Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV)
Page 28
That time, Jet saw the faint mischievousness behind it. He didn’t answer her question though, at least not in actual words.
“I don’t want you sleeping with the boy anymore,” he said instead, his voice holding that harder edge. “I want my bed back,” he added.
“Do you want me to move back to the other apartment?” Jet said, trying to wade through his words. “With Anaze?” When he made that rumbling sound in his chest, she glanced up.
“What?”
“I want you to sleep with me,” he said, speaking seemingly with an effort. “It doesn’t have to be sex...I am not asking for that. But I wonder if you would sleep next to me, instead of the boy? If you would let me do what you let him do?”
“We don’t do anything,” Jet said, exasperated.
“You understand,” he growled quietly. “I know you do.”
Jet stared at him, wordless for what felt like a long beat of time. Finally, she sighed, still studying his deep black eyes.
“Why do you even like me, Laksri?”
He shrugged, averting his eyes. “You know one reason.”
“Is that the only reason?” she said, feeling her jaw harden slightly. “You like to have sex with mammals with long hair?”
“...Only if they cut me with swords,” he smiled.
“Funny,” Jet said. “Really. Are you going to tell me why?”
“Answer my question first,” Laksri said, insistent. When she bit her lip again, he stroked her arm, loosening his tail around her waist. “Please answer. Please.”
“No,” she said, giving a short laugh as she looked up.
“No is your answer?”
“No, I won’t answer before you!” she said, exasperated. “My answer depends partly on yours...”
Exhaling, as if half in exasperation himself, he seemed to think about her words before he shrugged again. “You are like me,” he said after a pause. His voice held a note of surprise in it, especially when he repeated his words. “You are. You are like me...”
“I am?” Jet laughed again. “How do you figure?”
“You don’t like being ordered...made to do things,” he said. Switching to his mind, he added, You don’t like injustice...and you fight. I like this. Too many of my people just do whatever they are told to do. Even among the rebels... he added, seemingly as an afterthought. Many of those follow me only because I am the son of a king....not because they think I am right, or because they want what I want. They expect me to take the prince’s place, simply because of the blood of my birth...
Jet thought about his words.
“So why do you do it, then?” she said aloud.
He shrugged again, smiling at her wanly.
For the same reason you do, he thought at her softly. ...I have hope.
They ran the course at least five times before Jet could feel her muscles starting to shake from tiredness, and the stronger effects of the venom leaving her system. By then, it had to be close to two in the morning, Earth time, so when Laksri looked her over critically and pronounced that she’d had enough, Jet didn’t argue.
She decided to wait and shower when she got back to the room so she could put on clean clothes...and tried to ignore Laksri’s wrinkled nose and occasional snort as they walked back through the narrow corridors to his apartment.
Still, she found herself glad at that point that she could no longer hear his thoughts.
When they got back to the room, Anaze was still up, and clearly waiting for them where he sprawled on the couch. He looked wary, though more cautious than angry.
Jet knew that would change, though...as soon as Laksri had his say about the new sleeping arrangements.
Not wanting to hear the ensuing conversation, Jet announced she was taking a shower, grabbed some of the clothes from the left side of her wardrobe and disappeared into the bedroom to find the low entrance to the shower cubicle. She closed both doors behind her––the one to the bedroom and the one to the washroom itself––and turned the water on full, so that it echoed in the small, tiled space.
Even so, she still managed to hear the yelling on the other side of the walls.
Taking her time in the shower in the hopes that the worst of it would be over by the time she got out, Jet dressed slowly, too, despite the silence that now emanated from the other side of the walls. The venom had pretty much worn off by then, but she still got the feeling somehow, that the argument wasn’t completely over.
Venturing out of the washroom with her hair combed straight down her back and wearing loose clothes after putting on a kind of Nirreth skin cream and brushing her teeth, Jet walked cautiously into the bedroom. When she didn’t see either of them...she poked her head into the common room on the other side of the taller door.
There she found the two of them waiting for her, in almost the identical positions she’d left them in, twenty minutes earlier.
Looking between the two of them, Jet mostly just felt tired.
Anaze sat, arms crossed, on the green-cushioned couch. Laksri stood over him, but a little distance away, his own arms folded over his shirt and his tail flicking in annoyance behind him. In fact, that was the only real difference Jet noted between them, those muscular waves of Laksri’s tail as it rippled back and forth in an almost tangible emotion.
Both of them looked tired, too, Jet thought.
Despite all of this, Laksri’s expression remained immovable when he said,
“He thinks you would not agree to this. That I must have stung you several times, to get you to agree...”
Not surprised by this even a little, Jet sighed, looking at Anaze.
“It’s his bed, Anaze,” she said. “He wants it back.”
“With you in it?” Anaze burst out angrily.
“What’s the difference?” she said with a sigh. “He’s not going to be stinging me in his sleep...”
Anaze gave an incredulous laugh. “Of course he won’t. He’ll do it while he’s wide awake!”
“It looks better, if anyone decided to check,” Jet said, now slightly annoyed. “And what’s the difference? Seriously?” At Anaze’s cold look, she folded her own arms, so that now all three of them adopted roughly the same posture. “...I don’t know why any of this would surprise you, Anaze. This whole thing with you and me was never meant to be a permanent arrangement...it was just a temporary thing...”
“He wants you, Jet!” Anaze snapped. “Are you blind? Or just willfully stupid?”
Jet’s jaw abruptly clenched. “Funny. He said the same thing about you.”
Anaze’s skin darkened, but he didn’t lower his gaze. Instead, he shifted it to Laksri and raised his voice, letting it grow openly derisive.
