THE ROYALS

JET FOLDED HER arms, trying to keep the impatience off her face, or at least where the young Nirreth wouldn’t see it. When she glanced at Laksri, however, she saw his deep black eyes studying her in a way that told her he had…noticed, that is…even if the boy hadn’t.

She couldn’t tell what Laksri’s expression meant exactly, though.

Jet knew he studied her to see how she fared with the Nirreth prince. She expected to get those looks from him by now; he watched her like a hawk most days, as if examining every word she spoke and every gesture she made. Yet, rather than disapproving, the look on his face now held flickers of the facial ticks she’d begun to associate with Nirreth amusement…as much as she could discern anything on a Nirreth’s midnight blue skin and elongated features, that is.

Laksri taught her some of those facial expressions himself, as part of her ‘cultural assimilation’ classes. She picked up even more just from watching the Nirreth that surrounded her daily, including Laksri himself.

She’d seen that particular expression on his face a lot the past week.

“Come here!” the Nirreth prince demanded, seemingly oblivious to the looks exchanged between Jet and the older Nirreth.

Sighing a little, Jet avoided the kid’s eyes.

She didn’t want to give him the impression she would in any way jump because he said jump. She didn’t even want him thinking that raising his voice would be more likely to get her to look at him. She’d already made that mistake a few times in the weeks she’d been there, caving to whims of his to keep him quiet. She’d learned he could be managed easier if she didn’t think too closely about the fact that his parents could order her killed for sneezing on the kid.

Deciding not to think about that... today at least... Jet pushed back by refusing to meet the kid’s gaze. She stared in the direction of the main palace instead, letting her eyes roam over the several acres of gardens spread below the round-walled structure. Unlike the front of the building, which had a nearly human-like facade, the back of the complex and much of the gardens themselves were pure alien.

Really, it looked more like the brief glimpse Jet had gotten of the rest of the Green Zone.

That whole end of the structure had the same smooth texture that reminded her of eggshells, and the oddly-shaped designs that appeared ready to topple from their upper-story weight. The edge of the building extended past its base like a giant, flat mushroom, only one the size of a football stadium. Canals cut through the terrace below that flat expanse of roof, dotted by alien-looking trees as well as a number of glass-enclosed cages housing birds and different breeds of small mammals.

Whether most of those mammals were clones of previously-extinct Earth species or something from the Nirreth home world, Jet couldn’t always tell for sure.

She wondered idly if she could come up with an excuse that might allow her to retreat into the Royal Library... one of the few chambers in this underground lizard hole that Jet truly loved. Situated high in the dome of the main complex, it boasted a skylight the size of a swimming pool that let in the blue sky and sun from its curved apex down to the edges of the main dome. From its shape, it could almost be an old-style cathedral in some city of Old Earth.

Stained glass windows curved down three of the rounded walls, interspersed with wide bookshelves made of wood that filled most of the twenty or thirty meter high spaces in between, like rays of the sun.

The actual furniture inside had been done up in a human-looking style, in that it reminded Jet of pictures she’d seen of libraries in books. Carved, stone statues stood in alcoves accented with colored lights, some depicting humans and some Nirreth, but all in the same white stone that looked almost like china. Despite the human touches, it still felt like a Nirreth room, but in the ways Jet had grudgingly begun to appreciate.

Meaning, birds filled the high dome as well, darting in and out of small holes near the top of the skylight and roosting on plants and trees that grew out of the walls above the windows and bookshelves. Flowers grew down those same walls, as well as a tree-shaped stone fountain carved in some kind of dark blue stone with designs cut in what might have been real gold, including gold leaves and leaves of a light-green stone so smooth it looked like glass.

Jet found the room profoundly still, and almost eerily beautiful.

Of course, her feelings since she’d gotten to the Royal Palace couldn’t help be mixed.

Everything she experienced here, good and bad…but especially the good…seemed to bring up the same confused anger mixed with guilt and pleasure and then more anger. Inevitably she said yes to whatever new indulgence they threw her way…at first in order to keep up her strength and to appear to be going along, but now she had to admit her feelings were already growing somewhat confused.

It struck her at times, how easy it was to become used to hot water and soft blankets and green grass and a blue sky. All of it was too easy, really... the seemingly endless supply of food, the room she shared with Anaze with the giant beds with pillows and silk sheets, the high pressure showers with clean water, the endless supply of drinking water and clean vegetables. It had only been a few weeks, and already Jet donned clean clothes every morning without thinking about it too much, and sat at a table with Laksri and Ogli while servants filled their plates with more food in a single sit-down meal than Jet got in the skag pits over the course of several days... twice, since Nirreth ate two of those a day.

Still, her primary way of looking at this change still came to her in terms of survival.

For the most part, she could just shunt all of her emotional reactions aside and take these things for what they were, without over-thinking it. Even so, in the quieter parts of her day, or if something happened that really pissed her off, the conflict festered somewhere in the back of Jet’s mind.

Unfortunately, it also forced her to remember some of the arguments she and Richter had when he’d first brought her here. Arguments about how the planet got as messed up as it did, for example…and whether humans really did need the Nirreth, if they wanted to survive as a species, on this planet at least.

But that was a circular argument, too.

After all, the Nirreth weren’t cleaning up the planet, either.

Instead, they’d walled themselves off in these artificial environments, and pretty much let the rest of the world…including the vast majority of the human population…remain in the poisonous, over polluted mess outside their theme-park sanctuaries. According to Richter, it had been worse when the Nirreth actually arrived, but that hadn’t been the version of history Jet learned while growing up in the skag pits with her brother and mother.

Still, Richter believed it when he said it.

Jet didn’t know why she was so sure about that, but she would have bet on it. He’d meant that thing he said about humans needing the Nirreth.

Which of course brought her back to what Anaze told her about Richter being a rebel.

Not just a rebel... but the rebel, meaning their leader, if she could believe Anaze. Well, the leader of the human faction, anyway, however big that was in actuality.

Jet knew Richter probably didn’t have anything to do with those rebels who hung out by the old docks and beaches near the skag pit south of Vancouver... that young, angry, gang-like bunch of thieves and work camp escapees that took half of their new “recruits” and sold them to the Nirreth for slaves in the Green Zones.

Jet happened to know most of those losers were all talk, when it came to real rebellion. Bandit and raiding territories were pretty carved out by the different gangs operating within range of Vancouver... and everyone knew that ultimately, Richter owned the Northwest.

But, apart from a few raiding parties on the skag pit and surrounding farms, Jet hadn’t seen evidence of this great “rebellion” of Richter’s anywhere. They must have at least one base somewhere, but Jet didn’t know the location of that, either.

She’d heard his group consisted mainly of ex-army and the lean, hunter-looking mountain types from the Canadian Rockies all the way up north as far as Alaska, but Jet had only seen a handful of those at any particular time, too, and most of those wore masks.

So where was this band of rebels Richter supposedly led? Why hadn’t the Nirreth tried to hunt them down? Or had they? How did they not know Richter’s true identity, if so?

Most of all, she wondered what he’d meant by humans needing the Nirreth.

If she was going to work for this guy, willingly or not, it struck her as a pretty important detail.

Did Richter mean that humans needed Laksri and the other Nirreth rebels? Had he meant that humans needed Nirreth tech, to clean up the air and water and make the Earth livable again? Or did he really think humans could just move into the Green Zones, and all live as one big happy family under the fake blue sky, part of the new utopian society that he and Laksri planned to build?

Jet had no idea which, if any, of these things he’d meant.

The question nagged at her, though.

Richter and Laksri’s partnership nagged at her, too.

She knew she probably watched the Nirreth as closely as he watched her. Not to make sure he didn’t ‘give them away,’ like he did with her... but to try and figure out how to feel about him. Less than two weeks ago, she’d pretty much hated all Nirreth. Now, she didn’t really know how to feel about them as a group, much less in terms of individuals.

The only thing she did know for certain was that Richter had been right. No one in the skag pits knew the first thing about the Nirreth, not really. All those rumors she’d heard growing up consisted of little more than a bunch of tall tales and myths.

Not that the Nirreth weren’t frightening... they were. But the things that horrified Jet most were more of the mundane than the boogeyman variety.

Humans in the skag pits knew nothing about the Green Zones, either.

Jet honestly couldn’t decide if that was a bad thing or a good one.

She still couldn’t draw lines between what Richter told her that day and what Anaze explained under the trees behind the Trevi fountain that night.

She would have just asked him herself, but she hadn’t seen Richter since the demonstration.

She assumed he’d likely left the Green Zone altogether... maybe to hang with his mystery rebels in the Canadian Rockies, or to cull more skag girls to seed in some other Green Zone. She had no idea, because she hadn’t gotten a chance to ask Laksri or Anaze those questions, either. She barely got any time alone with Anaze, even though they shared a room... and really, a bed, since they’d only been supplied with one and it was big enough to sleep four humans.

She got a lot more time alone with Laksri, really, but that time didn’t do her any good, either.

Whenever she tried to ask him anything, even something relatively innocuous, the seven-foot lizard skin put a finger to his deep black lips, giving her a warning look. She’d tried mouthing words to him in English, to see if he might respond... or even take her somewhere they might talk safely... but he only looked at her blankly.

Jet was still musing about this, and around ideas that might get her out of babysitting duty for at least part of the afternoon, when the boy stomped his foot furiously in the red clay dirt.

Jet watched the dust rise from his sandaled, broad-clawed feet.

The stables happened to be one of the few places in the Green Zone, at least of those Jet had seen, where the natural red clay, red rock and red dust of New Mexico showed plainly through the artificial landscape. Of course, Jet hadn’t seem much outside of the Palace, so couldn’t really comment on the rest of the city... but on most of the Palace grounds, green plants, sparkling white stone and thickly sodded lawns covered over every inch of the natural landscape.

Jet wondered if the Nirreth engineered the rest of the city in the same way. It had appeared so to her, in her brief view from the windows of the trolley that brought her inside the Palace gates, but from what she’d been told since, she’d only seen a fraction of the overall Green Zone. In fact, Richter pretty much dragged her straight here from his culler ship.

The city itself was supposed to be something like 90,000 acres, so around 140 square miles. Jet couldn’t quite wrap her head around a city of that size, not when she actually looked at a map. It was more like a colony than a city.

Which, again, made sense, really.

“Jet!” the boy said, louder. “Jet! Look at me! Right now!”

Once more, she refused to turn.

“JET!” the boy demanded, stamping his foot harder.

More clouds of red dust rose from under his long, broad feet.

Pretending she hadn’t heard him…like she threatened to do when he’d yelled incessantly at her the day before…Jet continued to gaze out the fifteen-meter-high wooden doorway, watching sunlight catch hold of the red dust as the beams filtered through the rafters. Jet, along with Laksri and Ogli, stood in one of the ten or so warehouse-sized, manure-smelling barns that formed a sort of zoological stable on the grounds of the Royal Palace.

Ogli was nine years old.

He also happened to be the heir to the Nirreth throne and oldest son of the Royals, which meant he would someday rule not only all of Earth, but several of the moons around Jupiter, the smaller Mars colony, and the vast majority of worlds colonized by the Nirreth outside Jet’s immediate solar system. Since the Nirreth’s own planet had become unlivable due to some solar event that cooked the surface of their world, the Royal family had chosen Earth as the new primary base for the Nirreth’s leading caste.

The Palace itself was situated in Green Zone Hezeret, Jet learned.

Richter told her that Hezeret was basically the capitol of Nirreth Earth, in the same way that Earth functioned basically as the new capital of the Nirreth empire.

Jet found out from Laksri that Hezeret literally meant “Red Sun” in the Nirreth language of Nargili, presumably in reference to the red cliffs and rocks of what had once been called Santa Fe, New Mexico in the United States of Old Earth.

This particular stable housed domestic animals from Old Earth human farms.

It also happened to be one of Ogli’s favorite places, which Jet found a bit baffling. The kid could watch a T-Rex eat a zebra if he wanted, pretty much any time he felt like it. He could even stand next to one of those giant, leaf-eating dinosaurs the size of a building…or watch a tiger fight with a lion... or watch either a cheetah chase down a gazelle, or a lion hunt one of those bearded elk with the twenty-six-point antlers.

But no. Ogli preferred to hang out with a bunch of cows and goats and rabbits.

He didn’t even want to pet or touch them; he simply wanted to watch every move they made, for as much time as he was allowed between lessons and meals.

Jet wondered almost if Ogli had some unusually intense interest in animal behavioral patterns, to make him watch them so closely. Or perhaps they had animals a lot like dinosaurs on their home world, and the wild rabbit with the giant ears who thumped his hind foot every time Ogli got near it, (when it wasn’t trying to cram its body into the space under its wooden sleeping perch to make itself invisible)... maybe that was the exotic creature to Ogli.

Either way, Jet couldn’t help thinking the Nirreth really were different.

Truthfully, though, Jet was beginning to realize they were nowhere near as different as she would have liked. The similarities unnerved her more, maybe because she was a lot more used to her version of the mythologized Nirreth than she’d realized.

Like now, watching Ogli stare at the animals filling the stalls lining the right side of the barn... something about the spark in his eyes as he looked from one to the other reminded her of her brother Biggs, when he’d been a few years younger. Biggs got that same look on his face when he approached animals, especially if he thought they might be dangerous.

Here, the danger was harder to detect. For one thing, all of the animals were locked in very solid-looking pens. For another, these weren’t what Jet would consider highly dangerous pets.

Different colors and types of horses stood with their heads in or out of stall windows in a long row. The horses came in pretty much every shape, height and variety, so Jet had to assume at least some must have been shipped here from other parts of the world.

