by Lucia Ashta
“All right, guys,” Lila insisted. “Enough already. You’re making me squirm.”
My eyes snapped to the she-dragon and she blushed, an unusual sight. What the hell did that mean? I wondered.
“So... how long is the night here? Or the day? How many hours are there, does it add up to?” Lila was flustered, cobbling together words as quickly as she could, before she appeared to realize what she was doing and stopped talking.
Ilara smiled compassionately. It led me again to reflect on how different this Ilara was from the Princess I loved. The Princess would’ve eaten up Lila’s discomfort in one big wolfish gulp. But there was nothing sly or smug in this Ilara’s expression. “There are twenty-four hours in a day on Earth. Roughly, and I mean very roughly, the day is half that, and the night the other half. But this changes throughout the year. There are two points in the year, called equinoxes, but that’s neither here nor there, when the day and night are equal to each other. Between the equinoxes, the nights and days are stretching or shortening, depending on what hemisphere of the world you’re in.”
“Hemisphere?” Lila prompted.
“Which half of the world. Top or bottom.”
“That’s funny.”
“What is?”
“That you should determine what side is top and which is bottom on a round planet that’s continually spinning and moving through space.”
“Yeah,” Ilara said. “I suppose it is funny. Anyway, I don’t want to get bogged down in details. Basically, I don’t know how long the night will be because I don’t know what time of the year it is right now in the part of the world that the Sahara Desert is in. I mean, do we even know if time moves the same way on Earth as it does on Origins?”
“No, we don’t,” Aletox contributed in a sad voice I didn’t understand.
I looked at him curiously, but he revealed nothing, uncharacteristically slumped in his seat and facing the rest of us in our rough circle of space travel survivors.
I reined my curiosity in and tried to aim our focus. “Speaking of time, we don’t know how much of it we have until this day ends. We need to figure out when the best time to travel out of here is and then prepare for that the best we can.”
Ilara addressed Aletox. “You didn’t happen to notice where the sun was in the sky when you opened the door, did you?”
“You mean, did I make out the sun’s position in the middle of a blinding sandstorm while I fought to close the door?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.” Ilara wasn’t intimidated by his sarcasm.
“No, I didn’t notice.”
For this, I didn’t blame Aletox. My eyes had struggled to adjust even to the light he allowed in the door. Locating the sun would have been impossible for me in the time before he managed to pull the door shut.
Which reminded me, “Speaking of you shutting the door, Aletox, how is that you weren’t as affected by the space jump and travel as we were? Are you somehow immune to it?”
“I’d like to know too,” Dolpheus agreed. “The rest of us were sicker than almost any other time in our lives.” Dolpheus must be thinking of the time when he and I were learning to transport free of a clunky machine, because there weren’t many times in life when we became so sick we wished for death. But when we first were learning to transport, it was this nearly this bad.
In response, Aletox closed his eyes and appeared as if he had every intention of ignoring us.
“Oh no,” I said. “You don’t get to almost kill us and dump us in hostile territory on Sand and then play dumb. No way. I want answers and I want them now.”
“We want answers,” Lila added boldly. She’d come a long way in her attitude from the demure one she’d shown Aletox in the splicing lab. I guess nearly getting killed does that to a person.
Aletox didn’t move.
“Aletox,” I said, but that one word carried menace. I was sick of his bullshit and lies. And I was only growing sicker of them with each second that ticked past, however time worked on this planet.
He seemed to realize that, while he was one of the most dangerous men on O, I was the one with the reputation for ferocity. Reputations were usually at least partly earned. He opened his beady, dark eyes and trained them on me. “That wasn’t part of our deal. I was to tell you everything I knew about splicing and holographic replicas of human beings, and you were to protect me as if I were one of your own while we’re here. There was nothing about me having to tell you every little thing about myself down to the color of my underwear, assuming I’m wearing any.”
I passed right over picturing him with or without underwear—yuck. “Nothing about our deal implied you’d try to kill us and make us sicker than death itself.”
“Ah. Enough with this ‘I nearly killed you shit!’ Will you get over it already? We have more important things to do than dwell on the past.”
“The past?” Kai said dangerously. “I still feel like someone big and mean is yanking my insides outside of my body and playing jump rope with them.”
Aletox kept his eyes on me.
“Answer me,” I said. “Why weren’t you as affected as the rest of us were? Especially considering Dolpheus and I transport all the time and are used to the discomfort of our bodies being pulled apart and then reassembled?” I purposefully left Lila out of things. She too could transport, but was Aletox aware of that? I wasn’t about to give any of our secrets away unnecessarily, even as I pressed him to reveal his own.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ve been taking the transport machine on trial runs.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Often,” he added.
“‘Trial runs?’ How often? Since when?”
“Often enough. Since a while ago.”
Oh no. I just pieced it together. “You’ve been trying to get your design of this vunter death trap to work for a long time, haven’t you? Years, maybe even centuries.”
Aletox’s expression became stolidly impassive, which meant he was hiding something.
I kept going. “You had to have been taking this thing out on lots of test runs for your body to become so used to sensations I’m pretty sure no human body was ever meant to become accustomed to. Which means... Please tell me this isn’t the very first time you got it to work.”
