THE RINGS

“HIGHER!” ALICE SAID, her voice a snarl.

When Jet leapt up, catching hold of the ring with one hand, the woman gave an approving nod, albeit with seeming reluctance. She shook her head a bit more sharply, her posture and expression exuding impatience when Jet continued to hang from the rotating bar, grinning.

“Come down now!” the woman commanded with her crisp accent. “You are target for every thing they might want to throw at you...” She complained louder, when Jet didn’t obey her right away. “This thing is for quick escape. Quick only! Grab... then jump. Grab... then jump. Understand? You are being a fool...”

Jet jumped down, still grinning a little, at least long enough to catch Tyra’s eye.

The taller woman winked at her, snorting a laugh.

Things had gotten a lot easier between Jet and the other woman fighter in the past few weeks. Tyra came up to her pretty much within minutes of Jet showing up at the changing room, the day after she and Laksri went to the aquarium restaurant and got publically ‘seen’ as a hybrid couple or whatever. Given that Jet really hadn’t spoken to the woman before... as well as the fact that she was pretty conked out from the night before... it startled her a lot when Tyra came bounding up to her, a big smile on her face.

“So you got de-virginized, I hear,” Tyra said, grinning from ear to ear. “By that big bodyguard of yours? We’d all been wondering... I’d heard a rumor that he was the reason they didn’t match you with a Nirreth trainer. They said he bribed someone on the Board to make sure you got a human female instead... the dog! We all wondered if it was true...”

Jet couldn’t help wondering which ‘we’ Tyra meant. Grinning, the other woman motioned around her, but she and Jet were the only two people in the cavernous room.

“...So how was it?” Tyra asked, without missing a beat. “Is he as good as he looks? I was thinking he was kind of a hottie, your guy. I wondered how long it would take you to stop saying no. It was pretty obvious he was into you...”

Jet found herself completely at a loss for words.

She never in a million years would have imagined having this conversation, even a month ago. The idea that Tyra, or really any human, could embrace the idea of living side by side with the Nirreth was a little beyond her.

It also made her think about Laksri in a way that was more than a little uncomfortable. Although she’d had most of the day to think about it, she still couldn’t seem to get as angry at him as she knew she probably should be.

Luckily, Tyra didn’t seem to require Jet to keep up her end of the conversation.

“...I’ve been with my trainer for awhile. Anslom,” the woman added. “...It really helps with the training... that whole communication, empathy thing lasts for a good twenty hours or so after you’ve been stung, and improves your memory, too. A lot of the trainers take their human combatants as lovers, to up their chances in the Rings. It also helps with the whole political aspect, as you’re a lot less likely to piss the Board off on accident if you know the ropes well enough through feeling how a Nirreth feels... the kinds of things they react to, and so forth...” Shrugging a little, she added, as if thinking, “...Wonder why they gave you a human one? Whether your guy bribed them or not, it really tanked your odds on the rankings, I hear. I thought there was some rule about that... only Nirreth trainers for the humans and only human trainers for the Nirreth, something like that...”

Jet started to attempt to answer, but again, Tyra kept on speaking.

“...Maybe you can get your hunk to help you out, now that you’re playing footsie,” Tyra suggested. “He looks like a fighter... and all of the Nirreth know the Rings. The myth is that humans gave them the idea, but Anslom told me they had something really similar back in their old world... even in pre-colonial days. Only most of the contestants died back then and it was all Nirreth versus animals and other Nirreth.” She rolled her eyes, still grinning. “...According to Anslom, humans only gave them the idea to use some of the players more as recurring figures. Kind of like sports heroes, I guess... or boxers, maybe?”

She smiled, as if they were talking about the weather, instead of a sport that would probably at some point result in one or both of their deaths.

But then, Tyra really wanted to be in the Rings. She wasn’t just faking it. She didn’t even seem to be overly obsessed with the freedoms she might gain as a result of being a regular player... at least from hearing her talk. As far as Jet could tell, to Tyra, it was about winning. It was about being at the top of the heap as a star player of the Rings.

If she got rich or ended up living free and large as a result, all the better.

Jet wondered if Tyra had any family she would bring to the Green Zone, in the event she racked up enough points and wins. If she did, she didn’t mention that to Jet either, or in any of her interviews by the Nirreth media, at least not the ones Jet had seen.

Jet had the first of those scheduled in a week, too. Everyone was curious about the first two human female candidates, and Jet was owned by the Royals, which made her an added novelty. For now they were concentrating more on Tyra though, presumably because she’d be the very first female human ever to run in the Rings.

“...They have all these giant lizards living on their home world,” Tyra added as Jet thought about all of this. “...or they did, anyway. Anslom told me that the whole ‘lizard skin’ thing actually predates humans, too. It’s an insult they have for one another, meaning a kind of cave man or barbarian. I guess back in the old days, most of them actually wore lizard skins, so...”

Tyra laughed, showing perfectly white, straight teeth. They were so straight and white, Jet actually wondered if Tyra had been raised in the Green Zone herself, and been eating clean Green Zone food and seeing Green Zone doctors her whole life.

“...Anslom says the Nirreth haven’t changed much, really, but the Royals like to think everyone’s more sophisticated now. They only eat animals below a certain level of intelligence and have all these rules around taking humans as mates... I guess all of that is new with Earth and one other colony, though...”

Jet couldn’t help wondering what the other colony was like, and what the beings looked like there. It struck her as strange, suddenly, that the Nirreth would take mates among the species they conquered. Why? she wondered. Why wouldn’t they just mate with their own kind?

It also struck her as strange that they didn’t import humans to their other worlds, and vice versa. She’d heard somewhere, maybe from Anaze or maybe from her uncle, that Nirreth could live in far greater extremes of cold and heat than humans could survive, so maybe humans would simply die in that other place.

“...Even so,” Tyra warned, bringing Jet’s eyes and attention back to her. “Watch your back, hey, Jet? I hear that prince has got a real thing for you, and he might be young, but he’s still a prince. Tell your guy to be careful, or you could wake up next to a corpse one morning... or find yourself moved to the prince’s quarters in the middle of the night...”

Jet swallowed, but felt her jaw harden.

“Noted,” she muttered.

Tyra grinned at her, slapping her on the back. “Well, nice miss on that one anyway. I know their kids are supposed to mature sooner than humans, but I wouldn’t want to end up playing nursemaid to that spoiled little brat...” Tyra rolled her eyes, blowing at her bangs. “I don’t envy you, girl. I’m glad I’m not owned by the Royals. That whole family’s nuts, as far as I can tell. They can take their ‘social status’ and stuff it, as far as I’m concerned...”

Sighing a little, Jet nodded, hands on her hips.

“Yeah,” she muttered, noncommittal.

She found herself thinking about Tyra’s words afterwards, though, and the few things Laksri said that stuck with her from the night before.

Towards the end of that day, Jet still struggled with the whole empathy thing and why she wasn’t more angry with Laksri. All she could muster was a fair bit of irritation... embarrassment, of course... and a small amount of shame. But not a whole lot of honest-to-goodness anger, at least not of the variety that Anaze had aimed at her in the last twenty-four hours.

She had no idea what Laksri himself was feeling, if anything.

He wasn’t there by the time Anaze and Jet left the bedroom. She hadn’t seen him at Prince Ogli’s chambers that morning, either, at his usual post of chaperone. He hadn’t even been there to pick her up for lessons while the prince himself was shuttled off to class.

Instead, she’d had some middle-aged, female Nirreth waiting for her outside Ogli’s room, wearing an exotic-looking skirt made of colored, reed-like fabric and a tight, silk-like top of pale pink. The female Nirreth drilled her for over two hours on Nirreth customs and history, reacting at every wrong or muddled answer as if Jet’s very life depended on her full comprehension of every nuance and particular. When Jet finally just said ‘the heck with it’ and asked the female Nirreth where Laksri was, the other frowned, a faint glimmer of what might have been sympathy in her bluish-black eyes.

That was another thing Jet noticed that day, incidentally.

The Nirreth no longer all looked the same to her.

Not just Nirreth she’d gotten used to seeing and picking out of the crowd, like Laksri, Ogli, Tyra’s coach and so on... but all of them. Their faces now looked so different from one another to Jet that she had trouble understanding how they could have all looked the same to her before.

“He’s with the Royals,” the female explained, her mouth still curled in that small frown, the perfect opposite of the half-moon smile. Her voice held some sympathy, too. “...He has to answer for this... for taking Prince Ogli’s companion. The divine son of kings has lodged a formal complaint with his parents... he claims that Laksri took you with full knowing that Prince Ogli intended to do the same once he had gained your trust. He has accused your friend, Laksri, of an informal but knowing poaching of his desired friend...”

“Poaching?” Jet muttered, doing a bad job of hiding her frown.

She didn’t want the female Nirreth to stop explaining though, so she prompted her with another question, rather than reacting further.

“Is Prince Ogli likely to win this argument?” Jet said. She chose her words carefully, even though the Nirreth’s English was impeccable, or perhaps because of it.

The female Nirreth purred, her palms held up. “I do not know. Your Laksri, he claims he thought the prince too young to be harboring such wishes. He tells the Royal parents that he thinks Ogli’s affection for you is more that of a relative, or a close friend... a sister, maybe...” The female seemed to be thinking how to translate a particular word. “...perhaps a mother. Or a neighbor of some kind... ?”

Jet refrained from snorting at the ‘mother’ reference.

“So will he win?” Jet pressed. “Ogli?”

The Nirreth sighed, once more holding up her hands.

“I do not know,” she said again. “Normally, in such a case, the first contact would take precedent, unless the one chosen was forced...” The female Nirreth gave her a slightly more appraising look, nearly a question in her quirked lips. “...I am told Prince Ogli more than once tried to get you to say you were forced this morning, in front of witnesses... and that you denied such a thing... ?”

Jet nodded, feeling her cheeks flush at the female’s knowing look.

“I see,” was all the Nirreth said. “Yes, well... I would not worry, then. This law of consent and pairing is the Queen’s. She would not like to see it broken. Also...” She hesitated, then leaned closer to Jet, her face and voice close to conspiratorial. “...I think the Royal Mother is thinking that Prince Ogli is too young for this love he feels for you. She has been quite relieved when he did not ask this of his last attendants... particularly the most recent one, before you came into service. I have heard it said that she would like to see him mature a bit more before he does this binding with a mammal...” Seeming to realize what she had said suddenly, the female’s eyes widened in horror. “A thousand apologies, beloved guest of the Royals! I am meaning no offense! I merely spoke without contemplating the fullness of my words...”

Jet waved her off, more annoyed that she’d missed the last part of what the female had obviously meant to reveal than offended by the use of the word ‘mammal.’ Anyway, if the Nirreth thought calling her a ‘mammal’ was an insult, it was an accurate one, at least.

“No problem,” she said dismissively.

“Please do not share this with your blood-connection! He might take this as an insult, and it is rumored he has a short temper when it comes to––”

“Blood connection?” Jet said, baffled. “Who would that be?”

The female looked just as confused. “Your companion. The one they call Laksri... ?”

“Laksri?” Jet continued to stare. “Why would he be offended? Anyway, in case you hadn’t noticed, I am a mammal. So what?”

Jet had to reassure the Nirreth a few more times before the female calmed down.

Even when she left, she’d still seemed upset, or at the very least, nervous about what Jet might do. Obviously, Jet hadn’t done anything with it, except kick herself for ruining her chances to find out more about what was going on with Ogli and his parents.

Anyway, all of that had been almost two weeks ago, and Jet had more pressing things on her mind. She was to have her first televised match in the Rings Saturday night. She wouldn’t be fighting Tyra, or even competing against her, which was a relief as she’d already started to really like the other girl... or, woman, really, since she was at least five years older than Jet. She’d actually strongly considered trying to bring Tyra over to their side, but the one time she mentioned the possibility to Anaze, he’d looked completely and utterly horrified.

“She’s got a Nirreth mate,” he said, staring at Jet like she’d lost her mind. “He’s a Rings trainer... which means he was probably Royal Guard before, or at least in one of the branches of their military. If you tell her anything, he will know at once... the second he stings her again, which he probably does every night. You must know that, Jet... by now, anyway!”

Realizing what he was referencing and hearing the bitterness under his words, Jet frowned at him, her hands on her hips.

Then, thinking about his words, she realized something else.

“I never had any real choice, did I?” she said, staring at Anaze. “They said it could be Ogli or Laksri... but it was always going to be Laksri, wasn’t it? You just said it yourself. If it had been Ogli, he would have known everything... pretty much the moment he’d gotten enough venom in me to feel my mind...”

Anaze’s face grew unreadable once more.

“They considered Ogli,” he said finally, after a long pause. “He’s young, impressionable, and you would have been his first, most likely... or one of them, anyway. They thought maybe you could influence him. Gain his trust. Then, if we didn’t tell you too much, perhaps manipulate his feelings in various ways...”

Jet felt a little sick, but only nodded, not wanting to shut him up.

“Was it ever really up to me?” she said.

Anaze shrugged again, but that time he didn’t seem to be able to hold her gaze. Even so, his expression remained carefully noncommittal.

“I don’t know,” he said finally, and it sounded truthful. “My father says it was. He said they would have worked with your decision, either way... but he also didn’t seem to think it had been much of a choice for you, really.”

“Do you believe him?” Jet said, her voice skeptical. “You don’t, do you?” she said accusingly.

Anaze still didn’t meet her gaze, not directly anyway.

“I really don’t know, Jet,” he said, sighing. “I mean it. But he’s fighting a war. He can’t tell me everything. He can’t tell you everything, either... and I know sometimes he presents no-win choices and plans for any contingency.”

Jet remained silent, folding her arms in front of her, but Anaze’s words had infuriated her. In fact, they’d probably made her more angry than anything he’d said to her since he dragged her out of the Palace that first night to tell her he’d arranged for her to be captured by the culler ship.

“You are not concentrating again!” Alice snapped, bringing Jet’s mind back to the present. “You nervous? Is that what your problem is?”

On anyone else, the question might have sounded sympathetic, even concerned.

On Alice, it sounded closer to a full-fledged insult.

“...You be a lot more nervous once you get in front of those cameras and real, live weapons being flung at your head... ready to cut off your arms at the shoulder... !”

Once again, Jet wanted to ask Alice where she was from, but again, the woman held her hand up in the signal that they would re-start the program from the beginning.

Just then, Laksri showed up, standing against the observation wall in the gap between the small mountains of fake scenery. Jet found herself looking around at the topography, maybe to avoid catching Laksri’s gaze, and as she did, a light bulb went off in her head.

Dead in the absence of the virtual reality signal, the landscape had a near-symmetry to it, an almost inescapable logic. How had she failed to see it before?

Before Alice could finish signalling the program to begin, Jet blurted, “Wait. Is the terrain the same? In the real version... is it exactly like this? Or different?”

Alice gave her a shrewd look, her eyes shifting sideways.

“Why you ask me that?”

Jet shrugged, but her eyes continued to scan the room, memorizing its contours. “Well,” she said finally, once she was fairly sure she had the map in her head. “If I could keep my bearings, I would know the real boundaries of the arena... along with all of the obstacles, and...”

Alice chuckled, and Jet fell silent.

