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back at Bathari. “You don’t see why I’m suspicious?”
    “Domina Lennai is not her father,” Bathari pointed out.
    “But she is still a Chara domina. This is a distraction.”
    Bathari snorted. “Think what you like. I will fight all the harder tomorrow just to see if I can get my hands on the alien.” He mimed squeezing. “My hands all over her.”
    “You’re far too disgusting for a Jiayi.” Vega sighed. He got up from his seat, frowning at the Jiayi warrior, and turned away. “I’m going to bed. And if you get drunk tonight, I’m not saving your ass on the sands tomorrow. You’ll die because you couldn’t hold your cups. Think on that.”
    “Yes, yes,” Bathari crowed. “Get your beauty sleep, sweet Vega! And don’t worry about me, I’ll fight better tomorrow than I ever have before. You’ll see!”
    Vega just growled at him and left the table, heading out of the mess hall entirely.
    Idiots. They just couldn’t see. None of them could see. When Vega had volunteered to fight for his planet, House Chara had offered the best deal of all the high families. Fight, win, be free. But Vega had been young and he hadn’t thought about it enough, hadn’t looked closely. Hadn’t seen. You couldn’t just win once . Couldn’t just top the lists in one bout of games, no. You had to climb higher and higher, and you could never fall —not once— or you started back at the bottom all over again. Vega was only four game days away from his freedom. Unlike these useless shitpots, he wasn’t about to let some pretty alien thing distract him from what was his. From going home. At last. He left the uproar of the mess and headed for his bunk, thankful he had risen high enough that he had one to himself. He needed the quiet, needed to focus now, on the fighting to come.
     

Chapter Six
    Day and night were not words that existed on the station. Alaina discovered that quickly enough. She could not have said how much time had passed since she’d woken up on Rua’s ship. She cried for a while, and then the crying started to make her feel more helpless, and so she stopped. In an effort to reinforce her practical nature, she got up from the bed and began exploring. She started with her room first. Though it felt like a cell, it wasn’t, and it was on a space station. Alaina kept telling herself that over and over again to remember it, and to find a weakness somewhere. It was a small room, but the adjacent bathroom was fully functional. The shower poured that same milky white water from the bathhouse, which Alaina assumed was the space version of bodywash. There was a closet full of clothes, but all the clothes were more or less the same as the sheer dress they’d put her in at the slave market.
    There was also a control panel embedded in the wall, which told her what time of solar it was, whether the station’s life support program was running night or day and, she imagined, it was some part communication device but she couldn’t figure out how to work it. Tapping at it gave her the time and other pertinent information on the station, market activity and when the games would take place, but if there was a way to call for someone, she couldn’t find it. She considered that maybe it only went one way. She could be summoned, but couldn’t summon back.
    Eventually she gave up on the control panel. According to its information, it was night now, and she’d spent enough time crying and feeling sorry for herself. Now the slave quarters was dark and quiet, and the palace seemed to have gone to bed. If she wanted to escape before the games the next solar, she had to do it now. But she had no plan, no weapons, no actual method of getting off the ship, not even a basic understanding of where she was or how to work the station’s technology. Perfect. But there was an urgency in her heart and a determination to seize any moment she could. So she left her little room and worked her way back through the darkened servants’