Inalienable: Book 7 of the Starstruck saga

by S E Anderson

  I shuddered. “Good point.”

  “About the fresh air? I know, right?” said Blayde.

  “Do you really expect me to relay everything Zander just said and pretend you didn’t hear his entirely fair point?”

  She picked up her full glass of orange juice, throwing her head back and chugging the contents in one gulp. She wiped her face with her free hand, placing the glass back down, smiling. “Shall we?”

  “Fine. But you two need to work this out. I’m tired of being the adult here.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Zander but got up nonetheless.

  About half an hour later, we found ourselves in brightly colored jumpsuits again and gloves on our hands, braving the February early morning chill just to get some free space. We took a fallen limb over to the east of the main building that was blocking the road, the large pieces already chopped down by one of the institute’s caretakers, leaving only the small branches to clear. Our task was simple: Gather every piece we could, fill the bucket, and then carry the bucket to the huge brush pile that was being built a safe distance away from the institute.

  Mindless, repetitive work. Good for the mind.

  So long as we weren’t about to be abducted. I kept an eye on the sky as if they’d just send a ship; I didn’t expect them to be subtle.

  I picked up a tiny brindle with two fingers, dropping it into the bucket with a dull thump. And I did the same again, just waiting for one of the siblings to speak up.

  They were just as alert as I was. They were just being dumb shits about it.

  “Do you think we can talk?” I asked, begging for an opening.

  “I doubt Barker gives a shit about what we think,” said Blayde, pointing to the guard sitting on a downed log a few feet away, looking off into the distance as if we weren’t here at all. Not that there was any doubt in my mind that he was just as alert as we were.

  “Right. So, is this a trap?”

  “It might be,” said Zander.

  “Great, just great.”

  “Issues at hand,” said Blayde. “First and foremost, impending Agency abduction. Second, terrible hospital service.”

  “And third, bringing the Alliance down.”

  “Since when are we destroying the Alliance?” she sputtered. “A bit of a leap there, Sal.”

  “Blayde, they’re so deeply entrenched in my planet that I don’t even feel safe here anymore,” I said. It was strange how my muscles tensed when I spoke of them, as if my anger were on a leash and had started to pull. “They’re meant to protect Terrans from off-world interference, but I don’t trust that they do. They don’t have our best interests at heart.”

  “Even so, it doesn’t mean we have to destroy them,” she said. “The Alliance has stood for thousands of years. It’s one of the pillars that keeps this galaxy together. We can’t go around destroying every interstellar conglomerate we don’t like.”

  “Isn’t that exactly what you do?”

  “We have our limits, Sally,” said Zander. “Blayde, you’re unshunned. This is bigger than us.”

  “Finally!” I said, loud enough that Barker looked up from his mile-long stare. I waved at him awkwardly, and he went right back to it.

  “Oh, I’m not un-shunning him back,” she said.

  “Blayde.”

  “Fine, fine,” she scoffed. “Anyway, Sally, the Alliance has quite a few practices we don’t approve of, but they also do a lot of good.”

  “No, the two of you are out doing good, clearing up after them and the carnage they leave behind,” I spat. “And then they take credit, blame you, and call you terrorists. Meanwhile, their Agency has free reign on Earth, my home planet, and they act as though they own the place. They did nothing about Cross. They did nothing about the Youpaf! At the very least, we need to bring down the Agency, and then get you out of the Alliance’s scopes. It’s not like I’ve forgotten where they get their child-hires from.”

  “Fine, fine,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air, tossing branches all over. “We’ll get out of here, and then we’re going to take down some of the biggest players in this galaxy. Happy?”

  “I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic,” said Zander, “but that sounds like a good plan.”

  “Again, this is a goal, not a plan,” she said. “You see why you’re having problems with following through on your so-called plans?”

  “Then let’s focus on something closer to home, so to speak. What the hell is going on at this hospital?”

