Octavia Girl

Chapter 7

Boxing the Earpiece

Spikay Two was mostly undeveloped, except for a few cities. The city they were going to was called Vikla, and it looked like an industrial park, except for the market streets where people sold things outdoors. Which was weird because it didn’t stop raining.

Jenna had arranged to be there the day before the boxing match. She and Crimp got a hotel room that surprised both of them when they entered because it was cleaner and nicer than the pictures Ixy had provided of the hotel. It was the nicest she could find in Vikla, but it was still aging. What was once white was now yellow and what was once yellow was now brown.

Jenna slept on the bed and Crimp slept on the couch. They didn’t go out to eat. Smoothie had sent them with meal replacements and told them firmly that they were not to eat anything. Any foreign would surely mess with their digestion. They’d be puking or crying on the toilet if they ate a single bite of anything.

When they woke up in the morning, Jenna put on the brimmed knit hat Misha had given her to cover her crown and she and Crimp went to look at the market. Jenna bought a belt with a fabulous silver buckle at one of the stands right off the bat. It made her feel like a local, even though she didn’t look anything like a local.

She and Crimp stood out like sore thumbs. Crimp had pink hair and Jenna had a streak of pink that had grown out so much since that fateful day when Excelyn had fed her the liplo fruit. It was visible even with her hat on.

At Jenna’s insistence, Crimp bought a hat and covered her hair too. It instantly made them look more normal.

Everyone they saw looked like they were covered in dust, like everyone had been left on a shelf. Except that it rained constantly. It made no sense.

When night came, the hazy streets came alive with neon. There were neon signs of all colors advertising everything. Drinks this way. Sex that way. Entertainment up here. Drugs down there.

“This is kind of a low-brow place, eh?” Jenna commented.

“Where did you think we were going to watch bare-knuckle boxing? The really big casinos have fights in their arenas, but those are far from this system and the guys who fight are millionaires several times over. Besides, Sardius would be a fool to send you anywhere where you could be recognized. A dusty mothball like this place is perfect. Everyone thinks you’re a whore anyway,” Crimp sniffed.

“Do they?” Jenna asked.

“Oh, they think we’re both whores. Don’t let it get under your skin. It’s better for them to think that than anything else. Though I am surprised no one has tried to hire you. They must think your rates are too rich for their blood.”

Jenna nodded, eager to change the subject. “There’s one thing I don’t get. If Sardius could send me a package, why not include the earpiece in that package?”

“I think it’s because he’s going to be here and he wants to surprise you,” Crimp replied.

Jenna looked around the street on the way to the boxing arena. She hadn’t dared to hope for that. Slowly, quietly, she said to Crimp, “I don’t know what he looks like.”

Crimp’s face became a mangled jungle of annoyed lines. “You might have mentioned that before. Let’s see if we can figure out who he is by piecing together what you do know about him. What race is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was your personal assistant. Would you recognize his voice if you heard it?” Crimp asked, vexed to her collarbone.

“I’m not sure. Sometimes I wondered if he was using digital enhancements to make himself sound better. I don’t know if I would recognize his voice.”

Crimp stopped. “Wait. You don’t know anything about him, do you?”

“Not really,” Jenna said hopelessly.

Crimp didn’t blame Jenna. Instead, she rolled her left shoulder like she needed a good stretch and said, “This match should be interesting. I wonder if we’ll find him.”

“These people you work for are incredible. They set you up with someone who gets to keep all their info private when everything about you is public. We need to change the system, Jenna.”

“I could have found out more about him if I hadn’t been so busy… or self-obsessed,” Jenna finished without Crimp needing to say it for her.

Crimp glanced at her. It was the perfect time to take a dig at her, but Crimp didn’t. Instead, she moved them along and continued doing arm stretches all the way into the arena. They presented their tickets at the counter and got their hands stamped.

“Third row, numbers six and seven. Don’t mess it up,” the ticket master ordered.

They stepped in.

“This place is heckin nasty,” Crimp said with a huge grin plastered to her face. “I thought I’d never see another place like this in all my life. I love this. How did I land a job where I get to hang out with respectable beauty queens and come to places like this? I can’t believe you’re paying me.”

Actually, both Excelyn and Jenna were paying her for her services for that trip.

