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with seats. The sound of roaring approval came in from…somewhere. I didn’t see any speakers, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
    None of the humans around me cheered.
    The camera zoomed in on the pit.
    A door opened, and the woman I had just been talking to was dragged out and tossed onto the dirt. Lisa got to her feet and brushed her hands on her clothes, getting dust off.
    Nothing about the situation seemed to surprise her. Grim determination carved her face into hard lines.
    Her mouth moved. She was yelling at the people sitting in the bleachers around this pit—this thing that Lord Hector had called the Grinder—but I couldn’t hear anything she was saying. It looked foul, though. Lisa was probably using every single bad word that she had ever heard and making up a few to add spice.
    The camera cut to another door.
    Another woman came inside. She wasn’t dragged, like Lisa had been. Her jaw was set and her hands were balled into fists.
    A sickening idea came over me.
    The Grinder looked a lot like an old Roman coliseum to me.
    But there were no lions in this coliseum.
    I didn’t know if I wanted to watch what was going to happen between Lisa and her opponent. But I couldn’t look away.
    A bell rang, the crowd cheered, and the second woman went after the first.
    They both fought, and I don’t know if I expected spears or what, but I was shocked when the first fist connected with a nose. Maybe it was the sight of bright-red blood.
    The crowd sounded hungry.
    “Lisa doesn’t have a chance,” someone murmured beside me.
    That was the only thing anyone said during the fight.
    I wish it hadn’t been true.
    Lisa got her hits in. She might have broken the other woman’s arm at one point, and she definitely bruised her eye. But the other woman had several inches of height on Lisa, and that alone should have given her the edge.
    When Lisa fell to the ground, the other woman took her opportunity, straddled her, and wrapped her long fingers around the fallen woman’s throat.
    I didn’t hear the choking sounds.
    But my imagination was good enough to fill in the blanks.
    That was the end of the fight for me. I turned away, shaking with tears as I stumbled back to Marc.
    For the first time since I had been taken from my parents, I sobbed.
----
    L isa was dead .
    It didn’t take me long to realize that.
    Even though I was trying not to look at the TV screen, the reactions of the people in the cell with us said enough about her fate.
    A frisson of disappointment ran through our fellow prisoners. They returned to their mats, sinking to the floor to languish in the gloom again.
    For a few electric minutes, they had been alive. Awake. And they had wasted that energy by watching the battle instead of trying to gather themselves to turn their violence where it mattered.
    By the time I lifted my head, enough people had moved away from the TV that I could see the screen. The woman who had killed Lisa was being taken away by vampires. She wasn’t reacting to anything: the crowd above her, the men rushing her out, the woman lying behind her. She looked blank. Like there was nothing happening within her skull.
    I couldn’t imagine what that must feel like, killing someone for a bloodthirsty audience.
    Lord Hector had called it the Grinder.
    I understood now that meant we were all waiting for our turn to fight.
    “Marc,” I said, clutching my best friend’s arm. “We have to do something.”
    “Just tell me what to do,” he said, voice still rough. His eyes were still foggy. “I can’t think, Bianka. All the sedatives… I still feel like I’m dreaming.” He tried to focus on me. “Am I dreaming?”
    My eyes burned. “I wouldn’t dream anything like this in my worst nightmares.”
    Voices echoed through the cell.
    “Another! Another!” The vampires kept chanting that again and again.
    Another. Another. Another.
    I got a lump in my throat. Someone else was going to die.
    The door opened again. Two more