But he didn’t say a word.
Dolpheus said, “By the oasis, you actually brought all of us along on the transport machine’s virgin voyage, didn’t you?”
Aletox remained impassive.
“Holy...” Kai said.
Lila glared, she-dragon style. I’d be surprised if flames didn’t erupt behind her eyes. It was lucky for Aletox that she still looked queasy and unable to move, or I would’ve bet on the mousy laboratory researcher taking down the tall, formidable-looking man.
But Ilara laughed, quietly at first, but it quickly burst open, almost to hysteria. She held her stomach. “Oh my god,” she wheezed. “I’m going to be sick if I can’t stop laughing.”
“Why are you laughing?” Aletox said, snapped out of his show of silence.
“Because...” Tears slid down Ilara’s cheeks, and I found myself smiling even if I didn’t have a clue what the hell she could find to laugh about in our current predicament.
She wheezed, “I’m laughing because you are one crazy motherfucker, that’s for sure.” She laughed again. “And you’ve got the low-hanging balls to prove it.”
She folded in on herself. “Oh my god, I have to stop.” She took forced breaths. “Nope.” She dissolved into giggles.
I stared at the woman I loved, wondering which of the two she was, hoping she was the one I’d get to keep forever. Then I started laughing too. I didn’t mean to, but once I started, I couldn’t stop either.
And when Aletox flared the nostrils of his thin, straight nose and set his jaw at me, I laughed harder.
Ilara was right. Aletox was one crazy motherfucker with huge, dangling, low-swinging balls. But what did that make us if we willingly followed him into outer space? I’d r
ather laugh without reason than answer my own question. I didn’t think I’d like the answer to it.
6
“Are you all quite finished?” Aletox growled. He wasn’t used to people laughing at his expense, especially not an entire cabin of them.
But Ilara’s laughter proved highly contagious, and even the she-dragon joined in.
“I don’t even know why I’m... laughing,” Kai said in a squeaky voice, clutching at his stomach just as Ilara had.
“Then stop,” Aletox snapped, but his request only made us laugh all the more.
Finally he closed his eyes and slumped into his seat, his legs stretched out in front of him, preparing to ignore us for as long as it took.
Dolpheus shook silently next to me, and I realized how long it’d been since we’d laughed like this. It felt good. The back and sides of my mind felt like they’d opened, as if some of the pathways within had been clogged before and weren’t any longer.
But eventually I had to stop, or I’d pee myself. “Ah,” I said, intentionally trying to calm myself down. “At least that cleared out my eyes of most of the sand, so that’s good.”
That made Kai erupt in a new fit of laughter, but even he finally quieted down.
“Are you ready to begin acting your age?” Aletox said. “You’re not children anymore. Tanus, you’re four hundred and forty-three. Act like it.”
“Wait,” Ilara said, fully serious now. “How old did you say he was?”
“He’s the exact same age as you, Your Majesty. It should be easy to remember.”
“Did you say four hundred years?”
“Four hundred and forty-three.”
“Are you serious?”
Aletox threw his hands up. “I’m the one who passed out on the lovely vomit-covered floor of the cabin, yet I’m surrounded by idiots.”
“Hey,” I snapped. “Watch it.” I was well aware that Ilara—either of them—could handle herself, even with a man like Aletox. After all, the princess had been navigating the royal court since she was a babe, and there was no place with a greater concentration of dangerous people with the lashing tongues of vipers than that. But no one was going to insult the woman I loved—or any of my friends, for that matter—while I sat around and did nothing. My body still might be recovering from the effects of space travel, but I’d back up my threat if I had to. I’d find a way.
“Tanus,” Ilara said gently, “are you really four hundred and forty-three years old?”
“Yes. And so are you.”
She thumped back against her seat so hard that the knives clanked in their sheaths strapped to her arms.
“How old did you think you were?” I couldn’t help but ask, even though she seemed overwhelmed enough already.
“Twenty-six.”
“What?” I said. Now it was my turn to be shocked.
“Yeah,” she said.
“All right,” Lila said. “So it’s clear that time operates differently on Sand than it does on O. Or maybe that’s not clear. I suppose nothing is really clear, because it all depends on whether this Ilara was born on O or not.”
A lot—too much—depended on whether the woman to my left was born on Origins or on Sand.
“I hate to say it, mostly because the thought of moving sounds totally terrible, but we have to focus on what’s most pressing now. We’ll have plenty of opportunity to ponder the passing of interstellar time later if we survive whatever we’ll have to survive once we leave this capsule.”
She was right. I nodded, and Dolpheus said, “Yes, we need to get moving. Aletox, are you able to move?”
“Of course I’m able to move,” he snapped.
Dolpheus didn’t take the bait. With a calm voice, he continued, “I ask because you collapsed and were unresponsive not that long ago.”
“I’m fine.”
“Do you know why you passed out? If you say you’re used to the hellish movements of this machine, then do you know what made you lose consciousness?”
“I don’t,” Aletox said. I saw the lie in his dark eyes. He knew exactly why. But he wasn’t telling.