“Smart mammal,” Alice said. “I knew there was a brain up there somewhere,” she added, tapping Jet’s head with her knuckles. “You think you can keep all that in your head and still manage to not get yourself dead with spears and whatever else?”

“I don’t know,” Jet replied honestly. “But it can’t be much different than memorizing cave routes in the dark, right?”

Hands on her hips, Jet glanced at Laksri, almost without her willing her eyes in that direction. The Nirreth was staring at her, too, and something about the look in his dark eyes brought a faint flutter to her belly and chest. Shoving the feeling down angrily, Jet looked back at Alice, pursing her lips.

“...I could try it, right?” she said.

The woman nodded, her eyes once more shrewd.

That time, when Alice signalled the simulation to start, Jet’s mind let go of everything, and everyone. She let go of Alice herself... of Laksri... of Ogli and his temper tantrum earlier that day... of Richter and his scheming... of Anaze, who had once been her best friend, the person she’d trusted above everyone, even her own family.

Instead, she focused on the map in her mind of the arena’s terrain.

“Go!” Alice commanded.

Before the word finished echoing in the long space, the landscape burst into life around Jet’s eyes and ears and even under her feet. A high, snowy mountain appeared, stretching above the entrance to an ancient-looking temple in the shape of a human’s sandblasted, bare skull. Giant Nirreth, twice the size of those in the room she’d just left, leapt out of the opening of the skull’s mouth, the skins of prehistoric lizards hanging on their broad, muscular shoulders, their long fingers gripping clubs with sharp flint knives dug into the ends.

Jet watched warily as they came closer, but instead of trying to figure out which of these was a real Nirreth and which a virtual projection, as she normally would, her mind focused on the map of the cave’s contours beyond what she could see in the simulation itself.

That time, when she moved, she knew exactly where she leapt.

Despite Alice’s skepticism, she even managed to hold onto that awareness when the weapons started flying at her head.

“THAT WAS DIFFERENT,” Laksri said, as Jet exited from the changing rooms. He looked at her, appraisal in his flecked eyes. “It is different, yes? What you do?”

“What did I do,” Jet corrected without thinking. Still, she smiled as she said it, still glowing a bit from Alice’s praise, the first real praise she’d received since she started the training.

Anyway, those words were probably the most friendly and casual Laksri had spoken to her since their stinging night a few weeks back.

“What did you do?” Laksri said carefully.

Jet smiled in spite of herself. She could almost see him trying to memorize the words. He’d been trying harder with English lately... maybe because Jet was more likely to point things out and correct him than Richter.

No surprise there, really.

It was still strange being around the tall Nirreth. Nothing had happened between the two of them since that night, but Anaze still slept in Laksri’s quarters along with Jet, and in Laksri’s bed, along with Jet. Jet felt a little bad that Laksri had lost his bed in this whole arrangement... at least she did until she remembered that this had never been her idea in the first place.

Even so, well after the venom and lingering empathy and whatever else had worn off, it had been difficult for Jet to stay as angry at Laksri as she would have liked.

For one thing, Laksri himself had been openly apologetic from the first time they’d spoken afterwards... which happened to be pretty much the only time they’d spoken alone about anything since. They’d been in the same exact hallway as where they stood now, in fact, only Laksri pulled Jet into one of the nearby cubicles before she could speak.

Again, before she could collect her thoughts, he had launched into a formal request for her forgiveness for his, as he put it, “lack of judgment and self-control.”

Jet ended up stuttering out some kind of acceptance of his apology, and that had pretty much been the end of the conversation. Laksri opened the cubicle doors for her, bowing a little, and offered to take her to dinner. It hadn’t come up between them since. That had been a full day after she woke up in the room to find him missing, so she had to assume that he’d been with the Royals all that time, and that he’d managed to come out of it without being thrown in jail, assassinated, or being forced to hand her over to Ogli.

Even so, his manner around her continued to be courteous to the point of stand-offish.

Looking up at him now, she found herself thinking about what Tyra had said, about Laksri being ‘hot,’ and also about the fact that he might be able to help her in the Rings.

Ignoring his previous question, she said, “Did you and your pal arrange a human coach for me? To keep me from having a Nirreth one, like would normally happen?”

Laksri’s eyes registered a faint surprise.

“...Because that’s the rumor,” Jet added, her voice more accusing that time. “That you did it. That you paid off someone on the Board. Maybe offered a good rate on some long-shot bets on me... ?”

Laksri’s skin seemed to change shades slightly, growing a bit darker.

“Yes,” he said finally.

At her silence, his voice shifted to a more subdued tone.

“It is normal, for the trainers to sting,” he explained. “To take their charges as mates.”

“But wouldn’t that have given me a huge advantage?” Jet pressed. “In terms of learning the courses? Training me in how to beat the arena? Or even just nailing down the million or so rules, for that matter... ?”

Laksri’s face grew inscrutable.

“Do you know the Rings, Laksri?” Jet pressed again, harder that time. “I’ve only got a few more days, but I thought...” She trailed, but she could see from Laksri’s eyes that he knew where she was going with this. “...Well,” she said, feeling her cheeks warm slightly. “I could use the help, is all I’m saying. I heard today that more contestants get killed by the judges after the first fight than any other. I figure I need anything that might give me an edge, right? Impress them well enough that they might think I’d be good to keep around? Especially since they’re already going to be biased towards me for having a human trainer...”

Laksri continued to look at her, frowning slightly.

Jet got the feeling he was hiding a fair bit of his reaction, though, at least on his face, since his tail was flicking around behind him in slightly more predatory arcs. After another, longer pause, Laksri shrugged, his eyes fixed studiously on the door behind her, as if it were the most interesting thing he’d ever seen. He exhaled in a longish purr.

“What you say... it is true,” he admitted. “The first match, it is very significant.” He sounded out the word carefully, glancing at her. “I have been somewhat... concerned. About this. It is partly why I come here. It is partly why I am trying to assess, realistically, how you might fare in these Rings... what I might do to help.”

“So you’ll help me then?” Jet said, feeling her shoulders relax.

He gave her a sharper look. “We did not do so good with this before,” he reminded her, his voice warning. Giving one of those slightly trilling sighs, he made a gesture with his hands that Jet couldn’t easily interpret.

“...Still,” he added, his voice more business-like. “Richter has said, I have been realizing...” He paused, as if suddenly remembering where they were. “...That we should probably be seen again, since it must be clear to the Royals that you are still attached...”

Jet reddened at this, angered a little by the warmth that crept up her neck to her face. The fact that they’d discussed this without her didn’t help.

Still, she kept her voice as business-like as his had been.

“Sure,” she said. “Whatever. So maybe it can serve both purposes, you mean?”

“I am thinking that,” Laksri said slowly. “...Yes.”

Once again, Jet couldn’t help noticing that his English really was improving. At the same time, she knew she was likely distracting herself from the real issue here.

“So... do you know much about the Rings?” Jet said, her voice a bit more pointed that time.

After a faint pause, Laksri made another of those head-inclining nods.

“I do,” he conceded. Lower, he added, after glancing up and down the corridors, “...I was in the Rings, once.”

“You were?” She stared at him in surprise. “When?”

Again, his expression grew cagey. He glanced around where they stood a second time, as if already fearing he had said too much. Then he motioned politely down the hall, in the direction of the residential segments, and his room.

“Perhaps we should eat first?” he said politely. “We can come back for training later, do you not think? When the area is not occupied... it will be easier for you to concentrate.”

Hearing the warning woven into his words, Jet only nodded, once again wishing she had the faintest idea of Richter’s and Laksri’s actual game plan.

She’d promised Anaze when all of this started that she could follow orders, and even go along without knowing anything, as long as they didn’t do anything that made her question them too deeply. She wouldn’t kill anyone, for example... not without a damned good reason. She also wouldn’t do anything to betray the skag towns, much less bring harm to her own family. They’d jerked her around some, but Jet had to assume Anaze communicated her message to his father, because she definitely got the impression that he was being more open with her than was usual for him, in spite of anything.

Even so, being so far in the dark was maddening.

She understood the need for them to retain some protectiveness around the final plan, and knew she was in a potentially compromised position as a possession of the Royals themselves. Even so, she had no idea what their real endgame entailed, other than the more abstract concept of “freedom,” both for the common, non-royal Nirreth, and for humans. But for all Jet knew, freedom could mean a planet with Richter in charge (she shuddered at the thought), or one where Laksri’s people had elections instead of a king, and attempted to rule over the colonial planets more benignly... say with integrated Green Zones, or with Green Zones made especially for humans, at least until the planet was truly livable once again.

Jet found herself thinking about all of this again, all the way back to Laksri’s room, maybe at least partly to avoid thinking about the other, meaning her and Laksri’s proposed plan for the evening. In any case, they must have been talking longer than Jet realized... or else her training ran longer than usual... because when they returned to the room, she saw Anaze stare pointedly at the wall clock in the main living area, right before he motioned towards a table laden with food, most of it the human-compatible variety.

“I ordered,” he said, blunt, without getting up from his seat.

It struck Jet suddenly that Anaze had made sure that food was waiting for her every time she’d left Rings training for the past two weeks.

She found herself wondering if he’d been trying to head off another of those dinners where stung Jet was paraded around on display as Laksri’s possession, or ‘trinket’ as Richter put it. Jet honestly didn’t know if the feeling that possibility evoked in her was closer to appreciation or irritation... maybe because she couldn’t fully make out Anaze’s true motives in this whole mess either. Anaze and Laksri already circled one another like the mangy, stray dogs that fought over territory around skag town in Vancouver. Only the dogs had to fight for every scrap to eat and every piece of dirt to sleep on... so those fights, Jet actually understood.

With Anaze and Laksri, she had less sympathy.

Laksri was slightly more subtle than Anaze, in terms of his hostility... but only slightly. He had a tendency to bare his teeth perceptibly at Anaze when the human tried to insert himself between Laksri and Jet, and also whenever Anaze made a point of announcing when he was off to bed, usually with a somewhat proprietary nudge for Jet to do the same.

So far, Jet had managed not to blow up at either of them, but only by a small margin.

This time, when Anaze gave her a hard look, the faintest hint of accusation in his eyes at their lateness, Jet only rolled her eyes. She found herself tempted to grab Laksri’s tail though, or put her arm around him, just to get Anaze to back off... or maybe to get him to yell at her openly at least, and stop being so passive aggressive. She’d already had to elbow him off her a few times when she woke up in the middle of the night, although he claimed he’d put his arms around her in sleep, not on purpose.

She’d also said snide things to him a few times, mostly while they were getting ready for sleep, but her words seemed to go through Anaze as though she hadn’t spoken.

She supposed he thought he was protecting her... or told himself he was, anyway... but it still irritated her. It irritated her more, of course, because she’d far rather that someone told what was really going on than have any one of them ‘protecting’ her––especially since every one of them seemed more than willing to throw her under the bus when push came to shove.

After all, it would be her risking her butt in the Rings in four days.

Not Anaze, and not Laksri. Certainly not Richter himself.

Sitting on one of the standalone chairs, mainly so she wouldn’t be directly next to either Laksri or Anaze, Jet glanced at both of them before picking up a glass of cold apple juice from the greenhouse and chugging it down.

The apple juice at the Palace tasted like pure nectar; they chilled the amber-colored, sweet-smelling liquid to the perfect temperature, and seemed to use only the finest of apples for its creation. She’d grown almost addicted to the stuff, especially right after training, and would give just about anything to be able to share it with her mother and her brother, and some of her other friends back at the skag pit. It was better than anything she’d ever eaten or drank growing up, for as far back as she could remember.

Grabbing what looked like a chicken sandwich off the middle tray, she placed it on her plate and began loading up her dish with steamed vegetables spiced lightly and glazed with some kind of lemon-wine butter.

By the time Jet got her plate full, the other two had sat down as well.

Jet knew from Anaze that each of their basic dietary habits and preferences had already been documented somehow by the kitchen, and that they continually updated that information following every meal, based on how each item performed in their system.

Therefore, she knew that the long, dark-red slab of meat with the charred edges and the strange-looking flower plant with the purple bulbs and green, noodle-like things all belonged to Laksri... .just like she knew that the second chicken sandwich, the one that had cheese in it and red peppers, as well as the other half of the vegetable dish, belonged to Anaze.

Anaze got some kind of blood-red juice instead of apple, and Laksri had his usual Nirreth drink, what he jokingly referred to as ‘lizard beer.’ Jet had noticed he had a tendency to leave out the ‘skin’ part when using the derogatory name for Nirreth; it might have been even funnier if Anaze hadn’t been such a killjoy whenever Jet laughed at one of Laksri’s jokes.

Even so, she glanced at Laksri’s meal and gave him a small smile. Holding up her hands in the shape of rough claws, she growled at him, pawing the air.

Laksri looked at her, his eyes and face completely blank...

Then he burst out in the most real-sounding laugh she’d heard from him since that night a few weeks earlier. It came out as a low rumble, down in his chest, ending in a loud snort and more of those rumbles. Jet found herself laughing as well, almost without meaning to, but when she glanced at Anaze, his face was stony as he looked between them.

“What?” he said finally.

Jet pointed at Laksri’s plate, still smiling. “He’s eating dinosaur.”

“Lots of Nirreth do that,” Anaze said coldly, still looking between them almost angrily. “So what? Do you have to act like a kid about everything, Jet?”

She gave him a irritated look. “Never mind. Clearly your sense of humor was part of your ruse with me before, too... right?”

At the angry expression that rose to his face, she only shrugged.

Even so, his comments managed to sour her mood.

“Are you going to eat?” she asked him a second later. “Or are you too busy being pissed off at me for laughing?”

Anaze gave her a startled look at that, one followed by what might have been regret, a look that briefly overshadowed the anger. She was still trying to figure out what the regret might be from exactly, when Laksri turned to her, his dark eyes serious.

“You should tell him,” he said, motioning at Anaze without looking at him. “What you did today... at the course. What we will do tonight.”

Again, Anaze stiffened. That time, he seemed to make an effort to keep his voice and his expression polite, however.

“What did you do?” he asked her.

Jet finished chewing the bite of sandwich in her mouth before she answered. “Nothing, really. It just occurred to me to try and memorize the arena’s topography... you know, like what we do in the caves. Where everything is... distances. That kind of thing...”

She waved her hand vaguely, taking another bite.

Laksri made a low humming noise in his chest, nodding in sudden understanding.

“Of course,” he said. “The caves. You are some kind of builder? That is how you could memorize this so easily?”

Jet looked at him in surprise. “What do you mean?” she said.

Anaze sighed a little, explaining, “He means, not everyone has your freaky spatial thing, Jet. Most humans wouldn’t be able to keep their bearing in VR even with a square room with nothing other than the four walls. Even if they had a map of the room’s layout printed on the back of their eyelids, they still couldn’t do it...”

Jet thought about this, a little stumped. Then she looked at Laksri again.

“But it worked pretty good, didn’t it?” she said.

Anaze looked at Laksri, too, waiting for his answer.

“Better than ‘pretty’ good,” Laksri said seriously, glancing for the first time directly at Anaze. “Every point in first fifteen seconds... more than half in next thirty. And not getting hit once on her own body...”

