“Which way do we go now?” he asked in as soft a whisper as he could manage while still making sure that the others heard him.
“There’s a sign,” Angela said, pointing several feet ahead of him and up on a wall.
Staying crouched low to the floor, Jem scurried toward the sign and looked up at it. Jacob came up beside him and pointed at the top word.
“Lobby,” he said.
That wasn’t a word used on Uoria, but Jem took Jacob’s gesture and the way that Angela began to move in the direction of the arrow on the sign to mean that that was where they would find the exit. They moved as swiftly as they could and relief washed over him when he saw a wide, open area with a bank of doors ahead of them. He remembered this space. He and Galadriel had run across it during his first visit to the museum and escaped through those doors that stood just on the other side.
“Wait,” Jacob said when Jem made a move to cross the atrium. “There’s a guard at the front desk.”
That guard hadn’t been stationed there before and Jem could only imagine that his position had been added after Galadriel and he had simply unlocked the doors and run out amid the screaming of the alarm. Jem looked at the doors, narrowing his eyes to see them in as much detail as he could at the distance, and noticed that they were much the same as they had been the last time. Tall and wide, the doors were made up mostly of glass with the exception of black sections of metal across the center. It was on those metal sections where Galadriel had released the lock. Jem looked back at the guard. He knew that they weren’t going to have the luxury of enough time to pause and unlock the door before getting out.
The desk with the guard was positioned at the far side of the lobby, tucked to the side of the bank of doors so that he would have full view of anyone going into or out of the building. This meant that he was several yards away from the far doors, which meant that he would have to move around the large, nearly full-circle desk and then across the room in order to get to them if they were to go for the doors at the furthest end.
“How do we get there?” he asked, pointing in the direction of another corridor that fed out into the lobby closer to the far doors.
Angela looked down the hall where they were crouched and then back toward the sign.
“It looks like the galleries wrap around,” she said. “If we keep following this hall, eventually it will lead us through the exhibits and to that hallway. There will be other guards in those wings, though,” she said. “Museums spread them out so that they can keep the entire building under surveillance.”
Jem nodded.
“We’re just going to have to be careful,” he said. “We don’t really have much of an option.”
Angela and Jacob nodded at him and they started their way down the hallway again. Jem’s heart pounded in his chest as they crept through the corridors and galleries. It was as though he could feel the pendant around his neck jump with each beat, reminding him heavily of the journey that he had already taken and the one that still lay before him. As they moved through the museum he found his mind reaching out to the displays that they passed as if trying to capture any little pieces of information that it could about the different times and places that they memorialized. Everything seemed so much larger now, so much more complex than he had ever considered before he left Uoria. Just as they made their way into the final corridor, he wondered if somewhere deep in the museum, in a section that they hadn’t yet explored, there was an exhibit about the Denynso, and if there was, what it would say and how it would present his warrior kind.
When they finally reached the end of the hall, Jem, Angela, and Jacob huddled together behind a section of the wall that jutted out into the entrance to make a large, imposing arch. Angela looked around his arm at the doors and then up at Jem’s face.
“What now?” she asked. “The guard is right there.”
Jem looked at the guard and then back at the doors. They seemed further away from the corridor than they had when he first saw them, but this was their only chance. They had no other option for how to get out of the museum and every moment that they spent inside made it more likely that one of the other guards would discover them. The locking mechanism on the doors was more complex than it had been and it was even clearer now that they wouldn’t have time to even attempt to unlock them. He took a breath and stood.
“Now,” he said, “we run.”
Jem shot out of the shadows without another moment of hesitation, hoping that the others would follow him. He squared his body toward the door, brought his arms up cover his face, and leapt. There was a brief moment of stillness before he encountered the glass. In the next instant, he felt the pane splintering around him and heard the familiar screaming of the alarm accented by the glass falling to the ground. He hit the ground, but got up instantly to turn and make sure that Angela and Jacob were making their way out.
Through the other doors Jem could see the guard running from his desk toward the door, a communicator held to his mouth. The door had broken in such a way that the metal bar across the middle was bent but still intact, but most of the glass was gone from both the top and bottom sections Jacob was climbing over the metal as Angela scrambled across the ground to get out through the bottom. They both got to their feet and came running toward him seconds before the guard reached the door. Jem latched on to Angela’s wrist and he scooped her up into his arms as he took off running down the steps in front of the museum and down the sidewalk.
They ran until they reached a corner, then turned, starting a weaving path through the neighborhood surrounding the museum until he could hear Jacob’s footfalls slow and then stop. Jem stopped and walked back to Jacob before lowering Angela to the ground.
“They won’t find us,” Jacob reassured them. “They’ll look around the museum and in the immediate area, but until they watch the cameras, they don’t even know who they’re looking for.”
“When they do, it will pretty hard to miss Jem,” Angela said.
