The Binding Games (The Mating Games #4)

1. Olivia

OLIVIA

" T en."

I wake up the way you wake up from a car crash — all at once, nothing gradual about it, the world arriving in a single violent rush of what and where and why does everything hurt?

My eyes snap open.

Glass. Six inches from my nose. Cold, smooth, faintly reflective — I can see myself in the curve of it, which is how I know my hair looks absolutely insane and that I'm still wearing the scrubs I put on this morning.

Or what I think was this morning. My sense of time has apparently taken the day off without filing the appropriate paperwork with my addled brain.

"Nine."

The voice is mechanical and comes from everywhere at once, which is the kind of design choice that says we want you to feel like there's no escape and honestly? Mission freaking accomplished.

I press both palms to the glass and take stock of my situation with the calm, rational energy of a woman who has talked down a combative drunk at three in the morning, restarted two hearts before breakfast, and once managed a waiting room of forty-seven people with a single functioning triage nurse and a broken coffee machine.

I am in a pod. A glass pod. It’s roughly the size of a generous closet or, in fact, my last apartment. The ceiling is chrome and covered in blinking lights that pulse in perfect rhythm with the countdown.

Countdown?

Someone designed this shithole. Someone actually sat down and thought: you know what this terrifying countdown needs? Ambiance.

"Eight."

I try the glass again. Push with both hands, then the heel of my palm, then my shoulder. It doesn't flex. Doesn't creak. Doesn't do anything except remain completely, infuriatingly glass-like.

I scan for a seam, a latch, a button, a lever, a polite fucking sign that says exit here — but there’s nothing. Just smooth curved walls and that smug, blinking ceiling.

Okay. Think. What’s the last thing I remember?

I was finishing a double shift. I was walking to my car, keys in hand, and there was someone in the parking garage — I heard something behind me, turned around — and then…

And then…?

Nothing.

Blank.

A gap where the rest of my evening should be.

"Seven."

Then the sound hits me. All at once. I must have missed it before due to the shock. Like it's been waiting politely for me to be ready. Well, I'm not ready. And it doesn't freaking care.

Roaring. That's the first thing. Deep, chest-rattling roaring that I feel in my back teeth.

Then a wet, guttural sound that I don't have vocabulary for and am actively choosing not to acquire.

Then something that might be laughing, if you define laughing very broadly, and then a rhythmic scraping that drags up my spine like —

I look.

Shit. I wish I didn’t look.

There are other pods.

Five of them, arranged in a ring around mine. I'm in the center, which is the spatial equivalent of being the only normal item on a very alarming bingo card. The pods are identical to mine except for their contents, and their contents are?—

Are…

Oh my Lord.

I press my hand over my mouth.

Not human.

Not even freaking close to human.

The one directly to my left is a wall of muscle and fury — something enormous, broad as a doorframe, covered in dark-plated skin like overlapping armor.

It’s throwing itself against the glass with the focused energy of something that has decided the glass is its personal enemy.

Every impact shudders through the floor beneath my feet.

It has four arms. Four! I don't know why I notice that before anything else, but I do: four arms , and all of them are currently trying to dismantle the laws of physics.

"Six."

To its left: one that's laughing. I can tell because its chest is shaking, its head is tipped back, and there’s something deeply, cosmically wrong about the sound that's coming out of it.

It's lean, longer-limbed than the others, with a face that's almost angular enough to be handsome if you squinted and adjusted your entire frame of reference for what handsome means.

It turns its head and looks directly at me through the glass.

I stop squinting.

"Five."

The third one hasn't moved from the wall of its pod.

It's just — standing there. Dragging the tips of its claws down the glass in one long, deliberate stroke.

Watching me watch it. There's a patience to it that I find significantly more alarming than all the throwing and roaring combined.

The patient ones are always worse. Every bride's mother has taught me that.

Fourth pod: teeth. That's genuinely my first, second, and third impression of whatever that thing is — it's all jaw, pulling back its lips to show me row after row of long, curved teeth that overlap each other.

Like something evolved specifically to make you reconsider every life choice that possibly led to this moment.

It lunges and I flinch back even though there's glass between us, even though I know there's glass between us, because some things bypass the rational brain entirely and go straight to the run part.