From spending a few hours in this exact barn each day for the past two weeks, Jet learned to differentiate between them, and even their names... or she gave them nicknames if she didn’t see their stalls labeled. She found them strangely familiar creatures, compared to the others... and in spite of the fact that she’d seen no living horses before arriving  in the Nirreth city.

Some of the horses appeared so different from one another that they almost seemed to be from different species. One of the black horses, for example, had a delicate, triangle-shaped head, large, liquid eyes, an arched neck and constantly prancing feet. Another stood taller than the rest and seemed to be all legs. One, Anaze called a ‘piebald’ during his only trip to accompany them to the pens. That one looked sturdy and a bit tough compared to some of the others, so Jet supposed it made sense that Anaze would gravitate towards it. Another had a long face, a thick neck, a very full mane and a tail that dragged the ground.

That one, Jet nicknamed ‘Clouds’ for its dappled gray color.

The colors of their coats alone fascinated Jet, even without the variation in body type, head size, musculature, hair length and so forth.

Then there were the monsters like the one in front of her now, which seemed to be muscled all over. ‘The Percheron,’ as he was called, stood a good three heads taller than the next in size of the penned horses. Pure white in color with a dark gray mane, it looked like he could pull a train car if hitched to one... or maybe a small house.

The only thing larger than him in that particular barn was a young elephant that lived in a stall at the far end. Of course, the other barns had bigger animals, even apart from the dinosaurs, including a number of much larger elephants, as well as bison and rhinoceroses. Jet had also been told that at one of the coastal Green Zones, further south, they had a giant sea pen filled with mammals so large that they could swallow the largest elephant in one mouthful.

According to Ogli, who seemed to view himself as a sort of expert on the topic, the largest of these sea mammals even surpassed the dinosaurs in size.

Jet didn’t believe him, of course, but she found herself curious anyway.

The pens directly opposite the Percheron housed a variety of other traditional human farm animals, including dairy cows in different colors and sizes, goats, a woollier animal that Anaze called a ‘llama’, sheep, geese, chickens, ducks... the elephant. At the end, the open pen across from the elephant housed a massive, pink-colored sow and her litter of baby pigs.

Until she got here, Jet hadn’t believed pigs could really be that bright color of pink. She’d assumed that to be a fairy tale, something they did in picture books to amuse children.

Then again, most of the animals she’d seen since her arrival in the Green Zone struck her as make-believe creatures.

In another of the barns, great cats of different colors and patterns stalked in cages next to wolves, eagles on perches, mammals in water tanks that built elaborate houses out of wood, minks and squirrels, lynxes and snakes, bats and swans. In another, still larger of those enormous warehouses lived camels, striped horses, gazelles, hippopotamuses in tanks, a beautiful animal labeled ‘okapi’ in one pen that Jet really liked, water buffalo with rubbery skin, and a larger, woolly buffalo called a ‘bison.’

Jet also glimpsed an animal in one of the fields so tall and thin-necked that it had to be what Chiyeko described to her once as a giraffe... unless it was another of the dinosaurs the Nirreth had been busily cloning from bio-samples they collected in human museums and zoos.

Most, like the white Percheron in front of her, appeared unnaturally large and, well... healthy compared to any animal Jet had seen before coming here.

Jet also couldn’t help thinking of the beast in terms of her old life.

This one horse would feed the entire skag settlement where Jet was born. She guessed enough meat lived on its sturdy frame for every man, woman and child to have a full stomach, if only for a night... with maybe even a few leftovers to spare.

The cows struck her the same.

Here they provided a curiosity, and currently, a means of entertaining Ogli.

At home, they would feed hundreds, or better yet, provide milk and cheese for longer than that. If even a couple of them could be acclimatized to the higher radiation levels of her old skag city outside Vancouver, and hidden from roving bandits, maybe even in underground pens, they could perhaps breed them into a small herd over time.

Jet found herself wondering if she could somehow smuggle out a few pigs, or maybe a calf or two, in the event she and Anaze managed to escape. If she could obtain a breeding pair, keep them alive, hold off the other skags from killing them, they’d have a real chance to survive long-term. Maybe if she did well enough in the Rings, she could convince the Royals to give her a few as prizes... have them sent north to her family via Richter, or even Anaze.

Thinking of Anaze, she found herself wondering again where he was.

She assumed he was off amusing himself somewhere... if he wasn’t with his father. He wouldn’t tell her much of anything about where he spent his days of late. He dropped vague clues, here and there, but nothing specific... probably due to the heavy surveillance in the two-room suite they shared as their quarters. The Nirreth still seemed to view Anaze as leverage over her, but other than that, they seemed to have left him to his own devices... unlike Jet, who was stuck with language lessons, learning Nirreth customs and history along with the rules of etiquette and other elements of ‘assimilation’ as per Nirreth practice with new slaves.

Either way, Anaze hadn’t managed to sneak them out of the palace since that first night, so they’d had no time to talk where they hadn’t been under the watchful eyes of Nirreth security.

Jet herself had been pretty busy, too, ever since she’d petitioned her ‘owners’ formally to be allowed to fight in the Rings. They were delighted of course... or so Jet had been told, since she hadn’t actually seen them, but had petitioned through Laksri and two representatives of the Royal Guard as witnesses.

They’d expected her to offer, of course.

Richter sold her to them on that premise, assuring them that Jet’s fondest ambition was to rise to celebrity status in the Nirreth Rings. Why they would buy that, about any human, Jet had no idea... but buy it, they did. They positively gushed over her, actually, sending her congratulatory letters and presents that bewildered Jet more than flattered her.

But Jet had noticed a number of weird things about the Nirreth in that regard, in the few weeks she’d been here. For example, the Nirreth positively loved it when humans played by their rules. Jet didn’t know if it was latent guilt, or some kind of cultural quirk, or what, but they acted delighted whenever she did or said anything that implied, directly or not, that she was okay with her current situation.

Her current situation as a slave.

So yeah, they were thrilled to hear that Jet’s biggest and bestest desire in this world was to win big for them in the Rings. So thrilled, in fact, that they offered to spare no expense on her support and training team, in the event she made it through her first, trial match.

Of course, Jet had her own reasons for participating.

She was following orders, sure, doing it for the rebellion, for Richter... but she also knew the first prize offered by the Rings Board itself, if she made it through the ten consecutive matches with winning scores.

If she had ten wins in a row, Jet could bring any five humans to the Green Zone, and establish them in the human colony. Meaning, the colony within the Green Zone walls that didn’t consist of slaves, but ‘worker’ humans. Sure, the difference was semantics, in terms of the work itself... but they wouldn’t belong to any one Nirreth, so they couldn’t be abused by one, either. More importantly, if they agreed to come, Jet’s mother and brother would have clean food and water... as much as they needed, maybe for the rest of their lives. They’d be safe from cullers and radiation sickness and rabid dogs and disease.

Jet knew they might not thank her for that, even with the improved chances for their survival. Hell, she likely wouldn’t thank them for that ‘favor’ either, if their positions were reversed. But Jet also knew with that when and if fighting did break out in the colonies, between Richter’s and Laksri’s rebels and whoever else... the skags would bear the worst of it, like always. The Nirreth would retaliate on the skag pits, in the event of any human revolt.

Jet could keep them from getting hurt at least, once the fighting started for real. She could keep them next to her. She could also get them out, maybe.

Her eyes drifted back to Laksri, who watched her with narrowed eyes.

Giving him a hard look in return, Jet saw that amusement flicker over his cat-like face, right before he averted his gaze.

She had no doubt he’d been in contact with Richter.

The two of them were supposed to be partners, according to Anaze, the one night he managed to tell her anything at all about what was really going on. Laksri supposedly led the Nirreth faction of rebels who wanted to overthrow the Royals for their own purposes.

Which meant they probably wanted this kid dead, too.

“Come HERE! Girl! Come HERE!” Ogli shouted, that time loud enough to make her jump.

When she turned, Jet saw Ogli’s eyes on Laksri, their expression close to angry. Apparently, he’d noticed them looking at one another that time, and he hadn’t liked it. If Jet didn’t know better, she might have thought that disapproval was aimed more at Laksri than her.

Even as she thought it, Ogli smacked his palm loudly against the door of the stall.

“Stop looking at him! You are mine! Not his!”

Jet didn’t have to ask if he was speaking to her that time.

In the four weeks since she’d been assigned full-time guard duty over the young Nirreth, she’d become his newest and most favorite toy.

Sighing, she decided she’d probably ignored him long enough. She took her weight off the barn wall and walked over to where he stood.

“What is it, Ogli?” she said, folding her arms.

“You will call me Prince Ogli! Prince!”

She blew her hair out of her eyes. “Yeah. Okay. What do you want?”

He pointed up at the high back of the Percheron. “Ride him!”

Jet let a hiss of air out through her teeth, more impatience than anger. “No.”

“I’m ordering you to ride him... slave!”

Jet narrowed her eyes at him. “You call me that again, and I’ll never, ever refer to you as ‘prince’... not even in the royal court.”

Ogli’s eyes narrowed at her, but she saw him thinking behind that childish attempt at a glare. After a few more seconds, he bit his thin, Nirrith lips with the sharp teeth of his incisors. Flicking the deep black tongue between his lips, he nodded. His tail lashed behind him, but she saw some of the fire dim in his eyes.

“Okay, girl. I won’t.” He motioned at the giant horse again. “Ride him! I insist!”

Jet shook her head again. “No, Prince Ogli... I will not.”

“Why not?” he said, clearly frustrated.

Jet let out another sigh. “Because, Prince Ogli... I would bet you a few thousand royal credits that horse has never had a person... or a Nirreth... on it. Not once in its genetically-engineered life. Therefore, if I attempt to sit on it, it’s going to revert to instinct and buck me off and stomp my arms and legs to jelly for the fun of it...”

At Ogli’s wide-eyed look, Jet smiled a little in spite of herself.

“...Then you’ll need a new human to order around,” she added. “And to tell to do ridiculous things like ride horses that were obviously designed only for show...”

“You will ride him!”

“I will not. The very idea is ridiculous.”

“If you don’t, I’m telling my father!”

“Go ahead,” Jet retorted. “...Tell him. Then ask him to explain to you why it’s a bit of an expensive diversion when it requires him to buy a new slave for five minutes of your entertainment...”

“You’re just a human!” the boy snapped. “You’re nothing! There are hundreds of you!”

Jet felt her jaw harden. She didn’t look at Laksri that time. “Hundreds of me, eh? Are you sure about that, Ogli?”

“Prince Ogli...”

But Jet ignored him. “Hundreds of us, is that what you think, Prince? Hundreds and hundreds... just waiting in line to take my place if you kill me out of boredom?” Jet’s eyes narrowed to slits as she stepped closer to the boy, folding her arms.

The young Nirreth stepped backwards, though he was nearly as tall as she was.

“...Hundreds of teenaged girls who get culled by thugs like Richter, do you mean?” Jet said, her voice more angry. “...Or were you referring to the hundreds of adult men with shortened lifespans, who work as slave labor for the Nirreth, tending their gardens but getting shot if they get too hungry and try to eat any of their own crops? Or was it the skag children you meant, Prince... half-stunted by radiation sickness and poisoned water, living underground and stealing by their fourth year just to help their families survive? Did you mean the hundreds of old people herded into the Nirreth collectives to be killed where they might help fertilize the soil for Nirreth crops? Or do you mean my own mother and brother, who are always a little sick, always coughing and fighting to keep down the toxic food? Do you mean the mothers who are afraid to let their children out of their sight for even a second, between the culler ships and the risk of having them picked off by their own people to sell in your slave auctions... ?”

Seeing the wide-eyed look on the young prince’s face, Jet exhaled in anger, letting her voice turn more openly derisive.

“...And... by the way... how many of these ‘hundreds’ can win for the Royal crest and your father in the Rings, Ogli?” she said. “Maybe ask your father that before you’re so willing to see me get trampled under the feet of an overgrown beast, simply to prove that you can push me around whenever it suits you...”

Ogli frowned at her, but still looked a little nervous.

Staring back at the giant white horse, he seemed to be trying to think of a good argument.

Laksri, whose face normally remained impassive, gave her a warning look. Even as Jet caught that, however, he did that other thing, a faint eye-blinking that Jet learned was a kind of Nirreth smile, albeit a subtle one, and one that conveyed respect.

Some Nirreth, including Laksri himself, tried to mimic human smiles, too. But, maybe because baring teeth usually meant aggression to Nirreth, even a challenge to a fight, it usually looked more frightening than reassuring. That same body-language-communication difference caused a lot of ‘unfortunate misunderstandings’ in the early days of the invasion of Earth, Laksri told her during one of Jet’s history lessons.

Nirreth tended to convey humor and friendliness in different ways.

Unfortunately, there were so many of them, and such a wide number of gradations around everything from social rank, context, types of humor, respect, derision, playfulness, and on and on, that Jet couldn’t keep track. She’d barely scratched the surface of picking up nuances of different expressions of interest, curiosity, good and bad will, amusement, disapproval, condescension, anger or whatever else from her Nirreth captors.

Laksri watched her closely as she backed off her lecture of Ogli.

Clearly, he thought she was expressing too much to the kid.

Anaze already warned her to pretend total disinterest in politics around the Nirreth. Since they already thought of Anaze as a revolutionary of sorts, he got to play the opposite role, ranting about things that Jet doubted even he believed... all so she could argue with him and seem moderate in comparison. Jet found most of this acting exhausting... and also somewhat pointless. The Nirreth would be stupid to ever trust her, given what and who she was. She was a prisoner... and a slave, like Ogli said. They couldn’t possibly believe she’d ever be truly ‘on their side,’ no matter how many luxuries they threw her way.

The funny thing was, Jet actually liked the kid Ogli okay.

