by Greg Hanks
Rhapsi returned to the service elevator and put her hand on the door. “Now you two behave. No hitting, slapping, that sort of thing.”
“Who, me and André the Giant over here?” said V’delle. “We’ll be the best of pals.”
Rhapsi furrowed her brow. “Where’d you learn who that was? Did Rain make you watch The Princess Bride?”
V’delle ignored the comment and scrunched her face. “Inconceivable!” She chuckled to herself despite her cringeworthy imitation. “Sorry. I’m just discovering movies for the first time in my life.”
Rhapsi shook her head. “Y’know we managed to find more films than that.”
“Thanks for the cloak, Rhapsi,” V’delle said.
Rhapsi pushed the elevator button, shaking her head. “Please be careful.” The box clanked down toward the mine.
“Bold of you to pitch your tents so close to Flonneburg,” said Balien, looking out the small square glass window.
“You don’t know much about the Calcitra then,” V’delle answered. “Help me with this.”
The unorthodox duo pulled the service elevator’s rusty cage door to the ground.
“Here’s the deal,” she said, face haunted by the escaping violet sky. “My cloak is going to keep me invisible. You’ll follow me as if you were wandering the city, scavenging. If any drones or patrols spot you, I run, and you’re on your own.”
“I doubt we will run into trouble—”
“You’ll be able to see with these.” She shoved a pair of Calcitra night-vision goggles into his hands. Heavy, mismatched. “And I’ve got a route that’ll keep us inside buildings, at least until the outskirts. We’re going to be spending the night in a small cottage near where I burned Seen’ai. At dawn you’ll pay your respects before it gets too light and then we’ll come back. You ready?”
“Am I supposed to know how these work?” he asked, flipping the goggles over in his hands.
She wore her hood and vanished. “Don’t move your head too quickly; it’ll get disoriented, and so will you.”
“Calcitra engineering,” Balien mumbled, and put on the goggles. He wobbled his head. “Well, they work.”
V’delle opened the door with one movement. Silent hinges, still wet with grease. Her aqueous mirage jogged forward into an echoing, open-air cistern, two stories into the ground. A circular concrete staging area for an excavation effort long abandoned. The second level opened to a wider circle, connecting with the streets of the city via an entrance barred by orange tape and barriers. V’delle and Balien passed canvas covered boxes of neglected rebar, stacks of piping, leftover forklifts, cranes, hardhats, and vests. Instead of going up the stairs to the second level, V’delle showed Balien into a tunnel that extended farther into Beliveilles, fully concrete and lined with more blue tarps and two-by-four piles. Soon, concrete turned to prickly brick. They would travel by sewer.
For V’delle, it was a quick jog through a maze, dimly lit by spears of fleeing sunlight piercing through manhole covers. She knew this route as if she’d ran it a million times. And if the goggles were indeed working, then Balien would see clear definition as if it was noonday, making their traversal trivial.
“How long have you been here?” he asked, his deep voice echoing down the long sewer gullet.
Annoyed by the sound, she grimaced. “Three months. Don’t talk until we’re there.”
They climbed a ladder that popped them out into a maintenance shack built into an old general store. From there, V’delle’s route followed a predetermined line through the cramped buildings of Beliveilles—through carved-out walls of side-by-side housing, makeshift tunnels of corrugated steel, and backyard wrap-around porches. They trudged through a multi-leveled garage, a bank, two restaurants, a pub, and a collection of small businesses.
They stopped so V’delle could undo a tarp from a threshold to the next room.
“This must have taken . . . well, three months I suppose,” Balien said.
“It all looks untouched outside,” she commented, gently rolling back the tarp. “I hauled lumber and sheet metal, boxes of nails, used one of the forklifts, spent my nights out here.”
“Why?”
She pinned the tarp back so Balien could walk through.
“We had to lay low after Flonneburg. Lots of down time.”
He watched her roll back the tarp. “Flonneburg?”