“Still not good enough for the first five rounds,” Anaze observed.

Laksri nodded, conceding his point with a wave. “Still. Better than any other new humans. Better than the men, and they will be expecting worse. Much worse, since she has only human trainer...”

“Will it be enough to keep her alive, though?” Anaze said.

Laksri gave that head-inclining nod. “Should do. Yes. Unless judges think she cheating... or they do not like her. This is harder to control...” he added, glancing at Jet with slightly worried eyes.

Anaze glanced at Jet too, frowning.

It struck Jet that it might have just occurred to the two of them that she could really be dead as of Saturday night. How was it she was the only one who’d remembered that? It might have been funny under different circumstances.

Might.

“They’ll think you helped her,” Anaze said, aiming his words at Laksri. “Will that be a problem? For her, I mean?”

The Nirreth shook his head, tearing off a piece of the T-Rex meat and chewing.

“No,” he said, swallowing a few moments later. “It is not against the rules. In fact...” he added, glancing at Jet, cautiously that time. “She asked that I help. It think it is good idea. They should not know she has this ability... or those Royals who do not like her or me or Prince Ogli or Richter will find a way around this thing. It will also change odds on her too much... maybe make it harder for her to impress with first match. It is much better they expect nothing, than they expect something and it does not work...”

Hesitating at the hard look on Anaze’s face, Laksri picked up another spear of meat and added, “It will also help with cover. I have been questioned... more this week. Not only by Prince Ogli’s spies, but by other Nirreth, why I have not brought Jet with me to more. It is expected that there are more of such things, until all have accepted it... especially when there is some dispute. It is expected. It is custom...”

“How is taking Jet to the Rings to practice going to help with that?” Anaze said.

That time, Jet could practically feel the effort Anaze was making to keep his voice level.

“...Do you plan to invite others to watch you sting her?” he said, a little more bitingly. “Is that custom too? Or do you think they have cameras on the course, and that the camera operators work for Prince Ogli, too?”

“The Royals will see the films,” Laksri said, without missing a beat. “They are keeping eyes on their player... they will approve of after-hours training. They already worried, as their own betting on Saturday night match is showing. She must do well. If Prince Ogli is displeased with her for taking a different Nirreth as mate and if she is no good in the Rings, they will sell her... or give her to their son.”

Hesitating, Laksri glanced at Jet, then shrugged.

“Also,” he added, his voice more cautious. “I could take her out after. To more public places. Use sting for more than one purpose...” He glanced up from his food, looking at Jet a second time. “...You could come, perhaps, Anaze?”

But Jet found herself shaking her head.

“Bad idea,” she said.

“Why?” Anaze demanded, that edge back in his voice. He still looked surprised that Laksri had offered, but even moreso at Jet’s refusal.

“Because I don’t want the two of you fighting,” Jet said, giving him a hard look. “What? Are you going to hit him with a stunner if one of us does something you don’t like? How will we explain that to the Royals, if they happen to get something like that on camera?”

Anaze didn’t answer, but Jet saw the harder look back in his eyes.

Biting her lip, she looked away, taking another long drink of apple juice.

“How are things going with the prince, Jet?” Anaze said after another pause, his voice neutral once more. “...Is he still angry at you for the Laksri thing?”

Forcing her own anger back, Jet sighed a little, thinking about the question.

Ogli still grilled her pretty much every day about Laksri, and refused to allow him to be present as a bodyguard over ‘his’ human, as Ogli still insisted on referring to Jet. Since that had pretty much been Laksri’s role prior to all of this, he no longer had any valid reason for being present when Jet hung out with the young prince.

As a result, Jet had been forced to put up with a number of different indignities as the prince tried to take advantage of the situation while Laksri wasn’t around.

On the worst of those days, Ogli had demanded that Jet undress for him, presumably under the logic that he couldn’t force her to accept him as a lover, but still had the right, as prince, to order her around otherwise. His excuse had been so that he could ‘check her for signs of coercion and/or abuse.’ He’d meant by Laksri, of course, although the prince refused to say his name. In fact, when forced to refer to him directly, Prince Ogli had a tendency to call Laksri ‘rek-pet,’ which made Laksri laugh aloud when Jet told him.

Between him and Anaze, Jet worked out that the insult meant something along the lines of ‘commoner who is muscular but also stupid,’ like calling someone a boor or a neanderthal.

Needless to say, Jet refused to undress for Ogli.

Prince Ogli threw such a fuss, however, that she eventually had to fend him off as he attempted to sting her. Finally, one of the guards heard her shouting and intervened on her behalf, which was lucky, really, as from what Anaze told her, not all of them would have.

The guard scolded the prince and threatened to tell his parents... he also released Jet from duty for the remainder of the day, which had been a huge relief.

The next day, an obviously chastened and unhappy Prince Ogli offered Jet her own pet otter to make up for what he had done. Jet accepted, mostly because it seemed like the diplomatic thing to do, but she still kept a good distance away from the prince’s tail.

So now her own otter, which she named ‘Ricochet,’ played happily alongside Scampers in the canals. Ogli was even teaching her how to train Ricochet to come when Jet called.

Jet had to admit, it was rather nice having a tamed animal that followed her around and liked to be snuggled in her arms. She knew, of course, that past humans had a lot of domestic animals purely as pets, but that hadn’t been much of a luxury in the skag pits. They kept a few cats around for the mice, and dogs for hunting and to guard livestock, but most of those were pretty feral and only a few would even let you pet them without risking a bite or a scratch.

Anyway, rabies and worse swept the compounds periodically, so everyone was a little wary of animals, especially around kids or old people. Medicine was rare... sporadic at best... so no one wanted to risk getting bit on a bad day, or having anyone in their family bit, either. Generally, animals were seen as food, or potential predators, or carriers of fleas, lice or disease.

But the animals owned by the Royals were cleaner than any of the humans in the skag pits had been, much less the animals. None ate garbage or diseased rodents. None got radioactive bugs in their hair or intestines, and none of them shot bright yellow diarrhea all over Jet’s bed, the way the last cat she’d tried to befriend in the skag pits had.

Anyway, Ricochet was cute, playful, and incredibly affectionate. She also gave Jet and Ogli something to re-bond over... something that wasn’t anywhere near as unnerving as the prince’s crush on her had been.

“He’s fine,” Jet said with a shrug. “I’ve arranged to get him riding lessons...” Seeing Laksri’s lifted eyebrow, she added, “...Virtual, of course, at least to start. I told him we could try on real horses after a few of his guards got them used to being ridden... and after he got the hang of the virtual ones.”

Laksri nodded, his expression calm. “So it is better, then?”

Jet nodded. “Definitely.”

Laksri continued to look at her, as if thinking, or maybe trying to decide how to say or how to ask something. She gave him a questioning look, but he only averted his eyes, looking down at his plate and sawing off another piece of meat with his knife, holding the steak steady with the pronged, spear-like fork.

“So you’re going to the training room tonight?” Anaze said, still obviously doing what he could to make his tone sound natural. “And you don’t want me to come along... ?”

Jet nodded, giving Laksri a somewhat nervous look, in spite of herself.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess so.”

JET HAD NEVER been in the arena at night before.

She looked around at the empty space, seeing it with new eyes.

Pieces of terrain stretched all around her, their placement looking more random to Jet again, despite the logic she’d found in the layout earlier that day. Ceilings stretched up to what must have been close to eighty feet, and at least one of the artificial cliff walls went all the way to the ceiling before it shifted direction and ran completely horizontal along the ceiling itself, before climbing back down the opposite wall. The wall had been constructed differently on the one side than the other, though, and ended a good fifteen feet above the main floor on the opposite end.

Jet knew from experience that the same fifteen feet could stretch into one hundred or even a thousand feet in VR... or worse, it could look like a short drop into a pristine lake or fast-moving river that might be tempting to risk if surrounded on all sides by opponents wielding weapons. Jet had risked a similar jump herself once, with a Nirreth and four other opponents hot on her tail... well, figuratively speaking.

The results had been pretty painful, but Alice arranged for her drop to be padded by the emergency controls, so she didn’t end up breaking her leg.

There was an actual pool of water in the arena, too.

The size of a small pond, it sat in a different part of the arena altogether, right near the center of the terrain and beside another section of the moveable floor. Jet had a pretty good idea of the rate at which that floor moved, but it would still be difficult to estimate locations of the various obstacles and escape routes on any of those tracks, at least without knowing their original locations at the start of any particular program, as well as the precise instant they turned on the motorized tracks.

Maybe that was one of the things Laksri could help her with.

Glancing at him, she saw him looking at the multi-tiered structures with ladders by the nearest wall. He almost looked to be memorizing the layout with his eyes, too, just by the amount of staring he did at each object before turning to look at the next.

After a few minutes, he seemed to be satisfied, either by his own understanding of the layout, or with the architecture of the room itself... or by some other criteria Jet couldn’t fathom.

He walked up to her, pulling a small cylinder out of his pocket.

He motioned towards her arm with the same hand, grunting a little.

“You will take this,” he said.

“What?” Jet said, pulling her arms back in reflex. “Take what? What is that?”

Laksri’s jaw hardened slightly, but he only shrugged. “It is for when I sting you. It should... negate...” He struggled slightly with the word. “...Previous problems. What happened before. It is safer. For both of us.”

The odd pauses made Jet look at him more closely.

“Safer?” she said. “What problems do you mean exactly?”

Laksri exhaled in a kind of impatient sigh.

“You know,” he said, flicking his tail sideways.

“Let’s pretend I don’t,” Jet said, her voice still wary.

“We will be less likely to have sex,” he said, blunt. “More clear... clarity. Self-control.” Holding up his hand, he showed her the other cylinder he held. “I will take this, too,” he added. “I can do it first, if you like.” Pausing, he looked at Jet more intently. “I thought you would want this. After last time. It was not easy to get it... safely, I mean. Where no one would know I bought it. Where no one might guess why.”

Jet nodded, thinking. “Okay,” she said. She motioned towards him. “You first.”

Shaking his head a little and blinking at her for a long beat, which she was learning was close to a Nirreth eye-roll, he pocketed the cylinder he’d pulled out for her and took the longer one, the one with more of the pale, green liquid inside and pressed the sharper end to the inside of his bare arm. Jet found herself noticing that the inside of his arm was slightly more purple compared to the darker, nearly black-blue of his outer arm and most of the rest of his skin. He held the cylinder to the side of his elbow, slightly off-center to where the vein would be on a human, until the green liquid had all been emptied. Jet saw his face tighten slightly as he gave himself the injection, then smooth once the liquid must have hit his bloodstream.

He checked the cylinder to make sure it was empty, blinked a bit to clear his vision, then motioned her over to him.

“You now,” he said, his voice more calm that time.

Jet walked up to him, still a little reluctant for some reason.

She didn’t think he was poisoning her or anything... in fact, it didn’t really cross her mind to doubt that the drug would do anything other than what he claimed it would do. She’d even found it a bit touching that Laksri had thought to obtain the drug in the first place, presumably to ease her mind that something might happen if they were left alone like before.

Mixed with all of that, of course, was the part of her that wondered if he’d been planning on stinging her again soon, if he had the drug on him already. In that same breath, it occurred to her that he easily could have avoided telling her about the drug altogether, and she wouldn’t have known the difference.

It also occurred to her that he’d likely known about the drug before, yet had chosen not to suggest it that first time.

For reasons Jet couldn’t even begin to explain to herself, she wasn’t sure how she felt about any one of those things exactly. Strangely, the existence of the drug wasn’t as much of a relief as it should have been. She closed the distance between her and Laksri without protest, however, and held out her arm, unable to argue with the logic, either.

After all, they were here to work. And he wasn’t exactly her boyfriend... Tyra’s cracks notwithstanding.

Laksri pressed the pointed end of the smaller cylinder on the inside of Jet’s elbow and hit a button on the flat end. Jet watched the liquid disappear, not even feeling a pinprick, but only a slight pressure as the liquid was forced into her veins.

Once the cylinder was empty, Jet glanced up with a shrug.

“Should I be feeling something?” she said. “Because I don’t.”

He frowned a little. “Maybe it is taking longer on humans... ?” he suggested.

“Haven’t you used this before?” she said. “And it’s takes. Maybe it takes longer to work on humans...”

He inclined his head to the left, even as he blinked to acknowledge her correction of his English. “No,” he added, unnecessarily. “I have not tried it.”

“So maybe it won’t work on me at all,” she said. “You feel something? Already, I mean?”

He nodded. “Flatter, yes. More..indif... what is the word? Not feeling pain... ?”

“Indifferent?” Jet said. “Like you don’t care about anything?”

His brow cleared. “Yes,” he said. “That is it. Exactly. I feel... indifferent.”

Jet laughed at this, in spite of herself. Then she realized she felt a little light-headed. “I think I’m a little spacey, actually,” she told him in the same set of seconds.

“Is this like... indifferent?” Laksri asked.

She shook her head. “No. More like I felt when I had a few big swallows of that Nirreth beer on an empty stomach.”

Laksri frowned. “This is maybe not so good.”

Jet waved his concern away, smiling at his serious expression. “It’s fine,” she said. “You’re all indifferent, and I’m not all touchy-feelie, so I think we’re still good...”

Watching her face a bit warily for a moment, Laksri finally nodded, his own expression unreadable.

“Are you ready then?” he said after another minute.

Feeling her arms tense as she remembered the drug was only the prelude to the main course, not the main course itself, Jet forced herself to nod. “Yeah. Sure... as much as I ever will be, I mean.”

Laksri seemed to need to think about her response for a few more beats.

Then he walked up to her, his movements more business-like than they had been that first time, a few weeks back. Pushing up her shirt on one side, the opposite side as last time, he didn’t wait but abruptly stung her right below her ribs. Jet let out a short gasp as he pushed the venom into her, and looked up at his face. She saw something in his eyes flicker briefly, then he looked away, retracting his tail, angling it expertly to get the barb out without tearing more of her skin. Jet grabbed hold of his arms when the venom hit her system, but he took a step away from her, disentangling her fingers, but again, more business-like than rough.

Jet found herself clinging a bit to him, but released him once he was out of easy reach.

Stepping a few feet away from her, he said, this time without looking at her, “Are you ready? Should I turn on the machine?”

Jet wrapped her arms around herself, looking around the hollow-seeming room. She found she was having difficulty focusing, but her body felt okay. Despite the added distraction of the drug, she also felt oddly clear, like she had the first time. So after thinking for a bit, maybe longer than she should have under normal conditions, weighing her distraction around Laksri and the drug against her body’s relatively intact and healthy feeling, she nodded.

“Yeah. I’m good,” she said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

He gave her one last look, as if doubting her words. Then, nodding, he motioned for her to get in the starting position.

“Wait!” she said abruptly. “We’re just going to start? Aren’t you going to tell me anything about what I should be doing differently? You said you were in the Rings yourself once, right?”

He nodded, still watching her warily. “Yes.”

“When? Was it here? At this Green Zone, on Earth?”

He shook his head. After a pause, he walked over to her, laying a hand on her arm. The contact made her shiver a little, but when he began thinking at her through the connection, she found she understood why he’d done it.

That time, when he answered her, he didn’t move his lips.

No. Back at Astet, he thought at her.

