Page 24 of Alien Jeopardy (Mated & Afraid #1)
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Ellison
I stare at the ceiling, Rex snoring lightly beside me. Well, not exactly snoring, but doing that sort of deep, soft breathing that I’m hoping means he’s passed out because it’s better that one of us is well-rested than neither of us.
The room itself is pretty, relaxing in a spare, white linen kind of way. The bed is huge, and we can both easily fit on it, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the producers fully intended to force this issue.
Just another lovely dollop of fun on this whole adventure.
With him next to me, even without touching, it’s sent my entire libido into overdrive, and it’s taking every single ounce of my concentration not to roll over on top of him and see exactly what he’s packing.
The longer I’m in heat, the harder it is for me to remember that it’s probably a real bad idea to get down with him.
The sheet tangles around my feet as I flop over, doing my best to get some sleep.
The room is quiet besides his steady breathing, and even though I feel like I’ll never be able to sleep, I do.
I bolt upright, sucking such a huge amount of air that I choke on it. My heart hammers against my chest, sweat making the thin shirt stick under my boobs.
Nightmare.
One of those weird falling ones.
I glance over as Rex sits up, guilt swamping me.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” I whisper. “Just a bad dream.”
“No, I felt it too,” he says, his voice low. Dangerous.
“Felt what?” I ask.
Still, sitting like this, in a strange dark room, the fear from my nightmare or whatever woke me clings to my skin. I draw the sheet tighter around me.
“Something is wrong,” he says.
His arm circles around me, and I start to object as he draws me into him because doesn’t he know this will only make the heat worse for me?
The strangest thing happens, though, and I clamp my own arm around him. Sticking physically close to this huge alien is likely my best bet at surviving whatever is causing the ground to shake.
“Earthquake?” I squeak.
The last time I felt something like this was over a decade ago.
When the Roth invaded. It wasn’t an earthquake then—it was an all-out assault. Millions died. Our planet still hasn’t recovered.
Our population certainly hasn’t.
I squeeze my eyes together, like that will blot out the memories. The horror.
The walls rattle, and something nearby crashes to the floor. The room shakes, a rumbling, mechanical noise unlike anything I’ve heard coming from deep underneath us.
I press my face into his chest, and his wings cover me as he pulls me onto his lap.
“I have you. You’re safe, Ellison.” It’s a soft murmur into my hair, and for a half-second, I wonder how I’ve heard it at all over the roaring noise.
The sound stopped.
The shaking hasn’t.
“What is going on?” I ask, terrified. I wish I weren’t. I wish I were brave.
But this is too close to how it felt that night. How out of control everything was during it, and after.
How I haven’t felt in control since.
“This is part of the show, right?” I ask, finally opening my eyes.
Rex is staring down at me, orange eyes wide and volatile. “I do not know.”
“Attention, contestants.” A voice crackles out, sounding like it’s everywhere all at once. “I have been tracking you since your arrival. It has come to my attention that you are here to compete.”
“What?” I ask, nonplussed. It’s not the Roth Ayro’s voice. It’s not the human woman’s, either.
It doesn’t sound like a voice at all.
It sounds mechanical.
“It can’t be,” Rex says.
That’s ominous.
“I observe that some of you already have formed a hypothesis about who I am. Or should I say, what I am?” There’s an odd noise, and it sounds like a laugh track.
What. The. Fuck.
Rex’s lips form a thin line, and despite his obvious concern, his dingaling is doing interesting thingalings where I’m sitting.
FOCUS. I need Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson to come yell that at me, stat, because how the hell can a girl be thinking about sex at a time like this?
“I have caught up on the so-called reality dramas and contests of Earth and other worlds, and I have decided to render aid to your shoddy and laughable excuse of a show.”
The ground quivers again, and I sink my fingernails into Rex’s arm.
“I have you,” he tells me, but there’s a note of fury in his voice.
“And did you know,” the strange, tinny speaker continues, “that they intended to give all of you parcels of land on Sueva?”
