Planet Sand (Planet Origins Book 5)

by Lucia Ashta

“Olph, I’m fine, and I want to know where we’re going.”

  “To the condensers.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Because Yudelle believes that’s the best chance at finding the princess—if she’s a different woman than this Ilara.”

  “And Yudelle is some sort of expert in condensers on this planet?”

  “More or less.” Dolpheus appeared regretful to have to make the admission. Was it just because he’d always rise to my defense, or did he have something else against the woman? “We’ve had plenty of time to talk and try to make sense of things. You were out for days, Tan, so in that time we’ve been updating each other, piecing things together.”

  “Then you and I need to talk, because there are quite a few things I need pieced together.”

  “I’m sure you do. We’ll talk. But first let’s get you out of here, because I assume you don’t want to wait another second to take action?”

  He knew me well. “Not another second.”

  “Then off to the condensers.”

  He was right that I wanted to take action, but not this kind. I wasn’t ready to find out if this Ilara was my Ilara or not. For once, I’d rather bask in the bliss of ignorance. But there wasn’t much I could do to preserve my innocence. I hadn’t been truly innocent for a long time. Since my mother left.

  And I hadn’t shrunk from the truth or whatever action I had to take since that day, either. The day my mother left, I’d been forced to become a man. That man had become a warrior, and warriors did what needed to be done. No matter what.

  “Then get me some clothes. And tell me what the fuck we’re going to do when we get to the condensers.”

  “We’re going to call out to her.”

  “Of course.”

  I didn’t think I wanted her to answer.

  26

  “Come on, son. Get in.”

  I suspected Yudelle was calling me son because she was now aware of the effect it had on me. Hearing her call me that made me want to jump out of my skin, as if it set my whole body to itching. “Stop calling me that. Please.”

  Maybe I was wrong about her motivation. A ripple of what might’ve been flashed across her stoic face. “Then get in the car, Tanus.”

  As a rule, I didn’t trust machinery. It had betrayed me more times than was reasonable. It deluded you into believing its functioning was predictable, only to fail. Hadn’t Aletox convinced us all to hop into his vunter transport machine and then the stabilizer function broke and nearly killed us all?

  “I’d rather walk,” I said. “I can meet you all there. Dolpheus’ll walk with me.”

  As soon as I said it, he hopped out of the vehicle. He didn’t trust machines any more than I did. “I’d be happy to walk with you, my friend.”

  Ilara reached a hand to the sleeve of my shirt, with fabric far heavier than I was used to, and tugged. “Come on, guys. Get in the car. It can’t possibly be any worse than what we’ve already survived since landing on Earth.”

  “Machines aren’t trustworthy,” I complained.

  “Neither are people,” she countered. “But cars on Earth run pretty reliably, so get in. I don’t want to delay the inevitable any longer.”

  But I did. Ilara was looking at me like I was her lover. I didn’t want that to change.

  “Besides,” she said, “people won’t take kindly to you walking around with weapons attached to your belt, and since you refuse to leave your swords and knives behind...”

  “And we’ll continue to refuse to leave our weapons behind.” If this planet had shown me anything, it was that I definitely needed to be prepared to defend myself at any moment.

  “She’s right,” Yudelle said. “My influence can achieve quite a bit, but expecting the authorities to turn a blind eye as you traipse through town wearing swords is pushing it.”

  I would’ve conceded to Ilara’s request more readily if Yudelle hadn’t chimed in. I’d missed out on centuries of a son rebelling against his mother.

  “Look, Tanus, I’ve wasted enough time waiting for Aletox to show up so I could power up these condensers. Centuries. I’m done waiting. Either get in or don’t, but it’ll take you far longer to get there if you walk, especially since you look like you might fall over anyway, and I’m not going to wait for you to catch up. I’m going to get right in those condensers and see what happens. You might miss the entire show.”

  She faced forward and missed my glare. “Start the engine,” she told the driver.

  Dolpheus crouched down to look at me through the open doors, across Ilara. He’d do whatever I did, that’s how good a friend he was. Loyal to the end, even on an alien planet.

  I huffed loudly, making sure everyone knew of my discontent, then got in the car. Dolpheus followed. The second we pulled our doors shut, the driver pulled out.

  Ilara said, “You might want to put your seat belt on. We’re in Cairo, after all.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that, and I didn’t think I wanted to. I followed her lead and tried to pull a thick belt across my chest, but I soon gave up.

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think of that. A seat belt would hurt rubbing against your injuries.”

  Yeah. Like a motherfucker.

  I pressed my face against the glass of the window next to me, amazed that Sanders used pure glass so widely. It was everywhere, glittering in every direction the sun touched. Yudelle’s home had been filled with it, whole big panels made of pure glass. It was enough to make the King envious.

  But I soon ceased to notice the glass for the panic rising in my gut.

  The driver began by weaving us through small streets lined with houses and cars stationed in front of them. The van he drove was nearly too big to fit in spaces, and I had to unclench my fingers from my seat several times.

  When he delivered us onto a thoroughfare with more cars than I could count as we whizzed past them, I knew I wasn’t the only one struggling to accept the grave danger driving brought with it on Sand.

  “Holy motherfucking shit.” Lila had been engrossed in the functioning of the van when she first got in it. Now her voice was shaky and I was certain she wanted nothing more than to get out, just as I did.

  I didn’t turn to look at her in the seat behind me, though. I was working hard to keep my head still as the driver whipped us left and right, and my head followed, like a weight on a stick too small for it.

