Chapter Six:

  “Questions Vs. Ignorance”

  The walls were still damp from the last cleaning.

  If it could be called that. More like rinsing down blood with saltwater and hoping it didn’t stain the stone too deep.

  Helen sat with her back to the far wall of the holding chamber, arms wrapped around her knees. There were maybe thirty of them left now—those who had made it through the Mirror Field. A few stared blankly at the floor. Some had curled into sleep. Others sat with their backs to the walls like her, eyes tracking every shadow.

  The room was long, dim, and cut into the bones of the coliseum. Torches burned low in iron sconces, their light flickering against the iron gate at the far end. That gate only opened for two reasons: the next game, or new arrivals.

  When the locks clanked, every head lifted.

  The gate opened.

  Three figures entered under guard. No chains. No blood. Just motion and silence.

  A girl first—tall, sharp-eyed, dark hair tied back, a war fan still tucked into her belt. She moved like she knew how to kill. Not just fight—kill. Then a boy—calm, but tense, with the kind of quiet weight that made people move around him without realizing why. That was authority. Real or not, it read loud.

  And finally, padding between them, a cat.

  Not starving. Not half-mad like the rats in the corners. Just a cat. Sleek, alert. Watching.

  Murmurs rippled through the cell.

  “They’re not from Athens.”

  “Didn’t come through the field.”

  “She killed someone. That’s what I heard.”

  Helen said nothing.

  She just watched the girl—the one with the fan.

  That girl didn’t look afraid.

  And that was the most dangerous thing of all.

  They didn’t stay near the gate.

  The new arrivals drifted to the far end of the chamber, where space had been cleared beneath an unlit torch. The girl sat first. The boy crouched beside her. The cat curled between them, alert and still.

  Helen didn’t stop watching.

  No one spoke to them. That’s how it usually went. Newcomers brought uncertainty, and uncertainty got people killed. But this was different. They didn’t look lost. They looked like they had come here on purpose.

  After a while, the boy spoke.

  “He knew what he was doing.”

  His voice wasn’t loud, but the room was quiet enough that Helen could make out most of it. Not every word, but enough.

  “I didn’t want to,” the girl said.

  “You did what he asked.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Did you hold back?” he asked.

  Helen saw the girl look away.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  The boy nodded, slowly.

  The cat flicked its tail but stayed silent.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  One of the younger prisoners nearby glanced over, then quickly looked away. The rest pretended not to listen, but Helen knew better. Everyone heard. Everyone was thinking the same thing.

  Helen didn’t realize her hands had tightened around her knees.

  Who were these people?

  And what had they already lost to get here?

  Time passed slowly in the holding chamber.

  There were no clocks, no bells, no change in light. Only the flicker of torch fire and the weight of your own thoughts. Sometimes guards came. Sometimes names were called. No one knew how they were chosen.

  Helen stayed quiet. But she watched. So did the others.

  The newcomers didn’t pace or break down. They whispered among themselves occasionally. The boy—John, someone had murmured, seemed to be the one asking the questions.

  Eventually, he asked them aloud.

  “What do the Triarchs want?”

  No one answered at first. But then a voice spoke—low, from near the middle of the group.

  “They want to see how you break.”

  John looked toward the speaker, but they didn’t continue.

  Another voice—older, rasping, like someone who hadn’t spoken in days: “They don’t care who you are…”

  Someone else muttered, “No one leaves. Not unless the gods say so.”

  The girl with the war fan—Rai, didn’t speak. She just listened.

  Helen found herself leaning forward without meaning to. These people were different. They weren’t just asking the same hopeless questions. They were looking—planning. Even if they didn’t know it yet.

  And that was what made them interesting.

  Or maybe even... necessary.

  The torches burned lower and the holding chamber settled into its usual rhythm of half?wakeful misery—muffled coughing, the scrape of boot?heels over stone, the occasional rattle of a chain farther down the corridor. Even the rats had learned the schedule and kept to the shadows until the lights failed completely.

  Helen stayed where she’d been for hours—back against cold granite, knees drawn up, eyes half?lidded. From here she could see the newest trio clearly: John, Rai, and the impossible cat. They’d claimed a patch of floor a few body?lengths from the gate, close enough to watch both exits, far enough that no one risked brushing them by accident.

  Most survivors had decided the strangers were trouble. Trouble bred attention, and attention drew the Triarchs’ curiosity. Curiosity killed faster than the Mirror Field ever had.

  Yet Helen watched.

  She told herself she was only studying them. But part of her hoped they’d notice.

  Rai sat cross?legged, war?fan folded in her lap, staring at nothing. John leaned against the wall beside her, elbows on raised knees, thumbs hooked lightly beneath the twin hilts that rose over his shoulders. Between them the cat—RW, they’d called her—curled its tail around its paws, emerald eyes reflecting torch?glow like shards of glass.

  The silence between John and Rai stretched so long Helen thought they might simply let it swallow them. Then John exhaled—a sound closer to a question than a sigh.

  “He volunteered… but I need to hear you say it, Rai. Did you hold back?”

  Rai didn’t move. Torch?light danced across the thin streak of dried blood darkening her tunic—Their friends blood, rumor said. When she finally spoke, her voice was flat but raw around the edges.

  “I struck to win.?That should have been the end of it.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  A long beat. Then, softer—

  “He knew the mission. He made the only choice we had. If I’d hesitated, we’d all be dust on that sand.”

  Helen saw John’s fingers tighten around his hilt. He opened his mouth, closed it again. RW broke the standoff with a voice too calm for a creature without lips.

  “Strategically, Akira maximized our odds of reaching Nekrosyne. Emotionally… we should sleep before we debate the morality of inevitability.”

  Rai’s shoulders dropped a fraction. John nodded once, not in agreement so much as surrender to exhaustion.

  Helen wasn’t the only one watching anymore.

  Around them, other prisoners listened with varying degrees of subtlety. A wiry boy named Pentos risked a question.

  “You... you faced the Triarchs directly? All three?”

  John looked up; his gaze alone made Pentos flinch.

  “What do you know about them?”

  Pentos swallowed. “Only that Damarion chooses who bleeds, Thessala chooses how, and Calix sells the tickets.” He retreated before either stranger could ask more.

  An older woman—Briala, hair cropped to the scalp from lice—spoke without turning her head.

  “Ask less, stranger.?Listening is what keeps you breathing down here.”

  RW’s ears flicked. “Statistically speaking? Ignorance kills faster.”

  A ragged laugh spread through the cell; it died quickly when a pair of stone?sentinel guards lumbered past the bars.

  From her vantage Helen sifted details: John’s measured breathing, Rai’s haunted stillness, the cat’s unnatural poise. Weapons, discipline, and something impossible. Tools, maybe, when the next trial came. But tools cut both ways.

  She weighed risk against need. If half of them were destined to die again, new variables might tilt the odds. Or doom them faster.

  Across the chamber Rai finally spoke, so low Helen barely caught it.

  “Tomorrow… if they make us choose again...”

  “We won’t. Not like that.”

  “And if choice isn’t offered?”

  John didn’t answer. RW’s tail tapped once, twice, metronomic.

  Torch?light guttered. A distant gong marked the shift to deepest night; the guards changed post. Murmurs faded, breaths slowed, and the holding chamber slipped into uneasy half?sleep.

  Helen stayed awake, cataloguing everything until her mind placed each piece on an invisible board: the strangers, their grief, the cat, the Triarchs’ appetite, her own resolve.

  When the next gate opened, alliances would determine who returned. She intended to be among them.

  But not yet.

  For now, observation was survival.

  So she watched the newcomers through narrowed eyes, and waited for dawn to bleed.