“Phoenix.”
“Wait,” an unfamiliar male voice said. “You were named after a mythical bird?”
My head whipped to the left, in the direction of the new speaker. A boy. “Who are you? And how many more kids are in here?”
“I'm Bradley, and we're it. It's just the three of us. A ménage,” he replied happily.
The car suddenly jostled into motion, flinging me forward and causing my bands to pull tight. Grimacing, I righted myself.
“No one wants to hear you speak, Bradie boy,” Kitten said in that scratchy voice of hers.
“Like that's ever stopped me. I can't believe we've got a bird and a cat in the car.” Bradley chuckled. “I guess that makes me animal control. Nice.”
“I'm a Teran,” Kitten said tightly, “not a cat. And if I hear you call me a cat one more time, I'll scratch your eyes out. Understand?”
“Oh, I understand. I just don't think you'll like what I'm understanding, which is that you can't wait to get your hands on me.”
She hissed.
He laughed, but there was a trace of trepidation in the sound. “So…what do you know about Terans, Bird?”
“Don't call me that,” I snapped.
“Gotta distract myself somehow,” he muttered.
He was right. We had to distract ourselves however possible. Otherwise I might scream. “I know some Terans are covered in fur,” I said, answering his question. “Others simply have pointed pupils and pointed ears.”
“Ever seen one in real life?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Ever seen one attack a human?”
“No.”
“That's enough,” Kitten said, butting in. “You sound like an alienphobe.”
Did I fear aliens? “I'm not,” I said with assurance. I didn't have a problem with the otherworlders who lived among us. For the most part. The Sybilins, well, I wanted them dead.
“If a girl is hot,” Bradley said, and I was sure he was leering, “I don't care what race she is.”
“I'd already guessed that about you,” I replied dryly.
“Already wanting a piece of me, too, I bet.”
Kitten and Bradley continued to spar, ignoring me. I leaned against the back of my seat and drew in a breath. The air inside my hood was surprisingly fresh, light, as if there were air pockets sewn into the material. “What do you guys know about this bootcamp?” I asked, cutting into their heated conversation.
“Now why'd you have to go and bring that up?” Bradley asked with a moan. “I was doing a good job forgetting where I was and where I was headed.”
“I don't know a lot,” Kitten admitted. “What I know, I know because my sister graduated from it several years ago. See, every three months a panel of—judges, I guess you could call them—picks a few students to come and basically try out. Half are sent home in the first few weeks.”
One, try out for a drug rehab? That was craziness. Two, half were sent home? Maybe I'd be one of the lucky half.
“So what'd you do to get sent there?” Kitten asked.
Another rustle of clothing. “I didn't do nothin',” Bradley said. “One day I was playing virtual football with a group of Arcadians, the next I was blindfolded and shoved into a car with two sexy-sounding hotties.”
I rolled my eyes. The fact that he hadn't been caught doing drugs surprised me. Wasn't this camp for drug addicts?
“I'm here because I beat the shit out of an Ell Rollis,” Kitten said. “And I'm about to beat the shit out of a human boy.”
“Bring it on,” Bradley said.
Ell Rollis…I flipped through my mental files, but couldn't picture one. Sensing my confusion, Kitten said, “They're huge. Like two musclemen fused together—even the women are like that. And they don't have a nose. I think they breathe from their ears or something.” She purred low in her throat, as if her words delighted her. “Beating an Ell Rollis makes you an asskicker extraordinarie.”
To win against a creature like that, Kitten had to be gargantuan, but the Terans I'd seen had been lithe and small and graceful. So…the camp was for fighters and—in Bradley's case—perverts, as well as flyers. Not wanting to admit where I fell in that equation, I kept my mouth shut about my crimes.
Bradley chuckled, saying, “That's a fight I would have liked to have seen. I bet there was no pulling hair or biting.” He paused. “Wait, scratch that. Biting would have been good.”
I'd only known the boy a few minutes, but I kind of expected the comment from him. “I wonder what they'll do to us,” I said. “The camp people, I mean. Not the Ell Rollises.”
“Who knows?” Kitten shifted in her seat. “A few tolerance classes, anger management, probably. That kind of crap. My sister never told me about that part. Said she was sworn to secrecy.”
I'd endured enough of those types of classes in rehab. Tell us your feelings, Phoenix. Visualize a meadow of happiness, Phoenix. Deep breath in and deep breath out, letting all of your negative energy out, Phoenix. What a waste of time. What a nightmare.
Nothing was more boring.
The car suddenly twisted, pushing me to the left. I couldn't catch myself since my hands were locked behind my back and ended up sliding into a warm body.
“Oh yeah,” Bradley said. “Me likie likie. Feel free to stay like this.”
When he didn't try to palm my br**sts, I knew beyond a doubt that he was banded like me and the pair hadn't been lying. I straightened with a muttered, “Perv.”
“No better way to be.”
“One day a girl is going to cut out your tongue,” Kitten told him.
“If she does it with her teeth, I'm surprisingly okay with that.”
I held back a laugh.
After that, time passed in silence for a long while. Without the distraction, my mind wandered. What was my mom doing right now? Would I ever see my house again? Already a wave of homesickness hit me.
Finally Kitten sighed. “This sucks.”
Yeah, it did. The waiting…the not knowing…. A few minutes later, the road became bumpy, jostling me up and down. “Where the hell are we?”
“The devil's playground, is my guess,” Kitten said. “Although the entire last year of my life has been spent in that area, so this must just be another section.”
“I'd say we're in heaven.” Bradley belted out a laugh, but it once again held a trace of trepidation. “I'm betting this camp is co-ed and life just doesn't get any better than that.”