by Lucia Ashta
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Holographic Convergence
Holographic Convergence Preview
Thank you
Titles by Lucía Ashta
About the Author
Planet Sand
Lucía Ashta
Awaken to Peace Press
Copyright 2017 Lucía Ashta
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
Cover design by Lou Harper of Harper by Design.
Awaken to Peace Press
Sedona, Arizona
www.awakentopeace.com
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For those with the courage to voyage into the unknown
We exist wherever our consciousness lives.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Holographic Convergence
Holographic Convergence Preview
Thank you
Titles by Lucía Ashta
About the Author
1
I’d been idly wondering whether I was dead or alive when the drawn out, wobbly words, “You are such a... fuuucker,” reached me. I didn’t buy into the Devoteds’ promises that the Something Greater would be there to receive my eternality once it escaped my body, but if it did, I doubted these would be the Something Greater’s first words to me.
Still, I felt dead.
Wait, no I didn’t. My brain finally registered the pain and discomfort that seared every single part of my body. And then I wished I were dead, I really did.
“You... fucker, you,” I heard again and this time my brain registered that this was an unusual thing for Kai to say, because Kai didn’t talk like this. Kai was deferent and respectful and careful. “How dare you drag us with you on this infernal trip and not tell us how terrible it’d be? You didn’t even warn us!”
With each passing moment, the pain receded more, allowing my brain to begin its return to normal functioning. As it did so, I wholeheartedly agreed with Kai and began looking forward to being able to marshal my speech. Aletox was indeed a fucker, a dastardly one.
Someone to my right groaned horribly, but I couldn’t discern who it was. I was right there with them. I’d be groaning like a crazy man if I could get my throat to work.
“You...” Metallic unsnapping sounds reached me. “You’re—” Then came a loud thump. “Ugh,” Kai groaned from the floor. “You’re the worst person that’s ever lived.”
“You’re entitled to your own opinion.” Aletox’s voice sounded a bit less sure than usual, but he was still commanding. Was he even human? I wondered. How could anyone survive what we apparently just did and not feel like crawling around the floor of the cabin to scoop up errant pieces of brain matter?
“Is everyone all right?” I slurred, sounding more impaired than I would after a dozen pints or an extra large pot of hakusha tea. Still, I was impressed with myself. It was more than I thought I’d manage.
“No, I’m not all right,” Kai said from the floor, apparently unable to pick himself up.
I would’ve joined in on the hurl-insults-at-Aletox fun, but I couldn’t even manage a follow-up question. Barely moving my head, I shifted my eyes left. There was the woman that made this ordeal worthwhile. The one who’d talked me into this terrible idea. Her long black hair fanning around her face, she was intact—at least on the outside. Her extraordinary eyes, which reflected the cosmos, looked dazed, as if the universe itself were dazed after our jump from one planet to another.
She attempted a faint, reassuring smile at me. It looked like she was about to vomit. I attempted a smile back. Undoubtedly, it matched hers.
My eyeballs jittered as I scanned the cabin. There was Kai, orange-haired and lanky, more composed than the rest of us—save Aletox—even if he was the only one sprawled inelegantly across the transport machine’s floor.
My gaze took in Aletox’s shoes but refused to examine him further until I verified that my friends were all right. I didn’t care whether he was okay, even if there was a good chance he was my father. If this trip had accomplished anything beyond making me wish for a swift death, it was to provide me with more proof that this man cared only about himself. No one should be so cruel as to allow unsuspecting people to endure what we just did. Not only had he allowed it, he’d been the one to suggest it.
My eyes found Lila next. She didn’t look much like a she-dragon just then, with her mousy brown hair shaken loose of the tail she wore at the back of neck. She looked very much like she was trying not to vomit all over her lap, something she’d already done, based on the wet stains that darkened her lab suit.
Dolpheus, my closest friend, who was only in this torturous mess because he was loyal enough to always have my back, no matter how terrible the idea or direction I was heading in was, sat next to me. With a slight tilt of my head, I could see that my friend sat pressed rigidly in his seat, his fingers clenched and bloodless, with his eyes closed, unmoving. I couldn’t make out whether his chest rose and fell from his steady breath or if that was my still-wavering eyeballs that didn’t find stillness no matter where they looked.
I breathed in long and deep, swallowing the bile and nausea. Then I exhaled, slow and loud. I gathered strength from wherever I could find it, I drew on all my reserves, and then I mind spoke to the only person in this damned metal can that could hear me.
