A pit yawned open on the edge of the statue’s remains at the Mele beach. A livid scar, hollowed out by the raiders, another wound they had carved in the place and her people. Deep enough so that even the tallest islander couldn’t reach the top, the dirt walls spilled plumes of white sand from the rim whenever a raider came close. The sand was only the barest layer; below it was fertile brown-black, alive with roots. A grate made of crisscrossed tree trunks closed over the opening, its weight sinking it into deep ruts in the dirt. A looming crane beside it, erected by the pirates, was the only thing strong enough to lift it. This was the slave pit, a hellish prison for human beings degraded for the sake of the greed of others.

  Hepthys was still dazed from her defeat when the slavers had thrown her in. Someone caught her and lowered her to the cool ground. When the voice whispered comfort, it was familiar. Mailani.

  Hepthys surfaced from her despair at least momentarily, doing her best to concentrate against the hideous throbbing in her head. “Mailani?” she managed.

  The woman smiled. “It’s me.” Mailani sported a few minor wounds on her prodigious body, but other than that, and the soot clinging to her, she looked almost as she had at Kamo’loa.

  Hepthys sighed, grateful to see a friendly face, then replaced with horror when she realized it only meant her friend was imprisoned. “We need to get out of here.” Hepthys moved quickly, and the throbbing in her head pushed her right back.

  “Stay still. You look like you took the wrong end of a fight.”

  “I think we all did,” Hepthys said, touching her head. Underneath the wound, she was tender, but her skull was intact. The blood was going tacky. It would stop soon. She tried not to think about how much had come out. It was one thing to learn in Academy how much people could bleed; it was quite another to see her own blood spilling from her head.

  “You right about that.”

  Hepthys struggled into a sitting position. Her wings were no help. They ached after Anhchoi’s careless treatment of them, and were even more limp than they had been already. She cursed them for the first time. Her wings were supposed to be what elevated her. They had done nothing but hold her back since she found this Ash World.

  “What is this place?”

  “Slave pen,” Mailani said. “Really just a hole in the ground. Been dug here since before the attack. Threw all the survivors in.”

  Hepthys looked around. Kono was nowhere to be seen, nor did she see anyone with the distinctive tattoos of the ma’hanu. “Not everyone, surely.”

  Mailani nodded to one of the walls, and Hepthys guessed it was the seaward one. “The ma’hanu are out on the warjunk. Locked up special so they don’t use magic against the nationals. Nationals of magic.” Mailani said this last with a grin. Captivity, it seemed, hadn’t crushed her spirit.

  Looking around, Hepthys saw Mailani was one of the only ones. Or perhaps merely putting up a brave face for her alien friend. There were two distinct groups: one was freshly-wounded, sooty, but not especially dirty. They spoke in low tones in small cliques of twos and threes, often with furtive glances at the grating above. The second group was filthy, with dirt covering them in black gloves and boots, smeared up their bodies. If they were wounded, it was on the back, in long stripes in various stages of being healed. Their eyes were hollow, and they seldom spoke to anyone, even each other. They looked dead, but as though their bodies had yet to accept what their wills were telling them. Hepthys had a hard time looking at them. Harder still when she imagined it happening to Mailani. Or to her.

  “We have to find a way out,” Hepthys said.

  Mailani nodded. “Don’t know what that is yet. Talked to some of the Mele—ones that still talk, anyway.” She glanced superstitiously at one of the hollowed-out people. “They said they take us out every day. Work us to build those walls.” She shook her head.

  “What?”

  “Don’t know what they buildin’.”

  “A fortress,” Hepthys said.

  Mailani frowned. “A what?”

  “A fortified place to repel defenders.”

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  Mailani shook her head again. “Sounds crazy, but I think you right.”

  Hepthys thought of all the great cities she had seen. The ones on Atum-Ra, gracefully floating on the sunset skies. The Tethyn ones, rising above the oceans and sinking beneath them in a mirror image. The latticework geometric creations of Cytopaea, bound with crackling energy and spinning over their volatile world. She had seen pictures of the other allied Fire Worlds. So many cities, so many people, of dizzying variety. These people had never seen anything larger than one of their villages. There were metropolises in the nations, though Hepthys imagined them to be small and filthy, nothing compared to the soaring grace of the Fire Worlds in the Union.

  To the tribe, the idea of taking and holding territory was entirely unfamiliar. They didn’t conquer. The nations came to their seas to raid, nothing more. What Anhchoi was doing had no precedent.

  And Hepthys was the one who had given him the inspiration.