Sure, he was spoiled rotten. Like any kid given too much power, he went out of his way to test that power. He also had a tendency to be overly reliant on others, mainly underlings of whatever kind, for his entertainment.

Still, oddly enough, Jet thought the kid was all right.

He wasn’t devoid of compassion. Nor was he totally comfortable with his own power over others. He spent a lot of time in nature, and even wrote a form of Nirreth poetry, in addition to his interest in drawing and other forms of art. He actually enjoyed his education, and spent hours in the various libraries of the palace, showing Jet pictures and drawings of animals from his species’ home planet.

His best friend was a fresh water otter named ‘Scampers’ (which sounded something like Leetefs in the Nirreth tongue). Ogli had taught it to answer to its name and jump into his arms whenever it saw him, and gave the friendly otter the run of the palace’s dozens of canals and waterways, despite the complaints of his parents, members of the Royal Court and the Nirreth servants.

Given that the otter enjoyed both stealing food and splashing unsuspecting Nirreth who got too close to the canals, Jet couldn’t help but liking Ogli for that, too.

Ogli, despite his attempts to bully her, also gave her almost unlimited freedom over the Royal grounds. He let her come and go around the different rooms of the palace whenever she wished, even if he usually insisted on accompanying her, which Jet suspected had a lot more to do with boredom and loneliness than any attempt to ‘keep an eye on her.’  Ogli also ordered his guards to take the lock off her door when she asked. This was in spite of the fact that Jet technically remained what the Nirreth called ilezni... meaning ‘uninitiated,’ and which normally meant they watched her like a hawk until she’d passed the most stringent of their security protocols.

Ogli’s parents indulged his whims for a number of reasons, Jet guessed.

In terms of why they allowed her so much freedom, she figured her age and sex probably had a lot to do with it. Also, Jet had already shown in the demonstration that she was unlikely to harm the boy, or even let harm come to him. The entire castle was under surveillance anyway, so they probably figured they had little to fear.

Jet suspected Laksri was part of the reason, too.

Having a full grown male Nirreth attached to Jet’s hip at every hour of the day seemed to ease their fears on a lot of levels. Laksri had been included as part of the deal when she’d been sold to the Nirreth Royals, just like Anaze had, but because of his race and the fact that he’d passed all of their security protocols with flying colors, he was assumed to be loyal.

Laksri, being a good two feet plus taller than her, and at least two of her in weight, was the Royals’ primary security system against her. They might not trust Richter, the human who sold her to them, but they also knew he made a lot of money off them, and likely would prefer to keep relations cordial. Leaving Laksri at the palace served as that pledge of good will.

Ogli didn’t know any of this, of course... or Jet highly doubted he did, anyway.

No matter what his bloodline or future importance, he was just a kid. He was tall, since Nirreth bodies developed ahead of their minds and also ended up a good foot or two taller than those of humans, but Jet had adjusted to the illusion of Ogli’s height, too.

She’d learned that a nine-year-old Nirreth really wasn’t that much different than the nine-year-old humans she’d known. Other than the fact that he’d never in his life gone hungry, Ogli acted a lot like the kids at the skag settlement.

In fact, if she had to compare him to something, he reminded her of the human kids she saw in the old human movies they sometimes showed at the skag settlement. Bored and ultimately ignored by his royal parents, Ogli was a kid who only had the vaguest understanding of his place in the world. Other than the occasional royal audience and public event, he spent most of his day with servants. His parents had a hyper-awareness of the kid’s security, especially given that the previous ‘oldest son’ had been murdered before he came of age, but apart from that, his parents seemed to prefer to have someone else entertain him.

Ogli seemed to be as much of a prisoner as Jet herself. As far as Jet could tell, they never let him set so much as a toe outside the Royal Palace grounds.

Most of the time, Jet couldn’t decide if she felt more sorry for the kid or annoyed with him.

It was hard to feel too sorry for him, though.

“Please ride the horse, Jet!” Ogli said, abruptly changing his tactics. “Please! Please!”

Jet looked at Laksri. “That thing will kill me, won’t it?” she said.

Laksri frowned a little, folding his arms across his broad chest. His tail flickered in lazy circles behind his body as he approached the white horse. Catching hold of its bridle in one hand, he stared into the horse’s eyes, as if trying to communicate with it. After a pause, he released its head, rubbing a three-fingered hand over its nose. The horse bore it patiently enough, then shook its head, snorting and stomping a foot before letting out a low rumble of sound.

Laksri glanced at me. His English wasn’t as good as the young prince’s.

“Maybe not kill,” he said, blinking at her again in amusement. “But the father not like. Rings training a problem...”

Ogli looked up at Laksri, frowning, as if he viewed his words as treason.

When Ogli looked back at Jet, she held up her hands, as if in surrender.

“You see, Ogli?”

The prince seemed to realize he wasn’t going to win the battle and sighed, a trilling sound that was almost musical. He held out a hand to Jet.

She took it, and let him lead her deeper into the barn. Ogli coiled his tail around her arm, too, but Jet didn’t feel any threat in the gesture.

It actually felt affectionate... if just the slightest bit possessive.

When she glanced at Laksri next, he was watching her again, that harder scrutiny back in his deep black eyes.

JET DIDN’T MANAGE to get free until a few hours later.

Ogli left for his afternoon lessons and Jet bolted out of the room the instant she got permission, feeling her muscles relax as she began walking purposefully down the underground and winding corridor between two of the palace buildings. Despite the blue skies and high, yellow sun projected on the dome walls, the Nirreth still built their structures mainly underground.

Jet didn’t mind. She was used to maneuvering underground; she’d lived underground as long as she could remember, so truthfully, she felt more secure in enclosed spaces than open ones. Most of her life she’d been navigating underground passages, so keeping her sense of direction despite multiple turns and forks didn’t pose a problem for her, either.

Of course, the Nirreth liked to punctuate those tunnels with vast rooms, some of which were large enough that Jet lost herself in the open spaces.

Mapping tunnels also felt second-nature to Jet, so she found herself exploring whenever she got the chance. A few times, she got further off the main tracks than security allowed, and she’d been ‘collected’ by guards holding weapons. Everyone assumed she just got lost, so all she really got was a scolding and a finger-wag, Nirreth style.

Not enough to keep her from doing it again.

Before they caught her, Jet managed to find the underground greenhouses that grew food for most of the royal compound, as well as the air-circulation machinery. She even glimpsed the machines that created the weather inside the larger dome, including sun and rain. She found it interesting that the Royals controlled that for the Green Zone, as well.

Nirreth machines remained as inscrutable to her as their weapons, so it was doubtful the information helped her much. She watched closely whenever she saw one of the lizard skins operating any kind of machinery or access panel, from the most mundane to the most secure, but usually, she didn’t really get it. She watched the guards more closely than the rest, but still didn’t feel any closer to understanding how things actually worked.

Laksri would be looking for her soon, Jet knew.

Normally, when Ogli went to school, Jet did too. Sometimes that meant being hauled down to the virtual Rings, where she spent a few exhausting hours a day learning the complicated rules of the fights. Sometimes it meant language lessons. Sometimes it meant history, etiquette and so on.

Laksri usually was the one to bring her wherever they wanted her. But Laksri hadn’t been with her when she dropped Ogli off.

Jet didn’t wait around to see if he’d show up.

Taking off as soon as the guards came to take Ogli away, she headed to the next level down in the complex. Making a few turns from memory, she continued to follow passages that sloped deeper underground instead of up towards the surface. Funnily enough, Richter himself had determined the subject of her next exploration; she’d never forgotten his questioning her about whether she could swim. Some part of her chewed over that for a few days, trying to decide what he could have meant, given what she knew about him now.

Jet still didn’t think for a second that she could trust Richter... or even Anaze, who’d lied to her for the past five years they’d supposedly been friends. Even so, given what Anaze told her about why they’d brought her here, she’d been forced to reframe a lot of what Richter had done and said during the time she’d spent with him on the culler ship. After all, if Richter really worked for some kind of rebellion, then most of his questions and warnings must have something to do with his real reasons for bringing her here.

According to Anaze, Richter brought her here to help them bring down the Royals.

Jet was all for that... in theory, anyway.

Jogging around the first corner, past the more populated segment of the tunnels, Jet found herself hugging the wall as she half-ran, making sure her eyes adjusted to and checked every corner as she rounded turns. Unarmed, she didn’t know what she would do exactly if attacked, but she moved thus out of habit.

Even the skag tunnels stopped being entirely safe for her not long after she reached puberty.

Kids would hide in there at night, and challenge anyone who passed until they got caught by the wrong adult and were beaten, usually publicly and by their parents.

Less commonly, adults would lie in wait in those tunnels too, but when adults got caught, the punishment was generally banishment or death. The difference between the two usually depended on when they were caught... if it was before or after they’d managed to catch someone unawares down there... as well as whether that person was alive or dead, single or married, male or female, old or young, with child or not, and so on.

For Jet, the real threat was the boys.

The adults didn’t take their attempts as seriously, and girls were usually on their own in terms of making sure nothing happened. Most girls did that by avoiding certain tunnels altogether, which didn’t eliminate the problem, of course, but lessened it somewhat.

Jet didn’t like that as a solution, so she went to Mishio and her uncle Draven and asked them to teach her how to fight instead.

Black came out of that request, along with lessons from her two uncles on how to use it.

She still tried to be careful, of course... but the worst of those tunnels also happened to be the only real way to get out of the skag pit without being seen by most of the adults, including Jet’s mother. Since her mother didn’t want her hanging around either Mishio or Draven or Draven’s wife, Lara, much less playing with swords, Jet risked that tunnel, too.

Not risking it meant no hand-to-hand lessons with her uncle and Lara, either, so it seemed worth it.

Although Uncle Draven was the unofficial leader of the skags’ small fighting force, Jet found that Lara was actually harder to fight, if only because she was so fast. Lara also knew a lot of tricks to offset the advantages men had with weight and range and so forth, things Draven just never had to learn.

The boys that roamed those halls, looking for girls on their own, figured out quickly that Jet wasn’t the easiest quarry to corner. Thanks to two years of her uncle and aunt’s lessons, she’d broken bones and noses during their first real attempt, when she was twelve. She actually stabbed an eighteen-year-old ‘boy’ named Larks when she was thirteen.

The attacks seemed to escalate for awhile after that, at least from Larks and his gang... then Jet met Anaze, and they stopped.

Like, altogether stopped, and pretty much overnight.

Once it became known around the settlement that the two of them were friends, Jet never even got so much as a threatening look, not even from Larks, although she knew he hated her. She’d heard murmurs and warnings that he’d planned on getting her back... then she met Anaze and those stopped, too. All of the overt hostility pretty much vanished, as soon as they were seen hanging out a few times in public areas of the pits.

Thinking about it now, Jet found that curious.

At the time, she figured it was simply supply and demand politics.

Being a few years older than her, Anaze was already a hunter, and one who brought home kills. All kills required tithing of some kind, per pit custom... which meant they impacted everyone, including the parents of the boys who’d harassed her.

The one who made the kill got to choose the families who got the tithe. Most just handed them to the kitchen crew who either made something for everyone or rotated, but that was a combination of custom and mere politeness... no one could make the hunter give their meat to anyone, if they didn’t want to.

So really, Jet assumed those kids had been warned away from her so their families wouldn’t lose their quota of meat.

Thinking about it now though, that rang a bit hollow.

Even at the time, Jet wondered if that would have been enough to get them to leave her alone... especially someone like Larks, who probably didn’t care all that much about his younger brothers and sisters. Anyway, his parents might not have even known he’d planned to go after Jet; a lot of parents turned a blind eye to their kids’ behavior, especially in the tunnels.

She wondered now if it had been something else about Anaze that scared them.

Like, for example, if they knew about his connection to Richter.

Or maybe they’d known something else about Anaze that Jet didn’t.

It occurred to her in the past few weeks that she’d never actually seen Anaze fight, not really. They’d sparred, sure, but that was different than a real fight. She’d gotten a few flashes in that one raid against the dock rebels and their friends from Stanley Park, but not enough to really know how good of a fighter he really was.

She’d mostly been looking to see if he was still standing, then focused back on her own problems when he was. She’d gotten impressions, nothing more. He seemed focused when he fought, and he didn’t back away from larger opponents, or from taking on more than one at a time. That, in itself, was pretty unusual. Most in the settlement could fight at least a little, but they weren’t warriors in the strictest sense.

Most of those raids... the ones by Richter’s people, for example... Anaze had been out hunting. Of course, the fact that he’d missed the Richter raids now made a lot more sense, but he’d been gone for others, as well.

She did know he’d been in the thick of things that day, maybe even more than her... and yet he came out without more than a few cuts. She’d fought to protect the animal pens and the food stores, along with Kimchee, Hawkings and a lot of those who worked in husbandry, as well as the blacksmith, Edgar and Lacey, the shepherd’s daughter.

Most of those who’d been fighting over by the main entrances to the pits had lost arms, fingers, gotten stab wounds and arrows in their chests and bellies and legs. Anaze, although he’d been in the middle of that group, came out pretty much intact.

That might have been pure luck, of course.

Jet thought so at the time.

She’d gotten that one arrow in the shoulder, but it hadn’t hit anything serious. She’d been lucky, Anaze had been lucky... the settlement had been lucky. Lucky there hadn’t been more of them. Lucky most of the good fighters happened to be within shouting distance. Lucky the raiders hadn’t brought any of those Nirreth weapons, and lucky that they’d managed to beat them back without losing more than a few people in about three hours of fighting.

Looking back on it now, though, Jet wondered.

Reaching another fork in the tunnels, Jet took the downward passage again, and now she could smell it. Water.

The smell drifted up through the dark tunnel as though from the stones themselves.

Even the air tasted different.

