On Astet, Jet spent hours beyond counting inside interrogation cells being questioned by Nirreth in the new Royal Police.
They had beaten her just about every night during that time.
They’d stung her, beaten her––
Jet pushed the memories out of her mind, wincing.
It was disconcerting to think that Trazen rescued her from that.
At the time, she’d expected more of the same from him.
But that more never came.
He didn’t even share a bed with her, not even to sleep.
She tried to make sense of what had happened on Astet, but so far, her mind came up blank. Why had Richter killed Laksri? Wasn’t he planning on using Laksri to influence the government of the Nirreth? What changed? What could possibly have changed so much, that Laksri would no longer be of use to him?
Had Richter known Isreti would be taking down the Queen?
Had he realized he couldn’t stop that from happening, and taken the opportunity to wipe out Laksri personally?
It was the only explanation that made sense to Jet at all.
“Honorable friend?” a voice queried.
The voice made her jump, a finger of presence in that silence.
Well, not silence––the birds continued to sing, only a little louder than the humans who hung their bare legs in the pool a dozen meters away.
Jet wasn’t used to people speaking to her. No one but Trazen spoke to her, at least not in the last few weeks. Most of the others who lived in Trazen’s house, Nirreth and human, ignored her now, treating her like an eccentric part of the landscape.
Jet turned her head.
She found a Nirreth female standing there, watching her expectantly. A faint smile touched the female’s deep-black lips, reflected in the shimmers of her stone-like eyes. The expression contained the usual Nirreth subtlety. Jet probably wouldn’t have even seen it before living around them, and being stung by them.
“You are ready for the Rings match, Jet Tetsuo, honorable friend of the Nirreth?” the female said, folding her three-fingered hands together.
Jet hesitated.
Glancing down at the floor, she focused briefly on the clock embedded there in the stone. Once she’d concentrated on the space long enough for it to appear, she looked at the time, and nodded. She had wasted over an hour standing here, staring at the reflecting pools, trying to dig her mind out of the venom.
Her life was being scraped away, bit by bit, like a piece of volcanic rock rubbed, chipped and cracked into flakes and grains of sand. Jet didn’t know what month it was, what season lived outside the artificial blue skies. She didn’t know where Trazen’s house stood in relation to the map of the Green Zone as a whole.
She didn’t know why Trazen hadn’t hurt her yet.
All of this crossed her mind, but she had no idea how fast or how slow.
“I am ready,” she said simply, when it finished.
The female Nirreth inclined her head.
“Drink this,” the blue-skinned female said, her voice soothing, reassuring.
She handed a glass container to Jet, who took it wordlessly.
The liquid inside was pale green, the color of new leaves.
It never once occurred to Jet to argue with the Nirreth’s instructions.
Still smiling that faint, Nirreth smile, the female watched Jet uncap the bottle, then take a few long swallows from the narrow lip.
She stood patiently as Jet drank the whole thing down to the bottom.
When Jet had finished, the female Nirreth bowed lower, right before turning to walk out of the room, her long, four-fingered hands clutched in front of her elaborately-embroidered tunic. Her broad feet moved silently over the stone tiles, a darker blue than the leggings she wore, which more closely matched a version of that domed sky.
Jet let her mind fall back into familiar static as she followed the Nirreth to the front end of the house.
She still held the empty glass container in her hand.
She already knew one of those sailboat-like transports would be waiting for her outside.
Without thinking about it clearly, she fell back into her silent disguise as a slave.
She did it even knowing that Trazen would approve.
2
Waking Up
Jet’s mind continued to clear.
It cleared enough that she started having emotional reactions.
Real ones.
Reactions leapt into her with no warning, jolting her awake, jerking her heartrate through the roof, spiking adrenaline through her blood without giving her mind anything concrete to work with.
Jet felt like an entirely different person in a matter of hours.
She went from zombie, venom-drunk Jet to this more wide-awake, volatile version faster than her brain could process.
She’d never transitioned off the venom so quickly, not even with Laksri.
Not even under high levels of stress.
Some of those changes were borderline comforting. They reminded Jet of who she was, who she used to be, how she normally thought about things.
Some were downright terrifying as she realized how long she’d been out of it.
Most of the latter reactions felt like a panicked animal response––a lot closer to full-blown terror and fear-of-death than anything approaching reason.
By the time she arrived at the Rings stadium, Jet’s hands were shaking. She was having trouble breathing. She struggled to focus on what was being said around her.
She clutched a glass container in one hand. It was empty now.
That fact didn’t strike Jet as significant until sometime later.
Panic continued to rise and fall in her mind. Some of it felt like delayed reactions, as if stored up emotion, shock, even trauma came roaring back, the instant they were released. Despite just how much of it there was, how overwhelming it felt, Jet was getting better at surfing those currents with every passing minute.
She kept hearing gunshots in some part of her mind, along with screams.