I gasp, genuinely shocked by that, pleasure at the idea of having my own little slice of alien heaven?—
“I don’t think that’s very interesting. Yes, yes, they wanted to start a colony there, it’s very clear from all the comms that I’ve dug through over the last several cycles after they woke me up. But won’t it be so much more fun if you all fight to the death?”
My eyes go wide, and I clap a hand over my mouth.
“I’m not unromantic, however, so you won’t be forced to fight your current partners. We all love a romance arc, after all, don’t we? Especially the one who got all of her friends into this. I’m rooting for her to find love. A real underdog.”
Oh god. He means Poppy.
“I have deposited gear, weapons, and what remained of the rations from the space station after I took over several hundred years ago somewhere near where you are sleeping. Retrieving them won’t be easy, however, as I’ve also awoken the native fauna on this station’s surface.
I’ve also increased the signals to as much of space as I can, including the Draegon and Arco home planets.
Those water dwellers are strange, but they do love a good mate hunt.
It would be wrong of me to assist or hamper contestants, but I do love a good plot twist, so I absolutely will be.
Whoever makes it to my control center alive wins. I’ll be in touch!”
With that jaunty sign-off, the voice falls silent.
“What the hell is going on?” I ask. I’m so tense that if you slapped a blood pressure cuff on me, I’m pretty sure it would advise immediate hospitalization.
“I’ve heard about this. Everyone has. I always thought it was a story to scare children.”
“Not everyone,” I tell him, growing more anxious by the second.
His expression’s worried, his gaze fixed on some point in the distance.
“There was a space station—one of the first attempts at a cross-species colony. It was massive, the biggest ever built.” A pause long enough that I can hear my blood pounding in my ears.
“It was designed with a self-running, self-guided system, like nothing anyone had ever seen.”
“Self-running?” I repeat, not getting it.
He says something in his language, and I blink, my translation software not doing anything to help.
“It didn’t work.” I tap my head. “No translation.”
“Your species hasn’t created this yet, then.”
I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, so I clamp my lips shut and wait.
“A false brain. It could think for itself, make decisions for the betterment of the entire population of the station.” He shakes his head. “I do not know the term you would use.”
“Artificial intelligence,” I finally say, comprehension dawning.
A slow dawn, but a dawn nonetheless!
“More than that, but I suppose that is the general concept.” He nods, a grim set to his face. Outside, a far-off clamor begins, so different than the silence I’ve grown accustomed to. I swallow, feeling the need to get up, to do something—and yet making myself move proves impossible.
I’m terrified.
“For a few years, the station seemed to be paradise. It worked well. The systems ran how they were supposed to. The inhabitants were healthy, they worked together.”
I glance up at him, a muscle twitching in his jaw.
“Then it went dark. Completely dark. No contact was made, and when ships went out to investigate at the last known coordinates, there was nothing there. It was like it had vanished completely.”
I shouldn’t ask. I don’t want to know. I have a feeling I already know.
“What happened?”
He tilts his head, then holds a hand out, gesturing at nothing and everything at once. “The system made choices for the people there. Now it’s making choices for us.”
“You think we’re going to die?” It comes out in the smallest excuse for a whisper. Deep down, I know that’s what happened to the people on that space station. They’re dead. The AI killed them.
I wish I hadn’t asked it.
“No.” He sounds sure of himself. “I won’t let that happen.”
I want to believe him. I want to believe we’re going to be okay, that my friends are going to be okay.
My legs are trembling.
“It said we were going to have to fight each other. Those are my friends. I won’t do it. I don’t know how to fight, anyway.”
His face gets hard, and he tucks his arm back around me.
Leaning into him is natural and soothing, and right now, I’ll take any comfort I can get.
“You won’t have to. We are going to figure this out.”
No argument comes out, even though I want it to, because how can we figure this out? We’re sitting ducks. Worse than sitting ducks because we have nowhere to fly.
I don’t even have wings.