Or, perhaps, just shocked her into unconsciousness.
Whatever they did, Jet suspected the bottom line would be to humiliate her.
Trazen would instruct them to make the mammal with the sword finally and irrevocably irrelevant. They would insure that Jet no longer posed a political or social threat to any Nirreth who occupied a position of power.
Jet’s status as the face of a new humanity––a humanity that might be viewed as somehow deserving of equal treatment, or at least of empathy––would be erased.
This would be the first match Jet ran since they’d murdered Laksri.
Laksri.
His face swam in front of her, that small smile he often wore on his dark mouth.
Jet felt his features fading already, growing indistinct, less immediate.
She fought that loss; it confused her, too.
She had to struggle against the venom to even understand her own feelings, much less what to do with them. The venom had been a blessing in some ways for that, especially in those first few weeks, when all she could feel was anger, hatred, loss, grief, rage, desperation.
There’d been long silences––indifferences, coldnesses, a wanting to die––a mental and emotional disconnect that somehow upset her more.
The venom smoothed out all the edges.
It made it hard to feel enough about any of it to want to do something drastic.
Like kill herself.
Or kill a bunch of them.
Or try to kill Trazen, which would have gotten her killed, too.
Even now, she struggled to feel… about the match, about Laksri, who hurt so much to think about in those first few weeks, she swore she couldn’t breathe most of the time.
She’d been a captive through all of it, on the Nirreth home world.
It had been Trazen who pulled her out, rescuing her in a sense, although she didn’t know how to feel about that, either.
She didn’t want to think about those weeks on Astet at all, really.
Some of the scars remained. She’d counted them on her skin one night, until Trazen showed up and stung her enough times that the exercise felt pointless.
Trazen, her new owner, didn’t want her thinking about Laksri, either.
He would push her mind off the topic each and every chance he got, whenever they were connected. Jet didn’t know why he cared. He’d won. Laksri was in the ground.
Some part of her even wondered why Trazen didn’t relish more in the pain he’d caused her by killing him.
If Trazen felt her questions, or her doubts, he didn’t deign to respond.
As a result of these two things, Jet’s own grief and Trazen’s resistance, she had developed the habit of avoiding any thought or mention of Laksri with her mind, no matter how much that avoidance hurt. After a few weeks in the Ringmaster’s home, it felt almost as if the topic burnt her, whenever she circled close enough to touch it.
Was that love?
Jet supposed it might be.
She really didn’t have anything to compare the feeling to.
Perhaps it would be different if she had something to compare it to.
Either way, Laksri was dead.
Nothing Jet thought or felt about him now would change that.
Nothing about Laksri’s death would help her avoid the same fate for herself.
His death contained no lessons to be learned, no insights to be gleaned for her own survival, much less the survival of anyone else Jet loved.
She still didn’t know where Richter had her family.
Trazen used that image of her brother, Biggs, to screw with her head on her last Rings run, but she still had no idea where he’d gotten it.
For all she knew, he hadn’t gotten it from Richter at all, but from some record the Nirreth kept of human skags, a list filled with files and photos no one bothered to tell her about. Or they could have Biggs here, in some locked dungeon inside the Green Zone.
Or they could have shot him in the head.
He could have been dead before she even did the run.
The thought made her feel like she might throw up.
That sickness confused her, then brought a paradoxical lift and sharpness to her mind when she realized what it meant.
It struck her with a dim surprise that she felt the clearest she had in weeks. Months, perhaps. The clearest she could remember since the Retribution match on Astet, and those horrible weeks in the interrogation cells.
Her thoughts grew clearer still, every passing moment she stood there… sickeningly, painfully clear… but she still preferred that clarity, even with the pain it brought.
Being able to think her own thoughts again affected everything she could see around her, the way all of it appeared, even down to watching the water lap against the white marble close to her feet, sending shimmers of light and shadow to decorate the walls.
Maybe it was the impending match.
Maybe Trazen was letting her mind clear for that.
Maybe he wanted her to win, now that he owned her. Or maybe he wanted her to feel more pain when she lost. With Trazen, there was no way to know really.
Oddly, neither of those things felt wholly true, however.
She couldn’t have explained why, but she could feel that Trazen wanted her clear on this day for his own reasons––unrelated to the Rings.
Or incidental to the Rings, perhaps.
Peripherally related.
Jet’s puzzlement deepened as her mind fought to think through the reasons why this might be. Winding her way through threads still tying her to Trazen’s mind, Jet’s own thoughts fought to untangle them, like antibodies fighting off a disease even as she tried to comprehend that disease and what it wanted.
As she did, emotions started to ratchet up her heart rate and breathing.
Jet forced herself to focus on the immediate first.
Physicality. The present moment. She had to start there.
What was physical was immediate.
Moreover, it should help with the rest.
Deliberately, Jet raised her eyes. She looked carefully around at where she stood.
She knew this place.
