I woke up when I felt someone shake my shoulder. Once again, I had no idea how long I had been unconscious. In a land stuck in a perpetual noon, it’s impossible to measure the passage of time. Every muscle was sore and exhausted, so I only opened my eyes.

  The face of Graed’s oldest son looked down at me as I lay on my back. Behind him were iron bars, like in a jail cell. His face was grim as he spoke.

  “Good, you are not dead.”

  “Yeah,” I croaked out with a dry mouth. “What was that lizard-thing?”

  “You do not know?”

  I shook my head.

  “You must truly be from far away if you do not know the Vajizk.”

  I knew the name from when Inda called out to warn me. The thought of her jerked me back to the reality of the situation. I lifted my head to look around me. My vision spun for a moment, but I pushed through it and raised myself up onto my elbows.

  We were in a small room. The walls and ceiling were cut from some dark stone with an archway for a ceiling. One end of the room was a wall of iron bars that looked out onto a wide sandy area, which let in much more light than when I was in the cargo hold of the Sathog slaver ship. The other side of the room was more of the dark stone, but had a solid iron door. Other people were with us, all of them human men, but none were Graed or his younger son. And I didn’t see Inda.

  I looked up at his older son. “Where’s your father and your family?”

  He shook his head and helped me sit up against the wall. I was still feeling weak, but getting stronger every moment.

  “After the Vajizk was finished with you, my father and I were easily defeated, and we were all captured. You and I were brought in a caged cart to this place. My father and siblings were taken somewhere else.”

  “We’ll find them,” I said.

  I don’t know why I said it or with such conviction. The words just came out. I didn’t know where I was other than what the winged-monkey creature, Preet, said after giving me the bracer made of strange metal that seemed to make me as strong as a superhero. Well, not Superman strong, but probably Captain America.

  He smiled weakly at me. I could tell he didn’t believe me. But he clasped my hand firmly and said, “I am Dacrah, first son of Graed, chief of the Roaring Hoof Clan.”

  “I’m Stephen. But I don’t have a clan.”

  Held gripped my hand a little tighter. “Stephen. You may not have a clan, but you are a friend to my family.”

  I felt a little uncomfortable. It felt very formal and important. When I usually meet new people, it’s just an exchange of ‘hey’ and ‘how’s it going’ with maybe a handshake. Very casual and uneventful. I don’t think most people remember someone’s name ten seconds after they meet them.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s good to have friends in strange places.”

  He released my hand, and I turned to clutch at the bars, using them to pull me up to my feet. My legs were still wobbly, so I leaned against the bars as I looked out.

  A large, open sandy area stretched out from the little room holding us. I saw a high wall circling the area, with other barred gates across from us. Wooden benches were placed above the wall so that an audience could sit and look down into the open area. I’ve seen enough movies to recognize a gladiatorial arena when I see one.

  I turned back to Dacrah and leaned against the bars.

  “Did the Vajizk say anything about what they planned to do with us?” I asked.

  “You will feed their pets,” replied a man’s voice from the other side of the room. “Or maybe you will simply be executed for their amusement.”

  His voice was heavy with resignation. He sounded like someone who had been to hell and back and was destined to make the journey again and again. He sat with a few other men, who all either had his same exhausted appearance as him or were simply confused and terrified.

  I pushed myself off the bars and took a few tentative steps toward the voice. By the time I reached him, my legs were steady again.

  I sat down across from him and asked, “How do you know that?”

  “I am Erro, and I have seen many slaves come to this arena and die here. You will be the same.”

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  After a moment, my eyes adjusted to the dim light at the far end of the room. Erro appeared to be old with a tired expression and long lines on his face, but I got the impression that he wasn’t as old as he appeared. He wore a leather harness and skirt just like I had seen in gladiator movies. His sandals had bronze shin guards, and everything looked battle-worn, just like him.

  “I am Stephen, and this is my friend Dacrah.”

  “I don’t want to know your names. I don’t want to be your friend. I may have to kill you soon, so I would rather not know your name and carry it with me into The Scarlet Fields.”

  I could only assume that The Scarlet Fields were some form of afterlife.

  “What if we escaped? When they open the door, we can—“

  His laughter cut off my words.

  “Oh, that is a good one. You think you’re the first person to try to escape? Let me guess, your brilliant plan is that we all rush the door when the Vajizk guards come, right? You think you are the first person in this hole? You think it has not all been tried before? If you could defeat the Vajizk, then you would not be here in the first place.”

  Dacrah came closer. “My friend is new to these lands. He does not understand.”

