“Sergeant, I am confident in your ability to remain in hiding until we can come back, but we must catch—”
“No time. Everything’s on fire, going to explode. Someone here with me. Agh, no! Just do it.”
There was short, strained pause before the captain said, “Captain Druvvin to Matter Transference One. Can you get a lock on our man down there?”
Another voice said, “I’ve tracked the signal to two people in great danger. They are in close proximity to one another. The matrix is ready and holding. We should act now if we wish to save them.”
“Bring them up at once.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
The audio recording ended there. The next file listed on the drive appeared to be a separate format that Zoey guessed to be a video instead. Her heart beat fast. If she was correct then the following video was going to show the moment when she appeared on the Marslou for the very first time. One alternative running through her mind was that it would have been Dylan, but how would that make sense?
Furthermore, what happened to this sergeant that had teleported onto the ship with him? What would have happened if the captain had waited any longer to act?
“Are you alright?” Tong-Chang asked.
“I think so,” Zoey said. “I don’t know. I think I’m numb right now, but I need this. I need to know.”
“I know, but like I said, don’t push yourself.”
Zoey tapped the video file.
* * *
The scene was from a room with two dark pads on the ground, both circular. A pair of transparent tubes circled each pad in opposing directions in a slow motion. While both of the tubes were unmoving, the technician in the room pressed a series of buttons, and one of the tubes picked up again at a quicker pace.
The pad underneath glowed light blue and dark purple. It all appeared to be routine to the technician as he bobbed his head at the device.
Suddenly, sparks shot through the air and caught the technician’s attention. His face turned to panic. More sparks appeared in thin air around the outside of the active tubes. The room warped in hues from one side to the next. As the coloration returned to normal, the technician shouted into a microphone before another set of sparks popped beside them. The technician fell back and grabbed something from a case mounted on the wall. It was a pair of gloves and some goggles.
The technician went back to the console, working feverishly at it. The inactive tubes cracked and broke down. Everything died down, the lights included.
Light returned mere seconds before the door opened. Captain Druvvin and Admiral Fjorfolia walked in with two laeknir and a security officer. Their attention turned to the pad that was active until now, the tubes also gone.
Two bodies lay on the pad. The ground around them was coated in glass and scorch marks, mostly, but pools of blood flowed from both bodies. Among them, a man in a charcoal suit raised his upper body and looked at the other person, who appeared to be wearing other clothes bloodied and torn.
It was a young woman. The man shook his head in shock and fell over.
* * *
“Oh my god,” Zoey said, “it’s me. How did this happen?”
Tong-Chang said, “I’m not sure. That warping of light that I saw was unnatural for one thing. Well, maybe the next file will tell you? The only thing that I remember from that day was our power source acting strange when that discoloration passed through the Engine Room and work station. The rest of the ship saw nothing, and we saw no damage down there.”
A flashback shot through Zoey’s memory of that day. She still recalled the events as she’d told Captain Druvvin, but there was more.
“I think I felt a pinching sensation,” she said. “When I tried to help that guy up at the convenience store, something stung me in my side. It was so forgettable, though, that I thought nothing of it. You’re right, I should open the next one; it’s an audio file.”
* * *
A woman’s voice opened this time. She said, “This is the Marslou Journal, signed Laeknar Veran’uvia Saludalta, Doctor in the Field of Medicinal Studies. The date is still the sixteenth of Trejemane, Allied Revolution 225. I have with me Captain Druvvin and our surviving patient.”
“Confirmed,” said the captain.
“I regret to record that an hour ago, at seventeen thirty-seven, we lost a young man claiming to be Sergeant Mangchi from severe injuries too grave to treat with the resources available. His appearance and D-N-Al, as mentioned in my previous log, suggest that he might have been who he claimed to be, except younger by an estimated ten to twelve revolutions.”
“We have sent word to the Elysium Army and their division, the Stellar Rogue Battallion. They can neither confirm nor deny their man was anywhere near sa-Gir-2-V-n-3: p-3-c-D, or that he had any involvement with the Hulda’fi, but they will notify us upon our return if they require all of the information we have. They have given us permission to inter the body.”
A deep, nasal exhalation followed from the doctor. “Our second patient, whom we are tentatively calling Miss Sidiras, remains in stable condition for the moment, though wounded in several places across her body. Half of these wounds could easily have killed her if left untreated. The captain suggests that she may be Il’lyse Thalassas. We do not have D-N-Al from the young woman on file, but we were able to compare her to four living relatives, two of whom serve the Allied Peacekeepers at the present, and another retired.”
