The Nirreth sighed in a kind of agreeing purr.
Something about the tense way he’d been standing seemed to deflate.
“I, too,” he said.
Without looking to see if he was following, Jet retreated back into the bedroom, and the Nirreth’s suddenly much smaller-seeming bed.
Without letting herself overthink it, she climbed under the covers, staying as much to the far side of the mattress as she could.
Laksri entered the room soundlessly behind her, hitting the panel to shut the door.
Pulling the long shirt he wore up over his head, he let it drop to the floor.
He climbed into the bed after her, shirtless. Lying on his side, he cushioned his head with one arm in a kind of purring sigh. As she watched him surreptitiously, it occurred to Jet again that there was no way the muscular, long-limbed Nirreth could have fit in any way comfortably on a couch that barely held his body’s width.
Sighing again, as if in agreement to her thoughts, he sank deeper into the mattress, shifting closer to her as he did and touching her side briefly with his hand.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice low.
Jet smiled, unable to help it.
He’d sounded so young just then.
“It’s your bed,” she said. “You could have taken it back at any time.”
Laksri gave a kind of shrug, closing his eyes.
“Thank you anyway.”
Jet nodded, to no one really, since he wasn’t looking at her.
She closed her own eyes with a suddenly exhausted sigh of her own.
“Anytime,” she mumbled, already drifting off to sleep.
When Jet woke up, it was like digging herself out of a foggy trench.
She could already tell from her internal clock, she’d overslept.
She only remembered a few seconds later––after she’d already started to panic, envisioning the guards bursting in and arresting her or Laksri––Laksri told her the night before that he’d gotten her exempted from her duties with the Prince for the remainder of the week, due to the upcoming Rings.
No one argued with the request; from what Laksri said, it was pretty much expected prior to her first match. According to him, the Palace guard he’d spoken to acted like he’d already waited too long, that he should have pulled her a week sooner.
As Laksri crossed her mind, she stretched a little and looked down, realizing the resistance she felt, the other source of her brief panic, was explainable as well.
Although they’d started off on opposite sides of the bed, they now lay flush with one another, one of his arms and his tail wrapped around her.
Through the lingering empathy, Jet felt a warm contentment on him.
For some reason, that made it a lot harder to be irritated with him.
Which made her wonder if she should be more irritated at herself.
Resting her head back on the pillow, she tried not to think either about the look she’d last seen on Anaze’s face before he left, or the Rings match coming up in three days.
She remembered everything from their training session the night before, enough to feel a little more confident than she had the previous day, in terms of her ability to use her “freaky spatial thing,” as Anaze called it.
But she hadn’t exactly relaxed.
Scale would be an issue.
If the proportions of the real arena were different enough, it could really throw her off, enough to get her killed. It would render useless most of what she’d learned in terms of timing, for one, which was a lot of what she’d picked up from Laksri as they went through the course.
That timing alone was complex enough that Jet agreed with the Palace guard, and wished she and Laksri had spent the last few weeks training together, instead of leaving it to the last few days. Even so, the course had a rhythm to it, one clearly discernible through the noise of the projections. If she could find the rhythm of the real course, it would help immeasurably.
Now she at least knew to look for it.
All of the VR projections and attackers used would be different, of course, and based at least partially on imprints from her own mind. Given that the point would be to throw her off, to screw with her ability to concentrate, she should probably be thinking about that, so she could mentally prepare herself for what they might be likely to throw at her.
That dinosaur freaked her out… the one from her demonstration.
She’d always been nervous of bears.
She had nightmares about the human gangs that roved the skag pits––even since she got here, to the Green Zone.
She could feel her body starting to tense as her mind whirled around the various things they might try on her.
Laksri’s arm and tail tightened, pulling her closer.
“Do not think about this now, Jet,” he mumbled against the pillow, somewhere over her head. He pressed against her, and she felt desire on him, warm and tangible. “You should sleep now,” he added, resting his head back on the pillow nearer to hers.
“…We will talk about Rings later,” he added in another mumble, running his tongue briefly over her neck, startling her. “There are things I must tell you about this,” he added, his voice still sleepy. “About how the Boards function. You will have more help than you think.”
His voice trailed in another mumble against her skin.
Of course, this was just enough information to get Jet’s head spinning all over again, and around how little time she had left.
Despite how casual everyone had been about her upcoming debut in the Rings (well, everyone but Alice, who’d seemed positive Jet was marked for death, from day one), debut matches were a big deal. Most humans didn’t pass on to become regular fighters. Most didn’t make it even a third of the way through their first course.
Maybe what she’d taken as indifference was more an assumption she wouldn’t make it.
Maybe no one wanted to invest any worry in her, because they knew her chances were shit. They’d all been watching her training vids, after all. They knew what she was up against, and how she looked compared to other human candidates, like Tyra.
The more Jet thought about this, the more true it felt.
And the more nauseated she felt.