Olph, man, are you all right? It seemed that even my mind speak was tremulous and distorted. If Aletox had forever ruined me, I’d kill him and spare the world—any of them—from the menace he was.
Dolpheus didn’t respond. Olph, my brother, talk to me.
Still no response. I was definitely going to kill Aletox. He’d be the first unarmed man I’d killed. But just because Aletox wasn’t pointing a weapon at me didn’t mean he wouldn’t harm me or anyone else. With a mind as sharp as his and the resolve to carry out his devious machinations, the man’s every breath was a danger to humanity.
It wasn’t really possible to yel
l while mind speaking, but I tried. Olph, dammit, answer me right now if you can. I’m really starting to freak out.
The silence afterward was nearly as torturous as the sensations that crawled across my body. What we’d just endured had been awful. But my body could endure far more than my heart, and my heart couldn’t lose the man who was like a brother to me, the only person I could truly trust without reservation.
Olph—
Stop your yelling already, he said, and my heart began thumping.
Holy hell, Olph. You scared the shit out of me.
Well, if the fucking jump we just survived didn’t do it, then you deserve it. I can barely manage to get my mind to work. I couldn’t get words to form in time to answer you.
Tell me about it. As soon as I feel like I can move, I’m going to kill Aletox.
Not if I beat you to it.
The race was on, only it was a race between worms. It would be a long while before either one of us would be a threat to anyone else. Right now, all the threats thumped and rolled and beat within me, where there was no escaping them.
Relieved that all my friends had survived Aletox’s torture chamber, I rested my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes. I wished I’d never have to move again.
“Kai,” came Aletox’s voice, the one I wanted never to hear again. “You need to get back in your seat and snap in.”
“Fuck you,” Kai said, and I found myself appreciating how far he’d come in so short a time. He was expressing himself, and doing it for all of us who couldn’t manage it yet. “The only place I’m going is to throttle you.”
“Well, you can wait until we make it through the gaseous layer that surrounds Planet Sand and land before worrying about that. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.”
“We aren’t even on Planet Sand yet?” Kai asked, incredulous, while Lila grunted a protest from my right side.
Aletox chuckled. He actually chuckled! And I thought I’d surely find the strength to kill him right then. The rage that pumped in my veins was potent enough to reanimate the dead.
“You fucker,” I said, blaming my lack of creativity on what the man had done to us.
Aletox turned to look at me. His arched dark eyebrows, which looked remarkably like hairy worms right then, dared to suggest that I was crossing some kind of line that I shouldn’t. It made the rage surge even more ferociously through me. I was even more desperate to have at his smug, coldhearted smirk.
“Be careful, son,” Aletox said.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Words won’t change the truth.”
“Your words are an aberration of truth.”
Aletox’s nostrils flared with anger, and I wondered at the sudden emotion. It was the most I’d ever seen in him.
“Not all men have the luxury of being true to their words,” he said.
And while all sorts of alarm bells joined the chorus of strident sounds in my head, I wasn’t up to the battle of wits that any prolonged conversation with Aletox required.
I gave up, and when I didn’t fill the silence, Lila did. “Do we have to go through that again to get to Sand?” The inflection of her words aptly reflected the spinning within me. Her tongue was thick and clumsy.
Aletox chortled again. Apparently, the man got off on playing with fire. Or she-dragons. I knew well enough not to play with either. “No, Lila,” he said, dragging out her name in a way that made me uncomfortable and challenged me to rise to her defense and kill him—and I didn’t even think I liked Lila. “We’ve already jumped across space. We don’t need to jump again.” He spoke as if she were mentally infirm instead of a brilliant laboratory researcher.
I looked at Lila, but she looked too out of it to register or mind his condescension.
Aletox drawled on, “We only have to fly through the gaseous protective layer of Sand and land. That’s it. It should be a smooth ride from here.”
I didn’t take any comfort from that. Aletox seemed incomprehensibly unaffected by what had floored the rest of us, and Dolpheus and I transported, free of unwieldy and torturous machines, nearly every day.
“Your Majesty,” Aletox addressed the woman I loved. “Where do you suggest we set down?”
Ilara’s eyes, still hazy and unfocused, snapped to attention. “What?” Her word was the sharpest thing any of us had yet managed to express.
