How had she not felt that?
“You read the label...mammal?” the woman demanded.
Jet refrained from reminding the woman of her own mammal status. She’d already been told by a few of the others what happened to the last person who tried that.
Her eyes drifted down to the hit-marker instead.
“Spear,” she muttered under her breath.
“That’s right...spear!” Alice snapped. “You got a big piece of metal stuck in you right now. How you like that? Feel good, huh?” She jabbed at Jet with the handle of the whip. “How you expect to make it ten minutes in a real match, when you no feel that?”
Wincing a little in spite of herself, Jet didn’t answer.
Her eyes drifted to the tall Nirreth standing against the far wall of the room, leaning his shoulder on the curved surface. Unfortunately, Laksri was way too easy to pick out, even when he stood with three or four others of his kind. Jet saw his eyes on her as well and looked away, annoyed with herself for having stared in the first place.
She wondered again how she’d let Richter just thrust this on her...then found herself wondering if Laksri would do as he said and only sting her, not do anything else. Not like she was looking forward to being his personal zombie for however-long, but it was preferable to the alternative.
Looking away quickly when she realized she was still staring, she met Alice’s gaze long enough to realize the woman had seen where Jet had been looking.
“Got a new boyfriend, Tetsuo?” she said bitingly. “Took you long enough. Maybe he can keep you from dying in the Rings...or at least making a fool of me.”
Jet felt her jaw harden. “What’s next?” she said, narrowing her eyes. “Are you going to tell me? Or am I supposed to guess?”
“Depends. How serious are you about Rings career? Because right now, you not seem so serious. Too busy with new boyfriend, maybe...?”
Jet didn’t answer, but felt her teeth grind together harder.
The arena where Jet stood consisted of a combination of moveable, three-dimensional terrain and virtual overlays of whatever kind. The virtual overlays sent things like spears, arrows, animals...even other people and Nirreth, some of them dressed as space-age warriors and some more like cave-dwelling barbarians. She had a feral human thrown her way a few days earlier who actually tried to eat her after it knocked her down...she still wasn’t sure if it was meant to represent a male or a female, much less what time period.
The virtual landscape also threw natural occurrences at her on occasion, but usually those were relatively benign...fog, pouring rain, wind, zero visibility, snow. On the less benign end, she got caught in an earthquake once, as well as a forest fire and even a volcano.
Physical hit markers, like the one that dyed Jet’s suit, provided proof of a kill shot or other contact, such as a wound, a drug dose that would have knocked her out, etc.
Jet had already been told that in the actual Rings, the blows would hurt––and could even knock her out or down, like in the demonstration. To the audience, it might even look like she’d been seriously injured or killed. When Jet first had all of this explained to her, her reaction had been disbelief, relief and outrage all rolled into one.
“You mean it’s fake?” she’d asked Alice. “You’re kidding.”
She’d been unsure how to feel about that.
She remembered watching pirated feeds of the Rings matches, and how emotional some of the old timers had gotten, seeing the kills. Rarely did they know the actual fighters in the Rings, of course––although once there had been a thirty-something fisherman from the settlement down the coast from theirs. A few had traded with him, and we’d heard when he’d been culled. Even at the time, they’d speculated he might have been nabbed for the Rings.
The man they’d taken, Lai-Wen, had been a veritable giant among skags, over six and a half feet tall, so even larger than the blacksmith, Edgar, and a lot more muscular.
He was also about the right age, if nearing the high end, for the Rings.
They’d gathered around the old television in the long house of the pit, everyone holding their breaths whenever Lai-Wen got hit by one of the other fighters, or stepped out of the way of a sword just in time. Jet hadn’t known him at all, of course––at fourteen, she hadn’t started trading on her own yet, so hadn’t even met the guy.
Her mother had known Lai-Wen, though, and cried along with a few dozen others when a cat-like creature the size of a horse caught him unawares and leapt on him. Lai-Wen fought bravely, or so everyone said, but the tawny cat got its teeth around his throat and ended his struggles in one hard jerk of its jaws.