Your home world? she thought back at him. They had the Rings there?

Yes.

Jet didn’t answer, but she found herself remembering what Anaze had told her, weeks ago, under that tree in the dark. That Laksri had gotten in trouble on his home world once, badly enough that he’d been in prison. He’d been some kind of revolutionary back there, too.

It is true, Laksri confirmed, again speaking through her somehow. His fingers tightened on her arm. I was a political prisoner. You must have seen, in the skag pits, that those games are shown only from the home world... ? My home world, he amended, quieter.

So those Rings are different, Jet said, a little disappointed. You won’t be able to help me out much with the course here, will you?

“I don’t know,” he said aloud, releasing her arm.

Jet found herself reacting more to the lack of the contact than she had to the news that he wouldn’t be able to help her, and again she wondered why. She had so many more questions for him, in any case. Like how no one recognized him, if he’d been a terrorist, and one with enough notoriety that they’d made televised sport of his torture.

Jet found herself remembering suddenly what Alice and Tyra told her about the Rings on Astet. How they only had Nirreth criminals in that version, because everything in it could actually maim or kill you.

The human version was more like a televised sport with players and points and wagers back and forth on the so-called ‘stars’ at any given time. Everyone knew the big players in the Rings televised from Earth, mainly because a lot of them came back to fight, again and again. Jet hadn’t known this in the skag pit, of course, where they only got the random broadcast during those periods when they managed to decrypt the signal before it changed. They also hadn’t gotten the secondary feeds with all of the ‘style points’ and ‘Board likes’ for each of the players, which would have made it clearer that it was more like a sport.

Still, sport or no, this first match was critical for an unknown fighter like Jet.

The judges might decide she was ‘boring’ and have her ‘killed,’ which would likely mean just booting her off the Rings, since she still had value as a human slave. From what Anaze told her, that shame would probably be too much for the Royals to keep her as a servant to their son, however. They would likely sell her off and then not only would she be useless in whatever plans Richter had regarding the Royals, but they would no longer be able to protect her in any real way, either. The exception would be if the Royals agreed to sell her to Richter or Laksri themselves.

Otherwise, she’d be taken to some random home by some random Nirreth, probably to clean the house during the day and take turns sleeping with different members of the household at night. From what Anaze told her, the whole family would feel free to sting her whenever they felt like it, and she would be akin to the family dog... if humans had the tendency to occassionally have sex with the family dog when they were bored.

Given that she was young and female, it was unlikely she’d be bought by anyone who didn’t have that purpose in mind... at least in part.

“Are you ready?” Laksri asked again.

Looking at the Nirreth, it hit Jet that she would bond with any Nirreth they sold her to, whether she liked them or not. The idea terrified her, for the first time maybe as it sank in... enough to clear her mind, and lift some of the effects of the venom.

“Yes,” she nodded, feeling her hands clench. “Yes, I’m ready.”

Surprise flickered across Laksri’s face, along with a slow smile, then a more approving nod.

“Good,” he said, nodding again.

WORKING THROUGH LAKSRI wasn’t exactly a direct line, but Jet did get a better idea of the differences between the various forms of the Rings over the years, as well as the main similarities. The Rings on Astet, as far as she could tell, had a lot of the same structures and even the same layout as the practice arena where she and Laksri now worked... but everything on Astet was larger, more spread out, so she had to calculate distances accordingly.

The other thing she discovered was that the Rings did scans of Laksri’s brain while he fought. As a part of that, the Rings controllers had a direct line into what frightened him the most, his reflexes and fighting strengths, etc.

In Laksri’s case, it had been seeing his little brother get eaten by some kind of large lizard creature with spine-like teeth, each about a foot long, He’d also seen a childhood friend, a female he’d grown up with, get raped and stung repeatedly by other Nirreth while he couldn’t get to her.

In his case, since he’d been a prisoner, they’d actually done those things to him and to his family and friends. Apparently, in Nirreth society, if you were a criminal and a traitor, the whole family was implicated... as well as close friends and anyone else who ‘should have known’ and ‘should have put a stop to it,’ or at the very least, turned him in to the authorities. Parents were the worst offenders, according to the state, since they’d raised the child into a citizen who could turn on the Royals or anyone else in authority.

The whole thing made Jet sick... like actually, physically ill. Especially images of the thing with Laksri’s little brother, which she’d turned away from by refusing to let Laksri touch her until he’d agreed to stop thinking about it.

Laksri showed Jet all of this with the same indifference of emotion, however, which made it hard for her to know how to feel... much less whether or how to comfort him in any way. She felt currents under that indifference, of course, but she didn’t know what to do with those glimpses, either. When she gripped his arm during one of those breaks, while he was giving her more information, he carefully extricated her fingers a second time, keeping his firmer grip on her upper arm instead, so that he could continue to relay information. By the end of him sharing his experiences in the Rings, Jet found it almost unbearable, and told him so.

When he didn’t say anything in reply, she fought once more to clear her mind, to view this as objectively as he seemed to. Once she had, other questions came pouring through the cracks in the venom.

How did you survive?

Others in the Rebellion got me out.

How? she pressed.

He gestured vaguely. It would be difficult to go into specifics, he thought back.

Feeling his avoidance, she tried to feel more off him, but again, he pushed her away, using his tail to break her concentration as if nudging her with a hand.

How is it that no one recognizes you now? she said.

Again, Laksri seemed to hesitate. After another pause, she felt him give a mental shrug, even though his body didn’t move.

They do not show our real faces in the Rings. It causes less distress to the population if we are anonymous, or portrayed as deformed or ugly or sick... especially when they harm family and friends. In my case, my family had ties to the Royals, so it was especially important that my true identity not be known...

What about those who did know? Jet thought at him.

They think I am dead, he thought back simply.

But aren’t you afraid someone would recognize you?

Who? Laksri thought back. For the first time, his thoughts held more of a bite. They killed everyone who knew... all they could reach, anyway. They killed my family, my friends...  His dark eyes met hers. All but those who were actually rebels, of course. And one of my sisters, who we managed to get out in time, since she was away at school. They would be looking for her, but we supplied another body in her place, as well...

But who did the killing? Jet pressed. Someone must know who you are!

Rebels attacked the Royal Fortress on Astet, Laksri thought back, his mental voice holding almost no emotion again. They killed all who could identify me. They even kept my true identity from most branches in the Royal bloodline. Unlike humans, our faces are not widely known to one another in the Royal court. I was from the first family, the oldest son, so they said I was killed in a rebel attack. It is about saving face for them... that is all...

What about those who ran the Rings? Jet persisted.

Dead, Laksri shrugged. Or in prison on Astet. Everyone was under suspicion when I was caught. It was not difficult to make some of those in high up positions, including in the Rings, appear to be complicit in the conspiracy...

“Oldest son,” Jet muttered under her breath. At Laksri’s sharp look, she switched back to her mind. So you should have been the next king?

Laksri gave an indifferent shrug. “Yes,” he said aloud. Frowning, he thought at her a little more bitterly, I, too, could be playing with otters and demanding female mammals take their clothes off for me...

Jet sighed, speaking aloud without thinking. “You heard about that?”

“I did.” He looked at her, his eyes sharper once more. “Did he force you to do it?”

She shook her head. “The guard was Parente. He told the Prince that his request was ‘inappropriate’... and also an illegal infringement of a formal coupling. He also threatened to tell his father...”

Laksri snorted a little. Jet realized suddenly that he’d wrapped his tail around her waist. Lightly, but clearly not accidentally.

“I don’t like you sleeping with Anaze,” Laksri said after another moment.

Jet looked up, startled. “Anaze? Why?”

Laksri didn’t look over, or shrug. “I don’t like it.”

“We’re not doing anything.”

“He wants to,” Laksri said.

Jet just stared at him for a moment. Then she shook her head, snorting a laugh. “I really, really doubt that,” she said. “If you want your bed back, you should just say so––”

“I don’t,” he cut in. “...Doubt it. I know.” He looked at her directly then, his black eyes holding a faint glimmer of anger. “We see heat, you know. Nirreth. Not only color. We see other lights... other kinds...”

“You mean infrared?” Jet said, a touch of wonder in her voice. She thought about his words in relation to their conversation then and laughed. “So you think there’s ‘heat’ between me and Anaze? Is that it?”

“I did not say you,” he said. His face tightened a little as he clearly frowned. “I said he wants you... that much is clear.”

“And it’s less clear with me?” she said, still laughing a little in spite of herself, but more incredulous than anything. “Are you really jealous, Laksri?”

“Yes,” he said. He looked straight at her, as if daring her to laugh again. “Would you want me sleeping with another Nirreth? A female?”

Jet looked at him blankly.

The thought had never occurred to her really... that he might do it, or that she might mind if he did. Through the far greater clarity of a single sting, as opposed to multiple ones, one after the other, she tried to view this idea objectively, too, based on what she could remember feeling about Laksri when she hadn’t been stung. It was difficult to sort it all out, but she could remember thinking a few times that she viewed him strangely... not completely like a stranger, or even a friend, much less an alien entirely.

She couldn’t really get it all straight in her head though, not now at least.

Laksri waited for her to answer, then he refolded his arms, tighter.

“You get warm around me,” he said, looking down at her with those dark eyes. The ridged knot of bone on the back of his head was visible, she found herself noticing, since he wasn’t wearing the cloth covering that most male Nirreth wore. Even as her mind wandered around this, she found herself puzzling over his actual words, then finally understanding them, and what he meant by them.

“More than I do around Anaze?” she said.

He made a vague gesture, then exhaled sharply. “Yes. You do not know this?”

Turning his words over again in her mind, Jet nodded. “I guess I did.” Pausing, she gave him a curious look. “So why do you get jealous?”

Because I think you stay away from me because of my race, he thought at her at once, using his mind that time. Also, you don’t trust your reactions. Because of the sting...

Pausing again, he added aloud, “...Neither do I.”

Jet thought about this, too. “So you think I’d be more likely to act on something with Anaze... because he’s human.”

“Yes,” Laksri said at once. Switching to his mind, he added, touching her arm, Moreso, if he hadn’t brought you here. Taking his tail off her long enough to flick it sideways in some annoyance, he added, You don’t trust him. It blocks any heat you might have for him. I can feel it, this lack of trust... you see him as Richter’s statue... or...  He fumbled for the word. ... Game piece. You think he only does as Richter says. When it comes to whether he tells you lies or not, or puts you in danger or not...

Jet frowned, feeling a denser flush of anger. “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” she said. “I can’t trust him... and he’s not honest with me.”

Laksri shrugged, still holding her arm in one hand. Maybe you can. I don’t know. But I don’t understand why you trust me more.

Jet thought about this too, feeling some of her anger evaporate.

I don’t know, she admitted. But I know it’s different, Laksri. Anaze and I were friends for years, and he lied to me pretty much every day, that whole time. He got me caught by that culler ship, and you and Richter... after only befriending me in the first place so that he could maybe use me in some plan to bring down the Royals that I still know nothing about...  Jet shrugged. So far, anyway, I don’t have as many reasons to not trust you. Mostly because I’ve never fully trusted you, either...

Laksri nodded, still holding Jet’s arm. So I’ve neither gained nor broken your trust... ?

“Exactly,” Jet said aloud.

And if Anaze won your trust back? the Nirreth thought at her warily. Would you have warm feelings for him then?

Jet signed a little, leaning on his side. That time, Laksri didn’t push her away, but curled his tail tighter around her.

“I honestly don’t know,” she told him, then added in her mind, How can I trust what I feel about anyone here? After all, without the stinging, who knows if I would ever have been warm to you? I’m a prisoner. Tell me, if you were me, would you trust anyone?

“No,” Laksri admitted. His tail coiled around her a little tighter. ... But you did get warm around me, before I stung you. The second time, at least...  he added mentally, as if suddenly remembering their fight on the culler ship.

At Jet’s puzzled look, Laksri shrugged.

That time, she felt embarrassment on him.

... It is why I got carried away. Last time. Not entirely...  he added. ... Only partly. It was easier to convince myself you were okay with it... with me doing those things...

He looked at her, as if waiting for her response.

That time, though, he didn’t let it drop. When she didn’t speak, he prompted her again.

“Were you?” he said aloud. “Okay with it?” Again, he tightened his hold on her, speaking to her mind. ... I expected you to be much more angry with me. Once the empathy wore off, I mean... the residuals from the sting...

Jet shrugged. “I seem to remember us both being pretty high on life when that whole thing went down...”

“But I could have taken the drug then, too,” he reminded her. I didn’t. Some part of me wanted to see what might happen between us...

Jet laughed aloud. “Which part was that?”

Laksri shrugged, his lip curling in that slight smile.

That time, Jet saw the faint mischievousness behind it. He didn’t answer her question though, at least not in actual words.

“I don’t want you sleeping with the boy anymore,” he said instead, his voice holding that harder edge. “I want my bed back,” he added.

“Do you want me to move back to the other apartment?” Jet said, trying to wade through his words. “With Anaze?” When he made that rumbling sound in his chest, she glanced up.

“What?”

“I want you to sleep with me,” he said, speaking seemingly with an effort. “It doesn’t have to be sex... I am not asking for that. But I wonder if you would sleep next to me, instead of the boy? If you would let me do what you let him do?”

“We don’t do anything,” Jet said, exasperated.

“You understand,” he growled quietly. “I know you do.”

Jet stared at him, wordless for what felt like a long beat of time. Finally, she sighed, still studying his deep black eyes.

“Why do you even like me, Laksri?”

He shrugged, averting his eyes. “You know one reason.”

“Is that the only reason?” she said, feeling her jaw harden slightly. “You like to have sex with mammals with long hair?”

“...Only if they cut me with swords,” he smiled.

“Funny,” Jet said. “Really. Are you going to tell me why?”

“Answer my question first,” Laksri said, insistent. When she bit her lip again, he stroked her arm, loosening his tail around her waist. “Please answer. Please.”

“No,” she said, giving a short laugh as she looked up.

“No is your answer?”

“No, I won’t answer before you!” she said, exasperated. “My answer depends partly on yours...”

Exhaling, as if half in exasperation himself, he seemed to think about her words before he shrugged again. “You are like me,” he said after a pause. His voice held a note of surprise in it, especially when he repeated his words. “You are. You are like me...”

“I am?” Jet laughed again. “How do you figure?”

“You don’t like being ordered... made to do things,” he said. Switching to his mind, he added, You don’t like injustice... and you fight. I like this. Too many of my people just do whatever they are told to do. Even among the rebels...  he added, seemingly as an afterthought. Many of those follow me only because I am the son of a king... .not because they think I am right, or because they want what I want. They expect me to take the prince’s place, simply because of the blood of my birth...

Jet thought about his words.

“So why do you do it, then?” she said aloud.

He shrugged again, smiling at her wanly.

For the same reason you do, he thought at her softly. ... I have hope.

THEY RAN THE course at least five times before Jet could feel her muscles starting to shake from tiredness, and the stronger effects of the venom leaving her system. By then, it had to be close to two in the morning, Earth time, so when Laksri looked her over critically and pronounced that she’d had enough, Jet didn’t argue.

She decided to wait and shower when she got back to the room so she could put on clean clothes... and tried to ignore Laksri’s wrinkled nose and occasional snort as they walked back through the narrow corridors to his apartment.

