by Lucia Ashta
“Yes, all this is true. She moves as she always has, like a sensual cat. But the way she speaks is different. She’s not as quick to slice the air with her words. What she says isn’t half as clever.”
“But that could all be explained by her lack of memories, Olph. No one outside of the sand industry has ever traveled to Sand, or any other planet for that matter.”
“That we know of.”
“Yes, that we know of. She came from Sand and into my arms in a way we—the ones who believe in limitless possibilities—didn’t even realize was possible. The specialists in the sand industry use transportation machines. Yes, they’re outdated transportation machines, but still, they have an outer shell that isolates them from the potential severity of the transport.”
“True.”
“Remember, Olph, she came over from another planet. We’ve only ever traveled across one planet, and we know how harsh that can be. Remember what it was like when we were first learning to transport? It felt like the Devoteds’ Something Greater was tearing us apart, piece by piece, speck by speck, and punishing us for our grand notions.”
“Yeah, it was pretty rough. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget it.”
“Well, imagine what it might feel like to transport across planets. Not just what it feels like, but what it might do to a person.”
“Shit, you’re right, Tan. It’s no wonder she can’t remember a damn thing. We’re lucky she didn’t end up feebleminded, or with body parts in the wrong place. And a body like hers would be a real shame to mess up.”
Dolpheus wasn’t used to minding his words with me. I could tell he was struggling not to say the wrong thing when speaking of the woman whose beauty was as legendary as our warrior prowess.
“So we have no way of determining whether this Ilara is your Ilara or not,” Dolpheus continued. “No matter what Aletox says, you’re totally right about interstellar transport. We truly have no idea what it might do to a person. And we’re lucky as fuck that the princess was so competent in transporting across O. If not, the trip from Sand to O might’ve killed her. Shit, it might’ve made her explode or something equally terrible. I didn’t even think about it. For once, Tan, we’re lucky as fuck.”
I hadn’t thought of it in those precise terms either. Suddenly, the problems we faced didn’t seem as overwhelming or as important. Ilara was here, with me. At least some version of her was. The woman I loved was returned to me.
This shift in perspective alone was enough to expel tension from my shoulders. The day brightened considerably beneath the rising Suxle Sun. I smiled. “I’m not sure we’ve ever been lucky as fuck before, Olph. This is good, very good. It must be a sign that things are going to get better for us.”
“Sure they are,” he said. But it wasn’t clear if he believed it. I barely dared to believe it. Our lives had been one challenge after another since we were boys.
“Either way though, Tan, we still have to find some way to determine beyond doubt whether this woman is the princess or not.”
“Do we really?” I realized we had to. I just wanted to indulge in the fantasy of an easy life for a moment, however brief.
“Of course we do. I mean, I think we do. We can’t take the chance of just leaving the princess on some random planet, can we?”
“Ach. No. Of course we can’t.”
“So we’re back to the start. How do we know if this Ilara is the princess or not? How can we find out? I agree that we can’t trust a single thing that comes out of Aletox’s mouth. Or Brachius,’ even though obviously we can’t go to him with this.”
“I don’t think we’re going to find anyone to help us figure out who this Ilara is. No one’s ever done this before, Olph. No one. If Ilara doesn’t even know, and she looks exactly like the princess, we’re kind of fucked.”
“Yeah. But there has to be something we can do. Tan, come on, there always is. Think.”
“Okay, well, it is peculiar that, while she has no memories of her time on O, she does remember her time on Sand. I haven’t been able to explain that.”
“Hunh. That is weird, especially now that we can confirm that no one implanted memories of any sort into her. She came straight through to you, there was no chance of anyone else interfering with her. Lila, for example, with her scary-as-fuck kit of vials was nowhere near her, unsupervised, before you already determined that Ilara remembers nothing of her time here.”
“Speaking of Lila, maybe we should ask her opinion about all this.”
“But she doesn’t know anything about interstellar transport. She barely knows what Brachius actually does in the splicing.”
“True. But Lila’s wily, and even if she doesn’t know everything about splicing or how Brachius transports the splices off planet, she still knows more than we do about it.”
“All right. Let’s call her over here, then.”
“In a bit. I’m not ready to talk with her yet,” I said.
“I know what you mean. I don’t think I’m ever in the mood to talk with her. At least she seems to have moved past our kidnapping her.”
“Yeah, it seems as if she has. But you know what they say about she-dragons.”
“Never trust them when they’re breathing fire, and especially don’t when they’re not.”
“Precisely. Olph, the truth is that the fact that Ilara remembers her time on Sand but not on O lends credibility to the fact that she might not be the princess. It’d be one thing if she didn’t remember anything at all about her life on either planet. Then it might make more sense to think that her memories of her life would return at some point. But to remember one life and not the other?”
“Makes it seem as if she lived one life and not the other.”
“Exactly. Meaning, she might not be the princess after all.”
“Tan, we could loop through this all day long and still not arrive at the answer. There must be some way to figure it out though, and we need to before we can decide the strategy behind our next steps. If she’s the princess, we’ll need to consider whether we should take her to the palace or not. If she isn’t, then our considerations move beyond the preservation of the Andaron Dynasty as the ruling monarchy, if that’s still what we want to do.”