Together, they found their seats and sat down.

“Did you read up on our fighters?” Crimp asked.

“Yeah. I didn’t know there was such a thing as an ogre from outer space, but I mostly read about the other fighter, Ryatt.”

“He’s hot, eh?”

“Yeah, he is,” Jenna confessed. “It’s because he’s a calcumicas.”

“Shh… don’t say words like that here. They’ll kill ya. They are not politically correct here. Say boneman.”

“Boneman,” Jenna said obediently before whispering under her breath, “Excelyn told me it was the other way around.”

“Officially, she’s right, but It’s fine. The tough types like it. Some races get offended by their snarky nickname, but the bonemen like it. It turns them on… or something.” Crimp offered a wicked little grin. “Why were you so interested in Ryatt, the Gambler?”

“I was sort of hoping that Sardius was the same race as him.”

“Makes sense,” Crimp said, having to really speak up to be heard over the rapidly increasing crowd. “Who wouldn’t want a man with a body like that?”

Jenna could not tell Crimp that the reason she hoped Sardius was the same race had nothing to do with Ryatt’s rampantly obvious sexual appeal. It was because the bonemen, like cockroaches and fruit flies, were less affected by radiation than other Adamis. Even if Sardius died in the prison riot, Jenna still hoped he was a boneman because he would have been less sick during his time in the Xypher Zone. She had studied what happened to the people there from horrible chemical burns on their skin to their insides wanting to be on their outsides. Jenna didn’t want any of that for Sardius. Maybe he was a boneman so he didn’t have those problems… or maybe he didn’t complain.

The fight was about to start and the crowd was getting wilder. The MC appeared above the stage. Jenna had been expecting the MC to be a man in a cheap tux talking into a microphone. Instead, an Octavian was lowered in a fishbowl from the ceiling. He pulled himself out of the bowl and placed two of his tentacles like elbows over the edge of the bowl, he began his announcements.

“Tonight, two fierce fighters are going to take the ring. The Gypsy Ogre versus Ryatt, the Gambler. Our Gypsy has been all over the universe. He’s never lost a match to anyone other than another ogre. He smashed the Hyper Bastion. He ate the Forton Battleship. He bit the head off the Mighty Rocket! Now…” the MC paused for emphasis. “What will he do to the boneman, Ryatt, the Gambler?”

A curtain on the other side of the arena opened and the green-skinned ogre came out. He looked like the personification of the action figures Jenna had seen as a child. He had a large jaw and an underbite. His skin was slightly mottled, like the back of a frog, and he wore a pair of black briefs so shiny they looked like they were made of a black garbage bag. It was every bit as cheesy as Jenna remembered wrestling being when she was a kid and she watched whatever was on TV.

“Do you think this is choreographed?” Jenna hissed to Crimp.

“No. I think these boys are going to get bloodied up. That’s why I’m here.”

Jenna stared at her.

“Oh, and to protect you. I’m here to protect you,” Crimp amended, but her eyes were already moving back to the stage as she finished her thought with the words, “or whatever.”

The MC continued. “Ryatt, the Gambler, really lives up to his name. Since his debut three months ago, he has fought Reptilemen and won. He’s fought Scorpionmen and won. He’s fought other Bonemen and won. Tonight he faces an opponent in a heavyweight class when he’s only a mid-weight fighter. It’s a gamble, but that’s what he does!”

The spotlight went up the aisle closest to Jenna and Crimp. Jenna could not believe what she was seeing. The ogre had come out of his side with a robe over his shoulders that he had promptly dropped to show his imposing physique. Ryatt came out like he was an ordinary guy, dressed for a night out. He wore a black collared shirt, a long tailored coat, black trousers, and heavy boots. The front of his hair was spiked and blond, while the back was cedar brown. That was how he had looked in his promotional pictures, but Jenna hadn’t expected him to appear to fight dressed that way.

Besides, the way he dressed wasn’t what made him so appealing.

With his hands in his pockets, he strolled down the aisle toward the ring, pausing here and there to allow photographs. The flashes that went off indicated there were quite a few people in the stands that wanted his photograph before he got bloodied up.

When he was a step closer to the ring than Jenna and Crimp, he stopped and looked right at Jenna.