“I see. So the lizard skin is jealous. And you’re suddenly okay with indulging that, Jet. Funny, back in the settlement, I would never have guessed you were such an easy mark...I thought all of that stuff was just rumor...”
Jet knew his words were meant to anger her, but she didn’t change expression. Instead she just looked at him, and when her voice came out, it sounded strangely quiet, even to her.
“Look,” she said. “I’d rather sleep with him than you. It’s that simple. I need his help to get ready for the Rings, and he tells me more than you do. I have more reason to trust him anyway, because of the venom...”
“More reason to trust him because of the venom?” Anaze said coldly.
Jet flinched at his tone. His face hadn’t moved, but she could tell her words cut him more than he was letting show on his face.
“That’s an interesting theory, Jet...”
“I can feel things off him,” Jet said, biting her lip as she raised her voice for the first time. “It’s better than nothing...which is what I get from you and your father...”
“Do you seriously believe that the Nirreth haven’t figured out how to hide things they want hidden, venom or no?” Anaze said, his voice furious once more, and now holding a faint note of incredulity again. “Or that him and my Da
d don’t have their own games going, regardless of what they tell either of us...much less what he must be planning with his own people? He and Richter don’t exactly see eye to eye on everything, Jet...or hadn’t you noticed?”
Laksri looked at him, his eyes now filled with a near-violence, but not before Jet snapped back at Anaze,
“You might be right,” she said, her voice hard. “But it’s more than I can feel off you.”
At that, Anaze blinked up at her in surprise.
He frowned again a few seconds later, staring at the floor. She saw a conflict of emotion flicker across his tanned face, right before he shook his head, rising to his feet.
“I request permission to stay in my assigned quarters,” he said, looking straight at Laksri.
Jet frowned, folding her arms tighter, but Anaze wouldn’t meet her gaze. When Laksri gave him the permission sign and stood out of the way of the door, Anaze gave him the countersign even as he’d already began to walk. Without looking at Jet, he headed straight for the door and hit the panel to let himself out, exiting through the opening as soon as it was large enough.
He didn’t give a single backwards glance. He didn’t look at Laksri, either.
Jet watched the eggshell white surface close behind him, and swallowed.
Feeling a twinge of regret, she quickly pushed it away.
“I’m exhausted,” she said into the silence, looking at Laksri for the first time since Anaze left.
The Nirreth sighed in a kind of agreeing purr, and seemed to deflate, too.
“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 think about it too clearly, 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 up over his head, he let it drop to the floor before climbing into the bed after her, but across from where she lay. Lying on his side, he cushioned his head with one arm in a kind of purring sigh, and 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 back 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,” was all 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 that she’d overslept.
She only remembered a few seconds later, just about when she was starting to panic, envisioning the guards bursting in and arresting her or Laksri, that Laksri told her the night before that he’d gotten her exempt from her duties with the Prince for the remainder of the week, due to the upcoming Rings. No one argued with the request; in fact, from what Laksri said, such a request was pretty much expected prior to her first match.
He also told her that the 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 then 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 empathy, Jet could feel a kind of contentment on him.
For some reason, that made it a lot harder to be irritated with him.
Which kind of made her 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 the next few days. She could remember everything from their training session the night before, enough to feel a little more confident that the real arena likely had the same basic layout across the different models, but also that scale was likely to be an issue...different enough that it could really throw her off in terms of the timing she’d begun to pick 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 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 rest of the noise of the projections.
Of course, Jet knew the VR projections and actual attackers used would all be different, and based at least partially on imprints from her own mind, so she should probably be trying to think what they might be most likely to throw at her, based on that.
That dinosaur freaked her out...the one from her ‘demonstration.’
She’d always been nervous of bears, too.
Then there were the gangs that roved the skag pit...
She could feel her body starting to tense as her mind whirled around the various things they might try on her, when Laksri’s arm and tail tightened around her further.
“Do not think about this now, Jet,” he mumbled against the pillow, somewhere over her head. He pressed against her, and suddenly 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 really had left.
Despite how casual everyone had been about her upcoming debut in the Rings (well, everyone but Alice anyway, who’d seemed positive she was marked for death from day one), it crossed Jet’s mind more than once that the reason might be solely because she was still an unknown quantity to most of them. To most of the Nirreth, this meant she could easily die in the first few rounds...especially if the judges decided they didn’t like her. So none of them seemed to want to get overly invested in her before they saw what she could do.
The more Jet thought about this, the more nauseous she felt.
No one cared about her because everyone knew she might be dead by Sunday.
Even as she thought it, 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 that morning.
Three days later, Jet found herself being led with Laksri, Anaze and Richter up a narrow, sloped hallway.
They were deep underground, just below the main arena of the Rings for Green Zone, Hezeret. Only a few hundred feet from it, in fact.
Another roar from the crowd shook the ceiling over her head.
It sounded like thunder from where Jet walked, and she found herself flinching away from the sound even with Laksri’s firm grip on her arm and the lack of reaction from every other Nirreth and human walking past them, or simply watching them arrive.
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 have her own team once she made it past her fifth fight.
Assuming she did make it past the 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 of those five...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 and would 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.
All in all, the more Jet learned about the Rings, the harder it was to decide whether she should be trying harder to get scratched in the first round, before she got killed...or if she should be trying to win.
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 and words whirled through her mind, alternately bringing a kind of adrenaline-fueled resolve and confused panic.
But yeah, she knew Laks was right. She had to win. Get on the official roster.