Still, she found herself glad at that point that she could no longer hear his thoughts.

When they got back to the room, Anaze was still up, and clearly waiting for them where he sprawled on the couch. He looked wary, though more cautious than angry.

Jet knew that would change, though... as soon as Laksri had his say about the new sleeping arrangements.

Not wanting to hear the ensuing conversation, Jet announced she was taking a shower, grabbed some of the clothes from the left side of her wardrobe and disappeared into the bedroom to find the low entrance to the shower cubicle. She closed both doors behind her––the one to the bedroom and the one to the washroom itself––and turned the water on full, so that it echoed in the small, tiled space.

Even so, she still managed to hear the yelling on the other side of the walls.

Taking her time in the shower in the hopes that the worst of it would be over by the time she got out, Jet dressed slowly, too, despite the silence that now emanated from the other side of the walls. The venom had pretty much worn off by then, but she still got the feeling somehow, that the argument wasn’t completely over.

Venturing out of the washroom with her hair combed straight down her back and wearing loose clothes after putting on a kind of Nirreth skin cream and brushing her teeth, Jet walked cautiously into the bedroom. When she didn’t see either of them... she poked her head into the common room on the other side of the taller door.

There she found the two of them waiting for her, in almost the identical positions she’d left them in, twenty minutes earlier.

Looking between the two of them, Jet mostly just felt tired.

Anaze sat, arms crossed, on the green-cushioned couch. Laksri stood over him, but a little distance away, his own arms folded over his shirt and his tail flicking in annoyance behind him. In fact, that was the only real difference Jet noted between them, those muscular waves of Laksri’s tail as it rippled back and forth in an almost tangible emotion.

Both of them looked tired, too, Jet thought.

Despite all of this, Laksri’s expression remained immovable when he said,

“He thinks you would not agree to this. That I must have stung you several times, to get you to agree...”

Not surprised by this even a little, Jet sighed, looking at Anaze.

“It’s his bed, Anaze,” she said. “He wants it back.”

“With you in it?” Anaze burst out angrily.

“What’s the difference?” she said with a sigh. “He’s not going to be stinging me in his sleep...”

Anaze gave an incredulous laugh. “Of course he won’t. He’ll do it while he’s wide awake!”

“It looks better, if anyone decided to check,” Jet said, now slightly annoyed. “And what’s the difference? Seriously?” At Anaze’s cold look, she folded her own arms, so that now all three of them adopted roughly the same posture. “...I don’t know why any of this would surprise you, Anaze. This whole thing with you and me was never meant to be a permanent arrangement... it was just a temporary thing...”

“He wants you, Jet!” Anaze snapped. “Are you blind? Or just willfully stupid?”

Jet’s jaw abruptly clenched. “Funny. He said the same thing about you.”

Anaze’s skin darkened, but he didn’t lower his gaze. Instead, he shifted it to Laksri and raised his voice, letting it grow openly derisive.

“I see. So the lizard skin is jealous. And you’re suddenly okay with indulging that, Jet. Funny, back in the settlement, I would never have guessed you were such an easy mark... I thought all of that stuff was just rumor...”

Jet knew his words were meant to anger her, but she didn’t change expression. Instead she just looked at him, and when her voice came out, it sounded strangely quiet, even to her.

“Look,” she said. “I’d rather sleep with him than you. It’s that simple. I need his help to get ready for the Rings, and he tells me more than you do. I have more reason to trust him anyway, because of the venom...”

“More reason to trust him because of the venom?” Anaze said coldly.

Jet flinched at his tone. His face hadn’t moved, but she could tell her words cut him more than he was letting show on his face.

“That’s an interesting theory, Jet...”

“I can feel things off him,” Jet said, biting her lip as she raised her voice for the first time. “It’s better than nothing... which is what I get from you and your father...”

“Do you seriously believe that the Nirreth haven’t figured out how to hide things they want hidden, venom or no?” Anaze said, his voice furious once more, and now holding a faint note of incredulity again. “Or that him and my Dad don’t have their own games going, regardless of what they tell either of us... much less what he must be planning with his own people? He and Richter don’t exactly see eye to eye on everything, Jet... or hadn’t you noticed?”

Laksri looked at him, his eyes now filled with a near-violence, but not before Jet snapped back at Anaze,

“You might be right,” she said, her voice hard. “But it’s more than I can feel off you.”

At that, Anaze blinked up at her in surprise.

He frowned again a few seconds later, staring at the floor. She saw a conflict of emotion flicker across his tanned face, right before he shook his head, rising to his feet.

“I request permission to stay in my assigned quarters,” he said, looking straight at Laksri.

Jet frowned, folding her arms tighter, but Anaze wouldn’t meet her gaze. When Laksri gave him the permission sign and stood out of the way of the door, Anaze gave him the countersign even as he’d already began to walk. Without looking at Jet, he headed straight for the door and hit the panel to let himself out, exiting through the opening as soon as it was large enough.

He didn’t give a single backwards glance. He didn’t look at Laksri, either.

Jet watched the eggshell white surface close behind him, and swallowed.

Feeling a twinge of regret, she quickly pushed it away.

“I’m exhausted,” she said into the silence, looking at Laksri for the first time since Anaze left.

The Nirreth sighed in a kind of agreeing purr, and seemed to deflate, too.

“I, too,” he said.

Without looking to see if he was following, Jet retreated back into the bedroom, and the Nirreth’s suddenly much smaller-seeming bed. Without letting herself think about it too clearly, she climbed under the covers, staying as much to the far side of the mattress as she could.

Laksri entered the room soundlessly behind her, hitting the panel to shut the door. Pulling the long shirt up over his head, he let it drop to the floor before climbing into the bed after her, but across from where she lay. Lying on his side, he cushioned his head with one arm in a kind of purring sigh, and it occurred to Jet again that there was no way the muscular, long-limbed Nirreth could have fit in any way comfortably on a couch that barely held his body’s width.

Sighing again, as if in agreement to her thoughts, he sank deeper into the mattress, shifting closer to her as he did and touching her back briefly with his hand.

“Thank you,” he said, his voice low.

Jet smiled, unable to help it. He’d sounded so young just then.

“It’s your bed,” was all she said. “You could have taken it back at any time.”

Laksri gave a kind of shrug, closing his eyes. “Thank you anyway.”

Jet nodded, to no one really, since he wasn’t looking at her. She closed her own eyes with a suddenly exhausted sigh of her own.

“Anytime,” she mumbled, already drifting off to sleep.

WHEN JET WOKE up, it was like digging herself out of a foggy trench.

She could already tell from her internal clock that she’d overslept.

She only remembered a few seconds later, just about when she was starting to panic, envisioning the guards bursting in and arresting her or Laksri, that Laksri told her the night before that he’d gotten her exempt from her duties with the Prince for the remainder of the week, due to the upcoming Rings. No one argued with the request; in fact, from what Laksri said, such a request was pretty much expected prior to her first match.

He also told her that the guard he’d spoken to acted like he’d already waited too long, that he should have pulled her a week sooner.

As Laksri crossed her mind, she stretched a little and then looked down, realizing the resistance she felt, the other source of her brief panic, was explainable as well.

Although they’d started off on opposite sides of the bed, they now lay flush with one another, one of his arms and his tail wrapped around her. Through the empathy, Jet could feel a kind of contentment on him.

For some reason, that made it a lot harder to be irritated with him.

Which kind of made her irritated at herself.

Resting her head back on the pillow, she tried not to think either about the look she’d last seen on Anaze’s face before he left, or the Rings match coming up in the next few days. She could remember everything from their training session the night before, enough to feel a little more confident that the real arena likely had the same basic layout across the different models, but also that scale was likely to be an issue... different enough that it could really throw her off in terms of the timing she’d begun to pick up from Laksri as they went through the course.

That timing alone was complex enough that Jet agreed with the Palace guard, and wished she and Laksri spent the last few weeks training together instead of leaving it to the last few days. Even so, the course had a rhythm to it, one clearly discernible through the rest of the noise of the projections.

Of course, Jet knew the VR projections and actual attackers used would all be different, and based at least partially on imprints from her own mind, so she should probably be trying to think what they might be most likely to throw at her, based on that.

That dinosaur freaked her out... the one from her ‘demonstration.’

She’d always been nervous of bears, too.

Then there were the gangs that roved the skag pit...

She could feel her body starting to tense as her mind whirled around the various things they might try on her, when Laksri’s arm and tail tightened around her further.

“Do not think about this now, Jet,” he mumbled against the pillow, somewhere over her head. He pressed against her, and suddenly she felt desire on him, warm and tangible. “...You should sleep now,” he added, resting his head back on the pillow nearer to hers.

“...We will talk about Rings later...” he added in another mumble, running his tongue briefly over her neck, startling her. “...There are things I must tell you about this,” he added, his voice still sleepy. “About how the Boards function... you will have more help than you think...”

His voice trailed in another mumble against her skin.

Of course, this was just enough information to get Jet’s head spinning all over again, and around how little time she really had left.

Despite how casual everyone had been about her upcoming debut in the Rings (well, everyone but Alice anyway, who’d seemed positive she was marked for death from day one), it crossed Jet’s mind more than once that the reason might be solely because she was still an unknown quantity to most of them. To most of the Nirreth, this meant she could easily die in the first few rounds... especially if the judges decided they didn’t like her. So none of them seemed to want to get overly invested in her before they saw what she could do.

The more Jet thought about this, the more nauseous she felt.

No one cared about her because everyone knew she might be dead by Sunday.

Even as she thought it, Laksri tugged her closer. Before she could shut her eyes and try to force herself back to sleep, he said the last words he managed before he drifted back to unconsciousness himself.

“Richter will pull you before that happens,” Laksri mumbled. “He comes today... to tell you what to do, once they untag you for the Rings...”

At that, Jet’s eyes came back open.

They didn’t close again the rest of that morning.

THREE DAYS LATER, Jet found herself being led with Laksri, Anaze and Richter up a narrow, sloped hallway.

They were deep underground, just below the main arena of the Rings for Green Zone, Hezeret. Only a few hundred feet from it, in fact.

Another roar from the crowd shook the ceiling over her head.

It sounded like thunder from where Jet walked, and she found herself flinching away from the sound even with Laksri’s firm grip on her arm and the lack of reaction from every other Nirreth and human walking past them, or simply watching them arrive.

The thumping started again, a low, rhythmic pulse that seemed to tremble the stone tiles of the floor under Jet’s feet. She found herself struggling with what to do with her hands and fingers. She tugged at the uncomfortably snug sensor-suit she wore, half-costume and half-functional where it clung to every inch of her five-foot-five frame.

Her hair had been sprayed up into an elaborate design of flat, almost plastic-looking black curls, each about the size of one of the old copper water pipes they dug up whenever they were expanding the edge of the skag pit’s warrens. Her face had been painted with dramatic, mask-like make-up by one of the prep crews assigned to new recruits to the Rings.

Apparently, Jet would have her own team once she made it past her fifth fight.

Assuming she did make it past the fifth fight.

In the last few days, it seemed like everyone around Jet felt the need to constantly remind her that the first fight was the most crucial of those five... even more important than the fifth, when the Board would make its final decision on whether to invest in her as a career fighter. If she made it past number five, she’d have sponsorship from various families and would join the wager and point-spread system with the other regular “players.”

She would also have to respond to requests for challenge matches and tie-breakers according to the whims of the Boards and her owners.

All in all, the more Jet learned about the Rings, the harder it was to decide whether she should be trying harder to get scratched in the first round, before she got killed... or if she should be trying to win.

Laksri’s fingers tightened on her arm, reminding her there was still enough venom in her system for him to feel a lot of her thoughts... the louder ones, at least.

“You must win,” he told her in a low, insistent voice. “Remember why we are here, Jet.”

Hearing... or perhaps feeling... the double meaning underlying his words, Jet only nodded. Even so, his and Richter’s warnings and words whirled through her mind, alternately bringing a kind of adrenaline-fueled resolve and confused panic.

But yeah, she knew Laks was right. She had to win. Get on the official roster.

It was that or she’d end up being sold, or worse.

Even reminding herself why she needed to win felt more like a ticking clock hanging over her head than a real motivation. She heard that same clock beating pretty much in time to her heart––a beat that seemed to keep accelerating under her ribs the closer she got to the end of the long tunnel. Light shone at the end of that long track, just like the mythical death-land her mother taught her about. Jet found herself hoping feverishly that Biggs and her mother wouldn’t pick tonight of all nights to try and pick up the pirated feed from the Nirreth towers.

Even so, Jet knew they would. Just like she would have, if their positions were reversed and one of them had disappeared.

The stamping grew louder, until it seemed to be compressing the skin, hair and bone around Jet’s head, throbbing behind her ears and drowning out the imaginary clock it replaced.

“Big crowd out there,” Jet muttered. “Is that usual? For a beginner, I mean... I thought these were kind of nothing matches, right?”

She felt Laksri hedging before he even opened his mouth.

“It is the first match with a female,” he admitted after a too-long pause. “They are hoping for a good show...”

“They’re hoping for a bloodbath,” Richter snorted from his other side.

Anaze and Laksri both glared at him, but Richter never took his eyes off hers.

“...But you’re not going to give it to them, are you, kitten?” he said, laying a hand on her shoulder. “You’re not. Remember everything we told you... and get your head on straight! You look like a rabbit approaching the den of a wolf. You know all of this. Don’t panic on us now and blow everything. You need to walk out there like you own the place...”

For some reason, Richter was the person whose words snapped Jet out.

They took her out of the bad place, anyway, long enough for her head to clear, and for her to hear the logic in what he’d said. After letting that logic sink in, she nodded, taking a few deliberate, deep breaths in an attempt to slow down her heart. Shaking out her hands and arms as she walked, she forced her head up, a psychological trick more than anything, and did her best to block out all of the sounds around and above her, as well as the up and down oscillations of her own mind.

None of that would help her now, anyway.

Richter was right. If she walked in there like a frightened animal, it really was over. Richter and Laksri promised to pull her if she got axed, to get her out of the Green Zone before the inevitable fallout if she bombed her first match... or the Royals tried to sell her.

But it hit Jet suddenly, brutally, what that really meant.

It meant this fight was over... for Jet, at least.

She’d go back to the skag pits, try to eke out an existence for herself and Biggs and her mom while she waited for something to change, anything to change. She’d go back to being totally helpless and unaware of anything that might actually change things for the people she cared about... everyone she loved. She’d be at the mercy of people like Richter instead, and whoever he chose to replace her in their next attempt to destabilize the Royals.

There were other, more confusing ramifications that she couldn’t let herself think about, not now, anyway. Thoughts around Anaze and Laksri that she couldn’t disentangle well enough to make sense of them... like the fact that she’d probably never see either of them again.

Even taking the two of them out of it, the idea of going back home, knowing what she knew now, was almost unbearable. The other possibilities appealed to her even less... recruiting foot soldiers for Richter’s twisted war, or worse, living on some rebel settlement, playing games with the other settlers to help keep up their cover. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she realized there would be no going home... not really.

Beside, Richter would never risk just cutting her loose.