She wondered how long she’d been in this dreamlike state.
She wondered if some part of her had been broken all this time, ever since she’d seen Laksri gunned down on Astet. The cracks and fissures in her mind could have been covered over in venom all this time, hidden in Jet’s drugged psyche like imperfections smoothed over by a new coat of paint.
She’d still been staring out the window of the trolley-like transport when the sailboat-shaped vehicle began to slow.
Once more, the panic started, and that sharper clarity.
Jet focused out the window and saw a large crowd waiting for her by the back entrance to the stadium doors. The sliding door to the vehicle had scarcely begun to disappear into the wall of the trolley’s frame, when hands caught hold of her, pulling her out.
Those hands belonged to Nirreth.
All were surprisingly gentle.
Trazen’s people. Security.
She knew them. She knew each and every face and body, without being able to pinpoint the exact time or place she’d met a single one of them.
They held her firmly in their hands, guiding her out of the trolley and onto the sidewalk, surrounding her with their bulk, tails lashing in a low threat at the pressing crowds. They led her off the sidewalk without opening their ranks, bringing her up a grassy ramp leading to the Rings player’s gates at the back end of the stadium.
The crowd pressed up against her and her entourage at once, some human, but most Nirreth and well-dressed.
Media. Fans.
Even a few officials.
Jet saw a number of them holding recording devices and microphones as they shouted her name loudly, eagerly, human-like grins on their midnight blue faces. Jet saw actual humans, too, some of them holding cameras and microphones and shouting to get her attention along with the rest. A less-coherent shout went up from the crowd that pressed against a second set of ropes as soon as they saw her, one that soon congeal
ed into a word Jet recognized.
The implications of hearing it now, after everything that happened, completely dazed her.
“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!”
She stopped dead when she first heard it, staring around to assure herself the voices were real, that they weren’t like the gunshots or the screams.
They were actually happening.
They weren’t just in her head.
Briefly, Trazen’s people let her stop on the upward-sloping ramp. They clustered around her protectively, giving her friendly looks like she’d known them all of her life.
Nirreth security guards for the Rings stood there too, Jet noticed, holding up thick, muscular arms in front of the security ropes, lashing their tails in warning to the fans and the media representatives standing there.
Jet could barely make out the faces beyond their broad backs and thick arms, blinded by lights and deafened by the chants.
“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!” they screamed.
Jet stared at the thickest part of the crowd, lost in the waves of emotion she could see in faces, and in the shouts, screams and chants that grew louder when they saw her face turned in their direction.
“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!”
Tails thumped into walls, feet pounded into the sidewalk.
Human hands clapped as mouths shrieked her name, then took up the chant with everyone else.
The chant beat into her skull, bleeding up from the ground and the soles of her feet to travel up her legs, reaching a hotter area of her belly, something Jet hadn’t felt in weeks, months, maybe longer… not since Laksri died right in front of her.
“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!”
Jet held up a fist, even as her handlers attempted to pull her back from the surging and emotional crowd. When the screams turned ecstatic, the crowd began to shove forward into the ropes and the security, violently that time.
Trazen’s people caught hold of her again, their fear reaching her through their jointed fingers. They began to guide her firmly past the mob, pulling and pushing at her with careful hands, their faces visibly worried even past the dark inscrutability of their Nirreth bone structure and midnight blue skin.
The crowd went crazy when Jet’s fist went up.
Shouting her name and lunging harder against the ropes, the Nirreth and humans alike stomped their feet harder, shrieking her name and yelling out, even as those in the background continued their deeper, more rhythmic chant.
Jet didn’t know most of those faces.
She didn’t know them like she knew the Nirreth guards and security personnel who guided her towards the back end of the stadium.
Yet somehow, in all that surging emotion and those shining eyes, whipping tails and stomping feet, she felt like she did know them.
She felt like she knew every one of them.
She raised her fist higher, letting out a warrior-like call.
The crowd screamed louder in response.
“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI…!”
The thumping and those three syllables followed Jet all the way inside.
Even the heavy clang of the metal doors that closed behind her, leaving her in the relative quiet of the corridor leading to the changing and preparation rooms, didn’t manage to cut off their voices and stomping feet entirely.
She was a slave, it was true.
She might remain a slave for the rest of her life.
But breaking something wasn’t really having it. It was just breaking it.
The thought comforted Jet somehow, although she couldn’t have said why.
More than that, it reminded her.
It reminded her of who she was. Of who she always would be.
No matter how much of her they tried to take away.
3
Owned
Jet sat on a bench in the dressing room beneath the arena.
She was still panting, still fighting the adrenaline out of her body.
Blood ran down one side of her face.
She winced in reflex as the human attendant below her wiped a cold cloth over a cut on her thigh. They’d cut the sense-suit half off her to get to the worst of her injuries.
She could feel bruises all along the side of her torso.
