He lifted the skin above one eye, the equivalent of quirking an eyebrow.
“Why?” he said in English.
Sighing, she’d looked him in the face. You know why.
He’d left her alone by the pool, not long after that.
Even so, she’d seen him flinch when she said it, even as his tail gave a sharp lash.
Whispers of that conversation remained in Jet’s mind as she stared in the direction of her mother’s voice. It was snowing harder now, but the wind had died down.
Big, white flakes fell on her sense-suit and her hair, melting on the bare skin of her face.
“Mom!” she yelled.
She did it without thought.
Maybe she did it just to hear her voice.
“Jet! Help us! Help us, please, honey!”
The wind gusted around Jet again, driving wet snow in her face. She fought with what to do. She knew she should run the other direction.
She should just go, get the hell out of here.
Biting her lip so hard she tasted blood, she turned her back on the voice, slogging through snow that now came up to her knees. She knew if she kept walking like this, she’d be exhausted before long. She knew they’d keep trying to force her to go back, to push her towards where Bukka no doubt waited for her.
She knew she had to stay away from the other woman for as long as she could.
“Jet! Don’t leave us!” Her mother’s scream, weirdly closer that time, piercing Jet’s heart. “Jet! Please! They’re going to kill us if you don’t come! Please!”
Her mother screamed louder then, her voice holding nothing but pain.
The scream turned into begging, pleading, then an agonized moan. That moan stretched into another panic-filled wail, making Jet’s stomach turn.
“JET! JET HELP ME! GOD HELP ME! PLEASE!”
Jet closed her eyes, forcing her legs to shove faster through the snow.
She felt her throat close, told herself over and over it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real; they didn’t really have her mom. Even so, when the screams grew louder, more blood-curdling, it sounded so much like her, Jet could barely stand it.
“JET! JET! They have Biggs! Don’t let them kill my baby! PLEASE JET!”
That time, Jet came to a dead stop in the snow. Her mom always joked that Biggs was her baby. Biggs hated it.
No matter how much he complained, her mom just laughed.
“JET! SAVE HIM! IF YOU CAN’T SAVE ME… SAVE HIM!”
She closed her eyes.
She closed her heart.
She made herself walk, plowing faster through the snow.
She didn’t realize she’d closed her eyes again until she opened them and found herself hitting another fork in the maze.
This intersection only really offered her one real option.
She could go right, or she could go back the way she came.
Even as she changed the direction of her feet, turning right at the end of the row, Jet felt that pain in her chest worsen. She was sweating again, moving faster through the snow, but Jet ignored that too, forcing her legs harder through the rising drifts.
She’d only walked a few more meters when a thick snarl brought her up short.
The snarl turned into a deeper growl, something that sounded shockingly familiar, even though it was louder, more vicious-sounding than what Jet remembered in the wild. It also came from higher up. The animal Jet remembered wasn’t anywhere near that tall.
Given there weren’t a lot of things to climb in here, she didn’t see any other explanation. Whatever this thing was, it stood a few feet taller than her.
It really did sound like a mountain cat, though… what her mom used to call cougar.
Jet had run into a few of them in the wild, diseased and skinny, trying to get at the skag settlement’s few chickens and goats. They came down from the mountains in the winter, or when the Nirreth and the mountain rebels drove them into the lowlands.
This didn’t sound like the tired, hungry cats Jet remembered, with their near-desperate roars and growls as they paced outside the tunnels of the skag pits.
This thing sounded a lot bigger.
Even as Jet thought it, she heard panting breaths through the snow.
She crouched down before the sound, brandishing her sword.
Heavy paws impacted in front of her, kicking up clumps of wet, white powder.
The panting grew louder, even as the cat grew more quiet; steam plumed out with each breath, just visible through the falling snow.
Then it was nothing more than a shadowed blur running towards her.
It moved soundlessly, apart from those paws falling and digging, and the heavier pants, the barest trace of a lingering growl.
The quiet unnerved Jet, even as the animal bore down on her.
She let out a yell herself, raising the sword as she saw the thing leap. She ran at it as it leapt, darting to the left and closing the distance as she slashed up and to the right with her sword. She felt the blade make contact, jarring her arm as the thing screamed.
When Jet brought the blade back towards her, it was covered in blood.
Jet hated killing.
She hated it.
The thought hit her out of nowhere, shocking her with its intensity. It hit her emotionally for some reason, even as she shifted her stance to face the creature a second time. As her emotions turned darker, she realized they were being manipulated.
They were going after her mind in here.
They’d never done that before, either.
The giant cat stalked in front of her, roaring its pain and fury.
Jet could almost see it now, in glimpses through the dark.
The flash of fangs when it roared. More pluming breaths. She could smell its blood. She’d always felt sorry for those mountain cats driven down to look for food near the human skag pits. That feeling of not wanting to kill it––of not wanting to kill anything––reached her again, making her chest hurt, and her stomach.
