Chapter 22

Almost a Cold Shower

Jenna woke up with a gush of water splashed in her face. Well, it wasn’t really splashed in her face as much as dumped on her from above.

She was in a tank again, except this time it was a fish tank, and it wasn’t huge. The water in the face was horrible, but on the bright side, she was dressed. She was wearing what she had worn to bed the night before. Her perfect pajamas left everything to the imagination… when she was dry. She looked down and saw how the fabric clung to her body. She pushed a lock of wet hair out of her face and growled. Then she reminded herself that it really was better than being naked because she wasn’t alone. Someone was dropping water on her from above and unless she was super wrong, that person was Adamis.

Another bucket full of water came down on her.

Jenna coughed, wiped her eyes, and looked up.

Fallcet was above her. It looked like he was in charge of her interrogation, or her torture, or whatever reason they had for abducting her.

She stood up and looked into the open grate above her head. Fallcet was there, with his curls tied behind his head in a ponytail. The boho suit was gone and in its place was something very like a military uniform. No coat, but an army tank top, boots, and camo trousers.

“Hey, Baby!” Jenna called to him like he was there to rescue her instead of to terrorize her.

He squatted and spoke to her, matching her playful cadence. “Having fun?”

She giggled. “I like this. This is good. We’re progressing.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Are we?”

“Yup. Getting your opponent to kidnap you and torture you is clearly the best way to have a frank conversation. If you’re going to go to this much trouble to talk to me, you’re not going to beat around the bush. You’re going to get right to it. What do you want?”

He didn’t like her acting like she wasn’t at a disadvantage. He had clearly looked forward to putting her in her place. He ground his teeth together before answering. “The crowns.”

“Yeah, I don’t have them,” she answered, scraping her tongue across her canine.

“We found one in your room,” he informed her.

“Yup. Yup,” she agreed. “I have one, but I can’t get more than one without the media circus that Celestina does for me. That’s the rule. I sent all the crowns away for safekeeping, and I can only get one at a time.”

“Where are they?” he asked menacingly.

She giggled again, giving a Sardius-style molar click of her tongue. “Aren’t you going to pour more water on me? I think you should. You’re mad at me for refusing you like a dog and hurling you off-world. I bet no one has ever done something like that to you before. You’re pissed. I get it. Pour another bucket of water on me. I can take it.”

Armen rolled his shoulders like he was refraining from doing a lot more to her than just pouring water on her. But he didn’t point out the obvious and say that once the tank filled up with water, she’d drown, or that he could easily extract her from the tank and have all her teeth yanked.

Seeing him hesitate, Jenna saw her opening. “You’re such a coward. Like… if you’d just asked me for what you wanted when we were talking in my palace, I would have told you what I’m telling you now. I don’t have them. I can only crown one person at a time. That was what I arranged after the AAMC guys attacked my palace.”

He leaned down further and got his face within spitting distance away from hers. “You don’t get it. I’m not the one who kidnapped you. I’m the one negotiating for your release.”

“Aw! So you did come to rescue me, you big softy,” she said in a pouty voice and put out her lower lip. “Except if you’re here to save me, then why haven’t I been saved? I’m still in a fish tank and you’re up there staring down at me like I have literally become a fish in your barrel.”

Above her, a man next to Fallcet was poised to pour another bucket of water on her, but Fallcet put up his hand to stop him. “I’m a negotiator. I’m here facilitating a negotiation. The location of these talks may be unusual, but Octavians usually have water all over them. Doesn’t it suit you, little Octavian diplomat?” He said the words harshly and allowed another bucket of water to be poured on Jenna.

She smothered a laugh. He was trying to be cruel and if she didn’t act like he was being cruel he might retaliate by upping the anty of her torture. She thought about pretending that he was hurting her so that he might have whatever satisfaction he was longing for. She had hurt his pride. There was no doubt he wanted to hurt her back.

She was about to fake it when she suddenly thought of Ryatt’s false eyes. These guys didn’t want to kill her and whatever they did to hurt her, she could get fixed, just like Ryatt. Suddenly she felt like she could handle anything they were willing to pour on her.

“Where are the crowns?” Fallcet demanded.

“They’re in the ocean,” she answered directly.

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“The Octavians have them?”

“No. The ocean has many creatures who are not a part of these talks. Not only that, but the Octavians are not in charge of who is chosen to be a representative for the Adamis Alliance. The Octavians are not involved, but they did give me some options for protecting the crowns while I was still in the recruitment phase.”

Fallcet looked like he was about to scream. “Are you telling me that you gave the crowns to a bunch of fish?”

“I did!” Jenna shouted in glee before her mouth was filled with a bucketful of seawater that came down on her from above.

“Who do you think you are, the frickin’ little mermaid? Who the hell are you to make deals with fish?”

Jenna spat the water from her mouth, but wouldn’t stop chuckling.

Octavians did not believe in material wealth in the same way humans did. Favel had his own mansion, but it was a public place. Any Octavian could come and go if they desired. His mansion mostly housed family members, but it was usually an odd collection of them because the same relatives didn’t always stay.

