. “Why don’t we have sedatives for him?”
“A Vhorathi cultural rule,” she says, waving her hand dismissively, eyes still on the datapad.
When I don’t leave, she looks up, clearly annoyed.
“He is not permitted to come in contact with persons of the opposite sex, so there is no point in sedating him. You could not touch him, no matter his condition. Just deliver the supplies.”
“You know he won’t be able to sew himself up.” Even I would struggle with that.
“He agreed to the risks when he signed his contract and refused medical care,” she says, lowering her eyes back to the datapad, clearly unbothered by the impending death of another slave.
Gladiator or not, she doesn’t care. We’re all the same to her.
Expendable slaves. “Give him what he needs and leave. What happens from there is none of your concern.”
Feeling a mix of discomfort and frustration, I bite my tongue and pack the kit as instructed, tossing in a few extra packets of hemostatic gauze. It probably won’t help him, but it’s better than nothing.
Before leaving, I risk one more question.
“Do we really not have access to anything he could use? Like regen-tape?” I’ve never seen the stuff before, but Roveen waxes poetically about it like it’s some long-lost lover.
Supposedly, it’s very easy to use and helps wounds heal quickly. Sounds a lot better than sutures.
“No, Amara,” Solta says loudly, her voice tinged with annoyance. “Please, just do your job.”
I leave the room with a frown etched on my face and a useless bag of medical supplies under my arm.
I shouldn’t be surprised by Solta’s lack of concern—she’s part of the problem—but it’s hard to reconcile all the different faces she wears.
She can be kind and gentle, but at the same time, she’s complicit in the kidnapping and forced labor of hundreds of people.
I swear, either her cognitive dissonance is robust enough to compete in the unhinged Olympics, or her soul is blacker than tar.
Yuxta escorts me through the maze of hallways in complete silence while I fume.
When we reach Cell 29, the shorter of the two guards posted there stalks towards me.
It takes all of my willpower not to reel back.
I’ve seen a lot of freaky aliens at this point, but this guy takes the cake.
His face is a horror—scaly ridges covered with what looks like a thin layer of mucus—and he walks with a wide gate, approaching me like a massive salamander, dragging this tail on the ground behind him.
For some sick reason, my brain forces me to check for a slime-trail. There isn’t one.
I hold out the med-bag. “The medical equipment you requested, sir.”
The lizard grunts a confirmation and takes the bag.
I wait to be dismissed, but he just stands there, staring at me.
“Does the gladiator need help closing his wound?” I ask, hoping to end this interaction.
He answers with a short, angry, “No.”
Ok. Noted. I lower my head in a quick bow and return to Yuxta’s side.
We get a few steps down the hall before I’m forced to a stop by a jarring thud in my chest. Air bursts from my lungs, and I bend over, bracing my hands on my knees as my heart takes off in a series of rapid, uneven beats.
My ears roar. Sweat slicks my skin. And a surge of panic follows. Is this a heart attack?
“Amara!” Yuxta shouts, waving his hand emphatically.
I force myself to move. Maybe it’s just another panic attack. A really weird panic attack. The only issue with that theory is that the anxiety showed up after the heart palpitations.
An unhelpful voice in the back of my mind says, ‘It’s probably an alien heart condition.’
Great. Thanks, brain. Nothing like the warm reassurance of an untreatable new disease to calm my nerves.
As we near the first turn in the hallway, the uneven beats turn into a steady thrum.
My heart’s beating too fast, but I’m not feeling any of the negative effects I’d expect from that.
Fuck. If this is some weird heart condition, I’m completely screwed.
I don’t have access to medication or human doctors, so any issue with my body is going to tank my life span… and the amount of time I have to act.
I collide with something solid, and an “Oumf” leaves me. It’s Yuxta’s outstretched arm. “What’s go—”
He holds up a finger, his middle finger—which I guess might be considered his index finger since he only has three—and I wait. He tilts his head like a dog, oversized ears sticking straight out and twitching. Then I hear whatever he did: wet thumping sounds. Maybe punches? I’m not sure.
Then I hear a scream. A loud scream. Followed by the distant sounds of chaos.
Normally, a scream like that would turn my nervous system into a shaking idiot, but I’m fine. My heart’s still beating faster than it should, but beyond that, everything seems normal. No adrenaline dump. No pounding headache. Nothing.
