Chapter Three

Doom has Eight Legs

When Jenna awoke, she had the worst headache. The place it hurt was the spot just above her right eyebrow. It pulsed. Her throat felt raw as if she had slept while breathing through her mouth, something she rarely did. She smacked her lips together and swallowed, trying to encourage her saliva glands.

“She’s awake,” she heard a voice say. It wasn’t a normal voice, like a human’s. As a matter of fact, it sounded more like a parrot.

“Well, get out,” she heard Armen respond to the voice. “She’s not ready to see you.”

“Can I record your conversation?” the bird voice asked hopefully.

“No.”

“It’s for posterity,” the first voice begged.

“That’s exactly why you can’t record it,” Armen sighed. “You must know she’s not going to like any of this.”

“Who’s fault is that?”

“Shh… She’s waking up.”

Jenna’s eyelids fluttered, hoping to sneak a peek at the first speaker before they departed, but the lights in the room were bright and her eyes were unaccustomed to it, so she kept blinking, trying to push away the sleep.

“Get going,” Armen said firmly, though not unkindly.

She heard the door close on the first speaker and then Armen’s footsteps toward her.

She forced herself up, even though she couldn’t yet open her eyes all the way. “What did you give me?” she rasped, rubbing the painful spot above her eye.

“A sleeping agent, and a good one too.”

Her hand reached unconsciously up to her hair coiled on the top of her head. Was it still intact? She sighed, relieved to feel that it was.

“What are you hiding in your bun, Jenna?” Armen asked, losing the fine edges his voice took on when he hosted on the radio.

She deliberately ignored his question and rubbed her eyes instead. “Am I ever going to be able to see again?”

“In a minute. Just be patient.”

“Where am I?”

“You’re in an observation room in Saint Augusta Hospital,” he replied softly.

“Where?” Jenna asked, her voice rasping. “I’ve never heard of that hospital. Is it up by Sidney?”

“It’s in the city of Daavin, on Octavia Three. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Octavia system even if you haven’t heard of the city or the hospital before.”

His voice was so calm and assured that it was at complete odds with how Jenna felt at that moment. She did know that word–Octavia. She breathed in, unable to think of a bad enough word to call him. If she could have seen him, she would have kicked him, bruised him, or at least thrown a pillow at him. The phenomenon her grandfather had predicted had finally happened, except it hadn’t happened on her terms. She had been fooled. She had been fooled by Armen’s pretty hair, unique voice, perfect tan, and everything else that went into making Mr. Wonderful. She could have slapped herself and him—both of them. She almost did.

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“Why did you do this to me?” was all she was able to whisper.

“You wouldn’t go with any of their agents,” he said simply. “They said you’d go anywhere with me if I asked you.”

“And why would I do that?” Jenna hissed bitterly. Her vision finally came into focus and she saw him sitting next to her. He looked exactly the same, glamorous and exotic. “Is that even what you really look like?”

“It is. Let me tell you what the Octavians told me when they recruited me.”

“Great. Let’s hear your side of the story,” she huffed.

“A few months ago, my boss allowed me to be interviewed for a promotion. I’m a diplomat, and I was invited to interview for a position working for the Adamis Division that liaisons with the Octavian government. They had been trying to keep it as confidential as possible, but the Adamis diplomats assigned to the Octavians were dropping off in not-so-freak accidents. They were searching the universe for reserve diplomats. Keeping up?”

She said nothing but glared at him through her haze.

“The situation on Octavia Prime was worsening every day. They were desperate to find another diplomat to ease tension, but they could only find evidence of one reserve diplomat left. It was a woman from Earth, who had been approached by no fewer than two hundred and twelve agents. It didn’t matter how they approached her, she shut everyone down.”

Jenna ground her teeth. Had there really been that many of them? There had been hundreds of attempts to abduct her? She had only counted maybe twenty and she hadn’t been positive they weren’t just sickos from Earth. Had every random person who had ever spoken to her been an alien in disguise?

Armen continued, “Since they were failing, they started studying you and decided that the only way they could get you to go anywhere would be to find someone you would actually want to go on a date with—your perfect man.”

She huffed.

He continued. “In case you wondered if your tastes were hard to appease, after doing an exhaustive search of the available men on Earth, they discovered that there were no men on the whole planet that would satisfy you.”

Jenna gawked. “Are you serious? They searched through all the men on the planet and they found absolutely none that would suit me?”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

She leaned back into the pillows on her bed. She knew she was picky, but she hadn’t thought she was that picky.

Armen continued. “They ended up feeding your information into a matching program called the universal matching algorithm which included all Adamis men in the known universe. You had only eleven matches. Four were married. Six refused to help, and I accepted.”

“So, you agreed to help them kidnap me?” she accused.

“No. They would never have abducted you. I did that myself. The situation is critical. For your first day as a diplomat, you don’t even have to do that much. Just show up, smile, and show the people who you are, and you’re done. You will cause a stalemate in their conflict and save hundreds of lives that otherwise would be lost in one day, and every day thereafter.” He took a deep breath while looking searchingly into Jenna’s bloodshot eyes. “You were told about this day. You were told what was going to happen. We’ll work it out so that you are paid well for the sacrifice of being here.” He sounded desperate to Jenna when he meant to sound confident.

Jenna liked that sound of weakness in his voice as he pleaded with her. She smiled. “I’m not agreeing to anything yet. Who were you talking to when I was sleeping?”

“Favel. He’s the Octavian contact you would work closest with in an official capacity,” Armen explained.

She chuckled, remembering all the bonkers things her grandfather had told her. “Are you saying he’s a talking octopus?”

Armen nodded.

She stopped laughing. “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, I am. Not everything in the universe is Adamis, Jenna. Your family would have told you that. We’re weird to the Octavians too. They think we’re like half a person wandering around with only half our limbs. We freak them out as much as they freak us out.”

“I want to see the talking octopus,” she said flatly, thinking that there was no way he could produce one. She was still hoping that somehow he had found out about what was hidden in her bun, somehow connected it with the right story, and that everything she was seeing and hearing was a prank on his part and they were still in Victoria five minutes away from where she went to work. The room they were in was not strange. It was ordinary. It could just be that he was spinning a wild story, that a wild story was not actually unfolding.

Armen called for Favel to enter the room, and in the second before she saw their guest, she remembered the pink lights she saw hovering in the sky.

She turned her head and realized promptly that everything that was happening was all too real.