“We hit it before settling in the mine. Didn’t go well.”
Balien turned to admire the new building and his mouth gaped.
Murals. The walls, the ceilings, the desks, the windows. Oil and chunky paint. Vaseline and turpentine. Smears, streaks, stipples, dollops. A grayed canvas with few colors. Pictures of buildings. Pictures of trees and grass and brush. Vistas. Poorly-proportioned humans. Faces upon faces with eyes of every color and shape. All the noses came with prominent nostrils. An older woman made many times with white hair in multiple styles. Blonde-haired women in gray. Tan men with long black hair. A hand saturated in silvery pigments.
He opened his mouth, but she was too far ahead.
The closer to the outskirts, the better the drawings became. In the apartment building that bordered the wheat fields, Balien stopped before a painted wall of a man dressed in bright red, shooting flames from his palms.
“Who is this?” he asked.
V’delle had her hand on the door. “It’s just a picture. Let’s go.”
He lifted his goggles from his face. “Is he producing flames from his hands?”
“Good eye,” she said sarcastically.
“You have quite the imagination. Pretty soon you will run out of space.”
She gave the room a final sweep. Her hand took the doorknob. “Balien.”
He replaced the goggles and followed her.
“If you attacked Flonneburg three months ago, is all of this really necessary?”
“Don’t be stupid. And be quiet.”
When they were halfway to the forest, his comment started to gnaw harder. Neither Khor’Zon nor Preen’ch had been spotted the entire time the Calcitra had been in Beliveilles. V’delle hadn’t seen a single drone while working on her route. Seen’ai had tried to kill V’delle on his own, without alerting anyone else except his small Cocoon, so no one knew where, how, or even if he had died. No one came looking for him because there was nothing to suggest he’d left Flonneburg after the raid. For the Khor’Zon, Beliveilles remained a ghost town, a settlement long gutted during the first years of the invasion. But her Preen’ch instincts told her there was always a chance. She wasn’t going to be the idiot who slipped up and got an entire Calcitra hideout destroyed.
V’delle peeled back the curtain of golden bushes that guarded the clearing to her cottage. The usual breath of emotions blew her direction. She hovered her palms over the grains of wheat, letting the whiskers tickle. The cottage had become her distraction, her refuge. It had become what it was always meant to be: her home.
Once they cleared the short knoll, Balien stopped to observe the beautiful, albeit electronically enhanced, image of the homestead.
“Is this where you killed him?” he asked, somewhat startled.
She kept moving. Four solar lamps had been charging all day. She brought them inside. The home smelled better than her last visit. She’d found some old aromatic candles in the Beliveilles mall, and the fumes had finally begun to sink into the wood. She began to light them again with old matches.
“Close the door,” she told him, as she walked throughout the house, checking every window and opening. Once satisfied, she removed her hood and began setting up the solar lamps.
“This is your little outpost then? Very interesting choice.”
The clear warmth of the lights manifested gently, and V’delle placed them throughout the kitchen. “You can put your bedroll in that corner.”
Balien lifted his goggles and looked at his military-issued mat rolled under his arm. “Okay.”
V’delle finished her routine checks and t
ook off her cloak. She had brought some maps of the country to work through before bed. Using a notebook of sparse, sometimes unrelated intel, she updated the maps with small ticks and circles of marker to denote possible Calcitra camps, hideouts, and even one or two people who might be willing to join her cause. She’d struggled with how few followers were available, but when realization caught up, she knew every person counted.
Balien set up his own little area in the kitchen’s corner, diagonally situated from V’delle’s workspace at the dinner table. He remained quiet for the first thirty minutes, making sure his supplies were in order, then walked around the cottage, observing the intricate crown molding, the hand-carved cabinets and shelves. He wasn’t loud or obnoxious, even to V’delle. He was calm, careful where he stepped, and above all, respectful. He ran his palms along reinforced surfaces, like cabinetry that had been put back in their original places with fresh nails—and a little duct tape here and there.