The tiles remained that odd white color on the walls, but it seemed to Jet as though they were grayer, maybe from mold in the air from being so close to the main reservoir.

Adding a jolt of speed to her legs, she took the last few turns at a near run, excited for some reason. Maybe because she’d half-convinced herself the reservoir might be a way out, given Richter’s questions about whether she could swim... or maybe because she’d managed to find it on her first try, and primarily from paying attention to the direction in which the pipes all seemed to lead. Either way, finding their centralized water source had to be a handy bit of information.

When she turned the last corner however, Jet found herself coming to a dead stop.

Even knowing roughly what she would find at the end of that corridor didn’t prepare her for the view her eyes met.

A lake stretched out before her, under the dome of a rough-hewn rock cave.

Calling it a lake even struck Jet as an undersell... the surface of the dark blue water receded so far in the distance, Jet couldn’t see its opposite shores. Flickering, yellow and dark-green lights decorated the cave walls as far as Jet’s eyes could see, until they looked like fireflies floating on the surface, or maybe tiny boats lit with flames.

Nearer to her, and to the doorway itself, stood a number of floor-to-ceiling objects that must be computers... or some other kind of machine. They had those same, glass-smooth, eggshell-like casings that covered the back walls of the palace itself, only they seemed to glow where they stood, in pulsing arcs that made Jet wonder if it was a trick of the light. The machines sank deep into the rock, both above and below, and a number of white pipes protruded from their sides that also disappeared into the cave walls, only on the horizontal axis rather than the vertical one.

The pipes stretched wide enough for a person to crawl through, or a good-sized dog to walk through upright. Given that the ceiling of the cave stood at least ten meters high, even at this lower end, the machines struck Jet as somewhat intimidating.

Their shape, which lent itself to the impression of a small group of giants looming over her, probably didn’t help. The pipes protruded almost like arms, and despite their lack of features, the cylinders themselves, with their pulsing and vertical height, somehow managed to convey life more than machine.

Jet stared up at them for a long moment, wondering if they would have blueprints for any of these machines in the Royal Library, when a faint hiss behind her told her she was no longer alone.

JET TURNED, EXPECTING the security guards, she supposed, or maybe one of the Nirreth who ran the actual machines.

Instead, she found herself facing Laksri.

He stood blocking the tunnel, his tail flickering behind him in smooth waves. She hadn’t quite figured out the exact moods the different tail movements signified, but something told her he was more than a little annoyed with her.

When she saw his eyes shift from her to the tall machines, lingering on the higher set of pipes protruding from the walls, she found she was holding her breath.

His eyes flickered back to hers a few seconds later.

He began walking towards her.

Jet didn’t move as she watched him do his odd, circling walk, the one she was reasonably sure meant he’d chase her if she ran. In any case, he definitely kept himself firmly between her and the door, and Jet didn’t like her chances if she tried to get around him, particularly with his tail moving into the spaces that his body vacated.

He reached her in a few strides, but somehow, time slowed as he walked, and she found herself looking at him.

He was good-sized for a Nirreth, she’d discovered, now that she’d lived here for a number of weeks. All Nirreth had broad shoulders, but his were broader than most, and he moved faster than a lot of them too... often with darting movements that made her think of a wild cat or perhaps a lizard, like the slang the humans had for his kind.

Yet she found she recognized him the easiest of the other Nirreth, even though she’d really only known him half a day longer than the rest. Maybe it was the fact that she’d stabbed him with her sword within minutes of their first encounter.

He did have that curious ring of lighter blue around his eyes.

She happened to know that he had flecks of gold and a pale, sky blue, among other colors in his black irises, as well. She’d only really gotten a good look at them one or two times, when she got close enough, say within a foot or two of his face, but they made his eyes appear more alive than many other Nirreth, whose eyes were generally a more solid black.

She’d seen other variations in that time too, of course, including one Nirreth with eyes so light a blue that they appeared white in the darkness of his Nirreth skin. She’d also seen at least one other one with a ring around the black irises, usually a lighter blue or a greenish color, but none the exact shade of Laksri’s.

Most of the time, she didn’t find him particularly threatening... at least not anymore.

If only through familiarity, he’d become comfortable. Not a welcome sight, most days, but not an unwelcome one, either. At times like these, however, Jet remembered just how alien he was, and how little she really knew about him.

“You are here,” he said, his tail making another deceptively lazy arc towards the open space to the right of where he walked.

He stood only a handful of yards away from her now, and Jet found herself stiffening, if not quite dropping into an actual fighting stance. She watched him make another lazy line in front of her, effectively crossing her line of sight to the door.

“...Why is it?” Laksri said, his black eyes fixed on hers. “Are you lost, friend of the Palace, and of Prince Ogli... ?”

Jet felt her jaw harden.

Whatever Laksri wanted of her, and whatever made him follow her here, she felt quite sure he knew very well that she wasn’t ‘lost.’

For the same reason, she didn’t bother to answer, but folded her arms. Bolting clearly wasn’t an option, considering how quickly he could catch her and sting her with his tail. She didn’t have a weapon, so that left her with few alternatives.

“What do you want?” she said, when he stopped walking.

“There is moment... for talking.” He blinked with that faint twitch of his mouth that Jet had learned meant amusement. He gestured up at the cave walls, and then at the cylindrical machines now behind him and to his right.

“You pick this?” he said. “For talking?”

Jet had also learned to translate most of his broken English.

Most of it.

“Do you mean did I pick this place deliberately in order to talk to you?” Jet said, her voice faintly incredulous. “No. What do you want, Laksri?”

“Fortuitous,” he said, bowing slightly. “It is a good place.”

“You’re saying they don’t have surveillance down here?” Jet said, again a little incredulous.

“Surveillance everywhere,” Laksri said, motioning impatiently with one thick claw. He blinked at her again, tilting his large head sideways. He wore a thick cloth around his head, as many of the male Nirreth did, especially the guards. It wasn’t quite a turban... more like a thick, black scarf without the ties at the back. “...Not where it is. But when...”

“You mean when is the surveillance?”

“When is it watched,” Laksri clarified. “This is at night... only night. Too many here in the day... the time is good. Fortuitous.”

Jet frowned when he used the word a second time.

Had he just looked it up recently in the English-to-Nirreth dictionary or something? She looked around, still frowning a little, hands on her hips. She hadn’t seen anyone down here, or even in the corridor once she got off the main thoroughfare. She didn’t bother to contradict him, but she heard him make the faint hissing sound that came closest to their laughter.

“...It is a good time,” he said again. “And a good place...”

“Fine,” Jet said, realizing she probably wouldn’t get much more clarity on that point. “It’s a good time and place for what, Laksri? Did you want to tell me something?” She added, “...Finally?”

“We will let him do that.”

“Him?” Jet’s frown deepened. “Him, who?”

But Laksri merely bowed and stepped to one side, enough that Jet realized another man had walked in behind him, probably while she’d been focused on whether the Nirreth planned to sting her, like he had the first time they’d met.

When she saw the human standing behind him, however, she forgot all of that.

“Richter,” she breathed. “What the hell are you doing here?”

He smiled sideways at her, that same smile that never seemed to touch his eyes.

“Happy to see me, kitten?”

“Overjoyed,” Jet said, biting down on her jaw a little harder.

The rebel leader actually laughed, combing his thick fingers through dark brown hair with a long gold streak down the back. It had only been a few weeks, but Richter’s hair looked longer to her already. It made him look younger than ever, which bothered her more now that she knew him also as Anaze’s father.

“Well, I’m glad to see they haven’t housebroken you already,” he said, with a more genuine smile. “...Although your manners, as always, could use a bit of polish, girl...”

“What do you want... Eamon?” she said, biting her tongue that time.

His smile turned more cynical. “Funny you should ask.”

“Not that funny,” she retorted, her fingers clenching a little under where she’d folded her arms. “I knew you couldn’t possibly be here for any other reason.”

Even so, she found herself thrown off-balance by his sudden appearance.

He wore more formal clothes this time, and in a more Nirreth style, which made her wonder what else had brought him to the Palace, and who he’d seen since he’d arrived. Torn between not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing the lack of communication had been getting to her and asking him some of the questions she hadn’t thought to ask Anaze, as well as a few she’d run out of time to ask, she finally settled on facing the lake, her voice neutral.

“So what is it?” she said. “What do you want?”

When she glanced back, Richter was staring at her again, that uncanny scrutiny in his eyes. Since he often seemed to be able to guess what Jet was thinking, just by staring at her in that particular way, she looked away, feeling her jaw harden.

“Well?” she said. “Are you going to tell me? Or do I have to guess?”

When she finally glanced back at him next, Richter shrugged a little, as if conceding her point. He sat down on an angular protrusion jutting out of the tile floor.

“The thing is, kitten,” he said folding his arms and letting out a short exhale. “...We have a problem. Related to you, I mean.”

“A problem?” Jet said warily. “What kind of problem?”

He shrugged, his expression suddenly cagey. When he looked at her next, he seemed to be measuring her reactions with his eyes.

“You’re not domesticated enough,” he said finally. His voice came out blunt, holding not a trace of apology. “...Not for the council of advisors to the Royals, anyway. Not for most of the nobility, either. You’re starting to make some of their bigwigs nervous.”

“Domesticated?” Jet said, hearing the bite in her own voice. She glanced at Laksri. “Domesticated how? Meaning what, exactly?”

“Meaning...” Richter said, shrugging again as he looked away. His eyes rested over the dark waters of the reservoir for a full beat before he went on. “...Meaning, I suppose, that the Nirreth don’t trust any human who isn’t getting stung on a regular basis,” he said, sparing her another glance before his eyes darted back to the water. “...Preferably by the same Nirreth, or at least the same couple of Nirreth.” Shrugging again, he added, “...And meaning, we need them to trust you before we can enter into the next phase of our project. They aren’t there yet, kitten, and I need them to be. So does Laksri here,” he added, hooking at thumb at the tall Nirreth.

Laksri’s face remained immobile, but somehow, his stare was harder for Jet to hold than Richter’s.

“...In fact,” Richter added, looking up at her from his perch on the square length of pipe. “...a lot of them are complaining that you’re too close to the prince, kitten. Especially given how ‘uncontrolled’ you are.” Richter used his fingers to make the quote marks in the air. “I’m starting to hear about it, in terms of my training you for living in the Palace.”

“Training me to do what?” Jet retorted. “To get stung?”

“Basically... yes,” Richter said, his voice holding a trace of apology that time. “They want you to take a lover... a Nirreth lover,” he added, giving her a hard look. “That boy you’ve got in your room doesn’t count.”

“That ‘boy’ is your son, isn’t he?” Jet retorted. “I would think you could remember his name, if that’s the case.”

Richter’s face hardened.

He glanced up at the cylindrical machine, just as Laksri had done a few moments before. When he looked at Jet next, she saw real anger in his eyes.

“Keep your mouth shut about that, girl, or I won’t bother to consult you on these matters in the future,” he said. “You’re never to mention a word of that inside these walls... do you hear me? Or I’ll see to it you get stung a half-dozen times a day... if not more.”

Jet felt her jaw harden, but didn’t answer.

Family was family... even for Richter, apparently. And Jet got why he wouldn’t want Anaze’s parentage to reach the ears of the Nirreth security guards.

“Fine,” she said. “...and no,” she added. “To the lover part. That’s not going to happen.”

“That’s not the part I was consulting you on, kitten,” he said grimly, giving her a level stare, that time with a touch more emotion in it. What emotion exactly, Jet couldn’t tell, but if he’d been anyone else, she might have read it as sympathy. “...You get your choice of the who on this one, not the what.”

Jet stared at him. Replaying his words, she found she understood them just fine.

She just didn’t want to.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “No. As in, no way... as in, not going to happen, Richter.”

He sighed, folding his arms across his chest as he propped his ankle on the opposite knee.

“I hate to put you in this position, girl... I really do. But it can’t be helped. They’re pulling you from the Rings until they’re convinced you’re compliant. I don’t have time for them to decide to trust you after a few years of reliable service...” Shrugging, he refolded his arms, looking down at his boots. “...We need you operational now. So you get your choice.”

“Which is who, exactly?” Jet said, unable to stop herself from asking.

“The kid,” Richter said with a shrug, as though that were obvious. He turned then slightly, aiming a finger at the tall Nirreth. “...Or Laksri here.”

Jet felt her body freeze.

Unfortunately, it happened after she’d already shifted her eyes to Laksri’s face, so she found herself staring at him for a few long seconds before she caught herself and jerked her gaze back to Richter.

“No,” she said.

“To which one?” Richter said.

“To either!” Jet snapped. “Ogli’s just a kid. I don’t know what kind of ‘lover’ you think he could handle exactly, but the kid still gets entertained by bubbles... for hours, sometimes. And let’s not forget his best friend is an otter...”

“Well, then,” Richter said.

His eyes had grown hard as glass, but Jet noticed he couldn’t quite hold her gaze.

“...It sounds like Laksri then,” he said, giving her that infuriating half-smile.

Jet found herself looking at the tall Nirreth again, before she could stop herself. His dark eyes were equally fixed on her. When she frowned at him, his tail flicked sideways, but she couldn’t get a read on the precise emotion that was meant to convey, either.

“Stinging is what is important,” Laksri said, his accent merging the ends and beginnings of the words, just enough that he blurted them in a string. “Not the other. Just stinging... they look for that... not the other...”

“They’ll check the tapes,” Jet said, giving him a hard look back. “How stupid do you think I am? And they’ll know something’s up if we don’t...”

He hissed a little, shaking his head, an abbreviated imitation of the human gesture.

“We move to my room... not tapes. No cameras. I can request. They see you stung, it is enough...” His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “...Few Nirreth wouldn’t. Why question it?”