Fine. If he died while we were on Planet Sand, we’d be stranded here, but at least we’d be rid of him and his lies and manipulations. Eventually, I imagined Lila would be able to fix the machine to facilitate our return. At least all the people I cared about were with me here. We’d make do without Aletox if we had to.
“You heard the man,” I said to Dolpheus. “He’s fine. So let’s get moving. Ilara, what supplies would best serve us in this environment?”
“Water, definitely water.” She sounded far away at first, but her voice crystallized as she focused on the problem—or the problems, because we had a shitload of them, enough to share. “Anything to shade our skin. Food, I suppose. Some kind of medical kit would be good. I don’t know, what’s on board?”
“Let’s find out,” Dolpheus said. “Aletox, where are the supplies you stocked for this virgin voyage?” Dolpheus rubbed Aletox’s betrayal in subtly, but I noticed, so Aletox must’ve too.
“In the panel behind Lila.” He moved to get up, but had a moment of unsteadiness on his feet, which he tried to cover up by sitting back down quickly.
He might die out in the Sahara Desert after all. I decided that’d be just fine by me.
Dolpheus and I stood, tested our balance for a few moments, then went to the panel. Our movements weren’t smooth, but they’d have to do.
We made it over to Lila, but I had to lean a heavy hand against the panel above her head. I noticed Dolpheus was as well. Once we left the capsule, we’d have to trudge through inhospitable territory in extreme heat. I had no idea how we’d manage and I did my best not to think about it. One thing at a time, it was the only way we’d get out of here alive.
“Lila, can you get up?” Dolpheus asked. We’d have to stash her seat in order to open the panel behind her.
She sighed the heaviest sigh I thought I’d ever heard. “Honestly,” she said, “I don’t know. Everything’s still swirling and I’m trying hard to keep from being sick all over the floor again.”
“I feel you,” Dolpheus said. “But you’re going to have to try, if there’s any chance of us getting out of here. We need those supplies. Do you think you could give it a shot if Tanus and I prop you up?”
I tried to smile encouragingly at Lila, because we really did need her to get up. But I was having enough issues holding myself up without supporting someone else’s weight on top of it—and from the looks of her, she wouldn’t be doing much to keep herself upright.
But what was the life of a soldier about if not surmounting and surviving impossible odds? Dolpheus and I weren’t particularly lucky. But we trained our minds and our bodies hard enough that we made our own luck. We’d survived what others would consider impossible odds more times than I cared to count.
“I don’t know, but I’ll try,” Lila said. “Where am I going to go once I get up?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, I’m worried about standing up. You don’t think I’ll be able to remain standing on my own, do you?”
I didn’t say what I was thinking, that shortly she’d need to do far more than stand on her own, when we braved the Sahara Desert. “You can take my seat,” I said, even though I was already longing to reclaim it.
“You ready?” Dolpheus asked.
Lila started to nod, caught herself, and forced her head completely still. “As ready as I’ll get. Sorry in advance about the vomit. I think it might’ve all ended up on my pants and the floor, so hopefully my seat’s not messy.”
I hoped so too, even though there were things far more serious than some stomach residue. It was, in fact, the very least of our problems.
You ready, Tan? Dolpheus said to me alone.
As the she-dragon-lady said, as ready as I can be. I feel like I’m using every single muscle in my body just to stand without shaking.
Aye. Me too.
So let’s do
this, before we cook inside this vunter death trap. If we have to die, I at least want to make it outside this loathsome contraption. I’d rather die ravaged by sand and sun then in here.
Aye. For sure. On the count of five. One. Two. Three. Four.
And we heaved. Dolpheus lifted her left side, I hoisted her right, and we mostly dragged her over to my seat. We plopped her down heavily and she immediately clutched it in a death grip. “By the oasis,” she ground out, “that was awful.”
Dolpheus gave me a significant look as we released her. How on O were we going to manage this if moving a few steps across an enclosed cabin was so difficult?
But Dolpheus shared my mentality, and he didn’t have to say anything for me to know it. I knew him almost as well as I knew myself. One step at a time, that’s all we could do. I joined him in moving back over to Lila’s seat. I noted that we both leaned a hand against the cabin wall again.
Together, we managed to flip Lila’s seat up and into the cavity Aletox designed for it. We snapped it in place and then pulled open the panel behind it.
Instant relief. Whatever we’d face out there, at least Aletox hadn’t been lying about stocking provisions for the journey. There appeared to be plenty of food for all of us and even bags to carry it in. As little forethought as Aletox gave our landing location, he appeared to have given a great deal more to our time on this planet.
“This looks good, Aletox,” I admitted.
“It does,” Dolpheus added. “I think we’ll have plenty to get us out of the region. After we get out of the Sahara Desert, I assume we’ll be able to find other food. Is my assumption correct, Ilara?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We’ll certainly be able to find enough to survive on once we reach populated areas, assuming we have money of course, but we’ll need that for everything, for IDs, visas, travel, and anything else.”
“Money?” I said. “You mean like roones? Because I imagine pure sand isn’t the commodity it is on O since it’s so abundant here.”
“Correct. Sand here is just sand. When I say money, I mean like roones.”
“So where and how will we get money?”