Granted, Jenna had not had much experience facing down male sex icons, but she kept her head heroically by not allowing her stomach to flip or her face to show the slightest pleasure that he had singled her out for that moment.

He favored her with a twitch in his eye that was almost a wink, that managed to be far sexier than a wink, before leaking an amused smile and finishing his descent to the ring.

Crimp clutched at Jenna’s arm. “He looked right at you!”

Once in the ring, the guys in the crowd yelled some boos and insults that meant they had basically come to watch the ogre make a mess of his pretty face. Ryatt did not seem to mind in the least as he pressed a few buttons on a machine strapped to his wrist and his put-together outfit vanished, showing tight black track shorts that were one step off boxer briefs.

Crimp screamed with laughter. “He wasn’t wearing clothes! Even his pants were holograms. Hilarious!”

That was when the perfectly fake physique of the boneman was on full display. The bumps over his body were in the form of abs and pecs, biceps and triceps… they were all bones, grown to look that way. What kind of muscles he had under those bones was a complete secret. That was what Excelyn said.

It looked like the ogre was indeed strong enough that if he punched hard enough, he could break those thin curved bones as easily as a crab’s shell, but that wasn’t the only thing the boneman’s body had to offer. Their bones grew too long and protruded through various parts of their body. Ryatt had bones protruding from each of his knuckles, from the back of his elbow, hard round bones grew through his skin on his knees, and who knew where else? As it was bare-knuckle boxing, the orge was going to get cut, and he might bleed badly if Ryatt got too many hits off him. Jenna hoped the ogre wasn’t a bleeder.

In the ring, Ryatt called the MC down and whispered something to him.

The MC laughed and bounced back up in the air. “Our gambler says wants to make it more interesting. If he can make it through the fight without a cut on his mouth, he wants to kiss someone in the audience.”

“Why don’t you make it really interesting?” someone bellowed sardonically from the stands.

Ryatt smiled a grin like magic and laughed. “Ya gotta pay more for porn!” he shouted back.

The ogre came forward, but his voice was picked up by the MCs microphone when he spoke. “I wanna kiss someone too.”

They agreed and with a little more fanfare, they began the first round. Ryatt bounced on his covered feet and evaded the first few swipes the ogre made at him.

Jenna knew Ryatt was going to have to cut the ogre in order for him to have a chance at victory, but when it happened, she was appalled. He didn’t simply punch the ogre and pull his punch back. He punched in and twisted his hand so that the bones in his knuckles sunk into the orge’s skin and were ripped in a half-circle causing a cut for each of his four knuckles. It was a beautiful mark until the blood came.

The ogre didn’t act the wounds this affected him much on the first three hits, even though blood was dripping, but when the fourth came, in his lower back, he wailed in pain.

Ryatt avoided the ogre’s strikes. Jenna understood that if he got hit, it probably wouldn’t be a cut, but a broken bone, which was a serious injury in a different way.

The more times Ryatt hit the ogre, the madder he got, the heavier his strikes became, and when he finally landed one on Ryatt, it was bad. The strike landed on the boneman’s forearm leaving a web of internal bleeding under the skin, like glass had been broken, but not shattered.

Jenna gasped.

Ryatt looked right at her and the bell went off to signal the end of the first round. He turned to his corner.

“He looked at you again! He’s lucky the ogre didn’t clock him across the cheek right at that second. It might have killed him,” Crimp burst, confused, and worked up.

In his corner, Ryatt didn’t look anything like the boxers Jenna had seen before. He didn’t have a manager stoking him or someone giving him advice about what he ought to do in the second round, though the ogre in the other corner had someone playing that role, spraying his injuries and stopping the bleeding. Instead, Ryatt sat with one foot out and the other crooked next to him and stared out at the ring like he was staring out across the ocean. He had a towel offered to him by the guy who had put the stool up for him to sit on. Ryatt took it, but like he was at the pool and he was dabbing at his face between laps.

That was the moment that Jenna realized two things. The first thing was that even though the injury on his arm looked like something to her, it was nothing to him. The second thing was that he was playing with the ogre. He’d let him score that point off him to make the fight more interesting to the crowd. The fight had to look like a close call to entertain the spectators.

