5. Olivia #2
"No." Almost conversational. "No, I don't think so, little one."
Then Varketh is there.
He goes for my other arm and pulls. Suddenly I'm between them, and the painful pulling begins.
The pain in my shoulders ratchets up white-hot.
I can feel my joints screaming, the deep stretch of tendons and ligaments doing things they were absolutely not designed to do.
I clench my teeth against the sound in my throat because I refuse to even give them that.
I will not, even as my arms feel like they belong to someone else.
"You're going to pull her apart!" Varketh snaps .
"Then let go!" Khaedren growls.
"You let go."
Neither of them does.
I scream. It cracks in the middle and I hate the sound of it, hate what it hands them, but the pain has moved past the place where pride can hold it back.
The stretch in my shoulders has become too much, a warning that goes beyond pain into something more serious, the kind of signal that means permanent.
They’re going to rip me apart!
Then Khaedren's fist swings.
Not at me. At Varketh's shoulder — impulsive, hard, the animal winning over the calculation.
Varketh staggers, causing both grips to release at once. I hit the stone for the third time today, palms first. Same scraped skin, new sting.
I don't wait.
I get low and get moving. As behind me the sound of them colliding — actually colliding, with intent, all the antagonism between them finally given permission — travels through the platform floor and into my hands and knees. A deep seismic concussion.
The volcano answers it from below, or maybe that's coincidence. Maybe the timing is just terrible, which seems about on brand for this place.
I run two steps toward the corridor.
I stop.
The relic is right there.
Thirty feet, maybe forty. Glowing in its niche with that deep, rhythmic pulse that I've been not-looking-at since we landed on this damn platform.
I know what it requires. Two people. A male and the female at the center of the Games.
Consent. I know the ritual and I know what activation looks like and I know, with complete certainty, that the only male I will ever consent with is currently in his pod somewhere above me with red hands and bloodshot eyes.
The relic without him means nothing.
I look back at the two aliens tearing into each other, at the platform that is shrinking — measurably smaller than it was even five minutes ago — at the ash falling from an orange-red sky, and I think:
I need to get out of here. I need time to think. I need ? —
"Oh no you don't."
Khaedren's voice. Right behind me.
I didn't even hear him move.
His hand closes around my collar and I'm hauled back, feet dragging. Varketh steps into my path from the other side with the satisfaction of someone closing a door.
"She stays," Varketh says.
"She stays," Khaedren agrees.
And they return to the fight.
And I return to trying to escape.
Every gap between them, I try it. Every time their focus narrows down to each other — a lock, a throw, a sustained grapple that pulls them both sideways — I move, low and fast, angling for the exit. And every time, one of them catches me.
Sometimes deliberate — a hand shooting out to snag my wrist without looking, dragging me back the way you drag a wayward child.
Sometimes careless — an elbow during a swing that clips the side of my head, a foot that sends me stumbling as they shift position.
I am furniture. An object they won't let leave the room but aren't interested in right now.
The ground shudders.
The volcano is building toward something new.
I can feel it changing in the soles of my feet — a deepening rhythm, a new urgency in the rumble, the platform itself trembling with a frequency it wasn't trembling at before.
The lava channels at the edges have risen.
The platform is contracting, slowly, inexorably, the magma reclaiming the stone one yard at a time.
I make another run. Varketh catches me around the waist without breaking eye contact with Khaedren, lifts me completely clear of the platform, and deposits me a yard to his left with zero visible effort.
"Stay," he says.
Like a dog.
And the fight goes on.
It is evenly matched, and that is its own particular horror.
I've watched Kaelor fight and it's clean — efficient, precise, problem-solving made physical.
He identifies the vulnerability, he closes, he ends it.
This is nothing like that. This is two creatures of equal mass and equal brutality finding, over and over, that the damage they're doing won't take.
Every blow that should finish something lands and gets answered. Every stagger is temporary.
Blood splatters the stone.
Dark and heavy, too thick for human blood, dropping in slow steady falls that the ash is already graying at the edges.
The sounds are relentless: the crack of bone on bone, the grunt of impact absorbed, the wet compression of something not meant to yield but yielding anyway.