Jet stared up at him, fighting disbelief, and hating the color she knew must be rising to her cheeks. Then she glared at Richter.

“No.”

“No?” Richter said. “I don’t remember asking. If you can’t do this, then we’ll replace you. It’s that simple.”

“Fine,” she said. “Take me home.”

He gave her a faintly incredulous smile, one that didn’t touch his eyes. “Doesn’t work that way, kitten. You’d be sold. Probably to someone who would want some on the side... and who wouldn’t sting you all polite-like, the way Laksri here would.”

Her fingers balled into fists. “There has to be another way.”

“None that’s fast enough, kitten... sorry.” He gave Laksri an almost searching look, one Jet couldn’t quite interpret. When he glanced back at her, the emotion left his face, right before he gave her another of those smirking smiles.

“Anyway,” he added. “From what Laksri here tells me, you’re running out of time. That is, if you want a say in who stings you... as well as whether or not any hanky-panky is likely to follow. Laksri thinks Ogli’s developed a crush on you, kitten.” He shrugged again, picking at his front teeth with a fingernail. “How long do you suppose before he acts on it? Most kids his age have impulse control issues... you may have noticed...”

Again, Jet gave him an incredulous look, one she darted back to Laksri.

Unlike Richter’s mask of smiles and jabs, the Nirreth’s face hadn’t moved.

“He’s like... nine!” she spluttered, unsure why she had to keep explaining this to either of them. She gestured sharply, giving Richter the brunt of her stare. “What part of his ‘being nine’ isn’t clear?”

Richter only shrugged, adjusting his weight on the pipes before he shoved his hands into his pockets, crossing his ankles.

“He might be nine, but he’s the prince,” he said, his voice a touch more serious. “Your window’s closing, kitten. It’s a fact. Laksri seems to think young Ogli will throw a fit about our proposed alternative as it is... based on what he’s observed of late. But the kid can’t do anything about it, not if Laksri registers the pairing. Ogli can bitch and moan and throw as many temper tantrums he likes... he can make both of your lives absolute hell, if he wants... but he can’t force you to lie with him after that, not unless Laksri agrees to the arrangement, or makes an overt offer. Which he won’t...” Richter added, glancing up at the tall Nirreth with a smile. “Will you, you oil slick-blue barbarian?”

Laksri didn’t answer, but he showed his teeth a little in Richter’s direction.

Jet couldn’t tell if it was one of those fake smiles the Nirreth sometimes tried, or if he was actually baring his teeth at Richter in annoyance.

To Jet, he said in a stilted, almost formal voice, “I will not. No offers... unless you want such. With another...”

“And what about Anaze?” Jet said, cutting him off even as she looked away from those deep black eyes. She knew she turned a little too fast, but tried to keep it off her face and out of her voice. “...Does he move in with Laksri, too? Or were you planning on selling him to some other horny Nirreth?”

When she glanced at Laksri that time, he seemed to be frowning, or that odd, lip curl that served as the Nirreth equivalent.

“You sex with him?” Laksri asked suddenly, in his rough English. “Now, I mean. Is the boy with you now?”

“Am I sex with him?” Jet said, even as Richter chuckled. “No,” she said, not looking at Richter. “No, I not sex with him... not like that’s any of your lizard-skin business...”

Richter held up a hand in a peace gesture, still smiling a little. “All right, all right, children... you can bicker behind closed doors. So are we in agreement then? This thing needs to happen. Tonight. I’m not risking Ogli getting randy after lessons tomorrow.”

At Jet’s hard look, he gave a dismissive wave.

“...Don’t worry about Anaze. He’ll remain in the same room you share now. I’ll see to it that you retain that as your official residence, even if you don’t sleep there all that much.”

Jet swallowed, staring at him. “That’s not exactly my primary concern...”

Richter stood up, brushing his hands off on one another and then smoothing them on his pants. Once again, a vague discomfort flitted across his expression... or maybe Jet just imagined that it did.

“All right,” he said, his voice holding a note of finality.

He gestured vaguely between Jet and Laksri.

“So... it makes sense to start before you go back to the room. We need at least a few other lizard skins to see her walking around like that. Shall we say after the lessons today?” He gave Jet a taut smile, and again she got the fleeting impression he was avoiding meeting her gaze. “...We need you in shape for the Rings, after all... can’t be letting your extracurriculars interfere with work.”

Laksri grunted, but it wasn’t in humor.

He folded his long arms in front of his chest, and Jet wondered fleetingly if he was still wounded from where she’d cut him with her sword. Even as she thought it, his long-fingered hand massaged the upper part of his own chest, right about where she’d sawed through his shirt and his dark blue skin.

Swallowing, Jet looked back to find Richter staring at her once more. She swore she saw a frown on his face, but couldn’t for the life of her interpret what it meant.

So she shrugged, keeping her own face impassive.

She could no longer think of a good argument against their words, and for some reason, it felt worse to throw a fit than to shrug it off like she didn’t care. Without waiting, she headed for the door instead. She pushed past Laksri’s tall form as if he weren’t there, and didn’t spare Richter a glance.

“Fine,” she said, without looking back at either of them. “Until then, why don’t both of you do me a favor and leave me alone?”

“If you’d stay away from the restricted areas of the Palace for once, I might actually listen to that advice,” Richter retorted, raising his voice at the end to call after her retreating back.

Jet didn’t reply.

“CONCENTRATE!” THE TRAINER, Alice Rajpoor said. “That is three now, Jet. Not acceptable! Do you want to be in these Rings or not?”

The trainer’s thick accent told Jet that the human originated from some other part of Earth, but Jet hadn’t yet got up the nerve to ask her where.

“I do,” she muttered, forcing herself to sound like she meant it.

She found Alice a bit frightening, actually.

Even Richter never scared her as much as Alice, although she didn’t have as many trust issues with Alice, either.

Middle-aged with smatterings of gray woven through her straight, black hair, Alice Rajpoor had a dark, hawk-like face and eyes almost as black as a Nirreth’s. She also had no compunction about using the long-handled whip she carried on any one of the trainees if they angered her sufficiently... or even the black, electric prod she wore on her belt.

Jet had seen the Nirreth gun the woman carried on the same belt, and she had no doubt that she’d used that on at least one of her students, as well.

All of the trainers worked with all of the trainees in some capacity, but Jet had just found out from Laksri that Alice was to be her personal trainer, as well... at least for her initial, trial matches in the Rings, before she received a real ranking.

After that, assuming he made it to the next round, she could pick her own team, but initially, everything was assigned according to the whims of the Rings Board.

Laksri seemed somewhat less impressed by Alice than Jet found wholly comfortable, given that she needed to be ready for her initial, trial Rings match in just a few short weeks. Yet, because she couldn’t tell why he didn’t approve of Alice exactly, Jet wasn’t sure how to react. She definitely got the impression he’d been disappointed by the choice... but because at least part of his disappointment seemed to stem merely from the fact that Alice was human, Jet honestly didn’t know how seriously to take it.

She couldn’t get a read on what Richter thought of Alice, either.

Either way, Jet didn’t want the woman knowing she was afraid of her. Therefore, she only pursed her lips at the woman’s rebuke, giving her a neutral stare.

“So what was it?” she said. “What did I miss?”

Alice walked up beside her and shoved at her shoulder, pointing emphatically down at the ground. Jet stared at the red-tagged dart lying by her feet, and realized she hadn’t even felt it hit her sense-suit. The end of the dart was blunt, but dipped in a dark red powder that showed up like blood on her gray training outfit. Tugging at the fabric, Jet could see the red smear on the back of her shirt when she craned her neck, and guessed it must have tagged her right around the left kidney.

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 real 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 joke, 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.

Of course, Nirreth favorites had been thrown into the mix as well, despite the meticulous detail some of the Nirreth architects employed in hunting down previously indigenous life forms to complete their largely fictitious yet eerily familiar-feeling “paradise Earth.”

Jet supposed they justified those Nirreth plants and trees by saying their vision of the future involved a perfect blend of what was Earth and the best of what they’d been able to salvage from Astet, the Nirreth home world.

Still, she couldn’t help thinking it was more of an Earth amusement park than Earth itself. It reminded her again of the old human movies––more fantasy than reality.

But the Nirreth seemed to like their landscapes that way.

“Change?” Laksri said, his voice a bit more prodding that time. “New clothes? ... Then we go out. This is okay?”

Jet looked at him. His mouth had curled in that half-frown she knew indicated displeasure. His tail flicked more sharply behind him, too. He probably thought she’d been deliberately ignoring him, or at the very least, spacing out.

“Change into what?” she said, once she’d collected her thoughts. She heard the taut edge creep back into her voice. “What kind of clothes should I wear?”

Laksri motioned towards one wall, his three fingers flat.

Hesitating only a few seconds, Jet walked to where his hand had pointed and examined the blank surface. At least now, she had some idea of what to look for, even though her and Anaze’s room had been equipped with more human-like furniture, including a floor chest and a taller wardrobe full of racks for clothes.

But Jet had seen some of the wall storage units that most Nirreth used, including in Prince Ogli’s private chambers the one time she visited.

She’d also seen them in the massive, Grecian-looking changing room attached to the Rings’ training center. That same changing room housed a communal bath the size of a small pond, with hot and cold jets, soapy scrubbers and knee-high water that stood a dozen feet from the rows of drying cubicles between stone-like pillars.

So it only took Jet a few seconds longer than the average Nirreth to find the faintly glowing spot to the right of a curved stretch of unbroken wall in Laksri’s near-featureless room.

Laying her palm on the spot, Jet was rewarded by the wall breaking into four segments that retracted seamlessly, revealing an opening taller than she stood. Shirts hung in rows on branch-like hangars, and next to those, rows of form-fitting pants in various colors and with different designs hung as well.

After a few seconds of staring, Jet noticed that not a single one of those garments had been made to fit Laksri’s proportions. In fact, every one of them was about three sizes too small for him, if not more.

“These are for me?” she said, startled.

She turned around when he didn’t answer her immediately.

He was watching her, his dark eyes appraising as she examined the clothes, almost as if assessing her reaction towards them. It occurred to Jet that he might be trying to interpret her facial expressions and verbal cues as much as she was his.

“Laksri?” she said, letting her voice grow a shade sharper. “The clothes. Are they supposed to be mine?”

He nodded, in that jerky, awkward style of a Nirreth imitating human mannerisms.

“You and Richter did this?” she pressed, wanting to understand the full meaning of the clothes already being in his room. She wasn’t sure what exact information she wanted off him, only that she wanted more information than she had.

Laksri only shrugged that time, his eyes flat.

When she continued to stare at him, he blew air out of his lips in a short burst, a near whistle. Jet knew that sound, too; it meant he was likely annoyed.

“I do it,” he said, his voice gruff. “Need clothes... both places. Richter no good with Nirreth clothing... what is right... so I not ask him. There is a problem with this? Bad clothes? Bad size?” Pausing, he articulated more clearly.

“...You not like?”

“Wrong size,” she corrected him, unthinking. “And no, it’s not that. It’s just...”

“What?” he said, impatient again. “I want food. Anything on that side...” He made a jerking motion with his hand, one copied by his tail as he motioned towards the right side of the closet. “...That is fine. For this... for out. The rest is in... inside. Or training. Maybe in barns with Ogli, or other types of outside. But not good for this... for public. Understand?” He pointed his finger down, towards the floor, but at an angle so that it aimed at the closet as well. “...Same with feet. Right is good. Left is no good. Understand?”

Jet looked down, and realized he meant shoes.

She honestly couldn’t tell much difference between the two categories he’d outlined, other than the fact that those shoes on the right appeared to all be close-toed, whereas those on the left were mainly open-toed. Both looked like the regular sandals that all Nirreth wore, at least when dressed in civilian wear and not the booted uniforms of the cullers or one or another branch of the military.

She considered asking what the deal was with the ‘good’ and ‘no good’ thing, regarding the shoes and the clothes, then decided it could wait. She was starving, too. Nirreth generally only ate two meals a day, one around ten o’clock in the morning and the second around four or five p.m. It was edging past five now, at least if Jet’s stomach’s grouchiness was any indication.

Of course, most of the clocks weren’t Earth-based clocks, but Nirreth clocks, although they’d started using both to some degree, in the Palace at least... likely to acknowledge the different lengths of days and nights of Earth as compared to Astet.

Again, Anaze had been the one to clue her in on the fact that the Nirreth home world was a good two times the size of Earth, and therefore had significantly longer days and nights. Jet had only the faintest idea of conversions, and didn’t really care all that much, frankly. She still found herself thinking in Earth times out of habit. The Astet clock made no sense to her anyway, so she pretty much didn’t bother to learn it, at least beyond the basics.

Once again, Laksri blew air out his lips in a short, yet somehow expressive burst.

Irritated that time, Jet grabbed the first shirt and pair of pants that her hands found on the right side of the closet. She could argue fashion with the Nirreth later; better to get this dog and pony show over with so she could go to sleep and wake up herself again.

It was only after she’d pulled the shirt off the hangar and compared it to the others still on the rack that she noticed that all of the shirts on the right side had symmetrical designs down each long sleeve. The pants appeared to have similar designs down the outside and inside of the cloth legs. Those on the left side appeared to be more uniform in color, or containing more random designs built into the fabric itself, especially with the long shirts.

When Jet turned around, Laksri still stood where he had been standing since they arrived, but now his expression appeared calm. He’d turned his head politely so that he faced completely away from her. At her silence, he motioned towards her with one of his hands, without turning his head to look at her.

“Change,” he grunted. “I am hunger.”

“Hungry,” she corrected.

That time, instead of looking annoyed, he made that low, snorting sound that she associated with amusement. Probably his version of a Nirreth laugh.