The problem Ryatt confronted as he stared out into nothing was that he had allowed himself to be distracted when Jenna gasped. The threat the ogre posed was not nothing. Crimp had been right when she said that he had left himself open for a second. Why should hearing Jenna gasp have that much of an effect on him?

He dropped the towel and went for round two.

Jenna bit her lips shut and didn’t make another sound as he started taking swipes at the ogre’s face. The boxing ring got wetter and redder with the ogre’s blood.

By the third round, the ogre had given up trying to win and was solely concentrating on making Ryatt bleed from his mouth. He scored a few more hits, making another crack on Ryatt’s pec over his heart and scraping the side of his head with a punch. Otherwise, it was a punishing fight for the ogre, who went down in the fifth round.

The MC lowered himself down to speak to Ryatt while the ogre was removed from the ring by stretcher and little Octavians cleaned up the blood. “I declare Ryatt, the Gambler, the winner!”

There were cheers and there were boos, but he didn’t care and put his arm up like he was delighted with his triumph.

“Who did you have your eye on for your victory kiss, Gambler?” the MC asked.

“That little wild girl with the pink streak in her hair.”

Jenna looked down. “This was obviously planned.”

“Right… obviously planned. Go kiss your boy. That’s why you came here,” Crimp encouraged with a push.

Yet, with all of Jenna’s heart and soul, she knew that this man was not Sardius. Though Sardius said he was a violent person, Jenna had never been given any evidence of it. Immediately, it was clear his voice was not Sardius’. Over the speaker, Sardius’ voice has been something that gave her a buzz and put her to sleep, not something that woke her adrenaline and opened her eyes to the size of the night moons. It was a dangerous attraction, not the safety of Sardius.

Whatever this was, with this boxer, it was not her thing. She was just different from all the other women there because of her pink streak. If Crimp had not been covering every last strand of her hair, Ryatt would have seen the pink and chosen her.

All the same, the crowd was chanting that they wanted more entertainment in the form of Ryatt kissing her and since she couldn’t remember the last time a man had kissed her, she found herself rising to her feet. She came to outer space to do wild things and she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to take this chance whether it was a good idea or not.

The people in her row moved their feet for her and she made her way up to the ring. Ryatt parted the ropes and let down a hand to help her. Jenna noticed he had kindly wiped off the ogre’s blood before helping her. He didn’t wait for her to get both her feet on the ground before he was parting her lips with his and giving her the most fervent kiss she’d ever experienced. He tasted good, like the sea brine and the sea breeze at the same time and she went for it feeling more than a little buzzed.

He also completely grabbed her ass before letting her go. She had been about to slap him or scream at him, but her one hand was faster than her slapping hand or her scream. She touched the pocket in her pants and felt that he had jabbed something in her pocket. It was the exact size and shape of the earpiece she had in her ear that let her talk to Ixy.

“I’m glad I watched all that,” Ixy said in her ear. “That guy is super hot. Snog him some more. I haven’t seen a show like this in years.”

“Do you have access to what he gave me?” Jenna questioned fervently.

“Maybe,” Ixy replied.

“Hack it.”

“It doesn’t really have that sort of information. It’s not a storage device. It’s a communication device.”

Jenna let herself out of the ring while Ryatt swung from the ropes and accepted the love of his audience. When he turned around, she was giving him a flirty little wave from the aisles, waving for Crimp to join her and heading out. She blew him a kiss and he licked his upper lip in a straight vertical line, letting his gray/brown eyes linger on her.

In a different world, she would have gone back to him, wrapped her arms around him, and seen where the night led, but Jenna was accustomed to squashing any sexual impulse she had. From experience, she knew that five minutes of conversation with him would kill any attraction she felt for him.

Instead, she returned her attention to Ixy. “I want any metadata you can scrape from that device. Where has it been? How is it configured? Who is likely to be able to communicate with it and from where?”

“Sure,” Ixy said, getting to work.

Crimp’s satisfied smile as they headed back to their hotel room was entertainment on a whole other level for Jenna. Maybe it was the icing on the cake.

“That guy was a blessing from the creator. What did he taste like?” Crimp begged to know.

“It was better than dinner.”

“Good, 'cause we’re having tasteless sludge for dessert,” Crimp said, giving Jenna a smack on the shoulder as they stepped out into the rain.