I did not move.
Not because I was brave, not because I had a plan, but because my legs had submitted their resignation and were no longer accepting instructions from my brain, so I stood at the bottom of a dark hole in a broken realm and stared at the tiger that had just landed in front of me and the tiger stared back.
It was massive, the kind of massive that made the space feel smaller just by existing in it, and its fur was deep black with stripes that were blue the way electricity was blue, not painted on but lit from underneath, pulsing faintly like something inside the animal was charged and looking for a reason to release, and its fangs were white and long enough that I could see them clearly with its mouth closed, and its eyes were the same black and blue as its coat and they were looking directly at me with an intensity that made me feel like a very small and poorly prepared person, which was accurate.
It growled, low and continuous, the kind of sound that was less a warning and more a statement of intent.
I should have run. The hole was behind me, the slope was climbable, the scavengers were probably gone, these were all facts I had access to, but my feet stayed where they were and I stood there shaking from somewhere around my knees upward and looking at this animal that could end me in one decision and I thought about Puri.
Puri, who was black, who was mean to everyone in the household except me, who knocked things off tables on purpose and bit my father when he tried to pick her up and slept across my face in the night like I was a pillow she owned, and who had the exact same expression this tiger was currently wearing, which was the expression of an animal that had decided it was in charge of this interaction.
"Okay," I said, very quietly, to the tiger.
The tiger's growl didn't stop but its ears moved, one fraction of a degree, which I decided to count as engagement.
"I know you are very large," I said, in the voice I used with Puri when she was sitting on something she wasn't supposed to sit on, "and I know that you could absolutely handle this situation however you want to, and I'm not arguing with that, I just want to point out that I am not a threat to you in any practical sense given that I am standing here with one properly fitted shoe and no weapons and I fell into your space by accident."
The tiger stopped growling.
It didn't stop looking at me, and it didn't move, but the growl stopped, and I took that as something, stood up slowly from the half-crouch I'd been holding without realizing it, and kept eye contact the way I used to keep eye contact with Puri when she was deciding whether to bite me.
"You're very beautiful," I told it, which was true and also felt like the right thing to say, "and those stripes are doing something genuinely interesting, I've never seen anything like you, Puri would hate you immediately which means I already like you."
I took one step forward.
The tiger watched me take it.
I took another, slower, and raised one hand at a height that was not threatening, palm forward, the way I had learned to approach Puri after she'd drawn blood twice in the first week and I had decided that understanding her was more practical than avoiding her.
The tiger looked at my hand.
I moved it forward, slowly, and made contact with the top of its head, and the fur was warm and the blue stripes were faintly electric under my palm, not enough to hurt, just enough to feel like something, and I started to rub in the same slow circles I used on Puri when she was deciding whether I was worth tolerating and the tiger went completely still.
Then it blinked.
Then it pushed its head up into my hand, a single motion, the universal language of a cat who had not expected this and had immediately revised its position on the matter.
"There you go," I said, and scratched behind its ear, and the tiger made a sound that was not a growl, something lower and more continuous that I was going to call a purr regardless of how large it was, and I felt my shoulders come down from around my ears for the first time since this morning.
Then it pounced on me.
Not aggressively, I want to be clear about that, but there was no other word for it, all of that weight and intent landing on me at once, and I went down flat on my back with a tiger standing over me licking my face with a tongue that was enormous and enthusiastic and slightly painful.
I laughed, which surprised me, a real one, the kind that came from somewhere I hadn't accessed since the alley, and the tiger licked my face again and my hair went sideways and I said, "Okay, okay, you're heavy, you are so heavy, please, I just got electrocuted twice today —"
"Alpha."
The voice came from the shadows at the back of the room and the tiger stopped mid-lick, pulled back, sat upright, and went so still it could have been furniture, with the posture of a soldier who had heard their commanding officer and wanted it known they had been behaving the entire time.
I lay on the ground and looked up.
A figure came out of the dark and the first thing I registered was height, a foot and a half above me at minimum, which was a significant amount of person, and then he stepped into the faint light coming from the hole above us and I finished registering the rest of him in the wrong order because my brain lost its organizational structure somewhere in the process.
The cargo pants were military grade, worn in the specific way things got worn from actual use rather than age, and above them was nothing, which is to say no shirt, which is to say I had to make a conscious decision to move my eyes upward at a reasonable pace and I was not entirely successful, and then his hair, which was white and long and fell to his waist the way hair did in old illustrations of things that didn't exist, and then his eyes, which were pale blue in a face that had the kind of structure that made me feel like I had seen it somewhere before, not in person, not in a memory I could locate, but the familiarity of something that existed in a part of my brain that wasn't connected to language.
My face became very warm.
"You found her," he said, to the tiger, not to me, and his voice had a register that went somewhere below where most voices went and I continued to lie on the ground because standing up required a decision I wasn't ready to make.
The tiger, Alpha, looked between him and me with an expression that read strongly as proud of itself.
"I wasn't lost," I said from the ground, "I was hiding, which is different."
He looked down at me with pale blue eyes that gave nothing back, the way eyes looked when the person behind them had decided that expressions were optional, and I looked up at him and tried to remember what I had been about to say before I noticed his face, which took longer than it should have.
Then I saw what he was holding.
In his left hand, hanging from two fingers, dim and flickering with roughly half the output it had been producing an hour ago, was L.I, and L.I looked the way things looked when they had been through something, his light pulsing irregularly, his casing showing marks that hadn't been there before, his audio cutting in for one syllable at a time like he was trying to speak through a bad connection.
"L.I," I said, sitting up fast, and the warmth in my face converted immediately into something else. "What did you do to him."
The man looked at the thing in his hand like he had forgotten it was there. "Found it outside," he said. "It was making noise."
"He," I said, getting to my feet, "not it, and he's mine, I built him, give him back."
The pale eyes looked at me without moving, and he held L.I out at a height that accounted for the foot and a half difference between us without appearing to notice he was doing it, and L.I flickered twice and then managed, in a thin and damaged voice that had none of its usual energy, "Mani."
"I'm here," I said, taking him, and he was warm in a way he wasn't usually warm and his light was the wrong color and I held him in both hands and looked up at the man with the white hair and said, "What happened to him."
He looked at me for a moment. "You're in the Arena," he said, like that was an answer, "and you're standing in the open, and you are new, and you were crying loud enough to bring the Rakers to your location within minutes of arrival."
"The Rakers," I said.
"The people who surrounded you."
"I handled that."
Something moved in his face, not quite an expression, the suggestion of one. "You talked them into fighting each other."
"It worked."
"Then you fell into a hole."
I opened my mouth, then closed it, then said, "That also worked out."
He looked at me for another moment and Alpha pressed its enormous head against my hip from the side and I grabbed the fur automatically to stay upright, and the man with the pale eyes looked at his tiger, then at me, then back at his tiger, with the energy of someone revising a plan they had already made.
"You need to come with me," he said.
"I don't know you," I said.
"You also don't know anything about where you are or how to survive in it," he said, "and your device is damaged and you have one shoe on correctly, so."
I looked down. He was right about the shoe.
"Fine," I said, with as much dignity as was available to me, which was not a lot, "but I want it noted that I was handling it."
He had already turned and walked back toward the shadows and Alpha nudged me forward from behind with its head, and I went, holding L.I in both hands, still warm, still flickering, and I looked at the man's white hair moving ahead of me in the dark and tried to remember where I knew that face from and came up with nothing except the feeling that whatever the answer was, I was not going to like it.