“Hun-gree,” he enunciated, acknowledging her words. “You are still not changed,” he added, motioning his fingers at her a second time, still staring at the door.

Hesitating only briefly, Jet shrugged, then pulled the barn-smelling shirt over her head. Dropping it on the floor, she donned the new shirt after tossing the clean pants and now-empty hangar onto the shoes to free her hands. Tugging the new shirt over her head, she slipped out of the dirty pants at once, almost in the same set of motions, a little more self-conscious that time. Dumping those on the floor, too, she tugged the new pair on hastily. She didn’t bother to arrange the fabric around her legs until she had the pants mostly up and over her hips.

When she glanced at Laksri, he remained stone-faced, still staring in the opposite direction.

The lack of underwear in the Nirreth clothing was something Jet had been forced to grow accustomed to. The bra thing bothered her more than underwear. Not like she was super big on top, but during the Rings training especially, she had enough upstairs to be uncomfortable. Her mother always helped her sew halters at the skag pit, like most of the skag girls and women did, at least until Jet could do it herself. She tried to explain the problem to the Nirreth who saw after her and Anaze’s clothes, but the male Nirreth had been visibly baffled, above and beyond his spotty English, and Jet’s even worse Nargili. Jet finally had to approach Alice, one of the few times she had been sincerely grateful to the Rings’ trainer.

Alice dealt with the issue somehow, and Jet found four halter-top style bras of some stretchy fabric in her chest of clothes the next day. Each of them fit perfectly, so Alice must have had her own chat with the Nirreth tailor, or else found someone else who could teach him how to make what Jet needed. Apparently, not a lot of human women had been trained in the Rings before now.

None, actually... at least before her and Tyra. It was a sobering thought.

Once Jet had the patterned fabric all aligned on her legs and arms, she started looking at shoes. Pulling out one pair covered in light blue stones, she set them on the floor and began shoving her feet into them.

“You can look now,” she told Laksri. “What do you want me to do with the dirty clothes... ?”

When she glanced up that time, she jumped physically. Somehow he’d managed to cross the room without her hearing a single footfall. He stood over her now, and once again, she was reminded of just how tall he was. Really, compared to just about any human she’d ever seen, even in the Rings on the pirated stations... even compared to most other Nirreth... Laksri was really danged tall. She watched as he picked up her dirty clothes, wrinkling his nose a little, even though he did most of his breathing through the narrow slits in the lower part of his neck. Apparently the smell part was in roughly the same place it lived on humans.

It also struck Jet that Nirreth could probably breathe through three different parts of their body, not just the two humans had... four, if you counted each set of gill slits separately. She wondered if their ancestors had ever been able to breathe underwater, the way Chiyeko told her that humans had once been able to do, when they lived in the sea.

It was an odd thought, that humans might have that in common with the Nirreth. It would explain their endless fascination with water... more than the fact that nature had apparently decided at one point to divorce them from their primordial beginnings altogether.

Carrying her soiled clothes gingerly with two long fingers on each hand, Laksri brought them over to another segment of wall and pressed a knuckle into a bright spot on the smooth surface. A second opening appeared, this one much smaller, and nearly round. Laksri shoved her clothes through the opening and they disappeared.

Then the hole disappeared, too.

He walked back to Jet while she was finishing buckling her second shoe, and touched the discolored panel next to her wardrobe. The doors closed simultaneously and the lines disappeared back into the eggshell white and featureless wall, as if they’d never existed.

Jet found herself looking around, taking in the overall space of his room for the first time. Every wall and surface seemed to be the same pearly white in color, with almost no furniture. Yet, the ceilings remained absurdly high, at least by skag standards. The only furniture she saw included a low couch covered in flat, dark-green cushions over a white, hard-looking back and seat. Jet also saw a low table covered in a number of mechanical-looking devices. She could only identify one of the four or five lying there, a kind of portable view-screen that the Nirreth used to talk to one another, and to share information. The screens folded up into a variety of shapes, the most common being a bracelet-type band that they wore around their wrists. The screen changed size, orientation and location, too.

Looking around, Jet wondered about sleeping arrangements.

Laksri didn’t sleep on that bench-couch thing, did he? Come to think of it, Jet couldn’t remember what kind of bed the prince slept on, either. She wondered if, like the closets, the bed lived somewhere inside the walls. The one, small door she could see on the far side of the room looked awfully low for his height... more like a tunnel than a regular door. Jet had already seen a few bathrooms with doors like that, so she figured it could be the same. Compared to the dug holes around the skag pits, those little washing, toilet, cleaning cubicles were heaven, but still nothing like the porcelain seats and deep bathtubs she’d glimpsed in a few of the old Earth movies and picture books.

“Are you ready?” he said.

Once more, Jet found herself looking at the tall Nirreth, her heart pounding faster.

That time, she heard the undercurrent in his words, and knew what he meant.

Exhaling a breath in the hopes that it might unclench her muscles, she thought through her options, maybe for the last time.

“I really can’t fake it?” she said, hearing the doubt in her own voice.

He gave another of those low snorts, but his expression looked slightly less hard.

“No,” he said simply.

Jet shook out her arms, feeling like she was gearing up for a fight.

“All right,” she said. “Knock yourself out.”

Laksri’s eyes grew faintly puzzled at the last, but he moved closer to her. Reaching towards her cautiously, he caught hold of her hips, after holding his palms up briefly, like one might do when trying to reassure a wild animal... which Jet supposed wasn’t far from the truth, at least from Laksri’s point of view.

Rather than stepping towards her again, he pulled her closer to where he stood, his eyes watching her face. Jet couldn’t really hold that black-eyed stare however, and found herself watching his tail instead, her whole body tense. She remembered it had hurt the last time... a lot, at least until the venom kicked in. She remembered it feeling like a knife had been inserted between her ribs, along with the pressure of the venom being forced into her system as he finished injecting her.

On the side of her body where his tail was coiling in lazy circles, Laksri slowly lifted her shirt to expose the bare skin, moving cautiously enough that he almost seemed to be asking permission. Realizing why he was lifting her shirt, Jet didn’t fight him. Sighing again, she instead tried to resign herself to the whole thing, to not make it a big deal.

“Do you need me to hold it up?” she asked him.

“No,” he said, his voice gruff.

Hearing the change in his tone, Jet glanced up, in spite of herself.

His eyes didn’t meet hers.

Instead, he was staring down at where his long fingers gently gripped the fabric of her shirt. He got it up high enough to expose most of her side and part of her belly and bunched up the loose fabric in his hand. He seemed to hesitate then, and when Jet looked up that time, Laksri’s eyes were on hers.

A flicker of what might have been nerves crossed his expression, right before he pulled her closer.

“I won’t,” he said, his voice abrupt that time. “You don’t need to worry. I won’t... even if you ask.”

Jet blinked up at him, bewildered. “I thought you said you had to?”

Laksri stared at her just as blankly. Then his expression cleared, his dark eyes sharpening.

“Not sting,” he clarified. “Sting, I do. I must do.”

“Then what are you talking about?” Jet said, still confused, and now a little annoyed because his words briefly got her hopes up.

“Sex,” the Nirreth said, blunt. “I mean I won’t do sex... even if you want.”

Jet smiled, her lips creeping up sideways in spite of herself. “I don’t think you need to worry about me asking,” she said. “No offense. I’m sure you’re handsome and all, as far as Nirreth go, but you’re not exactly my type...”

“Shut up,” he said, his voice gruff again.

She did, but not so much for his words... more because just then, the end of his tail brushed against the bare skin of her side. She jumped a little, looking down in reflex, then immediately felt her whole body tense. Laksri tensed, too. His fingers curled more tightly around her hip, gripping the bone and flesh, and he tugged her nearer in the same set of seconds, less gently that time. His other hand lifted her shirt higher, even as he pressed his tail hard against her side. When she looked up at him, he was staring at her again, his eyes half-lidded.

“You’re getting off on this a little too much, Laks...” she muttered.

Just then, his body tensed more... right before his tail jerked against her.

That time, it felt different.

It still hurt. It hurt as much, if not more, than the last time, really. He’d done it so quickly in the hold of that culler ship, Jet hadn’t had a lot of time to feel much of anything.

This time, he pushed into her slow, his fingers gripping her hip and side harder as he did it. Maybe because she’d been expecting it to be worse, based on her half-baked memories of when she’d first been caught, or maybe because she’d been expecting it this time, it didn’t seem that bad. Not bad enough to struggle anyway. She found herself gripping the Nirreth’s arms instead, watching his face as she winced against the pain. That time, the drug or poison or whatever it was seemed to release into her slowly.

She watched Laksri’s eyes close as it did, even as his face tightened. She had time to think his features looked almost open in those few seconds at the end...

... then the drug hit her system, making her limbs lose all of their resistance.

When she looked up next, the Nirreth’s eyes appeared darker, the flecks of color lighter than before. He was looking at her again, and for a moment, she had the absurd thought that he might bite her. Not viciously, but more because of something unexpressed she could see in his eyes, as if he were holding back some intensity of feeling.

Instead, he let go of the edge of her shirt, and raised a hand to her hair, stroking it as if she were a cat. By then, her side didn’t hurt at all, and she found herself leaning into his fingers, even as she moved closer to where he stood. Once she slid an arm around his waist, however, he stepped backwards, releasing both her hip and her hair. His disengagement confused Jet more than embarrassed her... then it made her slightly sad.

When she frowned up at him, she found him looking at her again, his eyes hard, but again holding more than she could really pin down. She felt strangely floaty, but surprisingly clear, too. In fact, everything around her seemed suddenly much more clear... and real... almost bright. She had a sudden desire to take off all of her clothes and lie on the green sofa... or maybe the eggshell smooth floor.

“No.” Laksri shook his head, his voice firm. He took her arm then, and strangely, she felt a sort of regret through the skin of his fingers where he held her.

If he didn’t want to say no, Jet thought, then why would he?

“No,” he repeated, before she could ask. “We go out.”

“You’re hungry,” Jet remembered, as though through a thick pane of glass. “...You want food. Right? Is that it?”

He nodded, once, but she felt his relief, too. Pulling her towards him, he hesitated though, and she could almost feel him thinking that time.

“You want to sting me again?” she said. Thinking about it, she caught hold of the fabric of her shirt, lifting it on the same side as before. “Okay.”

Laksri stared down at her, his dark eyes blank.

Then she felt his hands tighten. She felt him make up his mind, seemingly before he let himself think about it clearly, then his tail wrapped around her waist from the other side, holding her in place before he stung her again. That time, he let out a short gasp, his tail tightening around her until their bodies were nearly flush. He gasped again as he continued to let out the venom, and that time, Jet felt the same rush of warmth and near-release somewhere in her own body, as if through the middle of his chest. It was intense enough that she clutched at him with her fingers, leaning against him in the pause.

He didn’t unwrap his tail right away, but when he started to, she grabbed hold of it, shaking her head.

“Another,” she told him.

That time, she felt a near-panic on him. He shook his head, even as a denser feeling rose from under that panic.

“No,” he said. He started again to uncoil his tail.

Jet felt a swell of disappointment, strong enough that Laksri looked away, as if he felt it, too. It took Jet another few seconds to realize he’d stopped moving away from her.

“Why not?” she said.

She noticed that his tail remained around her waist as well, if more loosely than before. Laksri looked down at her, as if preparing to answer, and that time, the colored points in his eyes seemed to stand out in the deep black like stars... even miniature constellations.

“One more,” she said, seeing the doubt that stood there.

Her voice was cajoling that time.

Laksri looked away, then his expression hardened. When he looked back that time, his tail once more coiled sharply around her waist. He gripped her tighter that time, his long fingers holding her shoulder in one hand, her rear in the other. It didn’t bother her, though... and it didn’t occur to her that maybe she should wonder about that, too. Instead, she found herself feeling what it was like inside his body, the different rhythm of his pulse against her fingers where she held his arm. Her other hand caressed the skin of his tail, and then the leg below, exploring the definition of his thigh muscles through his pants.

“One more, I might do sex,” he said, his voice gruff again. “Want it. Already I want...” He stared down at her, his tail tightening enough that she had her whole body against his, and even then could barely breathe.

“...More than I thought,” he said after the pause. “More than before.”

“You wanted sex with me before?” Jet found the idea bewildering, but not repugnant in any way. Not even undesirable really, which made her mind pause again.

“Yes,” he said, short, while she still thought about this. “Yes, before... since the ship...”

Jet looked up at him, at a loss for words.

“Would that be... bad?” she said finally.

His tail tightened more, forcing a gasp out of her.

“You will be angry,” he said, after she watched emotions war across his suddenly, vividly expressive eyes. She couldn’t remember seeing so much in them before, and had to assume that must be from the venom, too. Even so, she couldn’t bring herself to question it really.

“Sting me again,” Jet suggested. “Then we can decide...”

Laksri looked down at her, again his expression almost hesitant.

Then his jaw hardened, right before he pressed his tail against her side again, seemingly harder than before. He shoved it up against her skin right before the barb went into her, and that time, Jet let out a little gasp, even as Laksri wrapped an arm around her shoulders, bringing her tightly against him. He let out a low, rumbling sound in his chest, almost like the purr of a great cat, just as the venom in his tail started to let go. She had her arms wrapped around his waist by the time he finished, her fingers caressing his tail where it left the tailored hole in his pants. He gripped her tighter as she kept touching him, tighter still when her other hand slid under his shirt, caressing the smooth muscles and skin. From what she could tell, every part of him was muscle; the velvet skin moved over those hard slopes and planes like a silk covering.

She didn’t remember them changing positions, but suddenly, Jet was aware of lying on her back on something hard and flat.

