by Lucia Ashta
“If it weren’t for her eyes, we could show her, then hide her again.”
“If your father saw you with her, he’d know that all he’d have to do would be to trail you to find her.”
“Father can’t trail us. You know that.” Father had never had the imagination necessary to accept what lay outside the boundaries and definitions of the flesh. He liked rules. He liked technology. He liked the science that allowed him to splice human beings and control the resulting splices. He liked to discover ways to control what had never been intended to be controlled.
“You know better than to underestimate your father. He’s infiltrated the royal palace. Twice. And that’s supposed to be impossible.”
“He didn’t do it personally.”
Dolpheus cocked a dark eyebrow. He was right, of course. I knew better than to nitpick with semantics. My father was a powerhouse. I should never underestimate him.
“Other than her eyes, Ilara could, theoretically, blend in,” I said.
“Yeah. Right.”
“Seriously. If we could somehow conceal the nature of her eyes—” because I’d never suggest changing them “—then she might be able to travel across O without being recognized.”
“You’re fooling yourself. There’s no more beautiful woman on this planet.”
“True. But there are other beautiful women here. You’ve bedded most of them. If we were to hide enough of Ilara, she could disappear into the background a bit.”
Dolpheus barked in laughter. “Ilara. Disappear. Right.”
“Maybe we could put a veil on her.”
“That covers her face as well as her eyes? And who wears veils anymore? She’d stick out just as much because of her veil as she would without it.”
“The Devoteds still wear veils.”
“The Devoteds avoid the royal city as if it were diseased. They dislike its greed and corruption, and its loose morals. They’re only spotted rarely at the periphery of the city. They hardly ever leave their marharas.”
“Well, now that’s a possibility.”
“What? To put Ilara in a marhara?” Again, another laugh. “Ilara? A Devoted?”
I shrugged. “These are desperate times, Olph.”
“You want to put the most sensual woman either one of us has ever met in a marhara?” Dolpheus had met a lot of women, his point was a good one. His cynicism alone proved it. “Even covered from head to toe in a veil, Ilara’d still walk the way she walks, and she’d still talk the way she talks. Or do you have some plan to disguise the sway of her hips and the sultriness of her voice too?”
I sighed. “Okay. You’re right. That won’t work. Still, if we could find a way to cover her eyes, she could come into the city under a Devoted veil, only when it’s necessary. We could tell her not to speak, just as the Devoteds who take a vow of silence. People would wonder what she was doing so far from the marharas, but they wouldn’t know she was the dead Princess.”
“Except that we’re supposed to reveal that she’s not dead, but alive. Once the people know she’s alive, don’t you think they’ll suspect any woman that seems out of place? Especially if we show her to the people, and then somehow abscond with her without your father or anyone else following us. Oers will be looking for her.”
“Unless we tell them that it’s their duty to protect her from the would-be assassins that want her dead. If she makes a quick public appearance where she asks her people not to look for her so that she can remain safe, the people will listen. They’ll be reassured in the monarchy knowing their princess is alive. And they’ll want to defend her. If the part they can take in her defense is to allow her to disappear, they’ll do it.”
“You’re right. They will. That could work. We could find a way to make an appearance with her and then disappear without being followed. Although neither you nor I’d be able to be there with her. It would be too dangerous. If your father discovers you’re involved, he’ll eventually find Ilara, no matter what we do.”
“We could figure it out. I’m sure the King would allow us use of his personal guards. They looked like badasses.”
Dolpheus nodded. “They could protect the Princess. Your father wouldn’t dare attack her under the direct watch of hardened soldiers like them.”
I sighed. The circumstances were far from ideal. “I know we’ve been over it before, but do you really think it’s absolutely necessary that she appear in person? Perhaps Oers could be persuaded to be satisfied with a remote transmission. She could refer to the attack so that her people could be certain it was a recent transmission.”
“You know how easy it is to tamper with transmissions. It wouldn’t be solid proof of her survival. It would help, but it wouldn’t be enough. In the end, she’d always need to make an appearance at some point.”
“So we’re back to how do we hide Ilara after she makes an appearance in person?” I sighed again, a tired sigh. “I wish there were some way to cover her eyes.”
“But there isn’t.”
“No. There isn’t.” I’d never minded it before, not once since my mother first taught me this as a child. The eyes were the way to see a being’s eternal existence. They couldn’t be covered, by anything, not even for a minute. It would extinguish the light that dwelled inside. It would suffocate what made the being who she was. Through the eyes, a person could reveal all of who she was, and all of who she wasn’t.
“So we’re back to having no real plan.”
“Pretty much.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
The Auxle sun was about to set. So much for progress.
Twelve
Several days passed in deep conversation and plotting with Dolpheus. We’d come up with several ideas that could plausibly resemble a plan, but none of them was foolproof enough to convince either one of us. They stood little chance of convincing someone as demanding as the King of Planet Origins.