Jem felt a tinge of guilt, but then saw his mate smile. He reached down for her hands and turned them over to look at her palms.
“Are you alright?” he asked. “Did you cut yourself?”
“Only a little,” Angela said. “I’ll be alright.”
“Let’s get somewhere where I can bandage those for you,” Jem said.
They started walking down the sidewalk and a few moments later noticed what looked like a small restaurant. A sign glowed in the window and the faint sound of music came toward them as they approached.
“Are they open?” Jacob asked.
“It looks like it,” Angela replied.
Jem pulled the door open and the three stepped inside. He immediately noticed that they were the only people there with the exception of a grizzled man standing behind a long, narrow table that curved around the far end of the room. He lifted his eyes to the three of them as they walked in and his gaze focused directly on Jem. The warrior could feel the man evaluating him, scrutinizing him in much the same way that Angela and Jacob had when they first saw him. He anticipated a strong, possibly even violent, reaction, but there was none. The man simply gestured at the tables scattered around the room and then went back to cleaning the glass he held in one hand.
The three of them went to one of the tables and sat down, dropping their bags at their feet. Jem reached into his and drew out some of the bandages he had packed. He spread them across the table and then took out a cloth. Without warning the man appeared at the side of the table and place a large glass of water in front of Jem. He nodded toward Angela’s hands.
“Everything alright?” he asked in a voice that was exactly what Jem anticipated would have come out of him.
“Yes,” Jem replied. “She cut herself on some glass. I’m just going to bandage her up.”
“Can I help you with anything?” the man asked.
His tone was long and slow, the words grumbling in his throat long after he said them, but there was something about them t
hat sounded sincere and Jem shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Thank you.”
The man gave a single nod and walked away from the table. The interaction gave Jem a sense of comfort that he couldn’t really explain, and he felt more secure and calm as he went to work rinsing Angela’s hands with the water that the man had brought them.
“What do we do from here?” Jacob asked.
Jem started winding one of the bandages around Angela’s hand and shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Now that we’re here, I don’t know any more how to get back to Uoria than I did when we were on our planet.”
“I think the best way is going to be through the University,” Angela said. “They have connections with Uoria and with your king. They might even have another group preparing to travel there for the exchange program, and if they don’t they might be able to charter a special flight specifically for you considering the circumstances.”
“Do you know how to get there from here?” Jem asked.
“We can’t walk,” Angela admitted. “We need a car.”
“Maybe we should get in touch with Rilex,” Jacob suggested. “Galadriel asked him to take care of her car and her apartment and everything when she and Ty decided to stay with Vyker. Maybe he would help us.”
Jem wasn’t sure how he felt about reaching out to Rilex. Convincing her that his name was Rick and that he was a researcher who shared her fascination with the wall that had eventually brought her to Vyker and then to Jem, Rilex eventually admitted that he was actually one of Vyker’s species, the best friend of his father who had disappeared many years before. Though he had been extremely helpful to them in their efforts to restore the Star Wall and protect the universe from the StarKillers, Rilex had also been somewhat cool toward Jem, almost as though he were suspicious of the Denynso. He had chosen to return to Earth even after Ty and Galadriel agreed to stay with Vyker, which had struck Jem as strange, though now with the sense of attachment that he felt for the jungle planet where he had spent so much time since his own disappearance, he thought he might at least somewhat understand.
“How do we do that?” Angela asked.
Jacob reached into his bag and pulled out what looked like a small journal.
“This,” he said with a hint of a smile on his lips. “Galadriel gave it to me before I left to visit you.”
“What is it?” Jem asked.
Angela took the journal from Jacob’s hands and opened it.
“This is Galadriel’s journal,” she said. “It has Rilex’s contact information in it. Why would she give this to you?”
“She said that I should have it with me just in case I needed it. That I could give it back to her when she saw me again. It was almost like she knew that we were going to come here.”
“How could she have known?” Jem asked. “Even I didn’t know.”
Angela’s eyes dropped to the necklace that he still wore around his neck and then lifted back to his.
“Home is always home,” she said.
The man from behind the bar appeared at the side of the table again and rested his hand to the table. When he moved it away there was a small black metal piece sitting on the surface. He made eye contact with Jem and then walked away again. Jem felt like the man had been listening to them, but even though it should have bothered him, he was also strangely grateful for his presence.
“What is that?” Jem asked as Angela reached for the object that the man had left behind.
“It’s a phone,” she said. “We can call Rilex.”
Jem didn’t fully understand what she meant, but then she picked up the device and input the combination of numbers that were on the page in the journal. A moment later he heard a buzzing sound coming from the phone and then a slight click followed by a familiar voice.
“Hello?” Rilex said with a slight tinge of confusion in his words. “This is Rick Abernathy.”