She had a vague recollection of the Nirreth pushing or pulling her somewhere... putting his hand on the wall... then being here, in this dimmer space, and now Laksri had no shirt. His upper body had a kind of angular symmetry that threw her a bit... hairless, of course, with no nipples and ribs that seemed more vertical than horizontal. His shoulders were larger and more banded with muscle than they’d seemed even when he wore clothes. He pulled her against him, his tail wrapped around her again, only this time, inside and under her shirt.

“Again?” he asked her gruffly, raising his head from where he’d been sucking on her throat with his mouth and tongue. “Again?” he said, his voice more cajoling as his fingers stroked her bare skin under the shirt.

Jet’s breath was coming hard now, in strange, short pants, and she found her hands roaming to places on the Nirreth she’d never even explored on another human being. His hand slid inside her pants, gripping the back of her thigh in long fingers, even as he sucked more on her shoulder and throat. She felt desire coming off him in waves, even as she continued to explore his body with her hands, feeling him react under her fingers.

“Again?” he said, his voice more urgent, despite the murmur. “Again? Please... ?”

Before Jet could answer, another voice broke the quiet, seemingly from right over where they lay.

“I think you’ve both had enough... don’t you?” it said, booming over the small space.

JET LOOKED UP, dazed, her whole body tensing even as she clutched protectively at Laksri’s arms. If she’d been remotely in her right mind, she probably would have known what to expect when she looked up... or who, at the very least, given the wry humor in his voice, mixed with a darker sort of warning.

As it was, she could only blink in surprise at the image of Richter standing there, fully clothed, arms folded and a hard look in his coffee-colored eyes.

“Laksri!” Richter commanded, his voice holding more of that edge. “Get up. Or I’ll shoot you with your own stunner... like we talked about...” He chuckled a little, but Jet still saw that hard, almost angry look in his eyes. “...I figured I’d better check in on you two... .make sure you didn’t get too carried away for your first time. I guess it’s good I did.”

 Jet glanced up at Laksri, who frowned, still obviously having trouble focusing his eyes.

She saw him glance at her, right before his face tightened more. He said something to Richter in that gutteral Nirreth language, still gripping Jet with his fingers and tail. His body remained heavy on hers, too, and it took Jet that long to realize her own hand was between them, caressing the front of his pants. Even as she thought it, Laksri pressed tighter against her, letting her know he didn’t mind even as he gripped her possessively.

“We talked about this, my black-skinned friend,” Richter said, his voice warning as he cut Laksri off in mid-speech. “Laksri, I’m not kidding about the stunner. If you need to get laid that badly, we’ll find you someone in the slave pens, all right? We’ll do this experiment another night. When you’re thinking with a different part of your body...”

At Jet’s cry of protest, Richter only spoke louder, his gesture at her dismissive.

“...Plenty of girls down there who’d be more than happy to get you off... but not this one,” he said, emphasizing the word darkly. He pointed at Jet without looking her in the face. “We need this girl, Laks. You know it, as well as I do. I don’t care what kind of puppy dog crush you think you have on her, I’m not about to let you start screwing her for kicks... she won’t help us at all if you make a habit of raping her, simply because you can’t control yourself...”

Again, Jet tried to protest, but Richter cut her off.

“So what’s it going to be, pal? You really want to go toe to toe with me on this? Spend all of tomorrow with a hangover from the stunner? Or can we compromise? Find you another mammal to play with?”

Jet felt her mouth harden as she stared at Richter.

Then her eyes shifted up to Laksri’s. The Nirreth returned her stare that time, and again she felt that glimmer of regret, as if through his very skin. At the same time, she felt him avoiding the question in her about whether he intended to do as Richter was suggesting... find another ‘mammal’ in the slave pens.

Using his arms, Laksri lifted himself off her, uncoiling his tail from around her waist and back as he did. Jet only let go of him when he pulled the rest of the way out of her reach, and even then, she did it reluctantly, fighting not to take his withdrawal personally. She watched, still half-sprawled on the cushioned surface where she lay, as Laksri pulled his shirt off the floor and tugged it over his head once he’d straightened.

Looking down at herself, Jet was mildly relieved to find herself fully clothed... although perhaps not as relieved as she should have been. When Laksri left through a rounded door to a brighter, larger-seeming room beyond, Jet felt another stab of loss. Glancing around, she saw that she lay sprawled on a flat, wide cushion on some equally flat support structure, whether wood or metal or something else. Square cushions formed what might have been pillows, and Jet saw herself lying on sheets of a pale, blue color.

Richter chuckled again, reminding Jet that he was there, that she wasn’t alone, despite how alone she suddenly felt. She looked up at him, and he motioned towards the bed.

“Looks like he spruced the place up for you, kitten.” Winking at Jet, he added, “Nirreth don’t normally use pillows. Or sheets, for that matter...”

But Jet was staring up by then, seeing a scattered pattern of lights embedded in the darker blue ceiling, almost the same color as Laksri’s skin. Lights shone from there, some pale blue, some white, some with faint-colored tints of orange or red or yellow. One even seemed to flicker in a myriad of different colors, like a tiny kaleidoscope.

“Are those... stars?” Jet said.

She’d only really seen stars since she’d been in the Green Zone, when she ventured out in the night and gazed up at the recreated stars of the dome.

Richter shook his head, rolling his eyes as he approached the bed.

“He got you a few times... didn’t he, kitten? You’re high as a kite...”

He took her arms above the elbows to help her off the mattress. She flinched a little without helping him or herself to move, still pointing upwards.

“But, are they...”

“Yes,” Richter grunted. “They’re stars. Now get up, girl, or I might be tempted to finish what that big lug started...”

A hiss emanated from by the door. Jet glanced over and saw Laksri standing there, his cat-like face taut, his teeth bared in obvious displeasure at Richter’s words. Richter tensed a little, even as he tugged harder on one of Jet’s arms.

“Take it easy, Laks,” Richter began, his voice cautious.

Laksri said something harsh in the Nirreth tongue, speaking too quickly for Jet to make out more than a few words. His sharp gestures and violently darting tail conveyed the tone of the message well enough, however. After the Nirreth took a step closer to the bed, Richter released Jet altogether, holding up his hands in a kind of peace gesture that was at least part supplication... maybe even a form of submission to the larger male.

“Fine,” Richter said. “Just remember yourself, my big, blue friend. After all, I wouldn’t need to be here at all, if you had any self control. So don’t get high and mighty on me... got it?”

By then, Laksri had inserted his larger bulk between Jet and Richter and helped her off the mattress with careful hands. Once Jet managed to pull herself upright, his tail coiled around her protectively, even as he turned to face Richter, speaking strongly in the Nirreth language once more.

Richter had his hands up again, in the same gesture as before.

“Understood,” he said, when Laksri paused. “When you’ve come down off your little horomone surge, then we’ll have more words... agreed?”

Jet looked between the two of them, then up at the stars on the ceiling. She heard Laksri grunt a few more words in Richter’s direction, then he gently steered her towards the door to the main room, using his palm and his tail. Jet followed along willingly enough, still a little confused by the hostility between the two of them, and uneasy about the thought of Laksri going to find some other human to sting once they’d finished dinner.

When she thought it that time, however, his tail coiled more tightly around her.

“I will not,” he told her bluntly, wrapping his fingers around her shoulder.

Exhaling a little in relief, Jet nodded a thanks to him, even as she caught Richter looking warily between them.

“Should I ask?” he said.

“No,” Laksri said warningly, tugging Jet tighter against him.

Jet didn’t mind. Anyway, the concern in her mind had disappeared entirely, leaving no trace after the Nirreth’s reassurance. At that point, all she felt was a mild disappointment that they were leaving... and hungry. She could feel Laksri’s hunger so clearly through his skin that all she could think about was food. The more she thought about it, the worse his hunger seemed to get, which of course made her hunger worse, too.

Either way, she found herself relieved by the time they finally began heading for the door to the outer corridor, pausing only long enough for Laksri to remind Jet to put on her shoes. Again, she had no memory of having taken them off, but somehow Richter held them in his hand and was handing them cautiously to Laksri to put on her feet. Jet noticed that Richter still seemed to be approaching the male Nirreth like one might approach a dangerous wild animal. It didn’t strike her as anything more than a curiosity, however... Richter himself didn’t really interest her much at that point.

The fact that Laksri knelt down and began putting the shoes on her feet, one by one, didn’t strike her as particularly odd, either. His long fingers remained gentle, and she found herself remembering the look of his densely muscled, nearly black-colored chest. Her fingers touched the side of his face as she thought about it, and briefly, Laksri closed his eyes, just before he pushed her fingers gently away.

She started to wonder if he was unhappy with her in some way.

“No,” he said, glancing up. “I am not.” He regained his feet in one, smooth motion, towering over her once more. Reaching out, he caught hold of her hair in one hand, again stroking it in his fingers almost carefully. That time, it didn’t bother her at all.

“Not mad,” he said, adding a reassuring purr.

Leaning closer, he pressed his cheek briefly to hers. When he pulled away, Jet caught Richter staring at them again, and frowning. Jet saw what might even have been anger in Richter’s expression, but she had no idea what to make of it.

“I think you two better stick to a one-sting limit from now on,” he muttered, looking away when he caught Jet’s eyes on him.

Laksri didn’t answer, and when Jet turned, she found him staring at her again, as if the two of them were once again alone in the room.

JET TRIED TO focus on the room around her, and the people in it.

She felt eyes on her, which made her nervous... and caused her to flinch into Laksri’s side a few times, even though he sat on the bench right next to her, hovering almost protectively whenever another of the Nirreth came over to speak to either him or Richter, or merely to stare at her and Laksri together. She felt the appraisals, and some of Laksri’s reactions to them, not all of which were pleasant.

Clearly, in Laksri’s mind at least, a number of those stares held a little too much interest.

Humans sat scattered among the Nirreth as well, dotting the various tables with their smaller heights and lighter complexions. A few were male, which mildly piqued Jet’s interest... or as much as anything could interest her through the pleasant backdrop of venom in which her mind rested. That hyper-clarity didn’t confuse things so much as make it nearly impossible for any one thing to really bother her.

In addition to ordering food for her and making sure she liked everything they gave her, Laksri also answered her questions... some of them anyway, between the rounds of curious and roving Nirreth. He often did so whether or not she voiced those questions aloud.

“Clothes mean attached,” he explained in a grunt, at one of her thoughts. “...With friend.”

Jet had just noticed that all but two of the humans she’d seen wore the same patterned clothes she did, and that none of the Nirreth wore clothes with those same kind of patterns down the arms and legs. She wondered if it was only a human thing, this being attached.

“No,” Laksri said, pursing his lips a little.

His dark eyes shifted to hers, and briefly, she was again caught in the shimmering lights lost in those black irises and pupils. Seeming to think for a few seconds, he showed her a necklace he wore, a brushed metal loop with a dark blue stone set in a pendant on the end.

“Is that the male version?” Jet asked aloud.

She wondered if the boy humans were playing some kind of role that put them in female clothing, even as she fingered the stone at the end of the pendant with careful hands.

Laksri shook his head. “No. Not male...” He hesitated as if trying to think of the right word.

“More like owner and trinket, kitten,” Richter intervened, leaning over the table from the other side of Laksri.

The Nirreth gave him an annoyed look, but when Laksri turned back to Jet, his expression softened some.

“It is true... more or less,” he admitted. “But some of this is just... tradition,” he said, fumbling with the word. “Other colonies... there were fights. This system makes fights less...” He gave Richter another hard look before glancing back at Jet. “...I do not see this as ownership... like this. I am aroused by the same things, yes... but this is not what I think...”

Confused by his words, Jet nodded only because she realized he was finished speaking. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she remembered that no one else knew who Laksri was, in relation to her or Richter or the Royals, and that she had better be careful what she voiced aloud. In the same moment, she realized how much of him she could feel whenever he touched her skin, and for a little while, that distracted her into forgetting the other.

His fingers caressed the back of her neck, pushing her hair aside. She could feel his fascination with her hair through his touch and smiled at him.

“Christ.” Richter rolled his eyes, giving Jet a look that bordered on anger. “Save me from horny lizard-skins...” He gave Laksri a harder look. “That better be all this is. If you’re trying to play me, Laks... or make sure our little darling here is loyal only to you...”

The Nirreth gave him a dangerous look, growling a little as he gripped the back of Jet’s neck tighter in his fingers.

“Fine, fine...” Richter held up his hands in mock defeat, but his eyes remained hard when he glanced back at Jet. “Just remember this tomorrow, kid. I was on your side... all right? Don’t selectively forget that I tried to keep him off you...”

The remark puzzled Jet, but she found her eyes pulled back to the room as she sensed some kind of commotion coming towards them. Again, she wasn’t really alarmed. It only occurred to her to worry slightly when Laksri’s tail once more tightened around her waist.

When she saw who was approaching their table, she felt nothing but surprise, and a pleased recognition. The young Nirreth’s eyes bored into hers above where his arms and fingers wrapped around his pet otter, Scampers. He looked at Jet herself only long enough to stare into her eyes, then at her neck. He stared long enough at the skin there that Jet found herself covering it self-consciously with her fingers.

By then, young Prince Ogli had turned his attention to Laksri, his dark eyes filled with a seemingly uncontrollable fury.

“You have taken this human?” he demanded, his teeth half-bared. “You are saying she is yours now? That you intend to keep her with you... beyond just this night?”

Jet noticed that a lag existed between where Ogli spoke and when she actually understood the words. Then she realized that Ogli had spoken in Nirreth, and that she shouldn’t have understood him at all. Glancing down at where Laksri’s tail coiled around her waist, and now his hand held onto her lower arm, clutching her bare skin, she had to assume she was feeling the words through Laksri, along with the flush of his anger as he stared the young prince down.

