Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen

Nina

W e pile into the elevator. Reke breaks Ney's pain collar then fixes his attention on working the touch screen. Venn and Ney watch each other wearily, each with their back to a wall, half standing, half propped up. Our reflections mirror the tension in the elevator and in our bodies.

I want to bury my face in my hands, like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. Instead, I force myself to watch the screen set in the elevator doors, hunting for any clue as to what our next obstacle might be.

Our faces share the limelight with multiple camera angles of the Hov bodies littering the upstairs corridor and the dead gladiators we left in the basement, and I decide that whoever is in charge of film production probably deserves a pay rise. The quality is nothing to be sneered at, which is a thought that leads me down the rather distracted path of wondering if the Hov go to university—probably graduating with masters in torture, diplomas of digital media, PhDs in alien abduction.

Reke's tail flicks, the tip brushing against my jeans and breaking my frazzled daydream.

"Do you think they'll send more gladiators after us?" I ask Ney.

"You should not have goaded the cameras," is her only answer. "If we fail at this, we will not get a second chance. They will toss us into the Arena with the Karik, and our bodies will be jettisoned."

"I suppose you think we can escape with nobody noticing, when the entire space station is filled with more cameras and screens than … than … " I splutter, unable to think of an appropriate comparison. "Like Big Brother . The only way to ensure we have any sort of chance at success is if the Hov are making a profit on the production."

"My brother was not—" Ney begins, predictably lost in translation. Abruptly, she snaps her mouth shut and crosses all four arms over her chest, leaving me wondering what her life was like before the Arena. Maybe she's like Venn and I, mourning a family we'll probably never see again.

A wave of all-consuming homesickness plows through me, and I grit my teeth to stop the sudden onslaught of threatening tears. Now is absolutely not the time to be thinking of Grandma, and I step closer to Reke, catching his flicking tail in my hand and letting it fall lightly through my grasp.

He bestows on me a heavy-lidded look before returning his attention to the touch screen by the doors. His shoulders are hunched, and when I step up beside him, he loops an arm around my waist and pulls me against his side. I get the distinct feeling he's trying to block the screen from the overhead cameras.

"Reke?"

He presses a claw to the screen, touching an option that I can't read, as I resolutely ignore the bloodied prints he's leaving smeared over the glass. The screen doesn't change with his touch; the button he's pressing doesn't highlight to suggest it's letting him select it.

"But the elevator's rising," I whisper.

"Not because of me." He rubs his cheeks against mine, his breathy whisper hot on my ear. "The Hov must be controlling it."

"Where are they sending us?"

He doesn't answer. Clearly he doesn't know.

I glance sideways. The screen is now showing a sweeping view of the stadium. Patrons are leaning forward, bringing themselves closer to the heavy wall which encompasses the battlefield and which sports the screens with all our faces emblazoned across them. As they spot themselves, they point and nudge their companions. Others scream and shout, although there are no speakers in the elevator for us to hear them.

Hov guards are walking up and down the aisles in groups of twos and threes, the bright green of their skin making them easily distinguishable even among the swell of countless other aliens. They're holding what look like small rectangular boxes, probably payment terminals.

Sure enough, gathered around each group of Hov guards is a line of patrons, each pushing and shoving each other, trying to reach the front. When they do, they touch a card to a terminal.

I glance toward the other screen, showing the lists. The long numbers are scrolling so fast it's a wonder anyone can keep up.

Then the double doors open, and my mouth drops open. Before us is the largest room I've ever seen. It's some sort of hangar, but instead of airplanes and helicopters, there are spaceships, all parked in two neat rows, with plenty of space around each ship.

Stepping into the hangar, our footsteps are somehow muffled so that our presence hardly makes any impact on the massive space around us.

Ney races for the closest spaceship, Venn staggering behind. The ship's a small thing about the size of a car except that it looks a little like a fat bird—if you squint your eyes and imagine the cockpit at the front as being the bird's head, and the wings and tail as being … well, the bird's wings and tail.

She climbs up the side, using the edge of the wing as a foothold, and reaches into the open cockpit. "This one has a biometric lock. It will not respond to me." And she jumps down, landing heavily on her feet. With a wince, she ignores what must have been a painful amount of pressure on her ankles and knees and proceeds to the next ship, searching for one we can steal.

"Surely there's a key somewhere around here?" I skate my way down the center of the hangar, for once using the smooth floor to my advantage to gain speed as I search for signs of a control room—delusionally hoping that maybe someone's hung an Earth-style hook on the back of the door with a set of keys.