To a large extent, our hands were bound. The King wouldn’t give me additional information on Ilara’s whereabouts until I offered him a solid plan for her rescue, along with secrets of my father’s splicing empire. We couldn’t come up with a better plan for Ilara’s rescue without more information. And I knew next to nothing about my father’s splicing procedures, discovering them was likely to be a perilous venture with uncertain and potentially devastating consequences.
What I really wanted was to get my information straight from the source: Ilara. This thought went beyond the desires of a lover. Ilara and I were able to communicate with each other through brain waves. She was unlike the rest of Oers, most of whom relied on the crystalline amplification devices they attached to their heads during most of their waking hours. Those few that had need to speak with the outcasts of the outer-lying regions paid to use one of the communication centers that dotted Origins. There, large, crystalline spheres magnified their brain waves enough to span the desired distances.
Ilara knew better. She was different from her subjects, beyond the royal blood that pumped through her veins. Like Dolpheus and me, she rejected limitations. Her mind remained open to possibilities, much as it was when she was first born, when it was as open as it would ever be.
She’d been able to slip into my head before I became aware of her presence. It was a game to her, to attempt to settle into my brain in such a way that I wouldn’t realize she was there. I’d always catch her—although not always right away—and she’d reward me with a throaty laugh when I did.
But the stakes were different now. It wasn’t a game anymore. It was a matter of life and death—hers and maybe mine. If I could reach into her thoughts, far away on some distant planet, then I might discover a detail that could serve to our advantage in bringing her back. Perhaps there was some situation we hadn’t yet accounted for, or something that had changed since she left O. It was a fishing expedition, but we were low on advantages.
Besides, there was no one else we could ask for help or guidance. From the King’s statement that he was
the only one who remained that knew where Ilara was, the person the King commissioned to relocate his daughter was likely dead. Either the King ordered the servant killed to ensure he took the secret of Ilara’s survival to the dust, or the person killed himself. During the beginnings of the Andaron rule, after the bloody defeat of the Harals, loyal subjects would take their own lives when it would serve to protect the interests of the royal family. Even today, it was considered noble to end one’s life in the name of the Andarons, although less common than it once was.
I didn’t know if I could communicate with Ilara across the expanse of the universe, especially without knowing precisely where she was, but a chance existed. That was reason enough to try. She was attuned to my frequency. She’d recognize it right away and realize that I was trying to reach her, even if the signal that made it to her was faint or warbled.
Still, it would be undoable if I couldn’t narrow down the location to which I broadcast my signal. It would take longer than my lifetime to send out a mental signal, pinging across the void, hoping to land on her by chance.
To refine her whereabouts, I needed her father to tell me where she was, or at least to give me some hint to limit the search area. No matter how many times Dolpheus and I talked through the situation, we ended up in a loop. For the King to be disposed to give me any information about Ilara’s location, I needed to give him what he wanted. And right now what he wanted was something that was nearly impossible to give.
Luckily, Dolpheus and I were skilled at achieving the nearly impossible. We were far better at it than most. My next step was to do what I wished never to have to do again: break into the most fortified facility on the entire planet and hope that my father didn’t catch me doing it.
Thirteen
I wanted to go to my father’s lab right away. Three years of trying without managing to bring Ilara home had done nothing to ameliorate my characteristic impatience. We still might not have had a full plan, but at least now I knew which step to take next. I wanted to take it immediately.
But Dolpheus wore me down, eventually convincing me that it was reckless to break into the lab without getting some rest. Our discussions of the last days had left little opportunity for sleep. My eyes were bleary and dry. Finally, I agreed to sleep first. Ilara had already waited three years. Another night or two would make little difference.
However, now I was rested, recently awakened from sufficient sleep. My dreams were less haunted than usual. Perhaps it was the thought that Ilara might finally be within my reach.
Still, Dolpheus wasn’t satisfied. “You can’t go yet, Tan. Be smart.”
“Nothing about the plans we’ve come up with thus far is particularly smart.”
“That’s true. Obviously. There’s nothing safe about we intend to do. But come on. There’s no need to make it more dangerous by moving too quickly.”
“Too quickly? Do you think that three years is ‘too quickly?’”
Dolpheus huffed. “Come on, man.”
I clipped a sheath to my belt and inspected the blade of my sword.
“Your father’s facility has every type of defense we can think of—or worse, that he can think of. Let’s at least run through what we know one more time before we go.”
I slid the sword into the sheath and walked to the other side of the room. I pulled open the shallowest drawer of my desk. “There is no ‘we.’ You’re not coming with me.”
“Of course I am.”
“You didn’t come with me last time.”
“And I regret not having gone. I let you put yourself at risk alone. I shouldn’t have.”
“No. You should have. There’s no reason for you to risk your life by going to my father’s lab. It’s bad enough that I have to do it.”
“Tan, I’m not letting you go alone.”
I concluded the examination of my choices and pulled out two knives from my collection. I tilted my eyes up at him. “I’m not asking for your permission.”
“Well neither am I.”
