“Are you sure?” Maci looks completely bewildered by Kaya’s decision. “I really don’t mind. We were going to give up the com device anyway.”

“I really appreciate that,” Kaya tells her, glancing around at the room full of gathered women. “But I need to know that Sylvie’s okay. That Graham is still alive. I need to see them before I go.”

That’s true. She’s just leaving out the part about the three of us going with her.

I hate lying to them. The Sorority has been good to us, especially considering that we stole Tyson’s rabbit. But I’d feel even more guilty if I told them that we’re planning to escape—and leaving them behind. Not that we have any choice about that. Even with Kaya as my “hostage,” UA will never give me a ship big enough to take them all with me. And the more people who come, the better the chances of something going wrong. Of us getting caught, once we leave the planet.

“Well then, why don’t you stay here until then?” Audra suggests. “You’d be safe with us, and when Sebastian finds Sylvie and Graham, he can bring them back here. They’re more than welcome in in our community. Then, once you know they’re okay, Maci could take you out and make the call to get you rescued.”

“She’s right,” Tyson says from the doorway. “Anyone else you meet out here will likely not be…friendly. Especially if one of the former champions recognizes you from the arena.”

“What are they saying?” Callum asks in our dialect, and I translate for him. “I agree,” he says. “You should leave the woman here, to keep her safe.”

I translate his opinion for the rest of the room, and Kaya gives him a smile. “I appreciate the offer. I really do. But I’d rather stay with Sebastian.”

“Why—” Lilli begins.

Audra elbows her. “Because she’s in love.”

“Oh, I—” Kaya’s face flushes, and she glances at me quickly before dropping her gaze to the floor. But I can’t tear my gaze from her.

Is that true? Is this more for her than a way out of an existence she’s desperate to move on from? Than a satisfying sex life, after years of…David?

“Well, that’ll never work out,” Lilli says. “She works for UA and you’re a prisoner. That equation will never balance.”

Audra elbows her again, yet no one contradicts Lilli out loud. But they don’t know what I know. I don’t have to give Kaya up when I escape. I never have to give her up.

Callum studies Kaya, then turns to me, and it’s clear that he’s picked up on some of what I haven’t translated. And maybe some of what Kaya and I aren’t saying. “Men like us don’t luck out like this very often.” He takes Maci’s hand, and she gives him a warm smile. “So, from one lucky bastard to another…don’t fuck this up, man.”

“I won’t,” I assure him.

“Okay, then.” Audra stands and wipes her hands on the front of her cutoff pants. “Let’s make sure you have everything you’ll need.” But she’s talking to Kaya, not to me.

Kaya and I follow her into the hallway, where she stops in front of a small storage closet. Though all the other doors in the building are the standard slide-open interior kind, this one has been replaced with an exterior swing-open door.

Audra pulls a string from beneath the neckline of her shirt, and there’s a small metal ring hanging from it. She holds the ring in front of the door, where a notch in the frame denotes…something. When the ring snaps toward the metal door, I realize it’s a magnet.

She slides the ring toward the middle of the door, and I hear a soft grinding sound, like a deadbolt being pulled back. The bolt clicks into place, then the door swings toward us an inch. She pulls it all the way open and I see that someone has fitted the door and frame with a homemade magnetically operated internal deadbolt.

“Very clever.”

“Yeah, it’s Ty’s design.” Audra leads us into the large closet, where she begins pulling articles of clothing from several short stacks. “We don’t have a lot to spare yet, so if you don’t mind returning these before you get rescued, we’d greatly appreciate it,” she says as she hands Kaya a prison-issue tee-shirt that appears to be approximately her size.

“Of course,” Kaya agrees, as Audra adds a pair of pants and a precious set of prison-issue sneakers on top of the small pile in her arm. They’re a little worn, but infinitely better than the ones currently tied onto her feet.

“The clothes are a loan. We can only afford to lose one of the bed mats, but something tells me you’re okay with sharing.” She grins, and Kaya blushes. “But I’ll have to charge you for that. The supply drops don’t bring those.”

“Of course. What did you have in mind?”

“Well, some of the women are interested in the caviar, and there’s a rumor that you have crackers. We could also use antibiotics, if you have any to spare.”

“I do.” We have an extra bottle and a half, taken from the men I had to kill on our first night in zone three.

“And maybe a water bottle or two? We have the standard-issue pouches, but the rigid containers would come in handy for some things.”

I glance at Kaya. “I think we could spare one. Two, if you’re willing to trade one of them for an extra water pouch.”

Audra smiles. “I think we have a deal.”