It wasn’t his volume that caused V’delle to drop her marker in annoyance, it was the lack thereof.
“Have you never seen a human home before or what?” she asked, arm over the backrest of her chair.
“They are all different,” he said, holding a chipped ceramic bell from a shelf next to the sink. “And equally fascinating.”
She watched him set the trinket back into its place and continued to eye his slow gait around the room. His hands would probably be in his pockets if his pants had any. A tourist in a strange country.
“Okay, that’s enough,” she exhaled. “Sit down.”
Balien turned in surprise to see her gesturing to the empty seat across from her. “I thought I already went through the interrogation?” He took the chair’s back, pulled, and sat down.
“I wasn’t there.” She pushed her maps and folded her arms, sitting back. “You’re going to tell me why you’re neutral.”
Balien laced his fingers as he leaned into the table and repeated: “I am going to.”
“Yes, you are.”
“What did you want to know first?”
“Tell me where you came from.”
“Why is it so tempting to say, ‘another planet?’”
“I wouldn’t have laughed if you did.”
“Of course not.”
She shook her head. “We can either talk or you can go to bed.”
“Should there be a drumroll? I hear humans like that sort of thing. I come from an island about 300 miles from here. We call it Aeternis.”
“Show me.” She pushed one of her old-world maps toward him. He looked at it for a few seconds before pointing at a small island located in the middle of the large sea north of the country. “How the hell’d you manage that? Dropship?”
“We used a human boat, actually. This took two trips.”
“Calcitra boats?”
“No, no. Just an old boat. Your people call them ferries. Two floors high. We had to make our own fuel from scratch, it was—”
“And how many Khor’Zon are in . . .”
“Aeternis.” Balien shifted his eyes. “I think it is around two thousand.”
V’delle dissected him with her eyes. Two thousand Khor’Zon not loyal to the war effort? Impossible.
“I am not Seen’ai, V’delle,” he said, without prompt. “I am not lying.”
“You’re telling me two thousand Khor’Zon opposed the Lo’Zon? Your ship came to Earth with probably triple that. No way two thousand of you walked out of that ship unscathed.”
He smirked. “I would not phrase it like that. We lost many. As did they. But you are not wrong; our numbers are insignificant compared to Earth’s population. But just like our Warlord brothers and sisters, we found a way. A way without indoctrinating children.”
“So what happened then?”
Balien’s eyes turned to cloudy glass orbs, his voice dimmed. “I assume you know the story of the Lo’Zon?”
She shrugged. “Your brother briefly mentioned it.”
“The Lo’Zon . . . he indeed saved us; that is the truth. In my personal view, he took us from one disaster to another. Despite being our ‘Savior,’ he also lied to everyone. He told us we would arrive in peace and work with the humans.” He shook his head. V’delle could see the hatred in the glare of his pupils. “Once we were on that spacecraft, with nowhere to run, that is when he truly revealed himself. It turns out the Lo’Zon is a warmonger who prides himself too much in his calculated decisions. He distorted what it meant to be Khor’Zon. Even the word ‘Khor’Zon’ is capitalized in your English language, correct? And human is not. Every little detail he creates is to undermine your race. His sense of morality became a skeleton of ideals that only benefited his way of thinking. Unfortunately, a lot of Khor’Zon had no issue with that. He used the Oracles to ensure his leadership, then discarded us when we were not needed anymore.”
“The Oracles?”
“There are two distinct groups of Khor’Zon: the Oracles, and those of the war effort—the Warlords, basically.
“Like purebred and impure? Wait, no, Seen’ai was impure like you.”
“Those are physical characteristics, just like your different races here on Earth. That is another conversation. Oracles are an ancient line of Khor’Zon with the ability to foresee future events, whether you have a crownbone or not.”
“Crownbone?” V’delle smiled unauthentically. “You mean fish head?”