Jet remembered staring at the fountain of blood, half in fear and half in awe. She’d been shocked by the sheer amount of it. Jet remembered the sickening sound of tearing flesh and muscle, and the hollow crunch of bone in that head-sized mouth.
It had never occurred to her...to any of them, really...that it might not be real.
Alice merely gave her a scornful look at the time. “It’s real enough, you not perform well enough to please them.”
“Meaning what?” Jet said. Even so, something about the woman’s words raised the hair on the back of Jet’s neck.
“Meaning, the Board decides...the Rings Board. You not know this? How you not know? You say you want to be in the Rings...but you know nothing!”
Jet shrugged, her voice blunt. “We had pirated feeds. It looked real enough.”
“Ahhh...” Understanding came to those raptor-like eyes, and a rare smile to those narrow lips. “I see. You get only one layer of broadcast. You see the fight...hear the sound, yes?”
Jet nodded warily. “Yes.”
Alice had a satisfied smile on her face.
“You get no secondary feed.” At Jet’s blank look, Alice’s voice grew impatient. “Points, bets, odds, strategy according to the experts...biases of the Rings Board. You see these things?”
Jet didn’t change expression, but felt her stomach drop. “No. We thought it was just a fight to the death.”
Alice snorted in derision. “Why would you want to do this, if this is what you think? You have a death wish, mammal?”
Jet didn’t answer. Mostly because she didn’t have one.
“You know nothing,” Alice repeated shortly. “No wonder you are so bad.”
She pointed a finger at the only other female in the arena.
“Watch her,” the woman advised. “She is much better than you. Much better.”
Jet’s eyes shifted to Tyra, a tall, lanky girl with muscular shoulders and arms.
She looked to be a few years older than Jet at least, maybe in her early to mid-twenties, and she had lighter skin but darker, more slanted eyes and black hair cut with austere bangs that just covered the tops of her eyebrows.
The one time Jet ran into her in the palatial dressing rooms, Tyra elbowed her hard in the shoulder, nearly knocking Jet down. Jet figured it was some kind of posturing thing, since a lot of the Rings matches she’d seen on the feeds pitted humans against one another, as well as whatever animals or Nirreth they added to the pen.
Now she saw the woman knife-fighting with her own coach, a muscular Nirreth wearing the head-covering that indicated it was male. Jet could almost tell the difference in features by then, too, but not well enough that she didn’t need to check the cultural markers.
In general, the females had longer tails, too, although Jet had noticed a variety of different lengths across both sexes.
When she glanced up next, she found her eyes returning to Laksri, whose tail appeared to be coiling and uncoiling itself, almost like a muscle clenching and unclenching on its own.
“What am I supposed to be looking at, exactly?” Jet said, when she glanced back at the trainer. “She’s good with a knife...”
“No!” Alice said, firming her mouth in obvious disgust. “See how she plays with her opponent, watching from all sides while she fights him?”
“Pretty stupid in a r
eal fight,” Jet muttered. “You can’t assume you’ll always be better than your opponent...”
The trainer jabbed Jet in the back with the butt of her whip, hard enough to hurt.
“How stupid now, mammal?”
“So you watch the periphery,” Jet retorted. “Which, yeah, I should have been doing. But you don’t turn your head and look around like that! It’s just stupid...”
“What if you want to see behind you?” Alice said, her voice pointed.
“You maneuver your opponent around in a circle,” Jet answered promptly, before she’d really thought about it. “In a fixed arena, that’s probably not a bad idea anyway...”
She thought about this as she said it, and when she looked up, Alice was smiling faintly.