“Does it? I’m not sure knowing which Ilara this is changes our immediate considerations concerning the government. After all, this Ilara certainly will convince anyone she meets that she’s the princess. That fact is enough to position her to prop up King Oderon while he recovers.”
“If he recovers. Maybe the old coot will finally die.”
I chortled without mirth. “I’m not sure Oderon even can die, especially now that we’ve found out he’s spliced himself. He’s mean enough to live on forever.”
“As are Aletox and Brachius. And now we have to consider that it might be Aletox, and not Brachius, who’s been trying to position himself to rule all this time. The Crown believes Brachius is responsible for the assassinations and the attempts, though no one’s been able to prove it.”
“Probably no one ever will. You know what Brachius is like.”
“I do. And I also know that Aletox is just as cunning and just as secretive. We now officially have no idea whether Aletox or Brachius is the mastermind of it all.”
I stopped pacing for a minute to study Ilara, an outline at the top of a hill, alluring even at a distance. “Olph, why is it always this way with us? I mean, would it kill the Something Greater not to make things more confusing for us? Each step we take forward seems to open up a new set of questions.”
“It’s just not our way, Tan. It’s just not our way.”
“So what do we do then? Talk with Lila, see if she has any ideas? And if not, just proceed with this Ilara as if she were the princess, because to all of O she will be?”
“I guess so. But if the true princess is somewhere, we need to bring her back. We can’t just leave her there, forgotten.”
“No, we can’t,” I said. “And now the only man
who might have known a bit more about sending her away is unwaking. I can’t believe how fucking shortsighted the great and mighty Oderon was. I was asking him to give me information to save his daughter, for fuck’s sake.” Suddenly, I was angry. All this mess could have been avoided if the King had put his daughter before an attempt to get information from the splicing industry out of me. That delay alone might turn out to be the difference between securing the true princess and not having enough information to do so. “He knew I was trying to bring her back, that I’d protect her with my life. But was that enough for him? No. He wanted more. He wanted something for himself. Fucker.”
“A king like him doesn’t rule for more than a millennium without advancing his own interests at every turn.”
“But shouldn’t it be possible? For there to be a king who rules according to the interests of his people and not his own?”
“It should. But it’s never been that way. Not yet anyway.” Dolpheus paused. “Maybe a queen could rule more fairly.”
I followed Dolpheus’ gaze, pinned to Ilara. “Maybe,” I said. “No matter who she is, she’s certainly shown more concern for the few Oers she’s met since arriving than her father has ever done.”
“The Queen Mother was good though,” Dolpheus said. “She seemed kind enough.”
“She seemed kind enough. But we never knew her. Not really. We hardly even met her.”
“True.”
“And we know how much truth lies behind rumors.”
“Never enough,” my friend said. “Shit, Tan, I don’t even know why we bother with our planning sessions lately. We don’t seem to get very far with them anymore.”
“Just imagine how fucked we’d be without them, if we didn’t have each other to bounce ideas off of.”
“I’m glad I don’t have to.” Dolpheus smiled at me. “We’re in a big enough mess as it is. We always have each other’s backs, right?” He moved over to me and clapped a hand to my shoulder.
I smiled back, grateful what I’d feared to be an unforgivable betrayal turned out not to be that. “We always have each other’s backs,” I affirmed.
“Shall we go ahead and call over the she-dragon? See if she can get us anywhere before we go down dead-end roads any farther?”
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
“Hey Lila,” Dolpheus called out, loud enough for his voice to carry to where she stood, close enough to the horses to study them, not close enough to connect with them. If she ever wanted to learn to ride, she’d have to do better than that.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Will you come join us for a bit?”
She looked at Dolpheus, hesitant at first, then eager. “Sure,” she said and started our way, her smile growing as she walked.
“Damn, Olph. How is it that you can do that to a woman with just one sentence? And it’s a woman you don’t even like!”
“What can I say? I’m gifted.”
I elbowed him. “Yeah, you’re gifted, all right. Gifted with a bunch of mowab shit between the ears.”
We both laughed. He was probably as intelligent as the scientist we were calling over to cull her brain for ideas.
“You better keep up your ladies’ man show,” I said. “She looks dangerous as fuck with that scary smile plastered on her face like that.”
“Aye. That she does. I have the unbearable urge to cup my balls to protect them from her.”
I was having the same uncomfortable experience. “I know exactly what you mean.” Lila looked more dangerous than usual when she was pretending to be nice.
“Let’s hope she takes it as a compliment that we want to include her in our planning.”
“Let’s hope,” I said.
“Lila,” Dolpheus started, allowing his voice to reach out to welcome her. When he moved to meet her, I stayed where I was.
He’d need to take the lead on this one. Ladies’ man, work your faithum, I thought. We needed every speck of help we could get.
9
Dolpheus led Lila over to where I stood, guiding her with his arm wrapped around her. Her smile was the broadest I’d seen it since meeting her. She hadn’t done much to hide her attraction to my friend then, and she didn’t now either.