“Sure.” He pointed to his impure skull structure, three simple shelves that fanned backward down his head. “I cannot really get offended, can I?”
“Guess not. So what you’re saying is you can see the future?” Her vacant look spoke of sarcasm.
He tilted his head. “You do not think our abilities are real?” His tone was both flippant and embarrassed.
“Look obviously there’s something weird about it, so just tell me.”
“Do you really want the history?”
V’delle remembered the screaming voice of Seen’ai. He had lied to her about having the gift of foresight. He was “making his own future.” Naon had used “the gift” to fit the people of Flonneburg into Preen’ch gear. V’delle dropped her sarcasm for a moment. “Tell me.”
“Long ago our race was primarily tribal. We formed these small communities of families that were built around the notion of foresight. Our ancestors believed they could sense future events with their minds, their feelings. This tradition carried throughout generations. You are right to be skeptical; most of this foresight you hear about is nothing more than common sense, wise common sense. After all, Khor’Zon live at least a hundred years longer than you do.”
“So it’s all a big lie.”
“I said ‘most of this foresight.’ The one thing that does not add up is the Lo’Zon. Let me explain.” Balien became more active, more enthused. “Before the Lo’Zon came, there was this story, this myth. The ancient Oracles foretold of a calamity that would destroy our planet. The prophecy declared a being would come from our God, Orothaea, to save us. So you can imagine how people reacted when these prophecies started to come true.”
“So can you see the future or not?”
“Since I was young, they told me I had the ability. I had dreams. I saw things when I closed my eyes. They were weird, almost misty images that I could never discern. But as I got older, I started to believe it was simply my imagination enhanced by my leaders—indoctrination. Nothing truly came of it. This whole romanticized version of foresight is false. None of us are able to directly see if something will happen or not.”
Foresight was Naon’s excuse. V’delle briefly saw the bodies of Naon’s experiment lying in the broken streets of Flonneburg.
“But the Lo’Zon, what about him?” she asked. “Your brother told me your planet’s moons collided. There was a calamity. So they were right about those two things.”
He shrugged. “That is why I am not so sure what is real and what is just the brain’s intuition. For instance, one Khor’Zon astronomer centuries ago could
have easily discerned from our two moons that someday they would collide. I do not know. I leave it up to destiny so I can sleep well at night. I have given up trying to decide.”
“But you still call yourselves Oracles?”
“Consider it tradition. The way I like to see it, it is just a name to differentiate ourselves from the Khor’Zon who have invaded your planet.”
“But you are the Khor’Zon that invaded my planet.”
Balien became angry for the first time, his brow and demeanor striking a resemblance to his brother. “I did not have anything to do with what has happened. If there is one thing I can leave with you, it would be that. That is the reason we escaped. It is the reason we have our own community.”
V’delle felt the sincerity of his voice, the strength of his thudding fist on the table. She couldn’t really see the reasoning behind his whole persona being fake, unless he was extremely good at lying. He was Seen’ai’s brother.
Balien continued. “We had a giant meeting a month before the invasion. The Warlords on one side, and the Oracles on the other. We had not been told about the hostile takeover during our journey to your planet, we did not know of the containment spheres, or the Outpost plans. The Lo’Zon had kept that from us, making sure he used every ounce of our superior intellect before we became unnecessary. When he told us about the ‘inevitable dominion,’ we knew our position in his ranks would begin to decay. If we rebelled, it would have been an easy victory for them; they outnumbered us three to one, and they were always the better warriors. Then the Lo’Zon commanded that we be sent to the lower basement levels, near the engines.”
“Wait. You were sent to Confinement?”
“Confinement?”
“Big cells with no doors? Long open tubes with no floors? The bottom of the Central Pillar?”
“You have been there?”
“That’s where they send people like me. The Unborn. That’s how I escaped the Chalis.”
“Incredible . . .” he mouthed. “Well, I’m fairly certain it has changed a lot since we left. That was twenty years ago.”
“How’d you do it?”