  Blayde nodded. “The dreams. You need to remember yours. Start with what you do recall, and we’ll go from there.”

  “Only I don’t think they were dreams,” I said. “I think … I think Zander was in my room last night.”

  “Oh, lovely.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Please. Spare no detail.”

  “And, just to set things straight, I wasn’t in your room last night,” Zander added.

  I rubbed my temples. Maybe extra blood flow would give me extra clear recall. “The light scared me. I remember when I woke up, on the floor, I kept avoiding the light in my room. But there was nothing there.”

  “Okay, the dark isn’t the scary bit. It’s what the light showed you that freaked you out.”

  “Or what it didn’t show me.” I shrugged. “Nothing was there.”

  “So, we can say for certain that something was there at some point.” Blayde clapped her hands as I grabbed a handful of the twigs to put on the pile. “Now I need you to picture your room. Just your room. Just the floor in your room. The small spot in the center. The pool of light. You got it?” I nodded. “Now, what’s there?”

  “Someone’s there,” I said, faded figments of fiction flickering in front of my eyes. “Someone close. They’re bleeding. There’s so much blood.”

  “Go on,” she urged. Zander watched from the side, not daring to say a word. “Who is it?”

  “They’re not supposed to be there. Not supposed to be dying.” I felt my eyelids stick together, impossible to pull them open. When had I even shut them? “But he’s bleeding. He’s dying. Right there, in my arms.”

  “Who.”

  “Zander,” I replied, without thinking. Yet when the words left my mouth, I felt the shock of the scene once again, as if the name was the key to seeing the truth, the key that unlocked my mind. Images flooded in in a torrent, their painful stories burning at the edges of my mind.

  I shrieked, dropping the twigs as I relived the previous night, every instant stretched to last a lifetime, to inflict more pain than the first time. My hands rose unconsciously to my head, holding my ears where a phantom screech of feedback had pained me the night before.

  I rubbed the bare patches of skin behind my ear with an index finger, feeling the smoothness that I had not felt in months. My translator had sacrificed itself for me.

  “Sally!” Zander rushed to my side as I blinked in confusion.

  “Shut her up!” Blayde hushed. “You don’t want to alert a nurse, do you?”

  Barker glanced over, and I waved, faking a smile. Amazingly, he said nothing. Went back to staring off into the distance. He was either a terrible guard or I was an amazing actress. I highly doubted the latter.

  “That’s the least of your problems,” said Blayde. “But you dragged me out here to talk about the nightmare you had of my brother dying?’

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t a nightmare, it was—”

  “So real? So vivid you could feel it? Yeah. That’s called a nightmare, dumbass.”

  “Blayde,” I snapped. “The translator didn’t just snap in half for no reason. Zander was dead, then he attacked me. Drilled into my head with his … palm horns.”

  “So, Zander from, I dunno, the future came back to break your translator. With palm horns. To what end?”

  “I can’t envision a future where I’d ever want to hurt Sally,” Zander snarled.

  “I’m still not convinced it is Future You doing all this.
”

  “Neither am I.” His face was contorted in confusion. “Try to understand my reasoning. Why I would do something like this. How? It’s not possible to control a jump with such precision. And through time! It’s like trying to throw a ball into the air and hope that it will land on a grain of sand on the other side of the world. And did I mention? The grain of sand doesn’t exist yet. Not what anyone would call easy.”

  “Not easy at all.” I nodded. “I also remember feeling this deep dread that everything was falling apart. Like … the Alliance was already here. I think I was supposed to warn Blayde?”

  “Future Zander must have wanted to warn us,” said Blayde, “and change the past. So, we’re supposed to do something about it.”

  “Why would I ever hurt Sally, though?” asked Zander.

  “And why would I forget all these details? I don’t think it was Future Zander. I think it was whatever the patients and nurses are calling ‘bad dreams.’ Only they’re not dreams. Something is really happening to the patients here. It’s just that they can’t remember.”

