Waking up hurt.

Not the good kind of hurt—the kind that came after a solid fight where you'd given as good as you got and everyone walked away with bruises and stories.

This was the bad kind. The kind that suggested someone had used her skull as a drum and her ribs as kindling, then decided that wasn't quite enough and added a few bonus kicks for good measure.

Pyra's eyes opened to darkness so complete it might as well have been malicious. The air tasted wrong, like licking a copper coin that had spent quality time in someone's boot. Her fingers found cold stone beneath her, rough and damp, and when she tried to sit up, the world performed an enthusiastic barrel roll that made her stomach threaten mutiny.

"Okay," she muttered, voice scratching against her throat like sandpaper. "Not great. Definitely not great."

Memory arrived in pieces, each one more useless than the last. There'd been light—so much light it had turned the world white. Then falling, except falling in five directions at once, which seemed like the sort of thing physics should have objected to more strenuously.

After that... nothing. Just a blank space where consciousness should have been, and now she was here.

Wherever here was.

Her hand moved to summon flame—automatic as breathing, natural as blinking—and produced a flicker. A pathetic little tongue of orange that barely qualified as disappointed candlelight. It guttered against her palm like it was embarrassed to be seen in public.

"What?" The word came out flat.

She tried again, pushing harder, reaching for the familiar heat that usually responded like an eager puppy. The flame strengthened to maybe torch-level, casting shadows that danced across metal bars and stone walls.

Metal bars.

Stone walls.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me."

Pyra scrambled upright too fast, and her head punished the presumption with a spike of pain that suggested her brain was trying to escape through her eye sockets. She grabbed the bars to steady herself, and they were cold enough to sting even through her reduced heat.

A cage. She was in an actual, honest-to-badness cage.

Other cages lined the walls of what appeared to be an underground chamber, each one containing a figure in various states of unconsciousness or misery.

To her left, someone groaned.

To her right, someone was snoring with the determination of a person who'd decided to sleep through a tornado.

The flame in her hand flickered, and Pyra realized with creeping horror that maintaining even this pathetic light required actual effort. Like her fire had developed an attitude problem and decided working was for other people.

She let it die, conserving energy she didn't know she'd need to conserve.

Darkness swallowed the chamber again, leaving only the distant sound of dripping water and her own increasingly panicked breathing.

"Ember?" Her voice echoed wrong, bouncing off stone with no answering presence in her mind. "Cinder? Anyone?"

The silence had weight. Not the comfortable quiet of the others being asleep or distracted, but the hollow absence that came from being genuinely, completely alone.

No background hum of shared consciousness. No sense of four other perspectives existing parallel to her own. No reassuring presence of sisters-selves who'd always, always been there since the moment Nyx's curse had shattered them into pieces.

"Okay." Pyra's hands found the bars again, gripping hard enough that her knuckles went white. "Okay, this is fine. This is totally fine. I've been alone before. Like, technically. When I went to the bathroom. That was alone. This is just... extended bathroom time."

The joke fell flat even to her own ears.

"Alright, that's, okay." Something was seriously wrong. She should probably panic. Was definitely entitled to some solid panic.

She forced herself to breathe—in through the nose, out through the mouth, the way Ash had taught them during meditation practice that Pyra had mostly spent trying to set her own hair on fire just to prove she could.

Right. Focus. Assess the situation like a reasonable person instead of panicking like someone whose entire support system had vanished and left her alone in a cage underground with barely enough fire to light a candle.

She tested the bars. Solid metal, probably iron, definitely not moving no matter how hard she pulled. Somehow, her superhuman strength had also gone on vacation.

The lock was outside, well beyond her reach, operated by a mechanism she couldn't see in the dark.

Her body inventory revealed new problems: her clothes were wrong. Not her clothes at all, actually—rough fabric that scratched, too big in some places and tight in others. Someone had changed her while she was unconscious, which ranked somewhere between "deeply disturbing" and "I'm going to set things on fire when I get out of here" on the scale of violations.

Her feet were bare, which seemed particularly cruel given the floor's enthusiasm for being freezing.

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No weapons. No gear. No convenient escape tools that heroes typically found in their pockets during moments like these.

Just her, a cage, and flames that wouldn't even intimidate a nervous moth.

"Hey!" She called out, voice carrying across the chamber. "Anyone awake? Anyone know what's going on?"

A few groans answered. Someone told her, with impressive creativity, exactly where she could shove her questions. But no one volunteered information.

Footsteps echoed from somewhere beyond her sight—heavy boots on stone, approaching with the measured pace of people who knew they were in control and enjoyed it.

Pyra retreated to the back of her cage, which was maybe four feet from the front. Not much room for dramatic positioning.

Two guards emerged from a tunnel entrance, carrying torches that painted the chamber in wavering orange. They were large in the way that people with low self-esteem tended to be, and their armor seemed designed more for maximum intimidation than practical protection.

Spikey leather armor, clubs at their belts, and the satisfied grins of people who were paid to abuse others with no repercussions.

"This batch looks scrawny," one said, stopping in front of a cage two down from Pyra's. The occupant, a thin man who looked like he'd been having a bad month even before the cage situation, flinched away from the torchlight.

"Boss wants variety," the second guard replied. "Small ones die quicker in the arena, but the crowd likes watching 'em try."