  “Then understand this,” Erro said. “The Vajizk will come through that door soon. They will give you clothes that will please their masters. You may even get a meal, though do not expect much more than maggoty seed soup. Then they will open those bars, and we will be told what to fight. And then you will die, and I will return to this hole to wait for the next group of morons to come and tell me their brilliant escape plans.”

  He laid his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  I looked around at the other men trapped in the room with us. They had all listened to Erro. Some showed the same look of resignation as was in his voice. Some of the others looked scared. A few prayed to whatever gods existed in the Hollow Earth. None of them showed signs of hope.

  Maybe I was naive. Maybe I was feeling a little high on my newfound strength and combat abilities. Or maybe I still believed I was in a weird dream. But I didn’t think we were as doomed as Erro made us out to be. But he was right about one thing, the Vajizk did come for us.

  The men, including Erro, shifted away from the door as it opened and three of the monstrous, reptilian creatures entered. From their dress and scale coloration, I don’t think any of them were the same one I fought on the deck of the ship, but they all carried the same crystal-tipped bronze rod. My body shuddered at the memory of the amount of pain just one of those rods could inflict. I had no desire to find out what three of them could do to me.

  One of them threw a bundle of leather straps to the floor in the middle of our group and then pointed to Dacrah and me. They stood at the door and waited until we realized they wanted to watch us get dressed. I tried to think of the whole experience as putting on my baseball uniform and gear in a locker room before a game, but the outfit was nothing like anything I’ve worn before.

  If I hadn’t been running around in a ragged towel wrapped around my waist, I would have felt silly in the leather straps and kilt. I wasn’t going to call it a skirt, though that’s kind of what it was. It wasn’t armor at all, as the leather straps seemed more decorative than anything else. If I were going to fight, then my reflexes were the only thing that was going to save me. As I got dressed in the better light of the cell, I realized that my body had changed.

  In all the chaos of my life after emerging from the metal pyramid, I hadn’t bothered to look down. I was the most muscular I had ever been. Even the toughest training in college didn’t give me those kinds of results. The constant dull pain from an old shoulder injury was gone, and I had more mobility in it than I could remember. But I also noticed that the tattoo of my college logo I got after being accepted to the baseball team was missing, as was my appendix scar.

  I didn’t have a mirror to look into, but I was pretty sure that I wasn’t in my own body.

  It was at that moment that I realized no one had commented on the bracer of green-tinted metal on my right wrist. Ever since I put it on, I couldn’t remember anyone even looking at it. And I had seen no one else wearing such a bracer. I glanced down at it again, with its amber and purple gems, and wondered exactly what it did and how it worked.

  Once we were dressed, including the leather sandals with bronze shin guards, the Vajizk silently turned and walked out of our cell, locking the door behind them.

  “I guess no maggoty seed soup for you,” Erro muttered as he resumed his spot on the floor, bringing my attention back to our current predicament.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “Now we wait. Just keep watching through the bars. You will know it will be over soon once the audience arrives.”

  With nothing else to do, Dacrah, myself, and a few of the other men stood near the bars where we could watch the arena.

  For the first time, I could see Dacrah clearly. He was obviously Inda’s brother. They had the same copper-colored skin and straight black hair, though his was cut short, like mine. I noticed his eyes were brown while I remembered Inda’s brilliant green eyes. I wondered what happened to her and the rest of her family after I was knocked unconscious.

  Waiting for anything in the Hollow Earth is worse than on the surface world. At least on the surface, you can see the shadows move and lengthen. Birds fly to their roosts as the sun sets. In the perpetual noon of the Hollow Earth, time doesn’t pass. There wasn’t even a wind to stir the sand.

  “There,” one of the other men said as he pointed over my shoulder.

  I looked up and saw people of all types moving into the stands in the arena. Most were Sathogs, but some were humans like Dacrah. There were a few Vajizk as well, but I noticed that the three species of humanoids sat away from each other.

  After a time, a cheer went up among the crowd, and everyone faced our bars, but I could tell they weren’t looking down at us in our dark hole. Someone important had entered the arena above us, where we couldn’t see them.

  I watched the crowd and saw that the Sathogs cheered the loudest, raising their hairy fists into the air. The Vajizk, in their brightly colored sashes, gave some kind of salute. The humans simply stood quietly with their heads bowed in deference to whoever or whatever was above us. After the audience spent a proper amount of energy cheering, saluting, and supplicating, they sat down.

  “Here we go,” said Erro. “Time to die.”