If he thought she might spill the beans about who and what he was to the other skags, much less information about his ties to the Nirreth rebels, Richter might just kill her. More likely, though, he’d just disappear her into the ranks of one of his campgrounds of loyals, and she’d never see her own family again. She’d end up fishwife to one of his lieutenants, living in some backwater and birthing rebel babies, like Anaze’s mom.

Laksri’s tail wound around her, even as Anaze sidled up between Jet and his father.

“...They’re not only here hoping you’ll die,” Anaze said, giving his father another irritated stare. “...You belong to the Royals. They know that, and the Royals haven’t entered a fighter in a few months, so that makes you interesting. Most of them also know about you and the sword-fighting thing, so they came here to see that, too...”

Shrugging a little, he motioned towards her body with a grin.

“...Some also came to see a woman fight in a skin-tight costume. Just like they might do back home.”

Jet rolled her eyes a little, but knocked into him playfully with her shoulder without thinking, like she would’ve done back at the skag pit, before all this. He gave her a surprised look, then grinned, bumping her back with his own shoulder.

“There’s the Jet I know,” he joked, smiling. “I was wondering if she was still there, under the black catsuit and all that make up. You look like a raccoon, by the way...” he added, motioning towards her eyes with another grin.

Laksri gave a snorting laugh, loosening his hold on her slightly.

Only Richter’s eyes remained as hard as flint.

“You think you can put on a bit of a show for these blue-skins without getting yourself killed, you do it,” he advised, his coffee-colored eyes still trained on the growing patch of light up ahead, his strides steady and purposeful. “Remember, we need you to make it to that fifth fight.” Leaning closer to her ear, he added in a lower voice, barely perceptible even with his lips against her skin, “No fifth fight, no tenth fight... do the math, kitten and keep your head in the game. I expect this match to go by the numbers...”

“...So you wait until the last week to train me,” she retorted, giving him a harder look.

But something in her expression seemed to please him, because for the first time, his lightened. He chuckled in return, right before he clapped her on the back in a friendly way.

“That’s right, kitten,” he grinned. “You get to show us how good you really are.” His eyes went serious once more before he said, “What are your priorities?”

“Points,” she said promptly. “Especially in the first hour.”

“Do you try to win?”

Jet rolled her eyes a little, not answering.

“Do you try to win?” Richter said, his voice a harder growl.

“No,” she said.

Staring at her for another beat, he grunted. “Good. Remember that, kitten. No one wins the first match... you’re better off staying where the points are. You want to do well, but you’re still a rookie. Don’t get ambitious. Everyone who gets ambitious their first match get slaughtered... and if you try to win, it will take you away from the points. Understand?”

Jet nodded, internally rolling her eyes, but not really in anger.

Instead, her nerves had come back.

Anyway, they’d already explained to her why they waited so long to brief her on the Rings. Jet knew she still didn’t know everything. In fact, she was fairly sure that... as always... Richter told her only the bare minimum.

But she knew more, and that wasn’t nothing.

Whatever their final plan was, it required her getting through the first five preliminary matches. For one thing, it wasn’t until then that she’d lose the GPS tracker they’d implanted into her neck during that initial examination they did on her in that creepy, underground lab when she disembarked from the culler ship.

Richter hadn’t told her about the implant then, of course... but Jet found out not long after, while washing her hair in the shower and feeling the hard bump on the back of her neck. She’d freaked a little, hopping out of the shower half-covered in soap suds and shampoo to make Anaze look at the spot on her neck. Wearing nothing but a towel, she’d pulled her hair back so he could see the lump she’d fingered, sure she had some kind of mutating cancer from the Nirreth medicine and food.

When Anaze explained the meaning of the lump, and what the implant actually did, Jet had been furious.

Anaze assured her the device would only remain there for as long as it took the Nirreth command leaders to trust her.

Of course, at the time, Jet hadn’t expected that trust to require her to publicly take a Nirreth mate, or spend months entertaining Prince Ogli.

Really, she’d thought it would be enough, her volunteering for the Rings, and then enduring the daily training and humiliation with Alice without actually trying to kill someone. Especially considering they’d dragged her off the street and sold her like a dog.

Anyway, Richter wanted Jet to be a longshot in the Rings, that much she knew.

He wanted the bloodthirsty crowds and the small girl with too much make-up and the tight, all-black sense-suit and the long, Japanese-style sword. Richter wanted a distraction, partly to test run for the real night, which –– assuming all went as planned –– should be in exactly twenty weeks’ time, if they scheduled her to fight every other week.

If they thought too much of Jet’s chances, they’d throw a harder program at her.

Richter also informed her that they’d received intelligence that Ogli planned to buck tradition and buy Jet outright if she got booted from the Rings.

He would have enough money to outbid Laksri and Richter’s fortunes, even if they pooled them together, along with probably every credit scraped up by every member of the rebellion on both sides of the racial divide. Richter explained all of this to Jet casually enough, but she got the point –– the plan would change drastically if that happened, and not in any way to her advantage. Richter assured her he could ‘work with it,’ but Jet didn’t find his assurances all that reassuring. Given what it would mean for her if they didn’t manage to get her out of the palace, she found the prospect made her sick enough that she couldn’t think about it for long.

Laksri didn’t much like that plan either.

His fingers tightened on her arm, reminding her of that fact. He could obviously still feel a good chunk of her thoughts.

“You will win,” he told her again, pulling her closer.

“Richter says I shouldn’t win,” Jet replied, trying to keep her voice light.

“In that sense, yes... he is correct. But you will win a place in the Rings. Remember that.”

“I will win,” Jet repeated, a near mantra under her breath.

They reached the boundaries of the low rectangle of light. Jet blinked up in confusion, starting to slow her steps until Richter gripped her harder, forcing her to speed up so that she reached the light moving with long, more confident-seeming strides.

The second she hit the edge of that opening, the crowd beyond the corridor began to yell. She heard Nirreth voices mainly, a few yells and growls at first, then what could have been human voices, too.

The sound swelled as more and more of them saw her appear on the screens, until the Nirreth howls grew deafening. It sounded like she was about to walk into a jungle filled with wild animals... and more like one of the Rings’ VR projections than anything real.

Jet continued to walk up the triangle-shaped ramp, fighting disbelief and keeping her legs moving from the prodding of Laksri’s hand and tail, seemingly more than by the power of her own muscles and mind. On her other side, Richter had released her.

Anaze moved so that the two of them walked abreast.

However, when Jet saw herself on the high monitor, only she and Laksri appeared on the wall-sized image, moving together in a near-synchronicity... one that was likely aided by the venom. It didn’t occur to Jet until she saw them both up there, that this maneuver had probably been planned by Richter and Laksri as well, down to their near-matching outfits and the dark blue kohl eyeliner she wore along with the mascara that faintly sparkled, almost as if between them her makeup had been designed to match Laksri’s eyes and skin.

Next to a muscular, unsmiling Laksri, Jet herself looked more fierce suddenly, but also a lot smaller. She couldn’t help wondering if that had been deliberate, too, and if so, what they were going for exactly, in terms of the overall impression. At this point, she was beginning to think Anaze was right, that Richter planned pretty much everything he did, no matter how innocent or even boorish it seemed from the outside.

Laksri’s fingers abruptly squeezed her arm.

“Not in here,” he said in her ear.

But she’d already felt the same thought through his skin, and remembered less than a heartbeat after what it meant.

Fear hit her in the next set of breaths, as she grew once more conscious of the fact that they would be scanning her mind randomly as part of this event. The deepest of those scans happened a week ago, apparently, during her last, so-called ‘medical exam.’ Laksri also said they wouldn’t get a lot of actual thoughts, more her overall mental state, but they’d still cautioned her repeatedly to be careful, all through the match.

Even now, she had to be careful.

They would mostly be looking for key words, as well as fears, signs of aggression––anything that spiked her emotions too high or too low––which was part of the reason Laksri insisted on stinging her that morning. He’d wanted to help her moderate that part of her presentation to the Board, in addition to assisting with any last minute memorizations, since the venom should help lock those into her mind, too.

Given how spacey she felt on the venom at times, Jet had been surprised to note that it didn’t slow her reflexes any, not if Laksri stung her the normal way. They also had a way of pushing out the venom in a denser stream that could paralyze a human’s whole body, of course... which had been closer to what he’d done to her that first time on the culler ship.

Laksri told her that the normal sting should, if anything, speed her reflexes... not slow them.

The paralysis came from some kind of overload of Nirrith adrenaline, or the equivalent of adrenaline in their system. The venom itself didn’t produce those effects, but instead gave her that clarity that helped with memory and movement.

In effect, Laksri said, the venom sped up certain processes in her nervous system... so much so that the brain had trouble keeping up, in terms of reacting verbally and translating that know-how into conscious thoughts.

Most of what she retained fell into the category of the subconscious as a result.

So it seemed like her thinking processes slowed down, but it was only in contrast to the muscle and sense memory that went with the venom.

If nothing else, on the venom, Jet tended not to startle too easily, or overreact to false stimuli in the Rings programs. Even so, something about being on the venom in the real Rings, in front of all of these people, made Jet nervous... enough that she was kind of glad that most of the more obvious effects had already begun to wear off by then.

“You’ll be fine,” Laksri told her again.

He kissed her neck as he said it, and Jet realized that they must still be up on the main screen because the crowd once more erupted into sound––yells and long, trilling cries from Nirreth throats, and what sounded like a high burst of whistles.

Most of all, Jet heard pounding feet and a heavier thumping sound that she realized must be the hard smack of their tails against the low walls that stood behind each concentric circle of benches. Her heart once more rose to her throat, even as she remembered Laksri and Richter’s words to her the night before.

“But how do I know they didn’t pick up any information about who I am... who I really am... in that scan they did?” she’d asked, once they told her what had been done to her.

“They did pick it up,” Richter said, matter-of-fact.

As that was pretty much the last thing Jet expected him to say, she fell silent briefly, staring first at him, then at Laksri. They’d been in that garden underneath the water processing plant, alone but for birds in the trees and fish in the canals winding through the room between the gently weaving paths and bridges.

“And?” she said, a beat later. “Why aren’t I in a prison cell? For that matter... why aren’t you?”

Richter chuckled. “Don’t worry, kitten, we had the tapes pulled. We replaced them with the initial scans in the relevant parts.”

“So why the hell couldn’t you have just told me what was going on earlier?” she demanded. “Why wait for the scans at all, if you’re just going to doctor them anyway?”

“Because,” Richter explained patiently. “We needed your training in the Rings to remain intact. Laksri and two techs we have working for us went over those scans with a fine-toothed comb. Luckily, you’re pretty focused when you train... we were able to keep just about everything in terms of the time you spent working out in the Rings with Alice.”

He smiled at her in that infuriating way he had.

“...A few good cuts and snips while you worried about Laks and I turning on you, and a few internal monologue rants against Anaze, and we were in business. We’re just lucky Ogli didn’t sting you that day he got frisky in the barn. Although, come to think of it, I’m sure I––”

“––could have worked with it, I know,” Jet muttered. “Funny how whenever you say that, it does not reassure me.”

“Nice touch about you actually wanting the big blue, by the way,” Richter added with another grin, that one a touch harder. “We’re lucky they cut out all intimate material as a matter of policy anyway... at least the physical parts... but we were able to use a lot of your time together to really sell the whole interspecies thing, since you actually have feelings for the big guy.”

Jet felt her jaw tighten, but she didn’t look away from him.

Still, some of the anger she felt must have shown on her face, because Richter laughed aloud.

“Don’t worry, kitten,” he chuckled. “Your secret’s safe with me. Anyway, I never would have agreed to the coupling in the first place if I hadn’t seen the two of you flirting before all of this. I had to know you could be convincing, stung or not, or the others would have picked up on it.” He shrugged, his eyes shrewd once more. “Didn’t Laks tell you they can see in infrared? It’s how he talked me into letting him approach you.”

Richter winked at the Nirreth, obviously enjoying Jet’s anger.

“Laks already knew you had a bit of a sweet spot for him. And like I said, he wanted you in his bed even before we picked you up that day. I guess Anaze is a better salesman than I thought...”

“A little too good,” Anaze muttered, his arms folded from where he sat on a blood red stone next to a tree covered in white blossoms.

He stared up at the dome of the sky when Jet turned, not meeting her gaze.

Through all of Richter’s speech, Laksri hadn’t said a word, but Jet got the distinct feeling he hadn’t liked the conversation any more than she had. Or maybe he was a lot better at faking that kind of thing than she’d let herself contemplate. Maybe he’d just rather if Jet had more reason to think his role had been more innocent.

It was hard to know, really; he hadn’t stung her that day and his face was as inscrutable as it always was when they weren’t connected through the venom.

At Anaze’s crack, though, Richter only chuckled again.

“You’re a popular girl, kitten,” he grinned at her. “You’ve had my two best boys fighting over you pretty much from day one...”

By then, Jet was barely listening to him though.

Instead, she found herself thinking around the real possibilities in terms of Richter’s and Laksri’s ‘plans’... meaning those that occurred out of her earshot. It also occurred to her that Anaze was probably right. She might not be able to read Laksri even half as well as she wanted to believe.

As Jet remembered this again, she continued walking towards the harsh lights and high monitors of the main arena with her three ‘co-conspirators.’

The truth was, she really was on her own here.

She pushed her mind away from that, too.

Instead, almost out of reflex, she found herself clutching Laksri’s hand as they neared the edge of the ramp. Jet had seen video of the arena before, so she knew the basic size and layout, but it still caught her by surprise to see it at full scale. It seemed to grow around her as she looked up... pretty much the instant they left the shadow of the high-walled ramp.

Up until that point, Jet could see the view screen straight ahead of them, which alternated images from her and Laksri to the crowd, to an image of the Rings Board, which displayed an oval-shaped table filled with well-dressed and somewhat grim-faced Nirreth.

Jet counted fourteen members in the longest of those shots.

One, surprisingly, was human... the same woman Jet remembered holding a blue drink and watching from the crowd during Jet’s demonstration prior to her sale to the Royals.

Despite the massive screen that hung over the far side of the auditorium, Jet still hadn’t managed to glimpse any details of the actual arena, apart from a short stretch of the concourse that crossed her immediate line of vision. She stared at that slice anyway, trying to get a sense of whether the obstacles fit the parameters she’d measured from her training.

In some ways, that was even helpful... it got her mind back on the immediate problem, anyway.

When they reached the end of that ramp, though, Jet got distracted again.

She’d intended to begin mapping the exact dimensions of the terrain at once, but her eyes were drawn up and around at the sheer size of the arena itself, seemingly against her will. As she stared around at the full benches that slid upwards and backwards on a steep, angled slope, rising up at least ten or fifteen stories at the back, her heart nearly stopped in her chest.

It hit her again, with force that time, that Richter was right.

There was no possible way that humanity would win any real battle against the Nirreth. Not without help from the Nirreth themselves.

Just in this one place, more Nirreth were sitting and standing than Jet suspected remained alive of humanity in what used to be called Canada. She couldn’t fathom actual numbers, other than to compare what she saw to the skag pits themselves.

Their entire settlement of maybe two hundred plus wouldn’t fill even a tenth of the innermost ring of seats above her. She hadn’t known this many Nirreth lived on the entire continent, much less represented an unnamed portion of a single Green Zone.

