Chapter 16 #2
“Your wing,” I tell him, suddenly terrified of what will happen if he pushes himself through this course, or worse, what will happen if he doesn’t.
Dread fills me. My mouth goes completely dry. And then a flash of that out-of-control hormonal anger that has me seeing red brightens my eyes. Figuratively.
Well. We are surrounded by red magma, so, love that for me.
Zan’s pulling me along, my feet carrying me even when my mind seems to be twenty steps behind.
“Lily,” Zan says desperately. “I know this is a lot, but you have to focus.”
“I am fucking focused.”
He laughs, and it’s a raw sound that tugs at my heart. “There’s my female.”
The black rock in front of us abruptly falls away, leaving us staring at the sea of roiling magma beneath us.
I half expect a Hobbit to yeet itself off beside us.
“I think Ken needs to tone down the amount of Earth media he’s consuming,” I mutter.
“Focus, my sweet,” Zan tells me tightly.
The black rock beneath us shakes fiercely, so hard that I lose my grip on Zan, and he clings to me desperately.
“Oh shit!” someone screams, and I realize it’s me as Zan desperately tries to grip onto my hand, which is soaked and slippery with sweat.
“He’s separating us!” I yell, although it’s blindingly obvious to anyone that that’s exactly what Ken’s doing.
The two pillars of black lava rock Zan and I stand on split apart completely, and I rock forward as Zan tries to pull me.
“Stop!” I scream. “If you tug me, I might fall in!”
“I would never let you fall in,” he says.
But he does as I ask, letting go, his hand still outstretched toward me, even as our rocks move further apart.
He roars, a terrible sound that makes my heart hurt as he watches the rock I’m on float further away.
He flaps one wing, and I choke on a sob as I watch him try to spread the other out, but he can’t.
“Don’t hurt yourself!” I tell him, doing my best to keep my balance on the moving rock.
Ken appears before us, floating like an impish apparition just out of reach.
I’ve never wanted to commit murder before, and I’m not sure that murdering a hologram would count, but right now I would do anything to be able to do serious harm to Ken.
“You hurt my mate,” I tell him.
“And now we come to the emotional portion of our task.”
I try my hardest not to scream at him and rant and rave and simply bite the insides of my cheeks to keep myself in check.
I’m shaking all over, though, and it’s not from fear. It’s from straight up anger.
And truly, whatever the Draegon hormonal heat poison has going on has taken my whole PMDD rage to the next level.
If Ken thought this magma was hot, it ain’t got nothing on the way I feel inside.
And yet, a small part inside me tells me to wait, to play this smart.
I do my best to keep my balance on the shaky column of rock and keep my focus on Ken, who I know is planning something absolutely fucking vile.
“This portion of today’s entertainment is taken from an old human tradition known as Two Truths and a Lie,” Ken announces.
My breathing gets faster.
“And this will truly test what you have learned about your partner, which, considering the amount of time you’ve spent together, should be very easy… or will it?” he announces dramatically.
As soon as he’s finished speaking, three images appear before me.
The sound from the auditorium’s murder pit cuts off completely as the images begin to flicker to life.
The first image, furthest to the left, is baby Zan, no older than eight or nine.
A small child, and what looks to be an army barracks.
Well, as close to an army barracks as an alien species with wings can get, I suppose.
There’s a high platform, what would almost be a balcony attached to it, except there’s no railing whatsoever.
A full-grown Draegon leads him out onto the platform, ties a blindfold around his eyes, and pushes him off without any warning.
Little Zan free-falls, and I put a hand to my mouth, horrified at the staggering violence of the action.
The image cuts off, and the middle image begins to play.
Zan is slightly older, still blindfolded, assembling what looks to be a rifle of some sort as fast as he can.
The trainer behind him holds talons to his throat, and the threat’s implied.
The slightly older Zan doesn’t complete the task in time, and the instructor slashes across his face.
I’m horrified, absolutely stricken at what he’s seen and experienced.
Poor Zan.
This is sick.
I absolutely refuse to give Ken any emotional footage that he can use to splice together.
Zan’s life is his, and even if he did sign up for this, he didn’t sign up to have all of his childhood pain splashed across the screen, made into fictional drama.
This is real.
This isn’t some joke.
Ken can push me all he wants. He can show my deepest, darkest secrets. He can make fun of me, he can make a fool of me, but he cannot hurt Zan.