His impassive expression unwavering, Aletox said, “You’re the only one of us from Sand. So where do you suggest we land?” He enunciated each word, skirting the line of disrespect to his sovereign, or at least his possible sovereign. Saying that she was from Sand was probably meant as another jab at me. Aletox was prodding and poking my open wound, suggesting once more that this woman, though I loved her, wasn’t the one I’d first fallen in love with. If Ilara was from Sand, then she couldn’t be from O. Or could she?
Whether this particular version of Ilara was from Sand or Origins originally, she’d spent more than three years on the planet we currently orbited. Which made her the expert on Planet Sand. None of us had ever been there, or even traveled to another planet before. Although, perhaps Aletox had. How else could he be so unaffected by the jump when the rest of us were decimated by it?
Ilara’s eyes had grown wide.
“Your Majesty?” Aletox prompted, skilled in making words meant to impart honor sound cheap.
“They warned me you were a nasty piece of work. Too bad I didn’t believe them enough to stay the fuck away from you, you crazy motherfucker.”
“Where should we set down?” he continued as if she hadn’t hurled such beautifully emphatic insults at him.
“You could’ve killed every single one of us!”
“It wasn’t as bad as all that—”
But Kai cut Aletox off, emboldened finally having someone else join him in outrage. “It was most definitely as bad as all that. You did almost kill us. I actually believed I was dead until the pain became so bad that I realized I couldn’t be. And then I wished I was.”
Ilara and Lila joined in with affirming choruses of hmmm-hmmms.
Aletox huffed then and swept a dark, unremorseful gaze around the small cabin that, now that my olfactory senses were working again and able to relay messages to my brain, reeked of bile and desperation. He held each of our wavering, bobbing gazes for long seconds before speaking again in a chilling tone that brought complaints to a temporary end. “Do you want to keep dragging this out with your whining and complaining? Or do you want to get out of this transport capsule?”
“Get us the fuck out of this thing,” Dolpheus said, his voice gravelly, but filled with conviction.
I nodded my agreement and immediately regretted it, my world was spinning all over again.
Aletox returned his attention to Ilara. “Then, Princess, where should we land?”
Ilara sighed with audible resignation. “Where do you want to go? I mean, what are your intentions? What do you want to find or whatever?”
I too had been wondering what Aletox’s true purpose for traveling to Sand was—before we actually traveled here, when my brain was still my ally and not a drum I couldn’t silence.
“If we’re here to verify whether there’s another holographic version of you on this planet, then we’d want to go wherever another version of you would be,” Aletox said.
“It’s been a long time since I stayed in one place for long. I was a storm chaser. I followed the storms. I’d only come back to visit my parents occasionally, for holidays and such. So I don’t think that’s a good gauge for where another version of me might be.”
I admired how Ilara could speak so easily of the possibility that there might be another version of her out there—as if it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I was starting to fear it would feel like the end of mine.
“Then where would the King have sent the Princess?” Aletox opened his question up to the entire cabin but still garnered no response.
He prodded, “The King wanted to get th
e Princess away from potential assassination. But the King always makes the most of every situation. He studies every angle and takes advantage of every opportunity.”
Aletox spoke as if he knew the King well, and I realized then how similar Aletox and King Oderon were.
“Come on,” Aletox snapped. “Use your brains. What would the King do? Where would he send his daughter to get her away from danger and use her time here to his advantage?”
“You have no right to insult us,” Kai said. The kid had some balls. As my brain came on board more with each passing moment, I remembered that Aletox was a man we should tread carefully around, regardless of our true feelings. Either Kai didn’t care or he was still too woozy to realize. “If we’re unusually slow to react and think right now,” Kai said, “it’s entirely because of what you just put us through.” He let his words sink in. “So back the fuck off, and talk to us with some respect.”
Whoa, go Kai! Dolpheus’ voice said in my mind. The true soldier in him is starting to shine. I would’ve smiled but every part of me still ached terribly. I only had energy for the most pressing concerns.
Aletox sneered dangerously. “Will you please get your fucking stringy orange ass the fuck up off the floor and get in your seat so I can land this thing already? I would most appreciate it.” He smiled with thin lips, and I doubted a smile had ever looked more dangerous.
Apparently, Kai thought so too, because he didn’t say a word. He half crawled, half dragged himself across the floor back to his seat. Then he pulled himself into it and buckled in with trembling hands. I couldn’t tell if his hands shook because of the jump or Aletox. Either reason would be understandable.