The bed mat is small, but it takes up a lot of space, so I roll it up and put it in Kaya’s bag, along with a few pouches of food Audra was willing to part with, as well as two of our bottles of water. I carry everything else.

“Are you sure?” Maci asks Kaya again as women pour out of the building to see us off. “I hate to think of how vulnerable you’ll be out there.”

“Hey!” I grin at her. “I’m not going to let anything happen to Kaya.” For months, I’ve been forced to kill for UA, and despite the fact that my opponents were all death row inmates, each of those killings has weighed on my conscience. Because there’s no way to take a life with your bare hands and not be changed by that. But I would kill to protect Kaya in a heartbeat. I have killed to protect her. And I haven’t suffered even a second of regret over that.

“I know, it’s just…” Maci shrugs. “There’s safety in numbers.”

“We’ll see her again, Mace,” Audra says as she wraps one arm around the smaller woman’s shoulders. “And you’ll help her get off this rock.”

Kaya nods, and I hope they can’t see as clearly as I can that she’s hiding something. Surely they don’t know her that well already. “Thank you again, for everything,” she says. And for a second, she looks like she’d like to say more. Then she lurches forward and pulls Audra and Maci into a hug.

They hug her back, while Tyson, Callum, and I stand nearby. Awkwardly.

“Okay.” Kaya finally releases the ladies. “I guess we should go.”

“Be careful,” Maci says. “Oh, and don’t go east. It’s dangerous.”

“What’s east?” I ask. What could be more dangerous than the ambient threat of a prison planet?

“The fights,” Tyson says. “Audra and I were in zone three for a week before we found Callum, Maci, and the women, so I can tell you that most of zone three is open space. And except for our little community, it’s almost entirely male. So if anyone has seen your sister, they won’t have forgotten her.”

“Wait, what fights?” Kaya asks.

“The gladiators tend to congregate in a cluster of buildings in the east of the zone. They call it ‘the city,’” Audra says.

Great. “And you’re saying they still fight?”

Tyson nods. “We weren’t in that settlement very long, because Audra stood out. But they were having a semi-organized tournament, and they tried to get me to sign up. Then they tried to take Audra as their trophy. We had to fight our way out of there.”

“Surely they’re not all champions,” I say. “The men we ran into earlier definitely weren’t gladiators.”

“No,” Kaya agrees. “From what I understand, zone three is mostly just where they release arena champions, but there are some regular prisoners here.” She shrugs with a glance at the women. “Well, and you guys. But you all got here through…non-traditional means.”

“Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Lilli laments.

“What I don’t understand is why the champions would continue to fight,” Kaya says. “They’re not getting paid, and they’re no longer facing the death penalty.”

“Some men will always fight,” I tell her. “Some men don’t know any other way of life.” A few months ago, I would have thought I was one of them. But I don’t care if I never see the inside of another arena.

This isn’t how I thought I would retire. But I am ready for retirement.

“Are you ready?” I ask Kaya, and she nods, though she looks distracted by what we’ve learned.

“If you meet anyone—other than Sylvie and Graham—don’t tell them we’re here,” Maci says. “We try to keep a low profile.”

“Very low,” Lilli adds.

“You have our word,” I assure her. Then I put one arm around Kaya’s waist and guide her away from the crowd of women. “Would you rather stay?” I lean in to whisper. “I could come back for you after I find Sylvie.”

“No. I just hate goodbyes. Except the one I’m going to say to this planet,” she whispers.

Most of the ladies wave as we take our leave, and at the bottom of the hill, I look back to see that only Tyson, Audra, Callum, and Maci remain. They’re still watching us. They think I’m dragging Kaya into danger.

I really hope they’re wrong.

Despite the fact that we’re on our own again, Kaya is in good spirits. Now that she’s fully on board with the escape, she seems to think this will be easy, but getting off the planet was never going to be the hard part. The real challenges will be losing the ships that chase us, getting a credit transfer from my parents without triggering suspicion, then staying hidden from facial recognition software for the rest of our lives.

And, as she mentioned, the scrutiny and manhunt will be even more intense if we take off with a UA employee.

“You okay?” Kaya asks, a few minutes into our walk. “You’ve gone, like, half an hour without telling a dirty joke.”

I clutch my heart, as if I’m mortally wounded. “I am more than the sum of my suggestive frame of mind and flawless comedic timing, Kaya.”

“Yes, but those are the best parts of you.” She shoots a quick, pointed look at the front of my pants. “The second-best parts, anyway.”

I arch both brows at her. “It seems that my presence has had an obvious and irreversible influence on you.”

She laughs. “Thank god. But seriously, why were you scowling at the ground a minute ago?”