Forcing her eyes and her mind off that sea of faces, Jet jerked her attention back to the course itself. That helped almost immediately.

Her focus and clarity returned as she began comparing every detail of the obstacle course in front of her to the three maps she already carried in her head... two from Laksri and one from the practice arena. Her mind clicked through the process methodically, and Jet remembered again, somewhere in the background, how surprised Richter had been when Anaze and Laksri told him what she could do.

He didn’t call it Jet’s ‘weird spatial thing’ like Anaze had, however.

Richter had a different set of words to describe what Jet had always assumed that everyone else could do, too.

“You mean to tell me, kitten here has a photographic memory?”

Richter stared at her in disbelief, then broke out in a genuine-sounding laugh.

“Well, hell...” he said, still chuckling. “I would have pulled her while she was still in diapers if you’d told me that, boy...”

The boy, in that case, had been Anaze. Despite the fact that the man saying it to him was his father, Anaze’s facial expression turned stormy.

“I told you she was good in tight spaces,” he said. “I said she could maneuver well in the dark...” he added, his voice growing more annoyed, not less. “She was the best builder in the settlement because she remembered the exact location of every tunnel and pipe. She could dig and build without us ending up with a passageway sunk in old bilge water or sewage from a broken line...”

Richter rolled his eyes at Anaze. He didn’t take his gaze off Jet. “I think you’re now, officially, my new best friend,” he said with a grin. “How do you like that, kitten?”

Jet didn’t bother to verbalize her opinion on that.

She did try to decide, later that day, whether Richter finding her more valuable reassured her, or made her more uneasy. After all, if he thought she was worth something beyond her age, sex, and relative handiness with a sword, he might be less likely to dump her if things got sticky.

On the other hand, he also might throw more jobs at her that could get her killed.

Reaching up to grip the hilt of Black, the Japanese-style sword strapped to her back, Jet continued to take inventory of the room. She gripped the handle of the sword almost as a form of reassurance as her thoughts dwindled to a murmur in the back of her mind.

The ladder looks the same, she decided after another few beats. Same dimensions... same distance apart as in the practice arena... slightly more off-center to the pond...

Her eyes drifted to the rock-like walls dotted with hand-holds.

... Same basic components. Over twice the size, and a good twenty-six paces further from the moving track. Plus there’s that hook thing... never seen that before...

Her mind shifted back to the first pool of water, noting its spatial proximity to the rotating hooks, as well as what must be a collection of weapons portals through which real, physical objects might be launched.

The pond also had a ladder. That was new.

Looking around, she found more than a dozen more of those weapons clusters. She wondered if the angles shifted, if they could be aimed... loudly enough that she hoped Laksri would hear it.

Luckily, he did.

“Yes,” he told her softly in English. “...But only the larger ones,” he added, pointing them out with a few subtle flicks of his tail. “...Mostly, it’s easier for them to manipulate the projection... but I wouldn’t rule it out entirely, even on the smaller ones...” His voice turned warning. “Remember points, Jet. Points matter. Most of what attacks you will come from the projection, so you need to watch for more than physical projectiles.”

“I won’t be able to dodge much of anything if I have a spear sticking out of my back,” she muttered, her voice holding more of an edge that time.

When she glanced up, Laksri conceded the point, with his eyes and tail as much as his words. All three held the flavor of an apology.

“That is true,” he said, squeezing her arm with his fingers.

Jet had already gone back to mapping the long room.

She noted the transparent walls that Richter and Laksri described to her, and that hadn’t been present in the practice arena, either. She also mapped the locations of doors in the floor and in two of the walls. Some of the doors had panels in the outside walls, which meant she could trigger them herself, if she wasn’t careful. Memorizing the exact location of each of the triggers, as well as the dimension and locations of the doors themselves, her mind took in the rest of the room with equal care.

Seventeen steps up to the lowest platform... fifteen steps from that to the mud pit, below...

Full length jump from platform two to platform three...

Only way off five is that rope thing... probably motorized so no way of knowing when it will come around unless they map it to the projection...

... Cluster of those weapons tubes right next to the top of the third ladder... will need to ride that sucker down on the rails before they can trigger that bunch...

... Pool height exactly twice the length of platform six... could definitely make that in a jump. Leave open as an escape route if they trap me next to that other cluster...

Jet went through each segment of the course that way, right up until Richter nudged her. Tearing her eyes off the course, Jet found herself facing a row of Nirreth, none of which she recognized. Still, she knew who they were.

The Rings judges.

The judges kept the actual rules of the contest, as opposed to the Board, which voted on execution and made final decisions on each candidate’s performance. The judges would be the ones to validate actual points and kills, offering these to the Board with recommendations.

All final decisions rested with the Board, however.

In addition to the Rings Board and the judges, Jet knew there was also a team of operators led by an ex-Ringmaster, meaning one who had an undefeated run at the Rings of more than fifty wins. Not course wins, per se, but point wins.

The current head of ops was a Nirreth named Trazen.

He’d been the first Ringmaster to rise to that position in over forty years. He’d also been the youngest, which made him the youngest ops head in Nirreth history. Since the head of ops remained in their position until a new Ringmaster won the spot, the previous head had been getting pretty old when Trazen replaced him, less than a year earlier.

Apparently, the new ops commander was good, but tough.

Jet preferred that to what she’d heard about his predecessor.

The last Ringmaster had been a bit ‘whimsical’ at times, Laksri said. He could be vindictive and petty, too. It was thought to be part of the reason so few contestants reached the required number of wins to qualify as Ringmaster during his tenure. From what Jet had been told, it wasn’t likely he’d been designing programs to defeat contestants in some twisted effort to hold on to his job, either.

Everyone seemed to believe it more likely the guy was just eccentric.

In any case, Trazen, the current Ringmaster, managed to hit the magic number in spite of this. To many, this made his accomplishment more impressive... although a few still insinuated that he’d cheated, or that he had some kind of ‘in’ with the Board.

All of this went through Jet’s head in a rush as she stood over the row of Rings judges. She was still trying to decide what to do, when Laksri’s fingers pressured Jet’s arm, even as the impulse from his mind reached her.

Kneel.

Jet dropped to one knee without thought.

Luckily, the floor before the judges’ table was carpeted.

Silence fell over the crowd. It was spooky how complete it was... far closer to a real silence than the same number of humans would ever manage. Not only did they stop talking, they stopped moving. They seemed almost to stop breathing, their postures eerily uniform as Jet glanced up and around her. The effect was like turning off a radio.

When Jet looked up next, the judge in the middle, a male Nirreth with dark, seaweed-green eyes, was staring at her.

“Who owns this mammal?” he said.

Jet flinched, although she knew his wording was a formality, too.

Behind her, a familiar voice answered.

“Kraken Mosendre, Seventh Brother of the Supreme Royal Leader... Father of Olgidan Mosendre, divine eldest son of the same family and future Supreme Royal Leader of the Greater Realm of Asteti, Forever-Blessed Empire of the Stars...”

Richter intoned the words formally.

Maybe it was in her mind, but Jet still heard the barest edge of insolence in his voice.

To her left, Laksri repeated the same words, only in Nargili.

When both finished, the judge in the center leaned back in his chair, glancing to the four other judges in turn, two on either side of where he sat.

Jet remained where she was, her head lowered. Out of her peripheral vision, she still attempted to go over the map she was building in her head. As a result, Laksri had to tap her shoulder when she missed the center judge speaking to her.

When she refocused on him, the Nirreth with the green eyes laughed, then said something to the other judges. When the others laughed with him, Jet glanced up at Laksri, who still had one hand protectively on her neck.

They think you are nervous...  Jet felt through his skin.

That time, when the judge looked at her, pity shone in his dark green eyes, as well as a more subtle shade of regret.

“You enter this contest willingly, human?” he said in heavily-accented English.

Jet was hard-pressed to stifle a disbelieving snort. Luckily, they’d prepared her for this question, too, so she managed to keep her expression open, even enthusiastic. At Laksri’s warning squeeze, Jet forced herself to nod, gritting her teeth only a little.

“I am willing,” she said. “It is an honor to fight in the Rings...”

When she said it, it even almost felt true.

After everything she’d been through the last few weeks, she was ready to do this. Also, Jet was so happy to have Black back at her side, that fact alone made her strangely confident. If a negative outcome didn’t likely mean being forced into the humiliating position of mommy-slash-lover to the next Nirreth king, Jet might even be looking forward to the challenge.

She could almost understand how Tyra felt about this.

Almost.

As it was, she felt her legs shaking as she rose slowly to her feet, even with the venom. She knew it stemmed as much from adrenaline as fear, but still willed it away almost angrily as she straightened to her full height, which admittedly, wasn’t all that impressive. When Laksri touched her shoulder that time, she had to bite her lip to keep from shoving his fingers off.

Even so, his hand exuded reassurance, a near-humor.

It is good, he thought through her skin. We want them to underestimate you.

With the thought, she felt a pulse of excitement on him... coupled with a harder thread of desire. That time, instead of pulling it back, he let it linger.

I want you, he told her, quieter. The boy isn’t wrong.

Jet looked up at him, startled.

He released her before she could think of an answer.

She just stood there, between the three of them, unable to incorporate that new information with the rest of what whirled in her head. Briefly, it crossed her mind to wonder if Laksri told her that deliberately to throw her off, or if he really thought it was a good idea to lay that on her now, five minutes before trigger-happy Rings operators aimed live rounds of ammunition at her head.

Throwing both thoughts out of her mind, Jet went back to the map, letting her eyes roam across the eight corners of the walled cage, and then higher, when she saw the hatch that led to a whole other level above that. Remembering what Alice told her about thinking in three-dimensions, Jet found herself smiling a bit, in spite of herself, even as she made sure she had the location of each hatch mapped exactly.

Even as she thought about Alice, Jet saw her.

Alice’s hair had been done up as well, and she wore elaborate make-up that hinted of some exotic origin, coupled with a dark gray shirt that emphasized the severe lines of her muscular frame. Her feet wore jeweled, close-toed sandals. Jerking her eyes off the severe-faced woman, Jet focused back on the track, taking it all in again while she still had the chance.

Overall, the course was a brighter, cleaner and slightly larger version of the model Laksri showed her from Astet.

Given that the Astet model was probably a hundred years older, if not more, Jet was a little surprised how little the basics had changed. The fake mountains and rocks, structures to climb on and jump to (or from), the moveable tracks, the mud pit, sand pit, large and small ponds, the ladder and hanging ropes... very few areas of variation existed between this version and that original model, apart from the larger body of water, and that had to be because Nirreth couldn’t swim. They even managed to simulate space by using steel cables and timed freefalls, along with sensory generators in the projections themselves.

From what Alice told Jet, she could expect a lot more elaborate challenges in the real thing, compared to anything they threw at her in practice. They let new contestants train, yes, but they were still supposed to be coming in relatively fresh. The judges wanted an idea of their potential and versatility... versus a win based on memorizing a particular set of variables.

Beyond that, at least a percentage of the ammunition would be live, even in this ‘trial’ run. In terms of points, the difference between live and virtual would be minimal, but a live round could incapacitate her in a much more permanent way... or wound her so badly that she couldn’t dodge the virtual rounds, either.

Other points came from the accuracy of her own hits, style for hand-to-hand, and various ‘bonuses’ that could be found throughout the course... anything from weapons to armor to enhancements of speed, the ability to fly, reversal of virtual injuries, supplies...

Jet would also be timed.

She had four hours to make it through this initial, trial run.

Whether they broke that up into segments or gave her a single, long stretch on one elaborate course was totally up to the Rings operator and his team.

Jet knew four hours was still a short course, from the perspective of the pros, who sometimes spent a whole week on a particular run, sometimes with as many as three other live contestants, along with whoever they threw at them from the virtual end.

The suit Jet wore would ensure that most of the physical sensations reached her, pleasant and unpleasant, and accurately enough that it might be difficult at times to tell a real injury from a fake one... or a real person from a fake one, for that matter. The pain would make it hard to move, either way, but the difference would be important in terms of whether it was a good idea to force her way through a broken leg, or tap out and request assistance... or even call out a willing defeat to make sure she’d walk again at some point.

For this match, Jet didn’t need to worry about that so much.

No one said it outright, but Jet knew that if she were seriously injured... if she let herself be seriously injured, she told herself... it was likely game over for her. It also likely meant game over in terms of a future in the Rings.

In either case, they would call a halt to the demo match, since it was her first time. As little room for error as there was, in terms of Jet’s career, there was significantly more in terms of safeguards around her actual person.

Or so she hoped.

Jet knew she couldn’t think that way, though, or she’d be doomed. It was clear a lot of the Nirreth came expecting a good show, even if it was only Jet getting her costume torn off by virtual Nirreth and watching her get stung a few dozen times.

“Remember, you are the first,” Laksri said softly. He was no longer touching her, but must have read at least some of her thoughts off her expression. “They came for this... more than your death. If you give them a good show, they will love you for it...”

Looking up at him, Jet found herself nodding, even as an odd, and completely unwarranted flush of confidence infused her limbs.

“Well,” she said. “...Then I guess I’ll have to give them one.”

From the other side of where she stood, Richter smiled.

LAKSRI, RICHTER, ANAZE and Alice left her at the edge of the arena.

Jet barely crossed the white line between the ramp and the edge of the actual play space when everything disappeared, leaving her alone. For the briefest instant, just long enough for Jet to really get a lock on her location among the arena components, she stood inside the artificial landscape, her feet on solid ground...

Then, just as quickly, it was gone.

Jet stood inside a flat, gray space, nothing under her feet and nothing above her head, or to either side of where she stood.

Thankfully, the crowd disappeared, too.

She didn’t move in the gray space, other than to check that the hilt of Black still protruded from the scabbard on her back... and to make sure she could still use her arms and legs.

A tinny, accented voice rose, echoing around her in English. The echo was large enough that Jet had to assume it had been amplified throughout the entire stadium above.

“Virtual settings check...” it said in a cheerful voice, like from one of the machines from Old Earth. “...Projection beginning in three minutes.”

Jet’s heart hammered in her chest.

It hit her again, that all of this could be over, in just a matter of minutes. She could be shuttled off to Ogli, and Richter’s ‘Plan B’ would suddenly be in effect, whether that meant her kidnapping the prince or blowing up his sleeping quarters or whatever else Richter had planned.

She’d still be wearing the implant collar, like she was now.

That meant, they could just throw a switch somewhere up in security and Jet’s head would be separated from her neck.

Game over.

Forcing that out of her mind, even as it occurred to her that her emotions may have already spiked high enough to prompt a scan from the machine, she gripped Black’s hilt tighter in her hand and tried to unsheath the blade from the scabbard. It wouldn’t move. She tried again, yanking harder, and started to panic.

Then she remembered Alice warning her she wouldn’t have access to any weaponry until the session started.

Forcing herself to take a handful of deep breaths, Jet recalled the map of the arena as clearly as she could, her body taut as she watched the seconds tick backwards slowly.

One minute. She’d already burned through two, freaking out.

Forty-five seconds.

Thirty.

Jet fell slowly into a crouch, almost without noticing she did it.