He was using the human name he had chosen for himself when he arrived on Earth many years before after accidentally traveling through a portal, much as Jem had when he left Uoria during the battle with the Klimnu. That was the name that Jem had first used to refer to him, but it had never really fit him. Even though he looked fully human, there was something about him that had always struck him as different, as if because he, too, was a different species he was able to detect others. Soon, though, he found out that the man’s name was actually Rilex and that had been lying about his identity to manipulate Galadriel’s movements in an effort to complete the task that he had set out to do in a different time, in a different version of reality. Though the idea was difficult to wrap his head around when he first heard it, somehow it made everything fall into place. Suddenly his disappearance from Uoria and his arrival on the unknown jungle planet had begun to make sense.
“Rilex, this is Angela.”
There was a brief pause before Rilex replied.
“Angela!” he said with excitement. “Where are you?”
“We’re in a bar somewhere in the neighborhood with the museum. It’s the only place we could find that’s open.”
“Perfect, stay where you are.”
“What?” Angela said, but there was another slight click and she looked down at the phone with an expression that told Jem that the call had ended. “He hung up.”
“Why does he want us to stay here?” Jacob asked.
Angela shook her head. Jem reached across the table to hold her hand, finding comfort in the feeling of her skin. It was still so strange to think that she had only been his mate for such a short time. He felt like she had always been a piece of him and the thought of living only a second without her was unbearable. She looked back at him with the same intensity, the same reliance. It told him that even though she wasn’t Denynso and hadn’t been born with the same attachment that his kind developed for their mates, making it so that they could only ever truly love one person in their entire existence, she still felt the same level of passion and love for him.
For a third time the man appeared at the side of the table. This time he lowered a large plate to the surface between them and then slid the phone off the table back into his large hand. He walked away without acknowledging any of them and went back to his post behind the bar, wiping another glass with the cloth in his hand. Jem looked at the plate and saw it stacked with several types of food that he didn’t recognize, but that Angela and Jacob grabbed up eagerly. Hunger burned in his belly and he wondered for the first time how long it had actually taken for them to transport to the museum and then escape. He picked up one of the pieces curiously and placed it in his mouth. The flavor was rich and strong, accented by something very much like the water that they drew from the purple sea on Uoria.
“Do you like it?” Angela asked with a laugh.
Jem guessed that his face expressed his surprise at the surprising flavor of the food and he nodded.
“It’s different,” he admitted.
They had only been eating for a few moments when the door to the bar opened and Rilex rushed in. Jem, Jacob, and Angela jumped to their feet, surprised by his sudden appearance.
“Rilex,” Jacob said. “What are you doing here?”
Jem noticed Rilex look up in the direction of the man standing behind the bar and give a slight nod. It was a gesture of acknowledgement, of familiarity. With that one gesture, the man stepped away from his post behind the bar and through a door that led deeper into the building.
“When I heard about the museum, I thought that it could be you.”
“When you heard about the museum?” Angela asked.
“I have a police scanner,” he said. “I like to be able to pay attention to what’s going on in the area, especially with the wall here. I have to be vigilant. You never know what’s going to happen – or who might show up.”
There was darkness behind those words and none of them pushed him any further.
“What did you hear?” Jacob asked.
&nbs
p; Chapter Seven
Rilex looked at the three faces that were staring back at him expectantly. He could barely believe that they were there. He had been trying to figure out how he was going to get in touch with them and bring them to Earth, and then the announcement came over the police scanner. It had been difficult to decipher at first. The code was complex and the voices overlapped until they were almost indivisible into words. Finally, though, he was able to figure out that it was alerting authorities to a break-in at the museum. Though they called it a break-in, the scanner specified that it was actually unauthorized people in the museum who seemed to break out, smashing through the front door and escaping the guard by a matter of seconds
“As soon as I heard that the people had broken through the door, I thought that it might be you,” Rilex said. He gave a short laugh. “There’s not many people I’ve ever encountered who could just smash through a door like that.”
“But why did you come?” Angela asked.
“I’d been trying to find a way to get in touch with you,” Rilex said. “With Jem, specifically.”
Jem looked somewhat startled by the revelation.
“Me?” the warrior asked. “Why?”
Rilex felt what little amusement he had felt when thinking about Jem breaking through the glass drain away. He gestured toward the door.
“We should go.”
“Go?” Angela asked. “Go where?”
“To the University. I’ll explain on the way.”
“The University?” Jacob asked. “That’s where we were planning on going, we just didn’t know how to get there. That’s why we called you. We were hoping that you would be able to help us get there.”
“That’s where we’re going,” Rilex said. “I’ll explain on the way.”
“Wait,” Angela said as they started toward the door. “The bartender. We didn’t pay him for the food.”
Rilex shook his head.
“It’s alright,” he said. “It’s all settled.”
The Alien's Return (Uoria Mates IV Book 1) Page 5