What the Octavians prized most was ideas, thus plans were kept secret. They built their own starships underwater, filled them with water, and shot the entire thing into outer space. The Adamis ships were sometimes modeled after them, but they did not have the Octavian blueprints to work off of. Those were kept secret.

The way they kept their secrets secret was to store their ideas in memory drives that were then backed up by a fish network. There were few things weirder than that. Fish were notorious gossips, so certain rumors had to be checked and confirmed by vast quantities of fish before information could be retrieved. It was like having all four hundred of your friends on Facebook being willing to vouch for you at once if you wanted to open your deposit box at the bank. The tighter the security, the more fish had to confirm the rumor.

Thus, Jenna had to crown another diplomat herself on public TV networks in order for the fish to give her another crown.

“How many fish have to confirm you before you can get another crown?” Fallcet asked angrily.

She clicked her tongue. “A lot. Except, it doesn’t matter much. What does matter is that I don’t know where the crowns are and I can’t get them if I’m in this tank playing master and servant with you.”

Fallcet waved his hand to have another bucketful of water poured on her. The water was now up to her knees.

He was thinking harder as he stared down at her. “Can any of the other diplomats get the crowns?”

“You know,” Jenna said, figuratively sharpening her claws. “I don’t think I’m going to tell you anything more until you get out of here. This is seawater, which means that you could fill this tank up to the brim, drown me in seawater, and leave my body to sink or float in the ocean next to my palace. They’d put a Y incision in my chest and test the water they found in my lungs, only to find that it was the same water they found me in. I’d be dead, not your problem anymore, and it would look like a perfect accident, because your boys haven’t left a mark on me, have they? The story will be that I fell in the water. No one was to blame.”

Fallcet leaned forward and said darkly, “If you recognize how much danger you’re in, are you willing to negotiate?”

“I was willing to negotiate before,” she called forcefully through the grate. “You just weren’t honest with me. Never in our conversations did you ask me where the crowns were and you didn’t offer me anything I wanted.”

He frowned deeply. He had offered her himself and she didn’t want him. He motioned for another bucket to be dumped on her.

More than likely, both the people above him and below him in the chain of command knew of his failure. Everyone knew he was going to propose to Jenna when he went to stay at her palace, and they knew she had utterly rejected him. The humiliation stung him in more places than one, and he had more water poured on her until it was up to her armpits.

He was hoping to humiliate her.

“Why isn’t she shivering?” Fallcet asked a second AAMC officer next to him. “I’ve interrogated tons of prisoners and by this point, she shouldn’t be able to talk. Her teeth should be chattering without a wetsuit.”

“Sir,” the second officer said in a voice he hoped was too low for Jenna to hear. “I don’t think we’ll be able to break her so that she’ll snivel, cry, beg, and promise you everything you want.”

“Why not?”

“She’s from a planet called Earth. The people there have been incredibly slow to develop on the galactic scale because their planet is always trying to kill them.”

Fallcet scrunched up his face. “What?”

“It’s true. Her planet is incredibly inhospitable. Only one-third of the planet meets the habitable living standards set forth in the Adamis Region Bill. Otherwise, it’s too cold and it’s too hot. Not only that, but Jenna is from a part of that planet that is particularly uninhabitable. Apparently, she’s what they call a Canadian.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that her country is one of the most unpleasant on the planet for cold weather. If we were to torture her with water, we would need to lower the temperature of this water by twenty-five degrees.”

“That would take it near the freezing point,” Fallcet recognized. “That would kill her and it would look very suspicious when the authorities found her body because a person can’t freeze to death anywhere on Octavia Prime.”

“Not only that,” the officer continued, “but, if we take this water three degrees colder without killing her, she’ll be able to charge us with war crimes because what we’ve done so far is technically a water fight, not torture.”

Jenna wanted to pipe up that she was pretty sure kidnapping was illegal but didn’t because she wanted them to say they were sorry and take her back to her palace. If anything, she wanted to use this whole incident as leverage to get them to play by her rules. However, even if they did everything she said, she’d continue to think they were morons. After all, they thought she couldn’t hear them talking when the sound echoed through her fish tank.

Fallcet cracked his knuckles and knelt by the grate to look down at her again. “I’m sure we can come to some sort of an arrangement.”

She smiled up at him. “I hope so.”

He slammed the lid on the tank shut and screwed it closed with a wheel turn. The lid was glass and Jenna saw the soldier tapping buttons on the controls behind him while Fallcet kept his eyes on Jenna.

She should have told him to try to take her crown off her, then she could have cut the hell out of his fingers and had that bloodstream that she had been so afraid of running between her eyes. The idea of his whole finger rolling down her face and plunking in the water was pretty appealing at that moment as she glared at Fallcet’s smug face. She hadn’t worried about any of that since she had left Earth.

The water level wasn’t rising or falling, but soon she smelled the gas. They were going to gas her.

Fallcet was trying to make her scared. He wanted her to shout, bang on the glass, and promise to work with him, but she wouldn’t. She recognized that he couldn’t pull her out of the water when she was conscious for a hundred reasons. He had to get her to take another tranquilizer before he and his goons could move her.

She tapped her nose and made a show of breathing in.

It was too much for her and she blacked out with her head falling below the waterline.