Undoubtedly, the ships are like the guns—they know we're not Hov.

That's when all the walls turn on, flickering into life. What I'd taken for white and boring paneling is more screens. Because of course they are.

The screens are packed one on top of the other, floor to ceiling. Maybe a thousand of them. Possibly a hundred thousand, stretching farther than I can see into the distance. They alternate footage in a checkerboard pattern. Every second screen shows the four of us in the hangar, Venn and Ney moving haltingly from ship to ship, searching for something suitable we might be able to hijack. Reke is crouched in front of the closed elevator doors, acting as our sentry.

Every other screen shows another hypogeum. The cage doors are open, and the cages themselves are cycling round. As one gladiator steps out of their cage, the cage rotates, freeing another one. I can't count how many there are. Twenty? Thirty?

I flip my finger at the closest camera and follow Venn. Even exhausted, he's moving faster than me, like he's running on adrenaline, while I'm running on panic.

Grasping the wing of the closest ship, I haul myself up, copying what I'd seen Ney do. The cockpit is not so dissimilar to how I imagine a fighter jet might look, meaning I've no idea what I'm looking at. It's got a transparent covering made of something that might be glass but that sounds like plastic. Thankfully, the covering is open, as if waiting for the pilot to climb inside, and my stomach lurches as I consider the very real possibility that all the spaceships in this hangar might be single-person ships, because there's no fucking way I can fly one of these things. I can't even drive a car; just the thought of learning brings back memories of the crash that killed my parents.

And Reke. He wouldn't know how to fly, either.

I jab at the blank screen and press random buttons with fingers that feel like they're blocks of ice. Of course nothing happens.

"Hello? Wake up!" I demand, but it isn't voice activated, at least not to my voice.

Ney had said something about a bio … a bio-something lock, but I can't see anywhere it might accept a fingerprint or an eye scan, and after more searching I can't find a good old-fashioned keyhole like what a normal person would expect!

A glance toward the wall confirms the second wave of gladiators are in the glass-walled elevator. I let out a shuddering breath as it occurs to me that they won't all be able to fit in the elevator and will have to come down here in smaller groups.

I recognize two as being the women with the spikes down their arms who'd wanted me to dish the gossip on Reke. They've got their heads bowed toward each other and are whispering—planning, perhaps. How to kill Reke? Or how not to get killed by Reke?

And what's stopping all the gladiators, when they get down here to the hangar from stealing ships of their own? Well, the bio-something lock would stop them. But maybe I can distract them from attacking with the idea of escaping. Maybe Reke could offer to break their pain collars.

I scramble back down, almost lose my balance and continue along the line of identical spaceships. I hardly know what I'm searching for and instead return to my idea of a possible control room. Perhaps we can capture a Hov guard and force them to unlock the spaceships for us.

"I have found the Freighters." Venn's voice is muffled, like he's speaking into a pillow, followed by dampened footfalls as Ney and I run toward him.

Thank the fuck for Freighters. They're several sizes larger, more like double-decker buses than single-person cars, with a cockpit that's clearly designed for two or more pilots. Venn interlocks his fingers, and Ney steps onto the seat of his joined hands to give herself a boost up.

Venn's shaking, and he's definitely paler than usual, the map of scars across his skin in stark contrast.

"Are you okay?" I don't even try to stop myself asking, even though I know the answer. He wraps an arm around my shoulders, settling some of his weight on me, more, I suspect, than he realizes. And I loop an arm around his waist, pressing as close as I can get to him, wishing there was some way I could hide from the world within the circle of his arms.

Almost at once, my legs ache, and I clench my teeth to keep from grunting with the effort of keeping Venn upright. Clearly, I don't do a good enough job at disguising my discomfort, for he grabs hold of the ship's wing overhead and hauls himself straight.

"No." I protest.

"This one!" Ney sticks her head and shoulders over the side of the ship. "This one is not locked."

"Get in," Venn commands, right as I say, "I'll get Reke."

"No, Nina." He makes as if to interlock his fingers again, clearly intending to lift me into the cockpit, but I back away, shaking my head.

"Get in." I use my most stern nurse's voice. "I'm getting Reke."

"Come on!" Ney reaches down with two arms, using her other two to brace herself. Although I doubt she's strong enough to lift Venn, I have to believe that the two of them can manage, at least until I've collected Reke.

"Reke!" Pushing against the ship, I propel myself forward with enough momentum that I'm covering the distance like I'm gliding across ice. "We've got a ship!"

The room swallows my shout, and as my glide slows, I catch sight of the screens again. They're all showing the same thing now—the elevator doors opening and the second wave of gladiators streaming into the hangar.