I won’t let him make us a spectacle, because what we have isn’t a spectacle.
Not at all.
It’s real.
The third scene begins to play, and I recognize this version of Zan, because this is the one that’s mine.
The white scar given to him across his face by his former military instructor, well-worn, older, massive compared to the younger versions of him, and deadly.
A comms tablet is held in front of him, and the angle of the scene changes slightly so that I can tell he’s signing a contract, a contract clearly labeled the Mated and Afraid reality television series.
A voice I recognize as the Roth who was somewhere in the audience asks Zan, “Are you ready to find your mate? Are you ready to have the love of your life?”
Zan smiles smugly and answers clearly, “Yes, absolutely.”
And I know the one that’s the lie immediately.
“It’s that one!” I scream, pointing to the third scenario. “That one’s the lie. Zan didn’t come here looking for a mate.”
Triumph races through me because I know I’m correct. I know I’m right about this, and it doesn’t matter to me that he didn’t join this wanting a mate at all.
It doesn’t bother me one bit, because I sure as hell didn’t either, and yet I ended up with one that was perfectly suited for me.
The screens disappear, the silence replaced by the horrific roar of the crowd and the bubbling, hissing of the magma.
A quick glance down tells me it’s closer than before, and whether the rock is sinking or the magma is rising it doesn’t matter, because both options are equally terrible.
I glance over to where Zan is standing on his black column of rock, clearly undecided between his three scenarios of mine, and I wonder briefly what it is he’s seeing.
Before fear takes the wheel, and I wonder if he knows me well enough to decide which of my memories are the truth and which is the lie.
Finally, Zan points at the middle option of his and says something, his mouth moving, but he’s too far away to make out. Whatever bubble of silence I was trapped in, he clearly is as well.
His rock shakes, and I scream in spite of myself as he registers the new noise of the crowd, clearly finishing his task at hand.
I want to ask him what he saw, what he picked, but there isn’t enough time before both of our columns begin moving forward.
With a harsh lurch that almost sends me flying off the rock, I crouch, hanging on with my fingernails to the black rock, grateful there’s at least enough texture that I can get a good handhold.
Our columns finally hit the next black embankment, and I practically leap to safety the minute it touches.
No sooner have I set foot onto the stable area than Zan scoops me up again, holding me close.
“You picked correctly,” he says.
“You picked correctly,” I say, holding him tight, burying my face in his shoulder.
I don’t know when Zan started to feel like home, but now that he is, I don’t want to let him go.
“I knew you didn’t come here for a mate,” I say playfully.
“I got one anyway,” he says with a grin.
“Come on,” I tell him. “I don’t know where Poppy and her partner are, but we have to hurry if we want to make it out.”
I feel selfish at the thought, because surely Poppy deserves to get out of here just as much as we do, and I hate the idea of leaving her behind.
But at this point, Zan is brutally injured, and I want us out of here, into the safety of Sueva as fast as we can get.
Pop, you’ll have to figure it out. She’s the one who got us into this mess anyway.
Not that she deserves this either. Not that this was exactly what she had planned.
“I’m a bitch,” I tell Zan, feeling horrible about it.
“Oh, if you’re a bitch, then I’m a bitch,” he says.
“You don’t know what that word means, do you?”
“No,” he tells me, shaking his head.
“That’s just perfect,” I tell him. “If I’m a bitch, you’re a bitch. Team motto.”
He nods in agreement. “Come on, bitch,” he says, nodding to the red-light strips glowing in front of us.
A laugh tears out of me, and I know the minute he figures out what bitch means he’s going to be furious he called me that. For some reason, just imagining that version of the future puts some pep in my step.
We jog over to the wall, Zan limping slightly, but I don’t say anything.
As dumb as it is, I’m worried that if I point it out it’ll make whatever pain he’s in worse, so I just note it and move as fast as I can to match his still impressive pace.
A slick jet-black wall rises in front of us, a narrow opening lit with red, clearly lighting the path Ken clearly wants us to take for the next obstacle.
Zan and I share a long look before he takes my hand, giving it a light squeeze. For the first time, the look in his eyes isn’t cocky or smug— it’s uneasy, like he’s recalculating something— but the thought flies out of my head as the ground beneath us begins to fall away.
Zan pulls me forward with a huge tug, and we step into the narrow opening together.