“So what’s going on?” she asked. “Why do you need me?” Her tone was one of friendship. Perhaps she was willing to think of us as friends so long as Dolpheus kept up the ruse.
Or maybe she was a friend already, if it was possible to have friends one didn’t like very much. We’d come to a sort of unspoken understanding with Lila. She helped us since she couldn’t return to her job at the splicing lab. Before she couldn’t because Brachius, always suspicious, would suspect she’d been compromised after her abrupt disappearance from the lab. Now that Aletox had seen her in our company, she’d never be able to go back to her former employment. It was also possible that her life was in danger, threatened by either of these men. If Lila possessed secrets they didn’t want divulged, then they might consider removing the threat. We hadn’t spoken of it, but she was smart enough to work this out on her own.
In return, we’d kidnapped her and apologized for it, accepted her help in discovering Ilara’s off-planet whereabouts, and reluctantly agreed to consider ridding O of what she considered the terrible evil that was the splicing industry. Dolpheus and I were wiser than to go around poking Vikas viper nests with sticks, which is precisely what we’d be doing if we interfered with Brachius’ (and perhaps also Aletox’s) splicing empire. But what could we do? Lila claimed it was important to her, even though I believed she concealed the full reasons why. We’d made no promises, but Lila was hopeful we’d do her bidding after she did ours.
It wasn’t exactly the foundation of a solid friendship, and I counted no she-dragons among my few friends for good reason, but I was open-minded if I was anything. I offered Lila a tentative smile. If she was willing to play nice, so was I. “We want to see if you have any ideas about our current situation.”
“Yeah,” Dolpheus said, “I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’re in one giant, sticky mess.”
“How could I miss it? You dragged me into the middle of it.”
“As we’ve said multiple times,” I said, “we’re sorry about that. But maybe it’s for the best, really. I mean, now it’s become clear that things might be quite a bit different at the splicing lab than we originally thought.”
“What do you mean? I think I know what you’re getting at, but be clear so I’m sure.”
“We’d all believed Brachius was in control of the splicing empire and every attempt to take power associated with it. If you think splicing is evil, then Brachius was the evil genius behind it. If Aletox is actually the mastermind behind everything, and not Brachius as we thought, then that changes things. A lot.”
“And we can’t yet know how much,” Dolpheus added. “If Aletox is actually the master and Brachius his shadow, instead of the other way around, we essentially have little idea what’s going on over at the splicing lab. But you’re intelligent enough to have figured all this out on your own. You don’t need us to tell you.”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “Remember, I had to work with the crazy fuckheads. I told you they were evil.”
While she hadn’t told us both Brachius and Aletox were evil, or even that Brachius was, just that the splicing industry was, I got her point. Even if we didn’t know what exactly Brachius and Aletox were, we could be certain they were crazy fuckheads. Which reminded me that this wasn’t what we’d invited Lila over here to talk about. “I fear we’ll have plenty of opportunity to deal with Brachius and Aletox in the future. Now we have to figure out what to do about this giant mess we’re in.”
“I don’t consider this giant mess mine, just so you know. It’s your mess. You just dragged me, kicking and screaming—literally—into it.”
“Point taken,” I said while Dolpheus pretended to scratch an itch on his thigh so he could disengage his arm from Lila.
She had a point, but
still, by now she’d certainly seen enough to realize that Dolpheus and I were the good guys—most of the time, at least—and that we were just trying to do what was best for Oers at large. Or maybe the problem was precisely how intelligent she seemed to be. She was intelligent enough to realize that, while the greater interest of all Oers was at the forefront of my concerns, there would always be someone a few steps ahead. I didn’t attempt to conceal my devotion to Ilara, as much the princess as the woman. “Look, Lila. We don’t want trouble.”
“Really we don’t. We’ve had enough of it to last us a full millennium,” Dolpheus added.
“For two guys who say they don’t want trouble, you sure seem to find an awful lot of it.”
I said, “We just want to find the way to extricate ourselves from this situation, and leave O a better place for everyone.” This was the truth, and Lila’s intelligent eyes registered that it was.
Although Lila appeared to be somewhat sympathetic to our cause, Dolpheus stepped in, and I was glad he did. I didn’t have the stomach to pander to this woman right now, even if none of this was her fault. My patience, lacking to begin with, had been tested beyond reasonable limits by recent events.
“Lila,” he said, “I think it’s pretty clear that if any of us had been able to choose what happened, we would’ve chosen differently. We didn’t mean to rope you into all of this, but we did because the circumstances forced us to. If you give us time, we’ll try our best to make things right with you. But we have to focus on one problem at a time. And right now, our most pressing problem is figuring out what to do about the princess.”
“What to do about the princess?” she said, her tone flat.
“Yes,” Dolpheus said.
“What exactly do you need to figure out about what to do about the princess? It seems to me that lover boy—er, I mean, Tanus,” she said, not bothering to pretend that she cared that I’d asked for her respect earlier, “had no trouble figuring out what to do with her last night. From the sound of it, we were all missing out on the fun.” Lila gave Dolpheus a meaningful, suggestive look, which Dolpheus pretended not to notice.