“Have I offended you, divine son of kings?”

“Answer the question!”

Laksri’s tail tightened around Jet’s waist. “I have taken her,” he said. “I intend to keep her. She pleases me. More than words can tell, divine one...”

“I should have you killed!”

“Again I must ask... does my choice in companions somehow offend you, most divine one?”

“Yes!” Ogli stomped his foot, looking at Jet and then back at Laksri. “Relinquish her at once! I demand it! I demand you tell her that she is no longer to be yours!”

Laksri’s tail tightened still more, pulling Jet against his side. “You cannot make such a demand on me... even you, divine son. I am sorry, but I am unwilling to relinquish my right... nor do I foresee this changing any time in the immediate future...”

“Did you ask her?” Ogli demanded. “Did you ask her before? Or force her?”

“I asked her,” Laksri said.

Laksri glanced at Jet though, and she felt a pulse of concern on him, enough that her fingers wrapped around his. At the same time, she couldn’t help but be touched that the prince was so worried about her being forced.

“I will ask her!” Ogli threatened, the meaning of his words again coming to Jet on a slight lag. “When your venom has left her, I will ask her myself! If she did not consent, I have the right to take her from you... it is the law!”

Laksri bowed in acknowledgment of his words, but again, Jet felt worry in his hands, along with another feeling, what might have been... shame? Guilt, perhaps? Jet didn’t fully understand, but found herself stroking the skin of his tail in reassurance. The feelings coming from him changed when she didn’t stop, shifting from guilt to a harder, more urgent desire.

It worsened as Jet kept touching him, and for her, too, once the echo effect brought it back in her direction... until Richter smacked Laksri on the other side.

Only then did Jet notice that the prince had left them.

“Are you two going to need a chaperone tonight?” Richter said in a low voice, leaning closer over the table.

Jet was about to say no, but Laksri answered before she could.

“Yes,” he said, his voice hard.

Richter smiled a little, but his coffee-brown eyes remained hawk-like. “Fine. I’ll send Anaze. He won’t like it much, but he can sleep with your girlfriend in your bed tonight, Laksri...” When the Nirreth stiffened, Richter held up his hands in another peace gesture. “Hey! Big guy... he won’t touch her, all right? I just think he’s better off with her than you. I don’t trust you not to sting him out of jealousy... and then you’d have no chaperone at all, right?”

Laksri grunted a kind of reluctant concession, but his tail didn’t loosen around Jet. She felt his anger at Anaze, but didn’t understand it.

Laksri changed the subject when he looked at her next.

“The prince,” he said, blunt. “He will want me dead.”

Jet felt her body tense. “What?”

“He will want me dead. Out of the way. It is the only legal way...” He frowned a little, staring at the space where the young Nirreth had been standing. “...I had not realized he was so infatuated, that he’d be willing to risk a public scene. This will complicate things.”

She pressed deeper into his side. “Can he do that? Kill you?”

Laksri shrugged, laying his free hand on the table. “Technically, yes.”

“So why are we doing this, if he can do that?”

“Don’t worry your head, kitten,” Richter said, grinning more cheerfully that time as he leaned over the table to speak with her. “You’re not the only ears we have in his quarters... we’ll keep the big guy safe. Scout’s honor.”

Jet glanced at Laksri though, and found her muscles hadn’t relaxed at Richter’s words.

“Is that true?” she demanded.

Laksri shrugged, but his eyes met hers that time. “I think so,” he said. Pausing at her expression, he caressed her cheek with one finger. “Do not worry. The Royals do not wish a scandal of this kind, so he will be on his own. He is too young to play this game very well.” Still studying her face, he kissed her cheek. “I will be careful.”

Their food arrived somewhere in that, and Jet found herself eating with an enthusiasm that surprised her, even after everything else. The food didn’t lessen the effects of the venom any, but what Laksri ordered for her was different than anything she’d eaten in the Green Zone before, and better, really. It also differed from what he’d ordered for himself, so likely had been made with a human palate in mind, not a Nirreth one. She was a little shocked at how good it was, really, even without knowing what to call any of the specific items in it.

As soon as she thought the last part, Laksri moved closer once more, putting an arm around her as he pointed at different splotches of color and texture on her plate.

“Fes-re,” he said, pronouncing it slowly. “Fesre, or Fesrin-ge. It is grain. From Astet. Many humans like this... it is close to your barley, and the spices easy for humans to digest...”

Jet nodded, leaning against his side. The Nirreth’s arm tightened around her more. Again, she felt a flush of desire on him, but he seemed to be trying to control it more. This puzzled Jet a little, but she felt no ill will behind it, instead, a kind of protectiveness, so she didn’t mind.

“Los-em-ra,” he said next, pointing to what looked like some kind of meat covered in red sauce and another, smaller, grain-type plant.

“It’s meat, right?” Jet said. “What kind?”

Laksri frowned slightly, and Jet could feel him trying to remember the word in English. As he did, Jet got an image in his head of what he’d been thinking about and laughed.

“Rabbit?” she said. “Nirreth eat rabbit?”

He smiled at her, that curl of the lip that didn’t show any teeth. It used to seem like such a subtle expression to her, but now it was as if he’d grinned at her, coupled with a look in his eyes that bordered on affection.

“These are very good,” he affirmed. “Tastes very good, this rab-it.”

Jet laughed again, pointing at the grain. “Is this from Earth, too?”

“Yes.” Laksri nodded, close to enthusiastic. “Yes... it is a grain here. From here. That is one we find easier to digest than most. We cannot eat the whet so many humans like... that hard grain that is so difficult to chew...”

“You mean wheat?” Jet said.

“Yes,” Laksri affirmed, nodding again. “Do you like this? We can still get it made. It is cheap here... easy to grow and none of my people can eat without getting sick. We feed to animals. Your animals. Understand?”

Jet smiled, nodding as she took another spoonful of the losemra. “No, this is good,” she assured him. “Whatever it is, I like it.”

His black eyes stared at hers, long enough that she forgot the food briefly, feeling that flutter in her belly again. It got strong enough that he abruptly turned away. He didn’t remove his arm from around her as he continued to eat, however, spearing chunks of a different kind of meat in a pale green sauce and bringing them to his mouth to chew vigorously. Jet pointed at his plate with her own spear-like utensil, after watching him eat for a few minutes more.

“What is that?” she said.

Again, Laksri seemed to be thinking. Then he laughed in that low-snort kind of way and took his arm from around her, long enough to hook his fingers into claws, drawing his arms close to his body and giving a mock growl.

Jet giggled. When he did it again, baring his teeth at her, she laughed aloud.

“Dinosaur?” she said. “You’re eating dinosaur?”

Laksri gave that grunting laugh of his and inclined his head sharply to the right. It struck Jet suddenly that this was the same as a human nod.

“Yes,” he told her approvingly, jerking his head to the right a second time. He inclined his head just as sharply to the left. “...No,” he added, by way of explanation.

Jet nodded. “Got it. I guess you just get used to seeing it mirrored... ?” At his blank look, she added, “When you face someone, I mean...”

It struck her then, looking around the room, that very few Nirreth actually faced one another, at least while sitting down. All sat at benches in concentric circles, facing the middle of the room instead. Even those sitting in the center rings didn’t face one another... a floor to ceiling fish tank stood in the center circle, blocking the view from one side of the (comparatively) smaller circles to the other. The tank was the size of an old water tower and filled with multi-colored tropical fish, as well as sharks, a flat, two-finned creature Richter called a “sunfish,” living seaweed in long strands, and turtles that floated and swam at the higher levels of the tank.

The tank was so large, it provided most of the lighting for the room.

The only other lights Jet saw included those star patterns across the dome above, along with clouds moving across the sky and a moon traversing the arc much more slowly. Fake stones embedded in the floor also let off a faint glow, in mostly browns and greens and blues, but with the occasional violet or scarlet or orange, almost like flowers dotting the darker palate of a forest floor.

She, Laksri and Richter sat on a padded bench against a low wall, in probably the third or fourth of the larger rings when counting from the top of the circular room. A table so white it nearly glowed curved in front of them, the faint light broken only by trays of food.

When Jet felt Laksri’s arm curl around her once more, she glanced at him. Before she knew it, he was kissing her face, then her neck, running his tongue over her skin and nibbling at her gently down to her shoulder. He pulled her closer, wrapping his tail more tightly around her as well, when a new voice broke the quiet, this one holding so much anger it made Jet jump a few inches off the padded bench.

That time, she didn’t need to wait for a translation.

He spoke English.

“Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Anaze demanded, standing over them with clenched fists.

His face was bright red, visible even in the dim lighting of the room. He seemed to be struggling for words, as if each one came out of him with only a determined, half-strangled effort.

“Get your damned, three-fingered hands off her... you ugly, worm-eating, sewer-smelling, water-fearing, lizard skin... !”

BY THE TIME the four of them got back to Laksri’s room, things had finally calmed down, at least a little. Richter still kept his body firmly between Laksri’s and Anaze’s, and stayed with them in the room until Anaze and Jet retreated into Laksri’s bedroom. Jet heard Laksri and Richter arguing through the wall, along with a few more violent thumps that Jet guessed had to be Laksri’s tail smacking against something more solid than Richter himself.

It was difficult leaving Laksri.

That should have puzzled Jet maybe, but it didn’t seem strange at the time. Anaze barely spoke to her once they were alone. He instructed her to lay down and go to sleep, and Jet didn’t argue. She could only really make herself muster up a mild concern at his furious silence.

So she laid down in all of her clothes except for those shoes with the covered toes that pinched her feet and listened to Laksri and Richter argue on the other side of that door. At some point... really, after not very much time passed at all... the argument abruptly died down. Jet didn’t know if Richter left or stayed, but not long after that, she must have fallen asleep because everything drifted out of her awareness.

Unfortunately, the same wasn’t true of the next morning.

Jet woke up with a sore side, her shirt bunched up in a loop around her back, her hair knotted... and bruises all over the side of her neck that she unfortunately remembered getting in almost minute detail.

In fact, her memories stood out more clearly than even ordinary memories did... clearly enough that she found herself tempted to simply remain in the washroom until everyone else had left. That feeling only strengthened when she heard Anaze moving around on the other side of the door and realized he must be awake, too.

Instead, she just moved very slowly, hoping that he might take the hint and leave. She took a long shower before re-donning the clothes she’d worn the day before. She washed her face, brushed her teeth with a brand new, human-style toothbrush that must have been supplied by Laksri as well, and even found a kind of lotion for her face.

Eventually, though, she ran out of things to do in that room, and realized Anaze had no intention of leaving without seeing her. She just had to bite the bullet. Clenching her jaw and throwing back her shoulders, she jerked the door open and found herself facing Anaze directly and all at once.

He sat on the bed, watching her. Instead of looking angry, the expression on his face seemed to be laden with something like guilt.

“Jet,” he said, before she could wrap her head around this. “Jet... I’m so sorry.”

She paused, still standing at the door, thrown in spite of herself. Maybe it was the left-over venom, but she still wasn’t sure what to think of Laksri or the rest of it herself, much less her own role in it... or Anaze’s.

“What for?” Her voice was borderline dismissive. “Is that a confession of some kind? Or are you just assuming that Laksri forced himself on me?”

Anaze’s expression abruptly hardened. “Did you sleep with him?”

“Clearly I didn’t,” Jet said drily. “I slept with you.”

“You know what I mean!”

“Sure, I do,” she said, feeling her jaw harden again. “Maybe I just don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

“Because I’m the one who brought you here!” he burst out, thudding his hand down on the mattress. “Of course it’s my business! I put you in range of that asshole!”

“Which one?” Jet said, her mouth still taut.

Anaze glared at her. “That damned pervert lizard skin... who do you think?”

Jet felt her jaw harden more. It took her a second to realize it was because of what he’d said about Laksri... and then she was too confused to know what to think exactly. Frowning a little, she looked at Anaze, still trying to muddle through what was her and what was the remnants of the venom.

“How long does this venom last?” she said finally.

As soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t, but it was too late.

Anaze’s features turned back to stone.

“Why?” he said angrily. “Do you still want his tongue down your throat?” He motioned angrily towards her. “It’s not enough that he’s marked most of your neck... ?”

Jet clenched her fingers into fists, in part to keep from using them to cover the bruises she could feel Anaze staring at. Biting back anger once more, she forced herself to shrug, her expression flat.

“Well,” she said easily. “Am I a rape victim in need of your protection, Anaze? Or some kind of whore? Or are the two basically the same thing in your mind?”

Even as she said it, she was trying to assess her own brain, to get some idea of whether she was still under the influence of the venom or not. She felt clear enough, but then, she had the night before, too, at least for most of it.

“Are you staying here from now on?” Anaze demanded, rising to his feet.

Jet shrugged, stepping back slightly in spite of herself. She covered it up by leaning down for her shoes. “You know this was your dad’s idea, right?” Jet said. “You know he made me choose, right? Prince Ogli or Laksri? Pardon me for not being too thrilled with the idea of being a Nirreth child molester... or stuck as one of the Prince’s well-trained pets...”

The anger on Anaze’s face worsened, right before he glowered at the door that led to the main room of Laksri’s apartment. When he looked back, most of the emotion had leached from his eyes, but the frustration Jet could feel coming off him was almost palpable.

“Speaking of the prince... aren’t you due there now?” he said, his voice as flat as hers.

Jet glanced at the clock in the ceiling, which now showed the sun and clouds and blue sky, instead of the stars. Seeing that she was already two minutes late for her standard meeting time at Prince Ogli’s chambers, she cursed under her breath.

Hesitating only another half-breath, she walked to the door adjoining the two rooms and jerked it open, without letting herself think too much about who might be waiting on the other side.