No one cared about her because everyone knew she might be dead by Sunday.
Laksri tugged her closer.
Before she could shut her eyes and try to force herself back to sleep, he said the last words he managed before he drifted back to unconsciousness himself.
“Richter will pull you before that happens,” Laksri mumbled. “He comes today. To tell you what to do, once they untag you for the Rings.”
At that, Jet’s eyes came back open.
They didn’t close again the rest of the morning.
15
The Day Of
Three days later, Jet walked with Laksri, Anaze and Richter up a narrow, sloped hallway.
They were deep underground, just below the “Amphitheater of the Rings” for Green Zone, Hezeret.
They were now only a few hundred feet from the main arena.
Another roar from the crowd shook the ceiling over her head.
It sounded like thunder. Jet flinched, unable to help it, even with Laksri’s firm grip on her arm and his tail coiled loosely around her waist.
The thumping started again––a low, rhythmic pulse that trembled the stone tiles of the floor under Jet’s feet. She struggled with what to do with her hands and fingers. She tugged at the uncomfortably snug sense-suit she wore, half-costume and half-functional where it clung to every inch of her five-foot-five frame.
Her hair had been sprayed up into an elaborate design of flat, almost plastic-looking black curls, each about the size of one of the old copper water pipes they dug up whenever they were expanding the edge of the skag pit’s warrens. Her face had been painted with dramatic, mask-like make-up by one of the prep crews assigned to new recruits to the Rings.
Apparently, Jet would hav
e her own team once she made it past her fifth fight.
Assuming she made it past her fifth fight.
In the last few days, it seemed like everyone around Jet felt the need to constantly remind her that the first fight was the most crucial, even more important than the fifth, when the Board would make its final decision on whether to invest in her as a career fighter.
If she made it past number five, she’d have sponsorship from various families.
She would also join the wager and point-spread system with the other regular “players.”
She would also have to respond to requests for challenge matches and tie-breakers according to the whims of the Boards and her owners.
Most players washed out.
Well over half.
Closer to eighty percent, from what Richter told her.
Laksri’s fingers tightened on her arm, reminding her there was still enough venom in her system for him to feel a lot of her thoughts… the louder ones, at least.
“You must win,” he told her in a low, insistent voice. “Remember why we are here, Jet.”
Hearing, or perhaps feeling the double meaning underlying his words, Jet only nodded. Even so, his and Richter’s warnings whirled through her mind, alternately bringing a kind of adrenaline-fueled resolve and confused panic.
But she knew Laksri was right.
She had to win.
She had to.
Even reminding herself why she needed to win felt more like a ticking clock hanging over her head than genuine motivation.
Jet heard that same clock beating pretty much in time to her heart––a beat that seemed to keep accelerating under her ribs the closer they got to the end of the tunnel.
Light shone at the end of that long track, just like the mythical death-land her mother taught her about. Jet hoped feverishly that Biggs and her mother wouldn’t pick tonight of all nights to watch the pirated feed from the Nirreth towers.
Jet knew they would, though.
They would try, at least… the whole settlement would.
Just like she would have, if their positions were reversed and one of them had disappeared.
The stamping grew louder, until it seemed to be compressing her skin, hair, even her very bones, throbbing behind her ears and drowning out the imaginary clock it replaced.
“Big crowd out there,” Jet muttered. “Is that usual? For a beginner. I thought these were kind of nothing matches, right?”
She felt Laksri hedging before he even opened his mouth.
“It is the first match with a female,” he admitted after a too-long pause. “They are hoping for a good show––”
“They’re hoping for a bloodbath,” Richter snorted from his other side.
Anaze and Laksri both glared at him, but Richter never took his eyes off hers.
“…But you’re not going to give it to them, are you, kitten?” he said, laying a hand on her shoulder. “You’re not. Remember everything we told you. And get your head on straight! You look like a rabbit approaching the den of a wolf. Don’t panic on us now, and blow everything. You need to walk out there like you own the place.”
For some reason, Richter was the person whose words snapped Jet out.
They took her out of the bad place, anyway, long enough for her head to clear, and for her to hear the logic in what he’d said.
Letting that logic sink in, she nodded, taking a few deliberate, deep breaths in an attempt to slow her heart.
Shaking out her hands and arms as she walked, she forced her head up, a psychological trick more than anything, and did her best to block out all the sounds above.
Nothing she thought about now would help her.
It was too late for that end of things.
Richter was right. If she walked in there like a frightened animal, it really was over. Richter and Laksri promised to pull her if things got really dire, get her out of the Green Zone altogether… but it hit Jet suddenly, brutally, what that really meant.
It meant this fight was over.
For her, at least.
Besides, Richter could never risk just cutting her loose.
If he thought she might spill the beans about who and what he was to the other skags, much less information about his ties to the Nirreth rebels, Richter might even kill her.