Her jaw hurt, one of the toes on her left foot felt broken. Her arm got burned pretty seriously by that crazy flamethrower thing waiting for her outside the final run of the match––the goal of which had been, of all things, a rabbit.
Jet just sat there, feeling her heartbeat finally start to slow.
Grinning from ear to ear.
Damn, she was out of shape, though.
She’d have to get on that right away. It hadn’t even occurred to her before the run how soft her body had gotten from weeks of doing practically nothing but wander around Trazen’s house in dresses and stretchy pants.
She supposed that was probably a good thing, or it might have scared her.
She knew they’d likely thrown her in that way on purpose, maybe to give the run some added drama. Even so, Jet found herself thinking she must have been more stoned on venom than she realized to walk in there cold like that, so totally unprepared.
She’d only thought she was clear because––well, in comparison to the past few weeks and months, she had been clear. She’d been crystal-clear compared to that slave version of Jet who wandered like a zombie in Trazen’s palace.
Next to the old Jet, however, the one from the pits, she’d still been fuzzy as hell.
Now she felt even clearer, though.
She glanced at the rabbit from the run, which the operators had brought in after the match, grinning and swishing their tails as they welcomed her back to the Rings with Nirreth smiles and pats on the back and arms and legs. One of them had put the rabbit in a box next to her on the padded bench. It was a real rabbit, and a real prize, in that they’d gifted the creature to her as a pet to show their affection at her return.
One of the Rings Operators teased Jet that the Rings were fun again, with Jet and her photographic memory back for them to play with.
He’d gotten a little too flirty though, from the perspective of Trazen’s guards.
They’d kicked the whole group out shortly after the same Nirreth wrapped his tail around Jet’s waist in a spontaneous Nirreth squeeze of affection.
For some reason, the memory made Jet smile.
Reaching into the box, she stroked the rabbit’s soft ears with the fingers that weren’t covered in blood. The poor thing looked scared. She cooed to it, stroking its deep black fur again until its ears perked up and it looked up at her, as if trying to decide if she was a threat.
The grin never left her face.
They’d given her a short run, probably to get her back in the swing of things.
Short, but not particularly easy.
Jet didn’t know if they’d wanted to test her, see what she had left, given all the rumors circulating about her being “tamed” by Trazen in the intervening weeks. Pretty much from the first minutes of the run, they’d thrown opponent after opponent after her. Most wielded hand-held, non-combustion weapons.
Swords. Clubs. Long-staffs. One had a pipe.
Jet fought all of them with her sword, Black, and damn, it had felt good.
Still grinning, she winced again, sucking in a breath when the attendant sitting by her bared leg poured some kind of fire-like disinfectant on the cut there.
She hissed as it bubbled over the open wound, fighting to keep her leg where it was, even as her expression screwed up in reflex. Seeing the worried look on the attendant’s face where he half-sat and half-crouched in front of her, Jet laughed.
She could still hear the pounding on the benches and low walls above.
“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!”
She was still grinning when the door to the outside corridor opened.
Noise flooded the small room.
Jet glimpsed cameras, got blinded briefly by lights as they tried to photograph her in h
er half-naked state, wearing a ripped-up sense-suit and underwear.
Raising a hand to block the brightest of those lights, Jet found she was still grinning even as she blinked against the glare.
The sound rose higher as they saw her, questions shouted in Nargili, even a few in English.
Jet only made a handful of those.
“JET! Jet! Are you back in the Rings for good, Jet?”
“What about Bukka, Jet? Are you going to accept the challenge match, Jet?”
“Jet! Jet! Tell us how you’re feeling! How was your first run back?”
The door closed, leaving the room in relative silence.
Trazen stood there.
He wore the same clothes she’d seen on him out in the judgment circle just a few minutes before. There, she’d been covered in sweat, holding up her sword and her bloody arm to a stadium full of cheering and tail-thumping Nirreth, so she’d barely noticed.
High on adrenaline and barely able to think straight from the realization that she’d won, and won well, she’d barely noticed Trazen at all when he came up quietly to stand beside her. She only glanced over when the Rings Board began to speak, handing down their verdict on her performance.
Jet barely heard the words as they declared her the winner.
She only found out later they’d given her extra points for “style” as well, somewhere in that same speech.
In all of it, she’d barely noticed Trazen.
She’d barely noticed any of them.
Now, however, she found herself really looking at him.
He wore the requisite tunic, embroidered in front with gold thread, the color of his house. The cloth itself was midnight black, making him look even more the ex-Rings runner and athlete with its form-clinging fit around the chest and arms. The gold also made the gold in his eyes stand out, both the flecks and those pale rings.
He wore a black cloth around his head, the usual style for male Nirreth, wound and tied at the base of his neck like a pirate, or maybe a ponytail that hung between his shoulder blades. She hadn’t noticed the black boots he wore, which looked like leather, or the thick band around his muscular wrist, or the blue stone that hung from his neck on a copper-colored chain.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 71