"Fuck!" I land on my ass with a jolt that jars my teeth. On the screens, I watch Reke launch himself at the closest gladiator, burying his claws into their neck. Dark blood like ink spills across the white floor, but already Reke is leaping toward another.

Everything's deadly quiet; and I look toward the elevator, seeing nothing but a long stretch of hangar between me and it.

On screen, Reke collides with Vlet, who snaps his crocodilian jaw at Reke's throat, missing by a hair's breadth.

"Nina, you fell." Reke pulls me to my feet, a hand on my elbow.

"What the fuck?" I jerk back, staring between the Reke standing in front of me to the Reke splashed across thousands of screens, his claws scrabbling to find a weakness in Vlet's exoskeleton. "Oh my God, it's not real." I throw my arms around his neck, as if trying to prove by touch what my eyes are telling me. "But how's that even possible?"

He wraps his arms around me too, one cheek pressed to my cheek, his skin comfortingly warm after the still-cold touch of Venn and my freezing shock. Watching over his shoulder, I can't stop staring at the screens. I can see myself now. And Venn and Ney.

The screen version of me is holding onto Venn's arms, which are stretched over and above his head, and I'm dragging his limp body away from Reke and the fighting. A streak of all-too realistic blood coats the floor behind him as though he'd been stabbed. Or gutted.

What the fuck is happening?!

Only when Reke nips lightly at my earlobe, do I realize I'm digging my fingers into the backs of his shoulders, holding onto him so tightly we might have merged our bodies, like those two career gladiators.

"The Hov are lying," he says, obviously watching the screens over my shoulder.

"It's creepy." Deep fakes is what I think they're called back on Earth, when someone uses AI to create an entirely real looking but fake version of a person doing something the real-life person might never do. "And why bother? What's the point? Are they trying to make the fight appear more exciting than it really is for the patrons?"

We watch as Fake Reke beheads another gladiator. Blood splatters his chest, and the fake dead alien falls to the ground, her head slipping along the smooth floor and coming to rest under the stomach of the spaceship.

I stare at Fake Nina now kneeling beside Venn. My hands are pressed to his chest and I'm delivering CPR, just like I did back at the banquet a … few days ago? A week ago?

Fake Nina is looking suspiciously less rumpled than me, with considerably less knotted hair and shallower dark circles surrounding her eyes. She might have been me from a week ago, before the Hov sent the three of us into the Arena, before Venn nearly died and the three of us were separated.

Then again, maybe she is me from a week ago, interposed onto the backdrop of the hangar and the fake fight.

Why?

The roar of an engine sounds as if from a great distance. Ney must have gotten Venn into the Freighter.

Reluctantly, I break the hug and step away from Reke. There's blood clotted in his velvet fur, and I imagine him painting the shape of his embrace across the back of my sweater with that blood, leaving behind the imprint of where his arms had held me.

"The Hov have to want us to escape, otherwise it would cost them a fortune, paying lost bets," I reason. "So they're using deep fakes to pretend to the patrons that they tried harder to stop us from leaving than they really did," I speculate. "To help make everything more dramatic? To help make the fact that we're escaping and that the patrons are losing a shit ton of money more palatable?" Because the Hov are worried that Reke might really die if they kept sending gladiators after us? He came so close to being strangled, after all, and the thought makes me want to hug him again.

On screen, Fake Venn sucks in a lungful of air and sits bolt upright. Fake Reke kills more gladiators. Fake Ney continues her search for a spaceship to steal. Fake Nina pulls a recently revived Venn to his feet.

"They are leaving," says Reke, gesturing to the screens, and I hear the echo of my bewilderment in his words. " We are leaving the Arena."

"Yeah." My head's pounding with the beginning of a headache. I'm dehydrated, exhausted and absolutely in shock. But I'm determined that, whatever other horrors are probably already heading our way, I'll treasure this moment forever. "We are leaving."

He stares at me with eyes so wide I could drown in them, one gold and one the color of the sky on a clear day, a sky he's never seen.

"Come on, my sweetheart. If we don't hurry, I can't guarantee Ney won't leave without us." I force a smile at my terrible attempt at a this is a joke, but it might actually happen if we leave her waiting much longer wisecrack, but Reke growls low in his throat.

Picking me up without warning, he folds me over one shoulder so that I'm dangling headfirst down his back. Considering we're practically the same height, I find my face interestingly close to his beautiful and naked ass, but before I can take full advantage of such a situation, he breaks into a sprint for the departing Freighter.