Arena.

The word landed like an ice cube in Pyra's stomach.

"What about the flame-hair?" The first guard's attention shifted to her cage. "She awake?"

Pyra considered playing dead, then decided that was probably Cinder's sort of strategy and she wasn't smart enough to pull it off convincingly.

"Yeah," she said, trying for confident and landing somewhere near belligerent. "I'm awake. Want to explain what's going on, or are we doing the whole 'mysterious captor' thing?"

The guards exchanged glances. One laughed—not a nice laugh. The kind that said he was very much looking forward to watching someone turn her guts into a piñata at a birthday party for sadomasochists.

"You'll find out tonight," he said. "Try not to die too quick. The buyers are coming."

They moved on, discussing odds and bets with the casual tone of people evaluating livestock. Pyra listened, absorbing details while her mind raced.

Arena fights. Tonight. Buyers watching.

This was bad.

This was really, spectacularly bad.

The guards departed, taking their torchlight and leaving the chamber in darkness again. Pyra sank to the floor, back against the cold stone wall, and tried to think.

Usually when she tried to think, one of the others would chime in. Cinder with practical concerns, Ember with protective strategies, Kindle with optimistic alternatives, Ash with philosophical frameworks that sometimes helped and sometimes just made things more confusing.

Now there was only her own voice, echoing in a head that felt too empty.

"Right," she said aloud, because the silence was worse than talking to herself. "Step one: don't die. Step two: figure out where the others are. Step three: blow something up as a matter of principle."

The 'don't die' part seemed particularly urgent given the state of things.

Even though they've been used to dying and reviving for a while now, being alone and—most likely—very far from the others meant that counting on their integration and reconstitution to fix things was probably not a good idea.

If she died here, that was most likely it.

Pyra drew up her knees, hugged them to her chest, and stared into the darkness.

She wished, desperately, that the others were there. She wasn't supposed to be the one to come up with good plans. She was supposed to charge in, break things, and set everything on fire while someone else fixed the mess afterward.

The brief moment of being whole again—of being Abigail again—seemed like a cruel tease in retrospect. She had been prepared to get blown up. That was fine. Heroically self-sacrificial, sure, but at least it would have kept everyone else safe and made her death matter.

Didn't expect the ring Senna had gifted her and the crystal from Khroma to go off and save her by... splitting them up, again?

This was definitely the sort of mystery that needed an Ash or an Ember. Instead, there was nothing to keep her company other than her thoughts, the occasional snoring from the guy in the other cell, and the sound of dripping water that did absolutely nothing to ease the tension.

A laugh answered from the neighboring cage—dry and bitter as old coffee grounds.

"Good luck with that, flame-hair."

Pyra turned toward the voice. In the faint light seeping from distant torches, she could make out a figure in the adjacent cage. Older man, maybe forty, with scars crisscrossing his face like a map to every stupid decision he'd ever made. His beard was scraggly, and his hair looked like he'd spent time running his fingers through it before pulling it into a loose tail.

"You got a better plan?" Pyra asked.

"Yeah. Survive tonight. Then survive tomorrow. Then the day after that." The man shifted, chains rattling. "Anything beyond that is ambitious thinking."

"Ambitious is my middle name."

"Your middle name is 'dead' if you go into that arena expecting to win on enthusiasm."

Pyra opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. The man wasn't wrong. Her usual strategy—hit things with overwhelming force until they stopped being problems—wasn't going to work when she could barely maintain a candle flame.

"How long have you been here?" Pyra asked instead.

"Four months. Give or take." The man's voice carried the weight of someone who'd stopped counting days. "Longer than most. Most fighters don't last more than a few weeks."

"Fighters."

"That's what we are now." A bitter sound that might have been a laugh. "They grab people off the streets, out of taverns, sometimes buy indentured servants or criminals. Throw us in cages, make us fight for entertainment. Winners get to fight again. Losers don't get much of anything except not having to fight anymore."

Pyra's stomach twisted. "And the buyers?"

"Sometimes wealthy folk come to watch. Sometimes others come too—wearing masks, asking questions about magic or strength or resilience. They buy fighters who 'show promise.'" The quotes were audible. "No one knows where they take them. They don't come back."

The implications settled over Pyra like a wet blanket made of spiders.

"That's..." She struggled for words. "That's horrible."

"That's Dugales." The man's tone shifted, bitterness mixing with resignation. "Place like this, law only applies when it's convenient. And money's very convenient." He shifted again, and chains rattled in the dark. "Name's Ranth, by the way. Might as well know it, since we're cage mates and all."

"Pyra." She offered her name reflexively, then wished she hadn't. Too many missing pieces to explain, and too much risk in oversharing. Still, something about Ranth seemed trustworthy, in a beaten-down and world-weary kind of way.

"Well, Pyra," he continued, "if you're gonna survive here, you gotta learn to keep your head down. No grand schemes. No fiery rebellion. Just focus on making it through today, and tomorrow will take care of itself. Or it won't, but at least you got another day under your belt before then."

Ranth settled back into silence after that, leaving Pyra to stew in her own thoughts. She hated the idea of sitting around, waiting for some inevitable arena battle without even a solid plan in place.

That wasn't her style at all.

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