Damn them.
Damn them to hell for doing this to her.
Trazen warned her about this too, she realized.
In his own way, at least.
They have access to your mind, Jet, he’d told her through the venom. Never forget that! They’ll use what they find there. They can’t easily create something out of whole cloth… that’s against the rules and I don’t think they’d break that, even for this. But they can use what’s there. They can exaggerate things that are a part of your emotional make-up already…
At the time, Jet thought he meant they’d use her fears to design the run itself.
Giant spiders. Her mother being in pain. That kind of thing.
She’d already known they would do that.
The cat growled at her, trying to stalk around her in a circle inside the walls of the maze. Jet followed its movements, shifting her body, brandishing Black when it got too close. When the mountain cat swiped at her with one of its plate-sized paws, she slashed at it with her sword again, cutting its leg. The animal screamed and that nausea in Jet’s gut worsened.
She didn’t want to kill it.
“JET!” the voice screamed from behind her. “JET! HELP US! PLEASE!”
She closed her eyes, longer than a blink, then wiped her face with a gloved hand.
She couldn’t let them do this to her.
Trazen got through this.
If he could do it for his people, she could do it for hers.
It would be better if she could figure out how to deal with this emotional thing now. If she didn’t, she’d be useless by the time she had to go up against Bukka herself. Bukka, who wasn’t just a slave, but a lab rat, someone they’d violated before she’d even been born.
At the thought, Jet’s reluctance to hurt anyone grew more intense.
She couldn’t fool herself that Bukka was just a virtual creature.
She’d have to kill Bukka for real.
“JET! JET! THEY’VE GOT BIGGS! JET
! HELP US!”
She clenched her jaw, shoving the feeling down as it grew more intense.
Forcing her mind blank, she strode closer to the growling creature, wading through the deep snow, blinking against the cold. The mountain cat in front of her snarled, walking around her again. It struggled in the snow even more than her, its weight too heavy to stay on top of it.
When the animal got close enough, Jet lunged, slamming the sword forward into the thing’s side. The cat screamed, twisting to get away from her blade, and its own motion helped her to rake the sword deeper through its flesh.
She felt the jar of each rib as she cut it open.
The smell of its blood was all around her now, suffocating her.
Jet screamed, lunging at the thing again.
That time, the cat snarled back.
It reared up, swiping at her. As soon as it exposed its underbelly, Jet slammed the sword up and in. She cut right into its heart. The cat screamed louder. The second scream quickly bubbled, filling with liquid as Jet punctured one of its lungs. The cat continued to growl, scrabbling its claws in the snow. One of them raked across Jet’s shoulder and she gasped, yanking out the sword and rolling out of the way.
The cat fell heavily into the wet snow, still growling.
Tears ran down Jet’s face as she cut its throat.
They froze there, hurting her skin.
She hit the vein in the big cat’s neck and blood gushed out, darkening the snow almost to where Jet’s sense-suit clad legs stood. The growls gurgled louder briefly… then slowly died. The creature exhaled a last plume of steam, melting the snow where it lay.
The smell of its blood filled Jet’s nose.
Fighting another swell of that nausea and disgust, she rubbed her sword on the snow to get the blood off. She smoothed it again on the leg of her sense-suit to get off the rest, then re-sheathed it, pressing her gloved hands to her face. She fought with that disgust, with an overwhelming feeling of regret for having been forced to kill it.
Angry as she felt the manipulation behind that, Jet swiped her face with her gloved hand. She clenched her jaw, fighting to get her equilibrium back, to clear her head.
But the grief of killing the big cat wouldn’t fully dissipate.
Jet was getting ready to make her way around its dead body, to trudge through the drifting snow in the direction she’d been walking before, when another growl came out of that darkness. Then another.
That time, she was pretty sure it was from two different cats. Maybe three.
Cursing under her breath, Jet didn’t think.
She turned and began to walk-jog as fast as she could through the knee-deep snow. Her sword’s sheath banged against her back between her shoulder blades as she ran. She plowed her feet and shins as fast as she could, kicking wet snow in front of her.
She could only hope the cats wouldn’t follow.
She didn’t know if she could take on two, and truthfully, she couldn’t bear the thought of killing even one more of them.
It didn’t occur to her until she’d been running for a few minutes that she was now going the direction the Rings operators wanted her to go. Even when it occurred to her, however, she knew it didn’t matter, not really.
Not anymore.
They’d find a way to get her to run that direction eventually. Or they’d kill her, if she refused. For now, she just had to hope she could stall them long enough.
Long enough to stay alive.
Long enough to remember why she was here.
Long enough to kill Bukka, maybe.
Long enough for Trazen––
But Jet couldn’t think about that.
Not here. Not even now.
So she just ran, feeling her breath come harder the longer she pumped her legs through the heavy snow. Sweat started to dampen her face, to trickle down the back of her sense-suit. She knew she might regret that later, especially if she had to stand still long enough for her damp suit to freeze. She also knew she was already winded, and that being winded could get her killed when she came face to face with Bukka.