I stalked across the room and laid the knives on the table next to him. I yanked open the drawer beneath the table top. Dolpheus crossed my path and went over to my desk and pulled open the drawer I’d just shut.
“What are you doing?”
“What I choose to do. With the bees up your butt right now, I don’t have time to go to my quarters to get my own weaponry. You’d be gone before I returned. So I’m going to use yours.”
I stared at him, letting a full beat pass. He stared back, ran a hand through his dark hair. “Look. You’ve had my back all my life. Since we were boys. And I’ve done my best to have yours. I have no desire to abandon you now, just when it’s about to get tricky. We’re as close as brothers. Brothers don’t let each other go into the midst of hell without support.”
I continued to look but said nothing.
“I’m not letting you go in there alone.” Dolpheus paused. “You’d do the same for me.”
Finally, I nodded. “Grab the pearl-handled one and the Vikus-viper skin one. I sharpened them just the other day. And they throw well.”
Dolpheus smiled a smile that he usually reserved for disarming the ladies. A dimple formed on one cheek, near bright, straight teeth. “Now that you’ve come to your senses and agreed to my company, tell me again, how exactly are we going to get by your father’s security measures?”
I strapped the sheaths that fit my knives to my belt and tossed Dolpheus the ones meant for the knives he carried, one in each hand. He tried to catch the sheaths by sliding the knives meant for them inside in mid-air. He managed to do so with one; the other bounced off the metal tip.
“You’re losing your touch,” I called.
He grinned while bending to pick up the fallen sheath. “What’s the first defense we’ll encounter?”
“A force field that encircles the property, about a hundred feet away from the building.”
“And I presume that we can’t transport within the force field?”
Invalidating the transportation process was tricky, which was why transporting was possible everywhere, except within the palace walls and my father’s facility. There might have been other places into which we couldn’t transport, but we hadn’t encountered them. Invalidating transport involved reconfiguring the matrix of reality. One had to reweave the threads of the fabric that composed the unseen to forbid this one possibility of transporting.
As I understood it, this reconfiguration forbade the creation of new beings within this scope of reality. My body couldn’t reform within my father’s facility because no new energy body could form—or reform—within this altered matrix.
There was no one I knew to be capable of redefining the matrix’s capabilities in this way and thus limiting the possibilities within it. However, there had to be at least two people on O able to do it. One to forbid transporting for the palace, and another for my father’s facility, as I doubted that the King and my father were into sharing talent.
In my father’s case, I suspected the one responsible for this craft was Aletox. As faithful to my father as Dolpheus was to me, Aletox had been around since before I was a boy. I’d never understood what Aletox saw in my father that inspired so much loyalty. My father didn’t inspire loyalty in me, and I was his son. Yet Aletox had known my father for a lot longer than I had. I didn’t know exactly how far back they went, but at least before the time that my father met my mother. Maybe Aletox remembered the man my father used to be better than I did, and that was all it was.
“I tried to transport within the force field,” I said, “just in case it was actually possible, and the rumors that one couldn’t nothing more than rumors. It’s quite difficult to forbid it, as you know. I figured it was worth a try.”
“It didn’t work, though.”
“It didn’t. When I attempted to transport, all that happened was that I moved as close to the force field as possible, on the trajectory to my ultimate destination, which was the inner lab area.”
“I think so.”
“It’s definitely not your father.”
“I don’t think so either. Although, as you reminded me earlier, it’s best not to underestimate him.”
“I know. But still. Reworking the matrix to forbid transporting takes a considerable amount of imagination. Your father simply doesn’t have it. He lives by rules too much.”
“Yeah. His own.”
“For sure. But rules nonetheless. His life is too structured. If his mind works in a fixed way, I don’t see how he could access the fabric of the matrix. The matrix is alive and constantly in flux. There are no real rules that govern it.”
“I agree. But either way, it makes no difference. Aletox won’t help us.”
“No. He won’t. He would hand us over to your father and offer to kill us for him for our betrayal.”
A corner of my mouth lifted. “That sounds exactly like what Aletox would do. I don’t know what I did to make him dislike me as much as he does.”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with you. He can tell you don’t like your father, and Aletox doesn’t tolerate anyone who doesn’t worship your father as he does. Why he does, now that’s something I’d pay to find out.”
I smiled. “Well, if Aletox can manipulate the matrix, maybe one of us can do it too. If we’re able to get Ilara back, maybe it’d be a good idea for us to forbid transporting into our quarters as well.”
Dolpheus shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe. Although there aren’t many Oers who can transport like we can. It’s become a lost art. When the Andaron line first took over, they say almost everyone could transport. Now look at the oafs. Your father’s the main threat to Ilara, and he can’t transport.”
“Still. Maybe we should anyway. To cover all possibilities.”
“Let’s worry about that later. Right now, how do we get into your father’s lab? How’d you get in last time? When you snuck away without me?”
I knew I didn’t have reason to feel guilty for sneaking away as I had. I’d only been trying to protect him from my father’s wrath, which was as scary as any moab we’d ever come up against. Still, the guilt was there.