“I’m trying to figure out where to look for Sylvie and Graham.” Though that’s only one of my concerns. “For all I know, we could wander around out here for weeks without finding them. Especially if they don’t want to be found.” And considering everything we just heard about the fights, as well as the fact that Graham’s supposed to be dead and Sylvie won’t be expecting me out here for another nineteen weeks, they probably don’t want to be found.

“Maybe we’re wasting our time trying to find them,” Kaya says. “Maybe we should be trying to get them to find us.”

“How would we do that, when they don’t even know we’re here?”

“Well, first of all, I think there’s at least a fifty-percent chance that they do know we’re here. If they saw the crash, they’ll recognize the blimp, and they’ll know why it was flying over zone three. Even if they don’t figure out that you crashed it on purpose, if UA is looking for me, Sylvie and Graham have probably have seen the patrols. They’ll figure out that someone out here is wanted. We just have to give them reason to believe it’s us. Or, at least one of us.”

“Okay.” Damn, she’s clever. “So, how do we do that?”

Kaya shrugs. “I’m going to have to think about that part.”

We walk in silence for a few minutes, then she turns to me again. “Someone out here has to have seen Sylvie. And maybe even Graham. Unless one of them knows how to hunt and skin animals better than you do, they’re not living off the land. Which means they must be going to the supply drops. But if they’d been to any of the drops the Sorority has been to, the community would have known they were out there. Which means Sylvie and Graham are probably on the other side of the zone. The east side.”

The side where all the gladiators are. Which makes sense, considering that Sylvie was probably released the same place all the former champions were. “Okay. Any idea where the east side begins?”

“Nope. All I know is that there are two supply drops per week in each zone, and they always drop one on each side. To give inmates at least a theoretically even chance to get to them.”

“So, we know that eventually she’ll show up at a supply drop. But we don’t know when that’ll be or where the crate will land, other than on the east half of the zone.”

“We could probably figure that out, if we could turn on my com device, but that’s out of the question until we’re ready to deliver your demands.”

I shrug. “Okay, so back to your other idea, about drawing them out. What if we start leaving signs for Sylvie everywhere we go? Something she’ll recognize and immediately associate with me, to help her make the connection between the crashed blimp and my presence in zone three.”

“Okayyy,” Kaya says. “What about the Grand Champion logo? Or a simplistic version of it. You could carve it places. Like, into trees near convenient drinking and bathing spots in a stream. Or anywhere else she might discover it.” Kaya frowns. “It’s not a quick solution, but she and Graham can’t be in hiding all the time. They have to find food and water. So, maybe we just need to head east and start looking for places she might soon show up.”

“Again, the fights are in the east.”

Kaya shrugs. “We don’t have to waltz into the arena—or whatever they’re using as an arena—and announce ourselves. I highly doubt Sylvie and Graham are hanging out with all the other former champions, so by avoiding them, we might actually be getting closer to your sister.”

She’s right. She’s smart. And she’s all mine.

*

We spend the next two days hiking through zone three, carving the Grand Champion logo into trees near convenient bathing/drinking spots. The farther east we go, the more often we see men in the distance, alone or in small groups. We watch them just long enough to verify that there are no women with them, then we hunker down in the woods or in tall grass and wait for them to pass.

On our second night after leaving the Sorority, we find an abandoned building, and Kaya and I both breathe a sigh of relief. We’re exhausted and grimy, and if that building has running water, it’ll be the answer to largely unspoken prayers.

We head for it with a new burst of energy until—fifty feet from the front door—we see the beam of a flashlight through one of the windows. The building is occupied.

Kaya refuses to go any closer to it, even though I’m pretty sure that with the element of surprise, I could take whoever’s inside. Even if there are several of them. But after what happened last time, she starts shaking at just the thought.

“I don’t want you to have to kill people who may not deserve to die,” she whispers, as we stare at the dimly lit windows. “But I don’t want to let them go, either, if there’s a chance they’ll come back. And there’s always that chance, Sebastian.”

She’s not wrong. But I can’t leave until I know for sure that Sylvie isn’t in that building. So Kaya stays hunched down in the grass in the dark, clutching the folding multi-tool with the knife blade extended, while I sneak up to the building and peek into one of the windows on the side opposite the brightly shining moon. With no light source behind me, I shouldn’t be immediately noticeable from within the semi-lit room.

There are two men inside. The larger one is asleep sitting upright in one corner of the main room. The other is using his flashlight to dig through what I’m almost positive is the sleeping man’s well-worn backpack.

The smaller man looks…hungry. Hungry men are desperate men. Desperate men will fight even when they shouldn’t, because they have nothing to lose.

And the other one is almost certainly a former champion. Which means that even if he’s been without proper workout facilities and nutrition for several years, he knows how to fight.