There was no point thinking about that now.
Whatever was about to happen, it wouldn’t be much longer.
18
Heading Home
The growls of the great cats receded gradually behind her.
As they did, the screams ahead of her grew louder.
Like she’d suspected, they’d only been there to drive her back to where the game controllers wanted her.
Jet got a sense of the landscape shimmering once or twice as she walked, so she knew they’d probably re-coded the environment to further guide her where they wanted her on the actual playing field, too.
Some of the turns she remembered from before had already disappeared as she made her way back to the main stage of play. Most of the time when she hit an intersection now, she had only one option. Apparently, the pullers had learned their lesson when it came to trying to predict Jet’s directional decisions.
In better news, that cloying grief had finally started to lift. Jet could still hear the screams ahead of her, but her mind remembered they weren’t real.
They were still disturbing to listen to, of course.
Her mom’s voice seemed to go through her at every shriek.
But, all in all, Jet felt like herself again.
Her head cleared enough that she even wondered if there’d been some kind of field on that end of the arena, something that made her feel so bad emotionally that she had to leave. They might have put up some kind of boundary over the run space, something that would force her to turn back, make her go in the other direction.
She dismissed the idea minutes later.
She couldn’t afford to hope the phenomenon was confined to a single area. She had to assume they could do that to her wherever she was.
She had to assume they’d do it when she faced Bukka.
In fact, the longer Jet thought about it, the more she found herself thinking they’d pulled that particular trick out of their arsenal sooner than they’d intended.
It would have made more sense to wait and throw that at her when she faced Bukka the first time. That, or when Jet faced some virtual version of her brother or mom, or whoever was supposedly hurting them.
Increased empathy then likely would have debilitated her.
Jet wouldn’t have been able to recover in time, either, not if it was her family dying in front of her, versus a big mountain cat.
Whatever the specifics, they should have waited for something significant before they started messing with her head, especially since it was a trick they’d never used on her before.
She almost wondered if someone in the Ops Center had handed her a gift––maybe one of Trazen’s pullers, a Rings Operator loyal to him, or one who just didn’t like the way the odds stacked against her.
Someone who wanted to give her a fighting chance.
Now Jet would be ready for it, at least.
She trudged slower through the snow once the cat’s growls faded, saving her strength, and her breath. She fought to think past the increasingly pain-filled screams that came from in front of her, trying to decide if there was anything she could do to better her odds.
The light had increased somewhat in the time since she’d started heading back.
The change was subtle, but Jet found herself looking up at the sky a few times, into the falling snow, and thinking she could see the barest hint of clouds there. More light seemed to reflect against the snow as well, and Jet could see further down the row between the hedges than before, far enough to make out another L-shaped turn at the end.
Then something else occurred to her.
She’d never really looked over her sense-suit for virtual props. They almost always gave her something. A map. A headset of some kind.
Sometimes, she even got tools specific to the environment.
Like, for example… flash lights.
Infrared goggles.
; The thought made her jaw clench.
Then it made her curse under her breath.
Stupid. She might have had access to vision the whole time she’d been in here.
She didn’t know if the rules were different in a challenge match, but she stopped dead in the middle of the hedge row, feeling over her person for anything she could use.
When she stopped trudging through the snow in the direction of the screams, those screams seemed to grow louder.
A drawn-out wail made Jet wince.
That had sounded like her brother.
They sounded close now. Maybe only a few more turns through the maze.
For the same reason, she couldn’t wait to look for any tools that might help her.
She couldn’t feel anything new on her sense-suit, which is maybe why she didn’t think to look before. Usually her clothes changed as soon as she walked into the virtual field, transformed to match with whatever fictional storyline the pullers came up with.
In those matches, Jet was a soldier, a bandit, a pirate, a thief, a hunter, a spy. They even made her a serial killer once. In those cases, it made sense to go through her pockets, since everything she wore was unfamiliar, and relevant to the story.
This time, she looked pretty much exactly the same as she had outside the arena.
She was about to give up entirely when she felt over her shoulder near the hilt of Black, and found a long, narrow-feeling pocket that hadn’t been there before. The fold-over flap at top sat directly below her left shoulder, not far from the edge of her scabbard, but easy to miss even when pulling her sword.
She might not have found it at all, if she hadn’t thought to look.
She opened the snap-top and her fingers found a flat, narrow piece of metal inside.
Sliding it out, she held it up to her eyes, squinting through the dark to try to make out what it was. She honestly had no idea, even after she’d felt over it a few times.
One end seemed sharp, the other round.
Was it a knife of some kind? A pick? A key?
Taking her gloves off and feeling over it with her bare hands didn’t help much, since it was still too dark to see anything beyond its basic shape. The one end was definitely sharp. It must be a knife. But if so, why didn’t it have a handle?
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 85