  ***

  Hepthys spent that night trying and failing to sleep. Mailani and a few of the other Kamo’loa accepted their visitor. The other tribes, as much as there were divisions in the slave pen, did not trust the girl with sails on her back. Hepthys was grateful for any measure of acceptance. Although when her belly began to rumble at nightfall, she changed her mind. Word had passed through the pen; food was served once a day, right when they let them out of the cage, and then not much of it.

  Hepthys’s stomach yawned and gurgled in time with the throbbing in her wounded head. In the dark of the night, she couldn’t see much of anything. The only light came from the moon and stars, and a few torches blazing out of range. Of her fellow prisoners, she saw only shapes in the dark, heard breathing, none of which was even enough for slumber. And she heard a few, furtive sobs.

  The sun rose several years later. The crash of the waves and cries of the pirates followed.

  “Wakey, lazy tribals!” shouted a slaver from the top of the pit.

  “Time for another glorious day of work for the true lords of Zhao-Chi!” hollered another.

  The ropes squeaked and strained as they pulled the heavy grate open. The pen sighed. The pirates kicked in a coil of rope over the side, thick knots at regular intervals. It uncoiled, creating a primitive ladder.

  “Everybody out!” shouted the first pirate. “No pushin’, no shovin’. The work is gonna be there.”

  “But the first one out gets double rations,” said the second pirate.

  Both of them howled with glee as the hollow-eyed Mele bolted for the front. As weak as they were, they shoved the others aside with ease. For their parts, the non-Mele looked on with astonishment. Starvation hadn’t taken root in them quite yet.

  A scrum erupted by the rope, the Mele fiercely struggling for who got to go first. The others, Mailani included, called to them, telling them to remember who they were. Not to hurt anyone. The Mele ignored the words. Finally, the largest man shoved a young woman aside and scaled the rope with a few pulls. When he got to the top, his sides and back heaved with breath. His skin was covered in fresh nail marks from those he’d fought with.

  “Congratulations, tribal. You’ll be eating good tonight, an’ as a special reward, that last one who tried to take it from you ain’t gonna be eatin’ at all.”

  The other pirate laughed even louder. The winner could only look at the ground. Hepthys could swear his hunched shoulders shudder.

  After that, it was an easy climb out for everyone. Food was a thin stew served in halved fruit rinds. There was maybe a single chunk of something in each bowl, and when Hepthys ate it, it tasted like it had spoiled a long time ago. Her stomach first seized, but then opened, greedily taking what she had to give it. There wouldn’t be anything else, and this was scarcely more than hot water.

  After that, the nationals separated them into work gangs. Some were sent to cut trees, others to haul them, others to shape them, and others to put them in place. There were ditch-diggers and fillers, builders and weavers. Hepthys, possibly due to her small size, was sent to do the weaving. The palm fronds the haulers brought in were woven into thatching for the rooftops of all the new buildings being constructed. It looked like each ship was getting what would have been a great hall to the Waiolans, a land-bound barracks for every crew.

  There was no shade. Whatever trees had grown in the Mele village were cut down, repurposed into the palisades now surrounding it. In the brief glimpse she got out of the gates, she saw that the same was true for the surrounding jungle and orchards. She shook her head in despairing wonder. The nationals had, in the process of taking this place, gotten rid of one of the most reliable sources of food. How were they planning to feed all their people? Were they?

  As for Hepthys, she spent the day in the sweltering sun, crisscrossing the fronds over and over until her biceps were twitching. Her weave was clumsy, the gaps wide. One of the others, a man she later learned was from the Kokuali tribe, did his best to help her. By the end of the day, her fingers ached and were covered in a thousand small slices, wages from sliding her hand along the edge of the leaves.

  Her throat went dry halfway through the day. The sound of the surf was maddening. She knew the water was salty, unfit to drink, but her fevered mind could only hear The pirates only gave them a drink twice in the day, spit-warm water that tasted sour, in a tiny halved fruit rind. The rest of the day Hepthys burned in the sun, sweated, and cursed.

  As the sun sank into the ocean, the slavers lined the captured Waiolans up, counted them, and returned them to the pit. When the gate thudded over the top of them, Hepthys flinched superstitiously. It wasn’t just the closing of the gate—it was the sky being shut off from her entirely.

  That night, the growling in her stomach was louder. Her head pounded more too, though it felt like someone trying to get out rather than someone trying to knock a way in. Her breath rattled in a dry mouth. She slept, but it was closer to her exhausted body simply giving up, unable to keep her awake any longer. She periodically opened her eyes, looking up at the night sky, and wished for her wings. Her real, functional wings.