“With the little time we had left before the wormhole collapsed, I was able to send a request that the Thalassas family join us at their earliest convenience. Admiral Fjorfolia sent his own request in tandem. We have a long thirty days ahead before we reach Elysium IX, and it is estimated that this young woman will awaken before we enter the alliance territory.”
“If she is indeed Il’lyse, then she will want her family to be with her.”
“If she is a member of the Hulda’fi, then I will have no choice but to place her under custody. We have placed a few belongings in a bag to be further examined at a later time, but they do not appear to contain any weapons that can be used against us, nor did there appear to be any identification on her.”
“We have a code blue. Laeknir to me. Miss Sidiras is having another seizure. Sir, if you will excuse us?”
* * *
Dasos and his father were playing a game one-on-one when they heard Zoey screaming out in pain. Both men stood up from the sofa and ran for the bedroom they had given her. A crash sounded from the room the closer they got. Once he opened the door, Dasos saw Tong-Chang standing to the side with her hands clenched over her mouth, her eyes stricken with worry, and Zoey sitting on the floor, crying into the side of the mattress.
“Zoey,” Keft’aerak said, “what happened?”
When Dasos crouched down to try and comfort her, Zoey said, “This is all too much. I stared death in the face, and it told me I don’t even matter.”
“Who said you don’t matter?” Dasos asked while Tong-Chang joined them on Zoey’s other side.
“Death. You know? Oh, fucking . . . This is so maddening that I’m referring to made-up figures from Earth. I have all these memories and desires tied to who I was before everything blacked out with a flash of flame. I saw this new body appear instead of my old one. I heard the captain and doctor talking over me like I was some piece of meat. I had no idea how close to death I was, or the seizures I had that made recovery that much harder for them to achieve.”
“Zoi’ne, you’re alive now. You’re safe.”
“I don’t know if I actually am. I don’t know if I died and this is my afterlife. None of this makes sense, and I want it to. I listened, watched, and read all of this in hopes that I could understand things better, but I’m no closer. Simply believing is not enough.”
Keft’aerak lifted a small pouch from the floor. Judging from the shift in its weight, it had something inside that they couldn’t see without opening it.
He said, “I asked about the
belongings they found on you. I guess they never told you about it.”
“No, why?” Zoey said.
“If you had something from your old life, would it help you feel any better? It may not bring you answers that are beyond me on a grand philosophical scale, but it might give you something. Anything.”
Their dad extended his arm, offering the pouch. Zoey took a look at the bag and pinched it with a delicate hand. She opened the zipper and looked inside. She twisted her head left and right. If an epiphany was a cannon then her face had taken a shot upon seeing what was in the sack.
“Oh my god,” she said. “I feel so dumb right now. I should have looked at my things in greater detail. In all of the time that I had this box in my possession, I passed this bag off entirely.”
“What is it?” Tong-Chang and Dasos said together.
Zoey pulled out the first item. “One is my old house key back when I lived with my uncle. This one I could have done without.”
She set the metallic key down on the ground and reached into the bag for the next. It looked similar to the personal computers used by most people in the world, but smaller so that it fit in her hand like a cell-comm. The screen was cracked, but that could easily be fixed.
“This was my phone.” Zoey huffed. “Of course there’s no power left in it. I used to call my few friends on this, and talk to my girlfriends on it late into the night when my uncle was nowhere near to interrupt. I doubt my old service provider has any signal this far away.”
Her phone joined the key on the floor. Zoey was beginning to crack a smile again by this point. Then she laughed when the last item came out of the pouch, and she let the sack drop on the ground. The item was folded, fastened with two buttons, and had sections of green and gray along the surface.
“So I still have my wallet, I guess. Strange; I never used to mind how it looked. I was going to buy myself some Funyuns when this whole thing happened. Look at this.”
She extracted a few green slips of paper-like material and metallic disks of small, varying sizes. If Dasos had to guess what it was then this was the currency Zoey had used on Earth; her “money.”
“Twenty-three dollars and thirty-four cents; down to every penny. I made fifty last Winter doing yard work for some of my neighbors. I was going to find a job once I had an eye-D. God, if I’d had one already, how would Captain Druvvin and that doctor have talked during that recording? Would my eye-D have mattered?”
“Eye-D?” Keft’aerak said.
“Identification. You have those, right?”
“That makes loads more sense than what we say, actually.”
The garage entryway opened and closed. The sound reverberated as far as this bedroom. Bon’sinne called out to everyone, saying, “Dinner’s ready. Come down and get something to eat.”
When Dasos answered that they would be right there, Zoey leapt up and gave Keft’aerak a hug around his neck.
“Thank you so much, Dad,” she said.
