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“You would not dare.” Kaio glared at me, apparently thrown off-balance by the recent bonding ceremony. Gone was the lightly teasing monarch I’d met in his chamber, now replaced by…well, by exactly the kind of holier-than-thou jerk I would have expected him to be from the beginning.
“Want to bet? You need to be nicer to me, or you’ll be extraordinarily sorry.”
“Not for long,” he muttered. “We’ll both be dead before I have time to regret my life choices.”
But in his mind, he was running through the items in his supply bag.
“Wait,” I exclaimed. “What was that? Some kind of element-resistant fabric?”
“It’s a therma-cloth cloak. Designed to ward off both heat and cold.”
“That’ll work. I can cut it into strips and wrap my feet with it until we find something better.”
The look he gave me was pure outrage. “We might need that cloak later in the game.”
“If I break my ankle trying to climb around in this horrendous landscape, it won’t matter what happens later in the game. We won’t make it that far—we won’t, as you so eloquently put it, live long enough to regret our life choices.”
He heaved a sigh, but he opened the pack and pulled out a gorgeous cloak that shimmered purple and green.
“Is there any kind of knife in there, too?”
Without a word, Kaio pulled a blade out of the pack—the equivalent of an alien Bowie knife, giant, serrated, and slightly curved. He held it out to me, and I snatched it from his hand as quickly as I could without touching him, then began slicing the beautiful cloak into strips. I had to admit, I felt a twinge of regret as I did it—but as soon as Kaio shot me a triumphant glance, I pushed down the regret and focused on how much I needed to protect my feet.
There wasn’t really room in my samples case for my heels, so I dumped out about half the diet pills, leaving the cardboard and plastic blister packs under a couple of rocks.
If I had a chance, I’d come back and grab them.
Clark, my supervisor at Novaguard—assuming he’d actually survived the employee purge after the merger—would be furious if I came home without them.
You’re never going home.
For the first time since we had been bound together, I wasn’t sure if the thoughts in my mind were Kaio’s or my own.
But whoever it was, I feared they were right.
* * *
As it turned out,creating makeshift shoes out of fabric strips? Not as simple as you might assume.
But eventually, I had several layers tied around my feet. They weren’t what I’d call comfortable. But at least I wasn’t quite so likely to trip and break my neck trudging across the landscape—or down into that creepy fucking canyon.
“Okay. I’m ready.”
“Very well,” Kaio said solemnly. “Remember, you will need to avoid the falavon mist and the clakor gluttonvines. As I’m sure you know, they are poisonous to almost all carbon-based life.”
As he was sure I knew? I didn’t know anything about alien planets.
Kaio rolled his eyes. “Of course you don’t. I forget—Magnum T. Bloodworm has started pulling human women from earlier in your planet’s timeline.”
“Earlier in my timeline? What does that mean?”
He gave a careless shrug. “As I understand it, you originated about two hundred Earth years ago on your planet.”
My stomach lurched. “Two hundred years? I’ve been brought into the future? This is the future?” I glanced around at the terrifying landscape, then back up at the frightening alien male I had been paired with. “Why would he do that?”
“Apparently not enough human women have been willing to volunteer to participate in the Galactic Gladiator Games. Magnum does research to discover names of people in your history—your present back then, I suppose—and takes those who are listed as having gone missing and who were never found.”
I reeled at the implications.