She remembered walking these halls with Trazen. She remembered his four, long, jointed fingers pointing out rooms, speaking to her through her mind and skin, his thoughts wrapping hers like a warm blanket.
This is an atrium, Jet. You may come to this room whenever you wish. You may come to any room in my house whenever you wish, with the exception of my private work spaces, which I will show you. If you wish to go into one of those, you must ask me. Do you understand?
She understood.
Looking at the room that Trazen called the atrium, she remembered something else.
The other humans called this place the baths.
It was some joke that hearkened to history, to a period in the distant past.
One of the other slaves had been a history teacher back on his settlement. He was old enough to remember the world before the Nirreth.
The other slaves called him “The Professor.”
Blinking, Jet stared down the length of the room, trying to focus her eyes now that they felt like hers again. She tried to assess this place, to make sense of it without Trazen’s mind filtering her impressions.
At first glance, the room appeared as large as the bare bones of the Rings arena.
White, marble columns lined the enormous wading and swimming pools on either side of the rectangular hall. The high-ceilinged structure and its touches of human-looking artistry reminded Jet of the compound of the Nirreth Royals, which had been filled with these strange smatterings of ancient human art and ancient human civilization, sprinkled through with architectural touches and technological achievements from the Nirreth.
Jet recognized pieces of this room’s style from the picture books in Chiyeko’s lighthouse near Vancouver, B.C. Perhaps those were the time periods the Professor had been joking about when he named the space “the baths.”<
br />
Rubbing her face with the heel of her hand, she stared down at the water, trying to decide if any of that was important.
Jet knew little of the past civilizations of her people.
What small amount she did know wouldn’t help her here.
She focused on a group of eight humans sitting around the edge of the deeper end of the pool, their Nirreth-style shirts pulled up to their waists, their Nirreth-style leggings discarded as they hung their bare legs in the cool water.
A few others swam, entirely nude, back-stroking or side-stroking or simply treading water as they talked and laughed with those sitting on the pool’s stone rim.
They tried to befriend Jet, when Trazen first brought her here.
Well, some of them had.
The Professor had.
So had a woman Jet could see now, with long brown hair, who swam with the others, laughing with a wide, full mouth.
Even with the friendly ones, Jet avoided their smiles and intrusive-feeling questions. She couldn’t have said why exactly, other than a general disinclination to get close to anyone after what had happened over the previous months.
The Professor had been kind to her, though.
So had that woman.
Some approached Jet more like a rival.
Those ones appeared to be more focused on Trazen––not on the other humans of his household, or Nirreth in general. They seemed to sense something different in Jet’s position with Trazen, which made their smiles appear more predatory, their questions more nuanced and probing. Some came at her with a jealousy Jet could tangibly feel, through her very skin.
The sentiment might have struck her as sickly humorous if she hadn’t so clearly felt the smugness that lay behind it, the sense that those slaves had seen this before with Trazen, and knew exactly how it would end.
Shoving those humans from her mind, then all of them, even the kinder-eyed ones, Jet let her gaze drift upwards, her ears caught by the trilling call of a bird. Brilliant blue and scarlet plumage met her eyes as wings spread, pulling the perfect creature off its perch.
She watched it glide high above the water, then alight among vines strangling the white pillars rimming the pool.
Jet’s eyes followed the bird again, this time to a ficus tree growing next to one of those oddly alive-seeming pieces of furniture designed by the Nirreth. The latter might have been a chair, or perhaps a table, or even some kind of computer terminal.
The room had an undeniable grace.
The hole in the middle of the ceiling opened to a blue arc of artifical sky, the same sky created by the dome around the Green Zone.
In reality, the sky was a darker red-brown color.
Jet had seen it. Unlike many of the humans here, Jet had grown up looking at it. The air outside the dome hung heavy with pollution and dust from the mountains near what used to be Santa Fe, New Mexico, in what had been the United States of America.
Jet looked up in time to see the dark shadow of a hawk circling in the blue sky above the building, one of the breeds Laksri told her had been indigenous to this area before the humans wiped out most of their hunting grounds. According to Laksri, that happened years before the Nirreth arrived. The Nirreth had cloned new birds from bone marrow and DNA specimens pulled from corpses mounted in human museums.
Jet knew she was distracting herself though, even now.
She felt stares on her, whispers. But despite the smug smiles and whispered conversations of the humans with whom she shared Trazen’s home, none of it made sense to her.
Trazen stung her, it was true.
She’d expected that, when he pulled her out of that prisoner’s block on Astet.
He stung her a lot. He stung her seemingly whenever Jet saw him for more than a few minutes. She’d expected that from him as well.
Yet Trazen hadn’t made Jet his lover.
Despite what the other human slaves obviously believed, he’d never taken her in that way, not once since Jet had been here. He hadn’t done it despite ample opportunity to do so, even as early as the flight back to Earth from Astet.
He hadn’t done it despite the knowing looks and jealousy of the other humans, who seemed to assume Jet and Trazen did little else whenever they weren’t visible to the public eye.