“Good,” she said, a note of satisfaction in her voice. “Better, anyway.” She sniffed again, that scorn back on her lips and voice. “...You still need to learn how to play to the Board. We work on that tomorrow. In the meantime, you think about that...about how to fight in multidimensional, fixed spaces...” She tapped Jet hard, right in the middle of her forehead. “...Use that brain for once, not just fight stupid, like skag baby in a brawl for goats...”
Jet felt her face redden a little, given that she had fought for goats before, and more than once. The woman’s words didn’t embarrass her though...they angered her.
“You go,” Alice said, waving her away dismissively. “Your Nirreth boyfriend looks impatient to me...maybe he can’t wait much longer.”
Jet felt her jaw harden again, but only nodded, unfastening the Velcro straps on the cloth wraps at her wrist and unwinding them rapidly from around her palm. She didn’t look up until she’d already kicked off the special shoes they made her wear, and then it was to catch Laksri’s gaze long enough to point a finger towards the locker room door.
Without raising his shoulder off the wall, the Nirreth nodded, his face impassive, even as his tail flickered around him in slightly more sensual circles.
Jet didn’t meet Laksri’s gaze when she came out of the changing room.
The changing room itself looked the size of a banquet hall to Jet, and even the washing areas were more like tile-covered bedrooms with massive spray jets than ‘shower cubicles,’ despite what everyone called them. When she exited both, she wore the usual Nirreth outfit of stretchy pants under a long shirt with gilded edges. She also wore sandals with dense, rubbery soles and soft material over her bare feet.
Laksri looked her over once, grunted, then motioned for her to follow him down the hall in the direction of the residential wings on the east side of the palace grounds.
She continued to avoid looking at him directly as they walked down the hall together. They also didn’t speak. Even so, she’d resigned herself to things, insomuch as she realized it would be better to play this charade with Laksri than to deal with an adolescent Ogli groping her.
Still, she didn’t feel comfortable being alone with the adult Nirreth, either.
It struck her that on some level, it would be easier if Anaze was moving into Laksri’s room with her. She also wondered if Richter had dropped by to let Anaze know that she wouldn’t be back to their room that night, and why.
For the first time since it happened, Jet also let herself think about the kiss Anaze had given her that night behind the Trevi fountain.
He’d said he loved her.
She hadn’t really been clear at the time, or really, in the time since, what he’d meant by that exactly...if he meant he loved her as a person or a sister or a comrade or a friend, or if he’d been trying to tell her something else entirely. The intervening time hadn’t clarified anything. She tried to replay the feeling she’d gotten from him at the time, but couldn’t really trust what any of it meant, especially in retrospect...it was too easy to slant things in her mind towards one direction or the other, which was probably why she dropped it in the first place.
Now, though, she found herself wondering if this new arrangement with Laksri would bother him...or if he’d simply see it as a business arrangement, like Richter obviously had.
Jet was still turning this over in her mind when Laksri led her down a new corridor in the labyrinth, winding her further away from the sleeping quarters she’d been sharing with Anaze.
She followed him without hesitation, but felt her body stiffening regardless, almost as if something in the very air had changed around her. When he came to a stop by one of the narrow, faintly-oval doors, Jet suddenly found she was having trouble breathing. Just then, several Nirreth turned the corner ahead of them, and within seconds, Laksri had his tail coiled around her waist and part of her arm. It happened so quickly, Jet didn’t have a chance to protest, and the second she stiffened, the tail drew her closer to Laksri’s body, tightening like a rope pulled taut, and Laksri leaned over to speak in her ear.
“Do not struggle,” he hissed in a low voice. “Do not.”
Jet bit her lip, but nodded.
Her body remained tense, but she didn’t attempt to pull away.
She felt the black eyes of the passing Nirreth on her, and realized as they drew even with her and Laksri that the group of them had fallen silent, even though they’d been speaking to one another only a few seconds before. They continued to stare as they passed, intently enough that Laksri’s tail tightened on her still more, squeezing the breath out of her belly and up into her lungs and chest.
After a few final turned heads and craned necks, they disappeared around the corner from which Jet and Laksri had just come.
