She’d only thought she was clear because...well, in comparison to the past few weeks and months, she had been. She’d been crystal-clear compared to that slave version of Jet who lived in Trazen’s palace.
Next to the old Jet, however...the one from the pits...she’d still been pretty fuzzy.
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 once more.
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 had wielded hand-held, non-combustion weapons.
Swords. Clubs. Longstaffs. 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 attended 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 her 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. Then 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. He wore a black cloth around his head, the usual style for male Nirreth, wound and tied at the base of his neck almost 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.
As she looked at him, he stared back at her.
He took in her facial expression first.
Jet found the grin continued to ghost her lips, even with him looking at her...even with the confusion she could see in his dark eyes, as if he was trying to figure out what her expression meant. Then something in his face changed.
His dark eyes flickered down her body, right before his mouth firmed. He looked away, his tail coiling sideways in a hard, whiplike arc.
“Get her cleaned up,” he said, his voice a growl. “Why is this taking so long?”
Jet heard the anger there, but felt glimmers of some more complex emotion below that. The second remained too subtle for her to grasp.
“...We have a dinner appointment,” he added, still not looking at her directly.
With that, the muscular Nirreth turned away from her entirely.
Jet watched as Trazen walked the few steps back to the dressing room door.
He jerked it open with one hand, walking out the same way he’d come in, once more providing the Nirreth media with a glimpse of her, along with a half-dozen more photos and recordings of Jet sitting there, smiling for the first time in months, from that padded bench.
She had the strangest urge to stick her tongue out at him as he left.
Jet felt her head getting clearer and clearer.
With that clarity came a lot of things, not all of them pleasant. Once the adrenaline started to wear off from her run in the Rings, she found herself thinking strategically once more...and also trying to figure out what her options were, before Trazen or whoever else doped her up again.
The bottom line seemed simple. She had to get out of here.
Not just out of Trazen’s palace. She had to get out of the Green Zone.
It wasn’t safe for her here anymore...if it ever had been. She had to find her family, even if that meant hunting Richter back on her home turf, in the skag pits, toxic waters and wilderness of what used to be southwestern Canada.
She couldn’t assume she had much time to figure out a plan. She’d already put together that the green liquid that female Nirreth gave her must have cleared her head. It worked a hell of a lot better than the shots Laksri once gave her to counteract the effects of the venom.
What she didn’t know for certain was if Trazen had been behind giving her that liquid antidote.
She strongly suspected he had been.
She wondered if any of the humans would help her in Trazen’s home.
To even raise the question to the wrong one could get her killed of course...but she needed allies. Getting out of there on her own was likely impossible. With Trazen stinging her all the time, it would be hard enough to keep a secret from him for long...much less to keep herself focused on getting out of there in the first place.
Maybe she could find some way to get Trazen to trust her more.
If he’d let her out of the house on her own, she might be able to find more of the drug in one of the human areas of the Green Zone. She knew from Laksri that a black market existed in those districts, fed by humans and Nirreth. She could maybe find something to barter.
Or hell, maybe she could get access to some of Richter’s peo
ple...convince them she was still on their side. Or maybe just convince them that she’d expose Richter for real if they didn’t find some way to smuggle her out.
She toyed with the idea of asking the human slave “The Professor” for help...or maybe the brown-haired woman who’d been kind to her. There’d been a few kitchen slaves she remembered now, too. One offered Jet cake the first day she’d arrived in Trazen’s home. Another gave her a tour and found her clothes. Loyal to Trazen or not, they seemed to see her as one of them. They’d had some sympathy towards her, at least.
If she could convince one of them she wanted to explore the markets for benign reasons––out of boredom or curiosity or to buy a present for Trazen, since they all thought she was sleeping with him anyway––maybe one would agree to take her.
Or, better yet, look the other way while Jet went on her own.
In the meantime, she’d have to do her damnedest not to think about about anything that might cause Trazen to clamp down on her freedom even more. She couldn’t think about the drug she wanted, or going back home, or finding Richter’s people or the black markets or her family being held in the mountains outside of Vancouver.
She had to assume Trazen would sting her again soon.
He would definitely sting her before she could act on any of this.
Instead of focusing on not thinking about those things that would likely get her locked up or killed––which Jet knew pretty much guaranteed she would think about those things, possibly to the exclusion of all else––she figured she’d be better off actively thinking about something else. Preferably something distracting enough that Trazen wouldn’t notice anything strange going on with her. Preferably something that would distract him, too.
The mere fact of being allowed to fight in the Rings gave her hope.
They were likely lining up a whole new Rings match schedule for her even now. If she was right, she might have a lot more days as clear as this one.
Contemplating the Rings gave her something concrete to think about, as well.
Something other than escape.
Those reporters mentioned a challenge match. That meant Trazen had already gotten at least one offer...possibly more than one. That meant Jet might be close to reaching the point spread she needed for Trazen to begin accepting those challenges, if she wasn’t there already.
That meant longer runs. It also meant matches against Nirreth, not only humans.
Matches against men from the pits...humans tough enough to give her a real fight. Humans who might think they were fighting for their lives...and the lives of their families.
It might be enough.
It would have to be enough. It was all Jet really had. Nothing at Trazen’s home would hold her mental attention well enough to keep her occupied once he had his venom in her. Even the Rings might not be enough for that.
Further, it was difficult not to think about those Rings matches strategically...meaning, in regards to her need to escape. After all, she might be able to connect with some of those human opponents in the course of the match. Knowing the Nirreth and their proclivities for high emotional drama in the runs, Jet might even know some of her opponents.
They might be people she grew up. They might be friends of hers from the skag pits around Vancouver.