“It’s alright,” he said. “I know you’re still adjusting to your new life, and part of it is grieving over what you lost. Some of it relates to the trauma you went through. That takes time to recover.”
They all got on their feet and left the room. Zoey resumed the conversation when they turned the corner for the stairs.
“How did you get to the Marslou when you did, anyways?”
Keft’aerak said, “My ship flew us most of the way there. Bonny and Dasos joined me by shuttle, and . . .”
[ 24]
Soror Valide ran her fingers against the wooden beams of the handrail. It was perhaps the most interesting thing about the stairwell leading into the laboratory. A distant second was the tapping sound that her footfalls made thanks to the sheets of wood over every step.
A single older gentleman had his back to her when she entered the room and spotted him. He moved a few pieces of machinery about and returned to his board where he spent so much time working on two long formulas. He was probably going to perish of old age before he perfected this project, but he refused to seek anything as novel as treatment for the aging process.
His funeral, Soror Valide figured.
“You heard about our success, I suppose?” she said to him.
The guards showed no sign of caring, but the old man stopped moving. He turned toward her. He was a human male, claiming to be in his fifties though his hair and face suggested at least seventy for others of his ilk. Then again, this human was not from Lutoume. He had appeared in the frigid wastes outside by accident, and by the same level of serendipity he was found and nourished before the cold could claim him.
“Yes,” the man said, “I heard you’d established a wormhole, but that it made a huge mess. I heard that it didn’t close when you needed it to. Stable wormholes of that magnitude need more work.”
Soror Valide rolled her eyes. She said, “We haven’t found the culprit behind launching the Lady’s medicine toward Natt Grans.”
“That’s a shame.”
“We found a spy, though. I made sure to kill him and leave him on that rock we landed on. What was it you called the place? Oh yes, Earth.”
“Y-you set foot on Earth?”
“I thought of you when I was there. I set it on fire as we left. Now don’t look at me that way. Assuming your people aren’t too busy flinging feces or bombs at one another for the pettiest of reasons, I’m sure they had no problem putting the flames out.”
The man huffed. Then he turned forcefully back to his work. Soror Valide didn’t want to admit it, but some part of her did feel bad for teasing the human like this. She nodded and reached behind her for the object secured to her backside.
She spotted the guards turning her way. Please, if she was here to harm the man, then she would have killed all of them by now without hesitation. Soror Valide waved a bag in front of her so they would see it at least. The guards gazed at one another.
“Speaking of trips to far-off lands,” she said, “I brought you a little gift.”
“I tire of your foolishness,” the man said.
She tossed the bag over his head and bounced it off of the board. He looked down at it and took a moment before kneeling down to pick up the item.
“That was the right one, right? Enjoy your Funyuns,” said Soror Valide, heading to the stairs. “I understand you missed those.”
* * *
Zoi’ne stirred awake in the early hours of the morning. Nothing in particular woke her, but she became lucid and able to hear a shower running. In the past month the few showers she heard were her own or Tong-Chang’s.
Not only was Tonny still asleep next to her on the bed, but the humming that Zoey heard from the shower was a man’s voice. It was Keft’aerak. Something about his humming was reminiscent of pirate shanties that she had heard in cartoons and theme parks as a child.
She giggled silently toward the general direction the sounds were coming from. It wasn’t long until Zoey drifted back to sleep.
Later into the morning, Zoey took a walk through the upper floor of the house while Tong-Chang showered and Dasos made himself some breakfast. She stopped at a closed door where she knew a bedroom had to be, but hadn’t seen any of it yet. No one spoke of it, she thought. She placed a hand on the grip of the knob.
The handle turned without any noise; the door itself was as quiet. Once it was open, Zoey thought for one second that someone could have been waiting for her beyond the opening. No one was there. All there was inside the room was a bed, a pair of posters that showcased rock bands, an empty desk except for a few picture frames, and an ovular rug over the carpet. It had to be her room.
Zoi’ne closed it again now that her curiosity had been sated for the time being, and she went downstairs to find her mom tapping away at her digital pad.
“Good morning, Zoi’ne,” Bon’sinne said.
“Hi.”
“There is food in the kitchen if you would like to help yourself to some breakfast. Let me know if you don’t know what
or where anything is.”
“Sure, I’ll take a look.”
The cabinets inside of the kitchen were wooden frames with glass centers. Zoey had seen that much before, but she’d never gotten a good look at their contents until now. Dishes and cups were set up in neat, organized stacks, as expected. It was so much of what Zoey would have expected from any well-stocked kitchen.
On one shelf she saw three boxes that were plainly obvious as to what they contained. Zoi’ne tipped them over one by one to get a better look before grabbing one that looked promising.
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