When they were gone, Laksri didn’t remove his tail from around her.
Jet found her fingers wrapping around it near her navel, without really trying to pull it off. His skin and muscles tensed and moved under her fingers, again reminding her of some kind of snake, an animal separate from the rest of him.
When she glanced up, still holding his tail, he was looking at her, a glimmer of uncertainty in his black eyes.
“You understand?” he said. His hand was on the door handle, but he held the door open only a few inches. “Why I did this?”
After a pause, Jet nodded. “Sure.” Of course she did.
Laksri continued to hesitate, looking at her.
“What?” Jet said. Releasing his tail, she folded her arms, trying to ignore the coil of tail still wrapped around her. “Are we going in?”
“We should eat out,” he said after a pause.
He continued opening the door as he said it, loosening his tail around her slightly, but not removing it entirely as he walked inside.
Jet followed, her arms still folded...and still probably overly-aware of the tail wrapped around her waist. He didn’t drag her inside with it, however, and instead loosened it enough to follow her movements through the opening and inside the room itself. When she walked deeper into the room as he turned back to shut the door, his tail unraveled further and then released her altogether.
“So there’s really no surveillance in here?” Jet said, deciding to ignore his rather cryptic comment about dinner. “You sure about that?”
“I am sure,” Laksri said, and he sounded it. “We sweep this. Richter and I. There are machines...”
“And they’re foolproof, I suppose?” Jet said, her voice holding only a trace of sarcasm.
But Laksri’s voice grew blunt again. He didn’t quite cut her off, but managed to make it clear he’d noticed her avoidance.
“You hear me?” he said. “About meal?”
“We should go out,” she said, glancing at him in spite of herself.
He remained by the door, his long arms folded over the light gray shirt.
“Yeah, I heard,” she said, looking away. “So? You think we need to be seen together, is that it?”
“More than seen,” he said, his voice holding a faint warning. “You need to be stung...then out with me.”
“So you lizard-skins like your girlfriends high when you take them on dates?”
Jet meant it to sound like a j
oke, but it didn’t really.
When she looked at Laksri, she got the impression it didn’t sound like a joke to him, either.
There was an awkward silence.
Jet half-expected him to sting her right then, so she found herself reluctant to get too close to where he stood. She hadn’t really realized how tense she’d gotten until he spoke and she jumped, jerking back from him, enough that Laksri did the same, his tail lashing back and forth in one or two aggressive arcs.
What he’d said was, “Do you want different clothes first? Before we start?”
After they’d both flinched, Jet just blinked at him.
He’d said it politely, but something in his words struck her as more than a suggestion.
Looking down at herself, Jet realized that she was wearing the same clothes she’d worn that morning, in the stables. Anaze had already warned her that the Nirreth sense of smell was about ten times that of humans, and that it contributed to their fondness for bathing, despite their inability to swim. Elaborate, underground baths, shallow of course, lived under the main common spaces on the east side of the palace. Most looked out over gardens that lived still deeper underground, and consisted of waterfalls and rock formations, birds of course, which Jet was learning filled most of their common spaces, despite the near lack of them under the larger dome itself, as well as flower and fruit trees.
She had come to realize that the Nirreth adored recreating nature in its various forms. They did this both underground as well as under the artificial sky and sun amid the parkland of trees and grasses they’d built over the landscape of the New Mexico desert and its ruined sky.
Again, Anaze illuminated her some on their quirks around this.
According to him, the Nirreth’s home world sky wasn’t blue, not even before it had been ruined by some kind of cosmic event that rendered it unbreathable for the Nirreth or most of the indigenous animals of Astet, what they called that home world.
Of course, Earth’s sky behind the dome wasn’t really blue either, but they’d patterned their artificial landscape on what they hoped the Earth would look like, once they’d completed their “environmental repair plan,” something which they seemed to believe would take close to one hundred years to finish.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 20