You descend the limestone hallways of the George Merrick Amphitheater. It’s of Neoclassical construction. Muddy handprints loiter where Corinthian columns once stood. Merchant kiosks, betting stations, and food stalls hunker among the defaced architecture, stuffed within excavated portions of crumbling stone.

The five-hundred-year-old temple blesses your exit with decaying domes and shattered statuary, you and Ø arm-in-arm with the dregs.

At the entrance, the forty-meter-high grand staircase, you jostle the crowds further. The gunk gathered on each step keeps you anchored in lieu of a railing, sucking in the soles of your boots as you stumble. Only the occasional drunkard slips on revealed stone, sending themselves tumbling back down to the base. While bloodied, unconscious or otherwise, the unfortunate victim entertains those without the means to watch the bloodbath unfolding within.

At this distance, you hear the dying hisses of an unknown, already-forgotten creature as the crowd roars.

Ø’s mane drips from her head as you both reach Algonquin’s main street, its pre-historic construction affixed with a permanent, bubbling veneer of mire. Groups of disparate travelers hobble from one side of the road to the other. They dodge the stalks of exposed electrical wires and merchants shouting against the tempest. All clutch their ponchos close, their plastic wrappings exposing crisp outlines of revolvers and kukri.

Here, beneath the once-hostile canopies of omnivorous vegetation, the settlement stretches to the size of a small city. Every month another outlying building, with its formerly pristine concrete or stone foundation, is swallowed by the encroaching dendromass. Creeping treelines edge the outskirts a little further inward, centimeters closer to the artificial heart of Algonquin, the George Merrick Amphitheater.

For centuries, the limestone pacemaker has kept tourists, layabouts, fighters, and schemers flowing in and out of the last remaining single-platform spaceway, Fisher Spaceport. It rises before you, across from the gladiatorial sanctuary.

Although it has only a single lonesome platform to service the settlement’s intergalactic traffic, at first glance you might think it to be the busiest port on the planet’s surface. Even now, starships lurk between clouds, selfishly jockeying one another, arguing over who’s next to touch down, their strobe lights illuminating the dilapidated buildings and mudswept alleyways.

You’re careful to watch your step, avoiding the swale at the street’s edge. On either side, thin trenches channel the overflowing rainwater. It meanders down the slight inclines, hundreds of kilometers away, into the endless monsoons that batter uninhabitable coasts with three-hundred-kilometer-per-hour winds. Gales fast enough to send a palm frond through a femur or chew a wind turbine into a swarm of steel hornets.

Algonquin’s eternal dusk is slipping to night. Rain pelts neon signs, making them hiss and boil, flickering against the distant treetops.

The buildings are short, the tallest only five stories high, affixed forever on the stone bases from which archaic settlers had platted their foundations. Here the crumbling structures stand, meekly, against the howling degradation of perpetual thunderstorms. You and Ø hold the same pace, trudging through the mud and crowds to your regular destination, a two-story shack amidst the frothing settlement’s main street: The Columbia Manor.

A single poncho’d wampus mercenary guards its mangled Queensland doors. He crosses his four arms in a professional malaise as he loiters. His amber feline eyes, with his vertical pupils, shoot you predatory glances through the shadows. Within his black lips, his filthy catlike fangs are filed, whittled. Their sharpened forms stand against Black sediment that sticks to his muzzle and dances on his twitching whiskers.

You watch as two paws reveal a cigarette to light, while the other two jealously guard it above from further moisture. With an exhale that brings the smoke through his snout, he glances elsewhere; the wagluhe’s half-assed job of intimidation is complete, his rent earned, your familiar entrance granted with his tacit, yage-addled approval.

You enter the structure. Its shoddy doors give way to a cramped hallway, covered on all surfaces with ironed-on repurposed plastics. At The Columbia Manor, the mud is only a few centimeters thick. And as you dredge further into the intestines of the pub, it’s almost clean. Or, what you would consider clean after months of life on the rainforest planet.

Your footsteps squelch through The Columbia Manor’s esophagus and enter the dimly lit belly of the beast.

Rain drips from the bar’s monochromatic plasticwood ceiling. It collects in the series of buckets and orifices that encircle the flat-roofed tavern, which produce acoustics in lieu of the timeworn, dilapidated bandstand. Gnarled tarps overhead divert and channel falling water. The criss-crossing shadows draw sharp edges over the establishment, lathering the scene with a humid Cubism.

The ancient buntings, all greasy and moldy, have melted into the walls alongside advertisements for long-forgotten chautauquas. Miscellaneous posted bills are now part of the building itself, including the largest advertisement for privatized colonization with smiling hieroglyphic, Moderne effigies that declare, “It’s Always June on New Port Moresby.”

Ø scans the dark room for a suitable enclave. She preemptively investigates the various specters hunched over their drinks. In return, the local rustlers greet her with side-eyes, brows furrowed in loneliness and mutual destitution. They’re just as wet and miserable as you, but at least they’ve spent the past few hours drinking.