"Four."

And then there’s the fifth one.

I almost don't notice it at first because it isn't doing anything. No throwing, no laughing, no performing. It's simply standing at the center of its pod with its arms loose at its sides. And it is watching me. That's all. Just watching.

It's tall — they're all tall, this is apparently a brick shithouse requirement situation we’re in here — with a stillness to it that doesn't feel passive. It feels like the surface of very deep water. Like there's a great deal happening underneath that I can't see.

And its eyes are gold.

Not golden-brown, not amber, not hazel-in-the-right-light. Gold. The color of something that should be in a museum.

I decide immediately that it's the most terrifying one in the room and I'm never looking at it again.

"Three."

"Okay," I say out loud, because I've found that narrating helps me function when my brain is trying to emergency-exit through my ears. "Okay. You're in a glass pod. There are five aliens in other glass pods. There is a countdown. So what perfectly calm and reasonable thing can you do?"

I pause.

And scream at the top of my lungs and slam my fists against the glass. Fuck calm and reasonable! "Someone let me out! Hey! Whoever's running this, this — whatever this is — I would like to lodge a formal complaint!"

“Two.”

The countdown is not interested in my formal complaint.

The alien with four arms hits the glass so hard I feel it in my feet.

I spin around and look for something — a control panel, a release mechanism, anything that responds to human hands and human desperation — and find the same smooth, sealed, utterly indifferent surfaces I found thirty freaking seconds ago.

The chrome ceiling pulses. The lights blink. The countdown continues without regard for my feelings on the matter .

Beneath the pods, beyond the glass walls of whatever terminal room we're all trapped inside, I can see the sky.

Except it isn't sky. Not the sky I know.

It's a planet's surface, below us, close enough that I can make out the texture of it — dark rock, rivers of orange-red that move slowly, a massive column of fire and smoke rising from a central point. Even from up here I can see its huge.

A volcano.

A volcano the size of several city blocks, erupting in slow, continuous, catastrophic silence from this distance, spewing columns of molten rock into the atmosphere like it’s on a mission.

It is enormous. It is alive. None of your extinct muck.

It looks at nothing and no one because it doesn't need to — it simply is , immovable and indifferent and real in a way that I feel in my chest like a tuning fork.

That's when I understand, down in the part of me that bypasses logic entirely and just knows , that this isn't a breakdown. This isn't a stress response. This isn't me finally cracking after three years of other people's perfect days.

This is happening.

"One."

I pound the glass with both fists. I kick it.

I scream — actually scream, the full-throated kind I haven't done since grad school — and my voice bounces back at me in the sealed space and it doesn't matter.

Nothing I'm doing matters. The pod doesn't care.

The countdown doesn't care. The volcano below certainly doesn't give a shit.

The alien with gold eyes still hasn't moved. He’s still watching. What is he? A freaking monk? Like it already knows how this ends.

"One."

I close my eyes.

I have no idea why. My brain makes this decision without consulting me, which is exactly the kind of insubordination I'm going to address when I'm back somewhere with HR policies and a complaints process.

Because being in this situation, with that countdown, with these fine alien folks, can only get worse. There’s no up from here. Only down.

I think about my apartment. My cat, who will absolutely not notice I'm gone until her bowl is empty. The Kowalski bypass I was prepped to assist on tomorrow morning that someone is going to have to cover.

I think: I should have eaten a real breakfast.

I think: I should have taken a vacation.

I think: Please. Don’t do this to me.

"Launch."

The door beneath my pod slides back. The thing holding my pod in place lets go.

I begin to fall.

And the dark swallows me whole.

“Ho-ly shiiiiiiit!”

The pod drops.

Not metaphorically. Not in the romantic, stomach-lurching sense that people describe when they talk about falling in love or taking a leap of faith.

I mean I am in free fall. I am plummeting.

Through open space toward a platform far below that looks, from this altitude, roughly the size of a fucking postage stamp.

A postage stamp that's on fire.

"Descent initiated," the voice says, helpfully.

"I noticed!" I yell at the ceiling. And then belatedly add: “Asshole! ”

The ceiling doesn't respond. The ceiling is apparently a one-way conversational partner.