  “Maybe you needed to get rid of her translator for some reason that would soon become apparent,” said Blayde. “Or just because you wanted to drill through the past version of your girlfriend’s brain on a whim and thought a dramatic death could add some color? Euh, needless to say, worst—”

  He picked up a branch off the ground, launching it at his sister with amazing accuracy. The limb hit her straight in the face with a loud crack.

  “Wha’d’ya do that for?” I asked, watching Blayde’s face turn from pale to bruised, then from bruised back to smooth pallor before filling with her usual tan, the blanket of purple on her face spreading out then receding back, like watching ink spill in reverse.

  “What do you expect? She deserved it.”

  She blinked once, sitting back up straight and snapping her neck back into place before getting to her feet.

  “I did deserve that, and I apologize.” She smiled. Then she turned around, facing the security guard on his log, and dropped her hands to her hips. “And you. You’re shit at your job, you know that?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Except if your job is to watch without interfering,” she said. “It’s either that, or you see two mentally ill patients beating each other with sticks and you’re too lazy to do anything about it.”

  He disappeared in an instant.

  Simultaneously, the siblings leaped forward, bullets from a loaded gun, their legs carrying them forward faster than the eye could track. I watched—jaw to the ground—as they pelted into the forest, their feet barely making a noise as they propelled themselves forward through the trees, disappearing in seconds.

  I couldn’t just stand there. I took a deep breath, gathered my wits about me, and dashed off after them, following the blur of movement in front of me between the tight trees. There was no slowing down. It was full speed ahead or not at all. The air hit my face, trying to hold me back. Drag is such a drag. But there was no stopping me.

  With a loud thump and a yelp of surprise, Zander brought Barker down with a beautiful tackle, the man’s face slamming into a pile of leaves. He grabbed his neck, violently jerking him up into a sitting position, crouching in front of him so that they were face to face. Barker snarled at his captors, fierce and animalistic, his eyes losing any impression of humanity. He glared at Zander then at Blade, his eyes finally resting on me, the hatred seeping through and stabbing at me like little daggers. It seemed his shoulder might have gotten dislocated in the tackle by the way it was dangling at his side.

  “Cheap skin wrap,” Zander concluded. “You know, I thought your people would spend more on disguising their grunts.”

  The captive spat on the ground. “I’m not telling you anything.”

  “Oh great. A big damn hero,” Blayde growled. She reached up her sleeve, pulling out her laser, and flipped it between her fingers. Ready to destroy a man with office equipment.

  He must not have seen Blayde’s weapon of choice before and seemed entirely unfazed by the threat. He threw his head back, opening his mouth wide to laugh.

  “What?” he asked. “That’s all you can muster?”

  Blayde walked up close to the man, crouching in front of him so that she could stare right into his eyes.

  “Have you ever been to Jakeefa?” she asked, flipping the laser in the air and catching it repeatedly.

  The captive shook his head, staring right back into her stormy gray eyes, a snicker forming at the side of his mouth.

  “But I’m sure you’ve heard the stories,” Blayde cooed. “Sure of it, even. Come on, admit it. They were the ones that scared you most at night. The ones that kept you up, even when you transitioned out of childhood. The ones that kept you scared of the dark. You must have heard of the warriors of Jakeefa.”

  “So what if I did?” he snapped, his eyes unblinking.

  “I heard the stories too.” She grinned. “I mean, it’s hard to not hear them. And they inspired me. So, do you know what I did?”

  Barker shook his head, trembling slightly.

  “I went to Jakeefa. I went to their capital, to their master of arms. I asked if she would train me in the art of knife wielding, in the art of the blade. And you know what she said?”

  “What?”

  “She said no. She would not train me.”