Kaya is right. My sister isn’t here, so we should go.

We press on, and half an hour later we come across another patch of woods, where we find a clearing and start a fire the way Tyson showed us. He also showed us how to build a proper spit, but we don’t have anything to cook on it, so there’s no need to make one at the moment.

If we see him again, I’m going to ask for a lesson on skinning rabbits.

After a dinner of pre-packaged food, we lay our bed mat out on top of the spread-out poncho, to put as much between us and the ground as possible, then we go to sleep, too tired to expend energy on anything more fun.

But in the middle of the night, we’re awakened by a downpour. By torrential rain, unlike anything I’ve seen in my months on Rhodon. I’m soaked before I’m even fully awake.

“Damn it!” Kaya swears—a rarity that this storm seems to warrant—as she stands and begins shoving things into her pack. Our fire is out, of course, and the wood we gathered is soaked and useless.

While she packs, I roll up our drenched bed mat, then I shake out the poncho and drape it over her head. She’s already wet, but the plastic should still shield her. At least a little.

“We have to go back to the building!” I’m shouting to be heard over the roar of the rain and the frequent loud claps of thunder as I shove the dripping bed roll into one of our backpacks.

“I know!” she shouts back. “Come on!”

We slog through the rain, heading back toward the building we passed up earlier in the evening. Our shoes make squishy, sucking sounds with each step we take through the mud, and within minutes, Kaya gives up trying to keep the poncho hood on her head. The wind is too strong.

By the time the building comes back into sight, we’re so drenched that even my thoughts are soggy. There’s no light in the window this time, but I have no doubt the two men are still in there, probably trying to sleep through the storm.

I’m not sure how to approach this. All I am sure of is that we can’t stay outside. I have no idea when this storm will end, and while I’m pretty damn cold, Kaya’s teeth are chattering, and her hands are trembling hard enough to worry me.

“I want you to find a corner, like last time!” I shout right into her ear. “Just stay out of the way until I know how this is going to go down. Okay?”

As thunder shakes the world around us, she nods. Or maybe that’s just an extra-hard tremble.

I pull open the door and tug her in after me as quickly as I can, both to get her out of the rain and to get us both inside before the occupants realize what’s happening. Which turns out to be unnecessary, because somehow, they’ve been sleeping through the storm, and it takes them a second to fully wake up.

“What the fuck?” the smaller man grumbles as he stands, reaching for his bag out of what’s obviously an instinct developed to protect his things.

“Hey,” I say. “The storm’s pretty bad, so we’re going to have to share the building with you for a while.”

“No fucking—”

The larger man elbows him, then nods at Kaya. “No problem. Take a load off.”

I motion her toward the corner nearest the door we’ve just come through, and Kaya sits. She’s still shivering, and if we had the place to ourselves, I’d strip her out of her clothes and lay them out to dry while I warm her with my body heat. But that’s out of the question under these circumstances. As is sleeping. I’m not going to be able to close my eyes or turn my back as long as those men are here.

“I’m Eric,” the smaller man says. “That’s Warren.” Eric sits again, and I’m a little encouraged by the fact that they’re giving us some space. Though they’re both staring at Kaya. Which is to be expected, considering that the male-to-female ratio is even higher in zone three than in most of the other open population zones.

Though, that may not technically be true, considering all the women in the Sorority. But so far, the rest of the zone doesn’t seem to know about that.

“She okay?” Warren asks, when Kaya’s chattering teeth start to sound like a jackhammer demolishing concrete.

“She will be.” I move in front of her, partially shielding her from sight, and I make no effort to hide my size.

“You two have names?” Warren asks.

Kaya glances at me with her brows raised, silently asking for my opinion before she answers. Since violent criminals are my area of expertise. I shrug. I’m not sure how telling them our names could make this a riskier venture than it already is, considering that Warren—clearly a former gladiator—doesn’t seem to recognize her. “I’m Kaya,” she offers.

“Sebastian,” I tell them.

“Well, you both look pretty miserable. Feel free to change into some dry clothes, if you have any,” Warren says. “You have my word that we mean you no harm.”

“Though if you have any food to share, we wouldn’t turn it down,” Eric adds. “It’s been a while since we made it to a drop.”

I squat next to Kaya and dig in her bag, keeping one eye on the men as I assess the state of her spare clothes—the ones we took off a dead body several days ago and washed out at the Sorority. “They’re still pretty dry,” I tell her. And since we slept with our bed mat on top of the poncho, which was on top of a layer of leaves, there doesn’t seem to be any mud in her bag, even though the shoes and clothes we’re actually wearing are splattered with it. “Why don’t you change? I’ll watch the door.” I nod toward a dark hallway leading from the other side of the room.