Pulling up every memory of every training session she’d had with Alice, or with the old man, Mishio, back home... or with Anaze himself, back when they used to run little contests about who could do what when they were ‘bored.’ Those contests, Jet now realized, had been designed to test her abilities in this very thing. Obviously, Anaze had decided she could do it, or he never would have offered her up to his father as a candidate.

The thought comforted her. But only a little.

In the next second, she dismissed all of it.

She remembered what Mishio told her, what had been true for every fight in which Jet had found herself since. He said if you had to think about a move in an actual fight, it was already too late. Only he said it in Mishio-speak.

“Training is training time. Fight is fight time. You train while you fight, and you dead. No time to remember in a fight. You act. Hope your body remember...”

Jet sank into her body as the memory repeated somewhere in her mind.

She watched the clock tick down the last few seconds. Too late to learn anything new now. She knew what she knew. That was it.

She’d find out soon enough whether it was enough.

In that last second, Jet took a breath.

Before it was completed, the gray walls melted in front of her eyes...

... and reformed into something else.

Giant, burned-out buildings appeared in front of her, still smoking from recent fires. They rose dozens of stories, up into a flat, gray sky, which also held plumes of smoke, a red-tinted black. Their trails looked like a wound cutting through the pre-dawn light.

Jet didn’t move for a long set of seconds. She simply stared, conscious of the terrain around her, trying to map it to what she knew of the physical course, and where she stood in relation to it. None of the structures she’d mapped made sense, given her current landscape, so apparently she was meant to walk, at least until that terrain shifted.

She didn’t walk though, not right away.

Instead, she scanned the skies, and the windows of the nearby buildings, trying to get a sense of what the target might entail.

There was always a target... in every game.

There was always a goal of some kind.

Sometimes it was as simple as staying alive long enough for rescue by an allied ship or a group of hunters or warriors with whom one got separated. Sometimes it was reaching a village or well-fortified town or city. Sometimes it was more specific... like rescuing a teammate from enemy soldiers or a pack of wild animals, or detonating a bomb inside enemy headquarters, or kidnapping a particular leader or technician from the other side’s team.

Clearly, from looking around, the time period was modern.

Looking at her clothes, Jet realized those had changed, too.

She wore a dark gray uniform with armored plating, heavy boots... but human-style, not the Nirreth wall-walkers. The latter realization brought a faint twinge of disappointment; the wall-walkers could make the course fairly interesting. On the other hand, it also made it harder to keep her bearings as they manipulated the simulation around her dimensionally to accommodate the anti-grav boots.

Jet took a few cautious steps forward.

As soon as she did, a familiar rush of sound greeted her ears from overhead.

Looking up, she saw the underside of a dark gray and green mass, the shifting contours of camouflaged metal, and suddenly the uniform and its familiarity clicked.

It was the invasion.

She was fighting in the historical records of the Nirreth invasion of Earth.

Even as she thought it, Jet flattened her back to the segment of the smoking concrete building next to where she stood, her eyes shifting upwards along with the VR contact lenses that attached her vision to the rest of the suit.

She saw the hooks of the culler ship extended like the tentacles of a great, floating leviathan, and although it was an older, strangely more animal-looking version than the ones Jet had grown up dodging, the sight of it was so familiar, so real, that it snapped Jet roughly back to the reality of her old life... to Biggs, her mother, Chiyeko, Larks and his gang of thugs in the tunnels, Aunt Lara and Uncle Draven, Marcus and Mishio, the hunters and trappers and fighters who made up the men and women of the skag pits, half of them wearing the tattered remains of the same uniform Jet wore now.

Her breath caught in her throat, a near claustrophobia as it all came rushing back, her old life and everyone in it. The sword-fighting lessons with Mishio, the raids by Richter and his men, the packs of dogs that tried to fight their way into the Longhouse that past winter to get at their goats and their meager stores of food... the poisoned fish that killed Shiatu’s kid the following spring.

Traveling underground with Anaze to reach Everest and the other traders in Gastown, or the hamster cage south of old Vancouver, where they’d go to trade eggs and fish for medicines and sometimes sugar and synthetic clothes and other hard-to-get items.

For a long moment, Jet just stood there, her back flat against the wall.

She forgot she was looking at a projection, forgot everything she was doing and stared up at the culler ship, thinking only one thought.

Don’t run. Humans who ran got culled.

When the spotlight of the culler switched on, roving over the nearby alleyway and up the buildings on each side of where Jet stood, crouched in a burnt-out alcove, heart hammering in her chest, she managed to pull her mind at least partly together.

The images looked real, down to the smell of smoke in the air and the gravel under her feet. She couldn’t fully convince her senses or her mind that they were not.

She could remember that in this game, hoping not to be seen while she got underground likely wasn’t an option. They would find her.

She needed something else.

Even so, out of habit or reflex or something else, Jet found herself scanning the ground, looking for escape routes that led down instead of up. Her mind tried to rationalize this, too... either they wouldn’t have them at all, or the projection would shift around the terrain to accommodate her apparent change in levels.

In any case, going up, with that ship overhead, was out of the question.

Her mind was working again, sparking back to life in that crystal clarity left by the remnants of the venom in her system... along with the vitamin and energy shots and whatever else the techs gave her as they handed her the sensor suit. Reaching for her backpack out of habit, due to the familiar-looking landscape, Jet remembered she wouldn’t have that here, either. No digging tools, no compass... not even any of her knives, or the bow and arrow she usually kept with her in case she needed to fire from cover.

This would be a strictly hand-to-hand fighting session.

Which wasn’t such a big deal against opponents carrying swords, arrows or even spears... but she couldn’t expect to be encountering a lot of swords in the Nirreth invasion fleet or their military clean-up crews.

Instead they’d be carrying sandblasters and what her uncle used to call ‘cutters,’ those small, hand-held weapons that looked like flat stones. The Nirreth themselves called them pulre, or ‘hammers’... and those things packed a punch of blue flame that could blast a three-foot deep hole into a concrete wall with one hit. On the plus side, they took a good ten to twenty seconds to recharge between blasts, so she’d still prefer them to the sandblasters.

She was still standing there, trying to decide what her first move should be, when the radio in the helmet she hadn’t realized her avatar wore sparked into life.

“Alpha-10, Digger Unit... this is Base 2. Do you copy?”

The voice was so human, the accent so perfect, that Jet answered without thinking.

“Receiving you, Base 2.”

She felt thrown back into the games they played as kids, listening to their aunts and uncles and parents relay their stories of those battles in the ruined Earth cities.

A sudden tightening came to Jet’s chest in that fraction of a second pause, a realization that she’d missed the real fight, that it had been over before she’d been born. All of the settlement kids felt that way to some degree, like they’d been born into the world after the war had already been lost... their future already negotiated and surrendered away.

“You’ve got a lot of heat headed your way...” the voice in her helmet told her, again sounding so real it was difficult to remember she was in a simulation. “...You still think you can find this command center for us? Relay back the coordinates?”

Jet nodded, feeling her muscles tense. Her voice was steady, though.

“Yeah. I can do it.”

“Those cullers reached you yet?”

“As we speak,” Jet muttered, her eyes trained upwards at the shifting patterns on the metal underbelly of the nearest of the same. The culler spanned a distance maybe twice the size of the Longhouse in the pits.

“Stay sharp,” the voice said. “We need those coordinates, and you’re the only one left in that area. We can’t get to you with back up, either... they’ve got force fields shutting down the docks...” The man grunted then, his voice a humorless smile. “...It’s the main reason the brass is listening to you now, Alpha-10. It looks like the lizards have something to protect down there after all...”

“Right,” she said. “How much time do I have?”

“Four hours,” the man confirmed. “Not a minute more. Base 2 out.”

Before Jet could do much more than nod, her headset went dead.

Four hours. So one long run then, a single target.

Fair enough.

Her eyes refocused briefly on the stretch of street in front of her, finding an old-looking freestanding clock in the middle of unmarked sidewalk, almost like a potted tree.

Steam came out of the clock’s top, expanding as a cloud in the cold, dry air.

Blinking at the out-of-place clock like it was something out of a fairy tale, Jet felt her mind click suddenly into sharp focus. She’d seen that clock before... only it hadn’t been steaming. Her pal, Everest, who knew old Vancouver like the back of his hand, showed it to her once, probably to impress her. He told her it used to steam, but that the mechanism stopped working, right around the same time that the clock’s hands stopped moving.

This wasn’t some random, make-believe Earth city fighting a losing battle against the invading Nirreth military.

Jet was back in Vancouver.

They’d sent her back home.

JET STOOD AGAINST the wall, panting, trying to wrap her head around the idea.

It crossed her mind to wonder if the game operators had done the Vancouver thing on purpose to screw with her head. Then she realized... of course they had. They wanted to know if she would crack. The realization clicked her back into a more clinical focus, back to that crystal clarity... only this time, stripped entirely of emotion.

As that happened, the map returned to the forefront of her mind, immediately giving Jet her bearings on the physical layout of the arena itself.

It also occurred to her that they might have given her help... VR help, that is.

She immediately felt over her person and found a map shoved into one side of her armored vest, covered in waterproof plastic and marked all over with different-colored lines. Still keeping her head and body shoved tightly into the alcove, she put the map directly under her eyes and spent a moment examining it... and memorizing it... so she wouldn’t need to look at it again.

The map itself was so straightforward, Jet wondered at first if she was reading it wrong.

She remembered the coded maps her uncle Draven had shown her, all the symbols and confusing lines, so that if any of them happened to get picked up, they wouldn’t be giving away key holdings or positions, much less more strategic targets or civilian settlements.

Staring at the map she held now, with its clear markings for the base and their last sightings of the mobile command center of the Nirreth, she found herself flipping it over a few times, looking for the real version. The only strange thing she saw on it at all were a number of symbols written by hand next to one of the target points. The only reason that was strange was that those symbols appeared to be in Nargili.

Why on Earth would the rebel humans use Nargili in their code?

Reminding herself that, one, this was a simulation and, two, this was her trial run in the Rings, she flipped the map back to the front, memorizing every marked spot for ammunition and gun caches along with all of the Nirreth holdings as well as all water boundaries and streets, especially those with underground tunnels she could use.

Then she stuffed it back into her vest.

She tried to decide if having the simulation in a city she knew would be an advantage or a liability.

In the end, she decided it was more likely to be a liability; if they didn’t get the architecture right in areas Jet knew well enough to get confused, or if they missed key details she was counting on, it might be enough to get her killed.

In many ways, the terrain landscape continued to be the critical point.

If she didn’t lose sight of that, it might help her bridge any gaps between reality, her memories of the real Vancouver, and the simulation.

Realizing she’d probably been standing there for too long already, at least as far as the crowded stadium and the Board members were concerned, Jet peered out from under the alcove at the culler ship, if only to get a good idea of its location.

Immediately, the spotlight swiveled to the shadowed doorway where Jet stood.

Seeing the tentacled lines begin to descend, Jet made a break for it, along with a split-second decision to veer right, in the direction where she knew a ladder lived, along with at least two of the hatches into the floor. Jet figured she could side-step triggering the latter as long as she didn’t get within a two or three foot radius of the hatches themselves.

As she thought all of this, she ran, all-out, under the building’s eaves.

The culler ship made only the barest exhale of sound, but Jet had been trained to listen for that sound since she learned how to crawl, so she knew it was pacing her over that same, narrow outcropping of roof. She also knew the lines that whipped through the air could likely slip under the eaves, but that they couldn’t go through it, not without employing the ship’s guns. Assuming they were following regular protocol, they’d want her alive... especially during the war, when the Nirreth were supposedly obsessed with gathering intelligence.

Back then, that included eating the humans they’d finished interrogating, at least if her aunt and uncle could be believed.

Connecting that idea briefly to Laksri in her head, Jet felt a little sick.

Shoving the image of him eating the dark red meat of a T-Rex out of her head, she fought her mind back to level.

Through all of that, she didn’t stop running.

She didn’t stop, in fact, until she came into sudden range of the lowest part of the ladder, which mapped to a fire escape up the side of a brick building. The fire escape, unlike most of those in real Vancouver, had a metal covering around it that should protect Jet from the culler, but also would leave her trapped if something waited for her on the other end... as something likely would. The covering itself had to be virtual-only, so she could risk jumping off the ladder anyway, but the sensors in the suit would make it hurt like hell, as if she’d really cracked through metal with enough force to break it.

The sensors might even tell her suit that she’d broken her spine... or both of her legs or arms... which would make it virtually (and literally) impossible to fight, even if in reality her body remained totally intact.

Jet made that mistake once, in one of her later practice sessions with Alice after she’d started using her memory of the track to plan out her moves. She’d found herself lying on the floor of the practice arena, paralyzed with pain, helpless while her virtual body was hacked to pieces by sword-wielding humans and then eaten by their dogs. The pain had been so bad, Jet couldn’t believe she wasn’t hurt in reality.

Alice stood over her through the whole thing, refusing to turn off the simulation.

Afterwards, she only informed Jet that if it had been the real Rings, it would have been worse.

The pain, that is.

Remembering again why she was here, Jet realized that she needed to get into a situation where she could win points, but not be killed, at least not right away. She’d already gone too long without a kill. A pro, no doubt, would have found the main run by now and started collecting points on the bad guys, whether lizards or cave people or dragons or stone age Nirreth wielding clubs... or modern-day Nirreth with sandblasters.

Thinking about this a second longer, Jet’s eyes roved to the hatch.

Going up meant being trapped... but if she released and killed whatever lived in that underground cage, would they give her the option to go down? After all, according to the map, her virtual allies suspected the Nirreth command center to be located underground... or else underwater. Either coincided with what her uncle had told her about the real war, as well.

Jet was guessing they’d put it in the Sound.

She was human, after all... the crowds would go crazy if they forced her to swim.

The more she thought about that, the more sense it made, too.

She needed to get closer to the water. The easiest way to do that would be to go down.

Therefore, when Jet got to the end of the covered stretch of sidewalk and within grabbing distance of the bottom of the ladder that led up into the brown-brick building, she hesitated.

After another long-seeming second of thought, she ran past the ladder to the manhole cover, throwing herself to the asphalt on her knees and feeling around for how to open it. Finally, she just used her fingers in the holes to pry it up, just like she would have done on a real street back home. Once she got the cover off, she climbed quickly to her feet, stepping back a few paces and unsheathing Black.

She held the sword up in a ready position, gripping the hilt tightly in both hands.

But nothing came out.

Jet stood there, a few seconds too long, not sure what she should do.

Then a blast of air from the descending culler ship decided things for her. It crossed Jet’s mind that if this had been real, she would already be too late... but she didn’t take the time to curse herself out for that, either.

Instead she lurched forward, fumbling her foot onto the first rung of the ladder.

She climbed rapidly down into the dark, trying to look down, but not enough to slow her descent. Once she got a foot or so past the lip of the tunnel, she felt over her helmet until she found the light on top, and switched it on. She tried to feel for when the image would shift around her, the VR turning her around so it would only seem like she had gone underground, when really, she would be climbing back up again, or simply stepping in place.

That shift never happened.

The illusion of climbing down was seamless.

Jet reached up at the last minute to jerk the manhole cover over to protect her exit as she disappeared into the round hole.