You migrate to a booth at the back wall, between one cradling a passed-out gump, the other a temporary home for two green, bedraggled tourists.

The booth’s stone seats are carved into the rock. Touched with concrete. Covered with repurposed finto-furs and discarded poncho skins. Piecemeal luxuries that only the most affluent of publicans can afford.

Luxuries that, a year prior, you wouldn’t have considered to be luxuries.

You brush aside the tarp tent flap that encloses the booth, letting Ø in on one side before cramming in to face her. With the flap closed, buttoned, the incessant dripping above reverberates against the taught material. Ø’s huff of discontent draws fog across the translucent canvas.

“I hate this planet,” she growls. Triangles of light cascade from bright to dark across her face. Their angular shapes bisect and intertwine at the suggestion of the hundreds, thousands, millions of plastic layers that encase the pub. She’s a sopping, seething synchromy of muted hues. “I thought I hated it back then, but at least I had food. And a bed.”

You can see her former existence, as it often appears in her night terrors. Ones where she sweats, grinding her molars in between fits of screaming, recoiling at phantom pains. Life inside her golden cage aboard the Chang Tsung-ch’ang.

It includes intermittent flights across the known galaxy, admission to the exclusive palaces of bloodsport, mainly those of New Port Moresby. Aboard the helium harvester cum luxury liner, food is served. Handled by the private chefs. Slaves like her. Shanghaied instead of tank-bred.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Exotic, traditional flavors dance between her black lips, of caramelized sweet potatoes, fresh tomato and red cabbage borscht, arrowroot noodles with boiled Manchurian sauerkraut, prepared for the lonely consumption of one of the galaxy’s up-and-coming gladiatrices.

Then, finally, she lounges alone in her predatory sanctuary.

She’s doted on as all dangerous, caged animals are. Resting among the buttery, hand-spun milli-cotton linens, lazing on her kang, the bed warmed and vibrating with the hum of the nearby Chungming B-97 Microfusion Engines. She lays, cocooned beneath the silkwood, artisinal-carved bedframe that depicts Yellow-hatted bodhisattvas and anthropomorphic psychopomps. In the daze of her anabolic injections, delightful cocktails supplemented with the narcotics worthy of a tiara like herself, she stares through the translucent, damask weaved thangka tapestries into the canopy. Her hazy eyes trace the contorting muraled dakini figures, their dishabille forms adorned with skulls and spears, dancing to their deaths.

She toys with her ornamental psalion harness of silver-Blue lapis and coral insets that spreads across her snout, dragging her manicured digits across the jewels in a zonked-out bliss. Her mouth salivates into a comfortable domestication. Tomorrow she will kill. Then, she will kill again. And after that. Continuously, as she’s commanded to do.

She’s forever victorious, forever rewarded, lasciviously compensated for her enthusiastic participation in Pavlovian samsara.

But, bursting into her daydreaming, her eyes open to your tired face across from her, the both of you distressingly sober.

To admit her subconscious distaste towards manumission is embarrassing. Girlish. An attribute she lacks. So, she doesn’t meditate on the confusing emotions that lurk beneath her shallow brown eyes, refusing to acknowledge the insecurities she broadcasts beyond her control.

Instead, she hides. She skulks behind rose-tinted memories of groveling attendants. The ghosts enrapture her body with bird-and-flower bolts of pure-silk, ones that brush through her naked pelt, contorting against crevices from bar-coded sternum to massaged thigh, their pawing hands lingering slightly too long, tailoring her yet another hallucinogenic wrap dress as a phantom gift, repaying her for compliance. Compliance that she shirked when she stole her freedom.

It’s a dress fitted, tied at the waist, miraculously dyed in her mind for the sole purpose of spiting you for circumstances beyond your control.

“Don’t tell me you’d rather go back to being a slave,” you groan.

She glares, the last droplets from her chin settling on the stone table in front of you. It’s complimented with a thin skin of plastic wrap, holding inside advertisements for knocking-shops, opium dens, and freighting companies. She’s killed lesser men for back-talk like that.

But, as she chews her lips, she turns her oblong head to the side in contempt.

Without further murder, she flicks the simple switch to call for a barmaid. The contraption’s rusted metal exterior barely holds onto life. Its gnarled, polyester-wrapped wiring strains against the tension, threatening to rip loose in a twisted explosion of Black mold and sparks.

In another life, hundreds of years ago, it was an intercom aboard a pedestrian starship. Maybe a colonizing craft, or a repurposed commercial terraformer. Ø impatiently scratches at the dull rust of the exterior. It crunches and squeaks, forcing reactions of disgust as the noise bores into your molars.

“What’s the difference? It’s not like I have a choice to be here either, do I?”

A Red light blinks from the system. The monotonous on-and-off glare wipes itself against the foggy flaps of the booth, smothering you both. Your insecurities manifest the light into a perverse premonition. Covering you in bloodlike imagery, how could they not? Maybe you’re in danger, like the old man warned.