I keep myself between Kaya and the men as we pass them. The hallway opens up to three rooms, but none of the doors will fully close. One room is a two-stall bathroom, and the others are both empty offices.

Kaya goes into one of the offices, and I stand in the doorway while she changes.

“Hey, man, does the water work in here?” I call with another glance into the bathroom.

“Only in one of the sinks,” Eric calls back. “But both of the toilets still flush. Help yourselves.”

Kaya comes out a minute later, dressed in her old, ill-fitting but mostly dry clothes. In sock feet, because her shoes are a muddy mess. She gives me a tiny smile as she shoves soaked hair back from her forehead. Then she heads into the bathroom.

I change while she uses the facilities, then we stretch our wet clothes out over the stalls and across the sinks to dry. I’m not happy about leaving them there unattended, but I’m not going to make Kaya squat in the bathroom all night, so we return to the front room together.

One of our towels has mostly escaped the rain, so I use it to dry off the bed mat, then I gesture for her to lie down and try to sleep. I’ll keep watch. She lies with her back to the wall, but I can tell she’s not going to sleep. She’s as wary of Eric and Warren as I am. They haven’t noticed her lack of a prisoner number yet, and she’s keeping her hand out of sight, but even if they haven’t figured out that she’s not a prisoner, they know she’s a woman, and she’s probably the first one they’ve seen in a while.

I sink onto the end of the mat and pull Kaya’s feet onto my lap. Then, when I realize the men have nothing to do but stare at us, I dig in my bag and pull out two of our last pre-packaged cookies and toss them across the room. “Thanks for the hospitality,” I say. Because I know nothing here is free.

“Thanks.” Warren catches one of the cookies, but Eric’s hits the ground with a crunch. He snatches it up and rips the package open, then shoves a chunk of the broken cookie into his mouth.

“So, you’re one of them?” Eric’s gaze seems to be assessing me, and for a second, I think he’s into men. Which would be a relief for Kaya. But then I realize he’s just now noticing my size.

“One of what?” I ask, though I’m pretty sure I know what he means.

“One of the champions,” Eric says around another bite of his cookie. “The living dead. Because they survived the death penalty. You look like one of them.”

“I’m not,” I tell him. “Not exactly.”

Warren nods. “It’s not the right time of year for them to release a new champ. But we’ve never seen you, so you must be new.”

I lift one brow at him. “You know everyone in zone three?”

“No. But I’d remember you. You may not be a champ, but you’re a fighter, aren’t you?”

I nod. But I’m not giving him any details. “You too?”

Warren nods. “I was the champion several years back.” But since he doesn’t seem to recognize Kaya, that must have been before she took her job with UA. “Seems like a lifetime ago.”

“You should go into the city,” Eric says. “You could probably make a fortune in the fights.” He shrugs. “Or, what passes for a fortune, out here. You have to pay to enter, but they’ll take anything. Food. Clothes.”

“Your woman,” Warren adds, and Kaya shoots a glare at him. But I don’t think he was suggesting I use her as an entry fee. He seems to have been warning us about the possibility.

“The winner gets the whole pot,” Eric finishes. “They’ve been talking about making a tournament bracket, but so far no one’s been willing to put in that kind of effort.”

“Do you fight?” I ask.

Eric snorts. “I’ve been in the pit a couple of times, when I got hungry. But I’d get killed in the real fights.”

“The pit?” Kaya asks.

“Amateur hour,” Eric says around the last bite of his cookie. “For those of us who weren’t in the arena. It’s stupid, but the champs think it’s funny, and they sometimes make big bets on their pets.”

“Their pets?” Horror echoes through Kaya’s voice, and Eric bristles at her tone.

“You ever been hungry?” he snaps. “Cause you’ll do a lot of shit you always thought you wouldn’t, when you’re fucking hungry.”

“Relax,” Warren says. “She’s just trying to figure it out. They’re new.”

Evidently that’s pretty damn obvious.

“Some of the champs take smaller guys and turn them into…” Warren shrugs.

“Pets?” Kaya finishes.

“Well, yeah. They keep their pets fed, but they make them do things. Like fight in the pit.”

I’m betting that’s not all the pets are made to do.

“That’s despicable,” Kaya says. “Being forced to fight for food.” Eric still looks uncomfortable, but he no longer seems to be taking her opinions as criticism.

“It’s not much different in the arena,” I remind her. Choosing to fight is one thing. As with sex, it’s an issue of willingness. Consent.

Kaya nods. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

I’m not sure whether she’s talking to me or Eric.