  He laughed. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because that’s not where the story ends.” Blayde sneered. “There’s more.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  Blayde continued without his blessing. “So, I walked the length of their planet. I crossed the unnamed sea, I climbed their highest mountain, and I found the man who hated her more than anything else in the world. The one who wanted her to return to the dust that she came from so bad it was killing him. He agreed to train me. And he taught me everything he knew. Everything. And as the tradition of their world willed it, I did not train with metal until my first kill. I did not touch an iron blade throughout my training.”

  “So?”

  “So, I climbed down that mountain. I crossed that ocean. I walked the planet back around until I reached their capital. Until I reached their master of arms. The most feared woman in the cosmos, the one who made you check under your bed before you went to sleep for Jakeefian assassins. The woman whose name kept you up nights on end. The one who razed entire armies with nothing but her blade.” She paused, waiting for him to interrupt, though he did not. “The Alliance calls me the Iron for a reason. And I prefer to call myself Blayde.”

  Zander got up, leaving the paralyzed man to deal with his sister, alone. She flipped the pointer once more in her hand, the tip looking more menacing than it had before. The goosebumps that appeared were as real as any. “Now, would you like to know why?”

  The man pulled his hand back, but she grabbed it before he could bring his arm out of reach. A shiver passed through his body, and his fingers started to tremble.

  Zander put a protective arm in front of me. “Don’t.”

  “I just wanted him to know,” she said, baring her teeth, “that the Agency didn’t tell him who he was actually dealing with.”

  “Look, I was just here to make sure you three weren’t going anywhere. That’s all, I swear! That’s all!” Barker stammered.

  “And you never assaulted Sally?”

  “What? No!” he said rapidly, the fear obvious in his eyes. “Look, I overheard the whole thing, but I had nothing to do with what happened to her. From what the other guards have told me, the nightmares have been going on for years. It’s just something that happens at hospitals like this.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” Blayde ordered, pushing the pointer against his throat. “What did you have to do with it?”

  “I didn’t do anything! No way! I was just here to observe.”

  She threw him back on the leaves, rising to her feet in an instant and slamming her foot down on his chest before he could even move.


  “So, tell me, Agency grunt, how do you report to Foollegg?”

  He reached into his jacket, pulling out an ordinary pen. She grabbed it from his grasp.

  “Micro transmitter,” she muttered, throwing it back to Zander, who caught it one-handed. He gave it to me.

  “Look for the antenna,” Zander advised. “Transmitter pens are common enough. Where else do you think Earth intelligence agencies got the idea from? There are two main forms. “He twisted the handle up to the sky. “Model one. Great because you can still write with it. Then there’s model two, which you just point to the sky and click on. You can’t use the actual pen, but it gets rid of the telltale handle hinge.”

  “Right. How do we get rid of it?”

  “Water.” Zander chuckled. “A glass of it if you’re in a restaurant, but spit works just as well. Or …” He dropped it on the ground, crushing it under the heel of his shoe. He shrugged. “Don’t worry. He’ll have a panic button somewhere there.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” I said. “Salt. Water. I could get rid of an Alliance spy by simply bringing them to the beach? Why the hell are the off-worlders flocking to Florida, then?”

  “Not all of their operatives need skin wraps.” Zander pocketed the smashed bits of pen. “Pyrina was established by humans, after all. Distant cousins of yours. Speaking of, we probably need to do something about the old, forgotten legends, right? Seems ironic we keep forgetting.”

  With a swift movement, Blayde punched Barker, knocking him out cold.

  “A hand here?” she asked.

  The siblings proceeded to sling the man over their shoulders, leaning forward a little to make it look as if they were struggling under his weight.

  “You coming or not?” Blayde yelled back to me.

  I had not noticed that I was frozen to the spot until she pointed it out. I was standing, paralyzed, in the same spot I had been for the past quarter of an hour. I shook myself out of my reverie, grinning slightly.

  “I’m coming,” I replied, keeping up with their pace.

  A nurse rushed to our side to help with the unconscious man as soon as we emerged from the thicket of the trees into the clear patch of lawn in front of the institute.