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“Don’t worry about her. She’s too young and I’ve already told the organizers she needs to go back. They’ll wipe her memory and she’ll be in Physics class by Monday. They may be complete brutes, but the head honcho is a human, and he apparently had a daughter at some point. So he draws the line at anyone under eighteen. There was a nineteen-year-old last time. God, she looked like a baby. She’s gone now. Didn’t survive.” The banana blonde was back, pushing me away from the teen and toward a table across the room.
“Can you stop pushing me around?” I halted dead in my tracks. I was bigger than the woman, had at least thirty pounds on her, and I wasn’t going to just let myself be manhandled. “I don’t know where I am or who you are, and I want to know how the hell to get back home.”
“Look, I’ve got a job to do. Stop worrying about anyone else and start focusing on yourself. That’s all you can do. You can’t just hop onto first class and head back to whatever city you’re from. This isn’t Earth, idiot.”
“Can you at least tell me your name?” Just one little piece of information. If I could get her to open up about that, then I could pry more info out of her easily. It’s how you worked a big sale; you just needed to get your foot in the door.
She huffed but seemed to realize that I wasn’t going to be someone she could walk all over. “It’s Grace. And I’m stuck here just like you, but the difference is that I survived these games already. I survived, and now I’m doing what I have to do to earn a place here. I don’t want to be entertainment again, not in any way, shape, or form. My choices are either to fight, use my body as currency, or help the organizers prep the new human women for the bond. Take a guess what choice I made.”
Banana Blonde started pushing again, and this time I let her shove me toward the table.
“So your name is Grace.”
She didn’t respond.
“And you survived whatever… whatever is about to happen to me?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Luck. Pure freaking luck.”
Great. That helps me not at all.
“What are your sizes? We have uniforms this year. Be grateful for that. They’ll give you some protection. I didn’t have these. Or the cushy rubbery floor to land on. I was banged and bruised before the fighting even started.”
I stared at the black and cobalt uniforms. They were really going to clash with my Loubs. “Large, unless the chest area is small, then extra-large.”
“These will stretch to fit.” She picked up a suit from the pile and handed it to me. “Shoes?”
“Nines.” Guess I didn’t have to worry about my keen fashion sense after all.
She ran fingers over black boots until she found what she was looking for. They looked like Earth combat boots, but they weighed absolutely nothing when I held them in my hands. Lighter than air, maybe even lighter than the thin-feeling suit.
“Change wherever. There’s no privacy here.” Banana Blonde glanced down at my feet, snickering before speaking. “No fashion shoes and designer sales here, hot shot. It’s all blood and boots.”
I glanced around the large room, now noting that all the women were in the same uniform. There was no other room to hide in, no bathroom to utilize, no shadowed corner to protect modesty. So I started stripping right there in front of Banana Blonde. She stared at me, completely unfazed. How many human women had she prepped? Did she feel nothing now?
“So the uniform will give me some protection. Protection from what?”
The prickly woman blinked, pursing her lips. “Volcanic heat. Subzero cold. Not weapons, but it’ll help with environmental danger.”
Not weapons.
I rolled that thought around in my head as I stood there in my underwear, curves on full display. I’d been whisked away from Earth by a giant tentacle, dropped into a cage full of other human women, and given a suit that should help protect me from extreme temperatures.
“Hold still,” Banana Blonde ordered as she moved to my side and lifted my hair. Not sure what she was trying to do, I complied and stood motionless. It wasn’t an act of defeat, but mostly because I was still completely arrested by my own thoughts. Volcanoes. Weapons. Freezing cold. Jesus.
Something sharp slicing behind my right ear broke my concentration and I squirmed away from the other woman.
“What the hell!” I slammed my hand over the place that hurt, my fingertips feeling a trickle of wetness.
She tapped her own ear. “Translator. We all have them. Otherwise you can’t understand the aliens.”
“A little warning would have been nice,” I hissed.
“If I’d told you I was going to push a tiny piece of tech into your brain, would you have said yes?” She shrugged, not giving a rat’s ass that she’d just implanted something without my consent.
“You’re a real peach, you know that?”
She shrugged again and walked off without so much as a ‘sorry’.
What. The. Hell. Is. Happening? And where the actual fuck am I?