All of this ran through Jet’s mind as Trazen’s servant finished cleaning her wounds.
She wouldn’t have much time, no matter what she did.
Focusing deliberately on a topic was only marginally easier than not focusing on one. Slipping up would be as easy as forgetting for a single breath.
With the venom, it was so easy to forget a lot of things.
She thought about that the whole time she stood under the hot shower, once her wounds were cleaned and patched. She thought about it the whole time she dressed, pulling on clothes one of Trazen’s people had lain out for her on the padded couch.
She thought about it as another of Trazen’s servants arranged her hair, fingering oil through the ends of it before combing her straight, wet locks carefully to cover the new stitches used to close the cut by her hairline. Jet continued to think about it while they dried her hair under the blowers...and while they put black kohl over her eyes and down the line of her throat, and put jeweled sandals on her feet, carefully covering her taped broken toe.
She stalled for a few minutes more after they’d finished with her, smoothing creams over her arms and shoulders where they weren’t bandaged, including the ones that smelled the best out of the row of containers lining the marble counter of the prep room.
Giving her face a last stare in the mirror, she realized she looked pretty good.
After weeks and months of essentially ignoring her appearance after Trazen brought her back from Astet, she had color in her face from the Rings run and the shower, and the black makeup around her eyes brought out the lighter shades of brown in her irises. Her skin looked relatively smooth, even with the new bruises and cuts. Her cheekbones, which looked borderline gaunt to her earlier that day, now looked exotically high with the added color and the make-up that brought out her face’s contours in subtle shades of browns and reds.
Exhaling in relief at what she saw, she steeled her mental resolve before she turned, making her way to the door.
Someone had already removed the rabbit from the main prep room.
Jet had to assume that they’d taken it back to Trazen’s home. She could only hope she didn’t end up eating it for dinner that night. Feeling her mouth curl in a grimace at the image of the thing cut up and grilled on her plate, she shoved that out of her head, too.
She jerked open the door.
Immediately, she was surrounded.
Trazen’s people circled her first.
Jet sucked in a breath, stepping backwards in reflex and then lowering her arms slowly when she felt protective Nirreth bodies surround her, blocking the descending reporters from touching her. The guards pulled fingers off and pushed others away when those hands slipped through the boundary anyway. Most tried to stroke her hair and skin, as a lot of her Nirreth fans and even the Nirreth media were wont to do.
Jet fought to breathe, walking fast to stay level with her bodyguards as they guided her towards the back entrance to the building, moving fast.
Lights continued to flash in her face. She saw the blue glow of live video recorders surrounding her like a circle of iridescent eyes.
When they burst through the double doors, the sunlight shocked her.
Somehow, it seemed like too much time had passed for the sun to still be in the sky, even though it had fallen relatively low, tinting the dome a goldish hue.
She’d been under artificial light for so long, it still hurt her eyes. As she lowered her hand to gaze at the sunset, she felt her throat tighten.
Even this sky wasn’t real.
She didn’t have long to think about that either.
Trazen’s guards caught hold of her arms, guiding and pushing her towards and into another of those sailboat-like trolleys.
It happened fast. Before she knew it, the door closed behind her, and she sat on one of the padded benches in her long, embroidered shirt and Nirreth leggings. Outside that door, the guards held out their arms to block the trolley from the reporters’ cameras.
When Jet caught her breath and glanced around, she found Trazen sitting across from her. He stared at her unapologetically that time, his arm propped on the back support for the bench where he sat. Nirreth and humans continued to bang on the windows of the trolley where they squeezed past Trazen’s guards, calling Jet’s name.
Trazen didn’t look over. Only his tail contained much expression, coiling and uncoiling sensually as he resettled his weight, leaning back further on the bench.
His opened a hand towards her then, making a graceful gesture with his long fingers.
“You look nice, Jet,” he said.
She smiled, but the expression came more from surprise and confusion than anything.
He must have felt some portion of that, or seen it on her face.
“Should I refrain from complimenting you?” he said. “Does it make you uncomfortable? Or should I merely refrain from complimenting your appearance?”
She exhaled a half-laugh, sitting back on the bench.
Still watching him in something like bewilderment, she combed her fingers through her hair self-consciously, aware that the people in the crowd had been touching and tugging on it. In the process, she hit the fresh cut on her forehead. The pain came sharp and surprised her, so she sucked in another breath, wincing as she pulled her hair back over the cut.
“Come here,” he said. “Let me see it.”
“It’s fine,” she said, giving him a tauter smile. “I just forgot about it.”
He looked almost like he might argue with her, then seemed to change his mind, draping his arm once more on the back of the bench.
“Are you hungry?” he said, his tone still carefully polite.
Jet fought not to gape at him. She didn’t want to play into whatever game this was, but she couldn’t help struggling with how to react to his demeanor. Had he forgotten what she was like when she wasn’t stoned on his venom? Or was this Trazen flirting with her?
“Sure,” she said, after a too-long pause.
Hesitating, she looked out the window, maybe to buy herself time. She didn’t see much other than a blur of blue sky and green grass and shadows cut between them for buildings. She fought to think, then decided not to overthink this, either.
“Did you say we had a meeting or something?” she said, looking at him again. She caught his dark eyes appraising her, staring almost openly, and swallowed. “...Over dinner? Or did I mishear that?”
He inclined his head to one side, a Nirreth yes.
“Who with?” she said. “Anyone I would know?”
“No,” he said.
She thought he might elaborate if she didn’t press him, but he didn’t. When he continued to stare at her, his eyes lingering on her face, she exhaled in a kind of sigh.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 67