Ok. This is interesting.
Another scream reaches us. This one sounds closer.
Yuxta turns to me. “You must go to the Nurse’s Room alone. Can you do that?”
I nod and watch as he takes off around the corner.
It takes a moment before I realize I’m alone in the hallway.
Fuck. I really don’t want to get caught out here, but at least if I am, I won’t be the only person whose ass is on the line.
Yuxta will be screwed too. Taking that small detail as a sign of his confidence that I’ll make it back undetected, I start walking, slowly.
A year ago, I would have killed for an opportunity like this—some time alone to do some recon, maybe find a way to escape—but there’s no point in that. The only thing waiting outside these walls is death.
A few days after I woke up in the Coliseum, I was assigned my first patient.
A Sikut in Cell 7. The window in that cell is big and close enough to the ground outside for me to be willing to jump.
So, instead of patching up the sedated Sikut, I jumped out the window and ran.
I didn’t have a plan or supplies, but I was free, and I thought I’d figure things out as I went.
Maybe I’d find a nice local willing to help, or I’d find a shipyard and sneak onto a merchant vessel, but all I found was endless desert.
By the time the sun was setting, I collapsed at the base of a dune and was found by a couple of guards, sunburnt, dehydrated, and exhausted. They dragged me back here, and the Magistrate had me locked in a cell without food or water for two more days. I thought I was going to die.
At the end of the second day, I was handcuffed and taken to the Magistrate’s office. My head was swimming and throbbing. Lips cracked. Every movement hurt. And the stone chair in his office felt too much like metal.
“Escaping is pointless,” the Magistrate said.
“If you try to escape again, you will be deemed a criminal.” He slowly crept around his desk and lifted the chain between my cuffed hands with a single finger.
“The people of this planet hate criminals almost as much as I do.” He dropped the chain, and my swollen hands crashed to my lap as he leaned over me.
He was so close I could smell the sour odor of his breath and see the pink, raised skin around the base of his horns.
“They will hunt you down and skin you alive for sport. No one cares if a slave lives or dies. You are nothing more than a set of hands, a sack of meat, a creature of labor. Remember that the next time you see an open window.”
He wanted me to be terrified of him, of my situation, of everyone.
And sure, I am scared, but not in the way he wanted.
He took away his only bargaining chip. The only thing keeping me compliant.
The only thing I had left. Hope. It’s clear he hasn’t realized how dangerous a person is when they have nothing left to lose, and I can’t wait to watch him figure it out.
The sound of a lock thunking forces me to a stop. I’m barely ten steps away from where Yuxta left me and already someone’s opening a cell? Why? There shouldn’t be any gladiators moving for the next hour.
My heart continues its strange thrumming as I glance around, resisting the urge to run. I want to run, but if I run the wrong way, I risk encountering whoever made that sound, and I’m not ready to get caught breaking a law. Not yet.
I press my body against the stone wall and listen.
Silence.
The most logical explanation is that the guards are opening Cell 29 to deliver the medical equipment, and if that’s the case, I can just keep walking the way I was going. But if the sound is coming from somewhere else…
First things first. Check Cell 29.
I move towards the end of the hallway, silently rolling through each step. When I reach the corner, I stop and carefully peek down the hall. Relief floods me. This lizard is opening the—
“Were you able to get a hot iron?” someone says in a voice like rolling thunder.
My skin tightens, hairs stand on end, and the thrumming in my chest reaches a dangerous speed. That voice. I slip back behind the wall and squat down, clenching my hands over my heart. I’ve never heard a voice like that, and the desire to hear it again is overwhelming my sense of reason.
“We do not, but we have other medical supplies,” the lizard replies.
I can’t stay here, but my muscles refuse to act.
“What do you have?” the thunderous voice asks, each word vibrating through my body with a quiet hum that grows more insistent by the second until I can barely breathe.
“A needle and thread.”
“Zar’vok,” the voice booms. It’s like listening to the sounds of boulders crashing beneath a river’s surface during a flood. Both terrifying and hypnotic.
My fingers dig into my chest as the thrumming gets worse.
“This is all we can provide,” the lizard says. “I am sorry, Vexar.”
The door thuds shut and I’m plunged back into silence, feeling a sharp tension in my ribs and a pooling heat in my belly.