“I told you, nobody was there,” Ø shouts, cutting off any further thoughts on the matter. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull. If you talk to someone, if you see someone, if you even think about someone, I know. I can’t even ignore you if I tried. And believe me—I’ve tried.”

“Someone was there. That’s a fact. He had a fancy little umbrella, rich clothes, a cane, didn’t have a drop of water on him,” you stammer. You’re running out of breath, sprinting through your words. “Wasn’t from here. That’s for sure.”

“Shut up about his stupid outfit,” she snarls. “Explain how I couldn’t see him. You can mentally yell at me from five stories up, ogle me when changing, but I can’t see a guy who’s standing in front of you? And for another—”

The mare’s tirade halts as a clawed hand brushes aside the plastic lining of the booth, flooding it with the bar’s subdued commotion. Two vertical pupils invade the sanctity of the enclosure, their volcanic Red orbs glued on a froglike head, complete with tusks, horns, and matted olive fur. Its toothy mouth is on display. Ambivalent, locked in a perpetual, predatory grin. The hodag waitress stares at you expectantly, begetting your request.

Ø slams her fist on the table, creating a threatless puff of air within its poor insulation.

“You know what we want. So get it! It’s not like you serve anything else!”

The barmaid stares her down, batting its crimson eyes and investigating the source of the insults. Drawing a single clawed digit between you, the creature flicks off the switch, bringing the light’s bloody Red tint to a close. Too smart to hiss at your partner, it nods politely before slowly lurking from the tent, its back spikes carefully dodging the flaps that snap shut. Ø’s eyes track downwards, towards the silenced call button, transfixed between her nervous markings etched in rust.

She chews her lips and crosses her chest with indignation.

With her head sideways, you see the fresh cut. She suffered it only two months ago. The wound is perpetually young. It draws across her cheek as a single diagonal line, nearly catching the corner of her mouth and the bottom of her eye. In the humidity, it threatens to open up again. To become infected, ooze puss as every other injury does. It lives on her tired face as an unhealthy reminder of the tenuous grasp on your situation.

She sighs once more, her lungs spitting out enough air to pop your insulated bubble from the pressure.

“I’m sorry,” she growls, no other recourse available to her enfeebled psyche. Her mocking tone matches her general indignation. You know, in your intertwined consciousness, that she is not. Similarly, she knows you don’t care, choosing to ignore yet another outburst.

You don’t want to blame her. She’s right, after all. The barmaid will bring the same order.

Stale beer, lukewarm. Expired stock transferred from some other doomed settlement across the galaxy. Dropped from above, parachuted rather than delivered with care, fished out from the canopies. Watered down. Served with a metallic aftertaste from the gutters and pipes that leak above the bar, ones that soil the odd surfaces and taps behind the counter where the establishment’s workers often sleep.

Then, gruel. A mixture of tough plants, rubbery insects, and roots that get caught between your teeth. Stripped from the jungle’s tall trees or picked from the detritus. Boiled, now simmering in some impromptu stewpot that has simmered continuously in the pub’s four-hundred-years of operation.

Within the booth’s plastic wings, the earthy protein smells intermingle, producing an unholy concoction that tickles the back of your throat and naturally induces vomiting. You grimly accept the thought of paying for yet another one of these ‘meals.’

“Don’t be,” you whisper above your own negativity, lying in turn. “But the man said they would get us. Somehow.”

“Who would?” She scoffs.

“The Reds and Blacks. They’ll take us both out during the event. Us and a bunch of others.”

“They’d throw everyone’s shot at The Circuit just to turn us in? I wouldn’t run that job. Gates alone made double the amount in today’s betting. Not to mention Chief would miss his chance to qualify for The Circuit himself. The bigwigs don’t even know who we are, and if they did, we wouldn’t matter to them at all.”

“I thought the same.”

Ø looks at you, her frame perpetually on-edge, hyper-aware of your shared perpetual danger. Her wandering eyes beg whether you believe the shadowy figure. She wonders if you think you’re about to share your last meal with her. Not out of empathy, but revulsion.

She knows insecurity sticks to you. Like sweat, unable to evaporate off your sickly skin, fogging within your poncho. It’s preylike, she thinks. You’re cracking under the pressure. Weak, as always.

You both painstakingly ignore the radiant hatred that you both share, passed to and fro, growing with intensity.

And as she’s done for the past few months, she draws back. She sits in silence, refusing to continue the conversation. Even when you can read her subconscious before she can herself. Inside, she’s mentally vacant, as if she were elsewhere. Somewhere without the steady dripping of water on plastic.

Or somewhere with more organisms to peel the skin off of as they scream in fear, sating her anxieties like her embedded stimulus-response protocols demand. Peeling like the raindrops. One after the other, forever.

A clawed digit probes the plastic lining. The barmaid returns with her savage, rigid grin. You’re content to keep your opinions to yourself, too. New Port Moresby has a habit of stifling any discussion about the future.

The smell of stewed, rotted cicadas waft through your nostrils, and a familiar nausea bubbles from within.