More likely, he’d just disappear her among his people, and she’d never see her own family again. She’d end up fishwife to one of his lieutenants, living in some backwater and birthing rebel babies, like Anaze’s mom.
Laksri’s tail wound around her even more tightly, even as Anaze sidled up between Jet and his father.
“They’re not only here, hoping you’ll die,” Anaze said, giving his father another irritated stare. “You belong to the Royals, Jet. They know that, and the Royals haven’t entered a new fighter in over a year, so that makes you interesting. Most of them also know about you and the sword-fighting thing, so they came here to see that, too.”
Shrugging, he motioned towards her body with a grin.
“Some also came to see a woman fight in a skin-tight costume. Just like they might do back home.”
Jet rolled her eyes, but knocked into him playfully with her shoulder without thinking, like she would’ve done back at the skag pit, before all this. He gave her a surprised look, then grinned, bumping her back with his own shoulder.
“There’s the Jet I know,” he joked. “I wondered if she was still there, under the black catsuit and all that make up. You look like an angry raccoon, by the way,” he added, motioning towards her eyes with another grin.
Laksri gave a snorting laugh, loosening his hold on her slightly.
Only Richter’s eyes remained as hard as flint.
“You think you can put on a bit of a show for these blue-skins without getting yourself killed, you do it,” he advised, his coffee-colored eyes still trained on the growing patch of light up ahead, his strides steady and purposeful. “Remember, we need you to make it to that fifth fight.” Leaning closer to her ear, he added in a lower voice, barely perceptible even with his lips against her skin, “No fifth fight, no tenth fight. Do the math, kitten and keep your head in the game. I expect this match to go by the numbers…”
“…So you wait until the last week to train me,” she muttered, giving him a harder look.
But something in her expression seemed to please him, because for the first time, his lightened. He chuckled in return, right before he clapped her on the back in a friendly way.
“That’s right, kitten,” he grinned. “You get to show us how good you really are.” His eyes shifted back to serious. “What are your priorities?”
“Points,” she said promptly. “Especially in the first hour.”
“Do you try to win?”
Jet rolled her eyes, not answering.
“Do you try to win?” Richter said, his voice a harder growl.
“No,” she said.
Staring at her for another beat, he grunted.
“Good. Remember that, kitten. No one wins the first match. You’re better off staying where the points are. You want to do well, but you’re still a rookie. Don’t get ambitious. Everyone who gets ambitious their first match get slaughtered. If you try to win, it’ll just take you away from the points. Understand?”
Jet nodded, internally rolling her eyes, but not really in anger.
Instead, her nerves had come back.
They’d already explained to her why they waited so long to brief her on the Rings. Jet knew she still didn’t know everything. In fact, she was fairly sure that… as always… Richter told her only the bare minimum.
But she knew more, and that wasn’t nothing.
Whatever their final plan was, it required her getting through the first five preliminary matches. It wasn’t until then that Jet would lose the GPS tracker they’d implanted into her neck during that initial examination they did on her in that creepy, underground lab when she disembarked from the culler ship.
Richter hadn�
�t told her about the implant then, of course.
Jet found out not long after, while washing her hair in the shower and feeling the hard bump on the back of her neck. She’d freaked at the time, hopping out of the shower half-covered in soap suds and shampoo to make Anaze look at the spot on her neck. Wearing nothing but a towel, she’d pulled her hair back so he could see the lump she’d fingered, sure she had some kind of mutating cancer from the Nirreth medicine and food.
When Anaze explained the meaning of the lump, and what the implant actually did, Jet had been furious. Anaze assured her the device would only remain there for as long as it took the Nirreth command leaders to trust her.
Since, at the time, Jet couldn’t imagine that ever happening, his words hadn’t exactly reassured her.
Anyway, Richter wanted Jet to be a longshot in the Rings.
He wanted the bloodthirsty crowds and the small girl with too much make-up and the tight, all-black sense-suit and the long, Japanese-style sword. Richter wanted a distraction, partly to test run for the real night, which –– assuming all went as planned –– should be in exactly twenty weeks’ time, if they scheduled her to fight every other week.
It was also strategic for Jet herself.
If the Ringmaster and his controllers thought too much of Jet’s chances, they’d throw a harder program at her.
Richter also informed her that they’d received intelligence that Ogli planned to buck tradition and buy Jet outright if she got booted from the Rings.
He would have enough money to outbid Laksri and Richter’s fortunes, even if they pooled them together, along with probably every credit scraped up by every member of the rebellion on both sides of the racial divide. Which is why they’d need to smuggle her out of the Zone if that occurred.
Richter explained all of this to Jet casually enough, but she got the point––the plan would change drastically if that happened, and not in any way to her advantage. Richter assured her he could “work with it,” but Jet didn’t find his assurances all that reassuring.
Laksri didn’t much like that possibility, either.
His fingers tightened on her arm, reminding her of that fact. He could obviously still feel a good chunk of her thoughts.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 32