Varketh drives his knee into Khaedren's midsection and Khaedren folds forward.
He doesn't go down, driving his own elbow up into Varketh's chin with enough force that I hear Varketh's teeth crack together from three yards away.
They're destroying each other .
And they won't stop because one of them gets me when it's over.
The platform shudders again, deep and long. A fresh curtain of ash falls from the sky. Beyond the platform's edge, a massive elbow of rock detaches from the volcano's flank and hits the magma with a sound like a building collapsing.
I try the gap on the left.
Khaedren catches my wrist mid-swing, barely interrupting the trajectory of the punch he's throwing with his other hand. He slings me backward without looking. I hit the stone and roll. I come up already moving… but there's nowhere to go.
He's weakening. I can see it — Khaedren's movements have gone fractionally imprecise, something uncoordinated in the sequencing that wasn't there before.
His stance has widened. Blood runs freely from above his brow ridge in a steady dark stream.
He's compensating, overreaching, his strikes getting harder but less accurate, the desperation of someone who can feel the window closing.
Varketh sees it. Capitalizes.
Something settles in his face. Stops being reactive and becomes directed. He plants his feet and the next exchange is completely different — he stops trading and starts closing out, absorbing three of Khaedren's blows straight to the chest without retreating, one step forward with every hit.
Khaedren is swinging harder now, faster, with the frantic energy of someone who knows the math is resolving against them.
Varketh's hands find Khaedren's head.
One on each side of the skull. Those enormous hands, fingers splayed and pressing inward with a deliberate, graduated force. Not crushing yet. Just — enclosing. The preliminary note of something terrible about to happen .
Khaedren's hands go to Varketh's wrists.
Pulling with everything he has left. I can see the muscles in his arms standing out, can see the shaking of the effort. But Varketh's wrists do not move. Not a fraction. Not enough to matter.
Khaedren screams.
It is not a dignified sound. It is the full, unconstrained terror of a creature that understands exactly what is about to happen and has completely run out of ways to prevent it. Raw and enormous, filling the chamber, bouncing off every surface.
His legs are still moving — kicking, finding nothing — his body still trying to solve the problem of those hands, still generating solutions, still refusing to process that there aren't any.
I turn away.
I press my hands over my ears and I close my eyes and I clench my jaw and I do not make a sound, because I have used up my screaming and there's nothing left but this — the backs of my own eyelids, the warmth of the stone through my boots, the volcano a rumbling bass note playing underneath it all.
The sound happens anyway.
Muffled. Changed by my hands. Still completely, entirely clear.
A wet, catastrophic percussion that I will hear for the rest of my life.
Then silence.
Then something heavy hitting the stone.
Then footsteps. Unhurried.
Then the soft, methodical sound of hands being wiped clean on fabric.
I open my eyes .
I don't mean to. I mean to keep them shut. My body decides otherwise.
Varketh is two yards from me. Crouched slightly, wiping his hands on the hem of what was Khaedren's garment, thorough and careful. The motion of someone who has done this many times before.
His chest rises and falls with exertion but his face is calm — not satisfied, not victorious, just finished.
Like someone who has completed a necessary task.
There is dark blood on his forearms and across his chest. He wipes his hands with the same methodical attention you'd give to any tool after use.
I look at the ash on the stone. I focus on the lava rising at the platform's edges, slow and indifferent.
I look at the sky above, churning orange-red, dropping debris in slow burning arcs.
I count my breaths and do not look at the floor behind Varketh.
And I especially do not think about the sound.
I look up.
And Varketh is already looking at me.
The expression on his face is not complicated. It's the simplest thing in the world, — want and desire, stripped down to their elements, nothing softening either of them. His eyes move over me with a hunger that has been waiting impatiently ever since this Mating Game began.
He's going to mate with me.
My legs push me upright before my brain catches up. The trembling is real — deep muscular tremor, adrenaline and shock and the accumulated toll of this round — and when I take a step back they almost don't hold me, almost buckle and give way.
Varketh starts toward me .
And once more, because I have no other weapon at my disposal, I run.