He hadn’t done it despite Jet’s own willingness, despite her desperately wanting it at times. She’d asked him, more than once––more than a few times, more than a few dozen times––but he’d declined her requests.
That same venom created an empathy with the male Nirreth that could be unbearable at times, especially knowing what he’d done to Laksri, and possibly to Anaze, who she couldn’t help thinking of as her friend, even as her family… even now.
Trazen might have killed Anaze, just like he let Richter kill Laksri.
Even so, Jet wanted him. She’d begged him… more than once.
The memory made her grimace.
At the same time, that Trazen hadn’t done anything to her sexually struck her as exceedingly odd. Her mind slid around the reality of that lack in confusion, even as she felt the pull of his venom, that part of her that wanted Trazen still.
She felt hurt at his refusal, even now.
Maybe more so, now that she could feel her own emotions clearly.
He hadn’t wanted her. She didn’t know why he hadn’t.
She’d felt desire on him, more than once. She felt that desire as far back as the first time he’d stung her, in the recovery room of the Royal Palace.
Turning over her memories of the last few months, Jet also realized Trazen hadn’t spent so much as five minutes in her presence where he didn’t have some specific purpose in mind.
That purpose had never been intimate.
In Jet’s memories, Trazen’s behavior with her never felt anything more or less than completely businesslike.
Usually, that purpose involved him stinging her repeatedly––sometimes as many as five or six times in a row. He often followed those stings with lectures of varying length via the venom, giving Jet news of current events as they unfolded outside the walls of his house.
He spoke to Jet in a matter-of-fact way, politely declining any requests she made for anything more intimate from him. He never beat her. He never hurt her at all, although she’d expected that, too. Whether his words pertained to the Royals or the Rings or those events occurring behind the scenes, he’d been nothing but patient and polite.
He also told her a lot, she found herself thinking now.
He even told her a lot in areas where Laksri and Richter never bothered to educate her before.
Jet didn’t understand why Trazen told her all these things.
She definitely didn’t understand why he told her so much after stinging her, when Jet would be almost incapable of forgetting what he’d said.
Given the effects of the venom on human memory, he clearly wanted her to remember all of it, but she couldn’t for the life of her understand why. Wanting to please him because of the venom, and in spite of her hurt at his refusals, Jet she did her best to understand everything he told her.
She tried to remember all of it, since he obviously wanted her to.
Her mind grew full with names, faces, and facts as a result.
He shared the different players of the Nirreth political sphere with her, touching her arms or shoulders or hands to transmit the information from his own memory. He told her who allied with who, which were gaining power, either formally or informally due to their ties to the new First Son, a Nirreth named Isreti who Trazen seemed to think was some kind of ideological fanatic, with a near-religious following.
Trazen told her a lot about the group Isreti led.
He told her what they believed.
Most of it seemed to hearken back to a quasi-mythological view of the Nirreth “good old days,” when the Nirreth only enslaved inferior races and ate them.
They didn’t make any attempt to live in peace.
According to Trazen, the so
ciety Isreti and his followers wanted to build required maintaining a strict hierarchy among the Nirreth themselves, with rigidly enforced roles between the castes and clans.
Trazen seemed to think most of it was ridiculous, a made-up story that had little basis in historical fact. When Jet tried to press him about this, however, he backed off, evaded, pushing her emotions away, his mind growing curiously blank in the gaps that followed.
After Trazen subjected Jet to these discourses––which could last anywhere between fifteen minutes to several hours––he would brief her on the news that pertained more directly to Jet’s own situation. He would tell her what she should expect, in terms of the new Royals’ views of her returning to the Rings. He told her in detail how they viewed Trazen himself, and how that might impact her, especially if he were to fall out of favor.
He told her dispassionately that his falling out of favor would always be a risk, but it didn’t appear to be a very large one at the moment. He’d ingratiated himself with the new Royals, in part by assisting in the killing of Laksri.
Trazen told Jet details of discussions that had occurred behind closed doors, about the meaning of Jet’s prior relations with Laksri, the likelihood she would be subjected to more interrogations by the Royal Police or even the military board, the status of inquiries into Richter’s whereabouts and that of the other human rebels.
Trazen also told her––sometimes in minute detail and by showing her maps––news of the human encampments and skag pits the Nirreth military had destroyed in their ongoing efforts to root out the rebels.
According to Trazen, the search was not going well, from the perspective of the Nirreth military. Many of Isreti’s fanatics felt more drastic steps were required.
Trazen told her things might grow more openly violent soon.
Whatever Trazen himself believed, regarding these different developments, he didn’t really say. He also didn’t tell Jet anything about his own relationship to Richter, or even if such a relationship existed.
The whole thing puzzled Jet… now that she was clear enough to think about it.
It puzzled her a lot.
Trazen spoke to her without looking at her most of those times, without seeming to acknowledge her as an entity different from the furniture or the clothes she wore or the paintings or birds decorating whatever room the two of them happened to inhabit.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 70