  “How can people... ugh... live this way?” Kai said from behind me and to the right. All of us, except for Aletox, were crammed into the van, along with Yudelle’s driver. Another van followed us, even though I couldn’t imagine they could keep up with us in this mess, and I wasn’t about to turn to see if they were.

  Yudelle had been reluctant to leave Aletox behind, even in what she called the best care money could buy. Once I’d awoken, I discovered she spent most of her waking hours, and some of her sleeping ones, at his bedside. A part of me hoped it was because she wanted to be there when he came to so she could confront him about not doing anything to help me as a boy, after she left. But in truth I knew it wasn’t that. Before I woke, while Ilara held vigil at my bedside, she did at his. It was what one did when she was in love.

  Yudelle waited for no man, apparently not even Aletox, and it seemed I inherited my impatience from her.

  “Why don’t they use flying transports on Sand?” Dolpheus was asking. “The cars are like eight or ten deep. Can’t they find a better solution to this crazy mess?”

  “You get used to it,” Yudelle said from the front seat, next to the driver.

  “No, I could never get used to this.”

  “By the oasis, what is that?” Kai said, sounding as shocked as if he’d just seen a human sprout two heads.

  I jerked my head around to look out his window and instantly regretted it, but not before I saw what he had. My mouth dropped open. “Is that a...?”

  “A man on a bicycle carrying a giant tray of bread on his head with one hand wh
ile steering his bicycle through this insane traffic with the other? Yep,” Ilara supplied. “On what looks like a door, actually. Wow. I’ll never cease to be amazed at how resourceful people are when they need to be.”

  I didn’t flinch in the face of danger, but this was a whole different level of it. “Delivering bread must be the most dangerous job on Sand, then.”

  Ilara and Yudelle chuckled, and I shot Ilara an unappreciative look.

  “What?” she said. “It’s cute.”

  “What’s ‘cute?’”

  “You, seeing everything on Earth through fresh, innocent eyes.”

  I wanted to take offense, but couldn’t manage it.

  “We’ll be there soon,” Yudelle said, so I focused on keeping my breathing steady, my head still, and blocking out concerns about what might happen if another Ilara answered our call at the condenser.

  But you know how well blocking things out works... It usually doesn’t. “Why were you waiting for centuries to use the condensers?” I asked Yudelle. “Because obviously it wasn’t to call out to anyone. You couldn’t have known there was the possibility of a second princess out there, or had any desire to contact her if you had.”

  Yudelle didn’t answer.

  “So what’s your interest in the condensers? You settled in this region because of them?”

  She waited so long to answer I thought she wasn’t going to, that she was going to drive me mad with pent-up anger and frustration.

  “No, obviously I didn’t know you’d come here and want to try to contact the princess. I wasn’t aware of these parallel holograms or identical holographic manifestations that Aletox told you about.”

  Lila said, “So you haven’t ever seen replicas of yourself or of anyone you knew back home?”

  “No, but I wasn’t looking for them either. Once Aletox sent me off planet in one of the sand industry’s transport machines, I slowly made my way to the regions with the most pure sand, thinking if anyone from Origins came here, they’d be looking for sand. They already were coming here to mine for it. I figured it increased my odds of making contact with home.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  She did, even though she sounded like it was something she begrudged me. “It took me a long time to get here and settle in. I was alone on a foreign planet, and I was with child. I had to figure out a whole bunch of things, among them, how to support myself and my baby.”

  I didn’t let myself see her as a frightened woman, alone on an alien world. I wouldn’t let myself feel sympathy for her.

  “Aletox was supposed to come join me, once he raised you and was certain you were safe and settled, that you could fend for yourself, and after he managed to deal with Brachius, however he could. But Aletox never came. Well, not until now. In all this time, the only thing I could think to do was position myself so he could most easily find me. To take me and our son back home.”

  If I rankled when Yudelle called me her son, it was nothing like the emptiness I felt when she referred to Narcisse that way. He sat behind me, between Lila and Kai. I held my head rigid so I wouldn’t have to look at him and all the features I was so familiar with, the ones that only reminded me that Yudelle had raised him and not me.

  Lila saved me from seething at a person who didn’t deserve it. Narcisse was a victim of our parents’ decisions as much as I was. It seemed that he’d been raised without a father, even if Aletox was barely worth thinking of in those terms.

  Lila said, “You settled near the condensers because you thought that’s how Aletox would find you?”

  “Mostly because I had no better plan. I had to leave O in a hurry. Brachius found out about Aletox and me, and we feared he’d find and kill me if I was anywhere on the planet. So Aletox bribed one of the sand industry employees and bought me a very expensive one-way ticket to Sand. We didn’t know what Sand would be like, only that it was similar enough to home and that it was the one place that was reachable from Origins. The condensers were the most powerful energetic tools that I knew of on this planet. It seemed like the best place to be, especially since it was in a desert of pure sand.”

  “So you haven’t used the condensers before?”

  “No, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself if there was no reason for it. Besides, no one on Sand seems to know how.” She chortled. “It’s the oddest thing. They have these huge, beautiful condensers, and to them they’re nothing more than a tourist attraction.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to call attention to ourselves by using them now?” Dolpheus asked. “The light they emit will be visible from all over.”

  “Yes, well, while that’s true, I’ve waited more than four centuries to power them up. And now I even have an excuse to do it. Planet Origins needs its true princess. Calling out to her is the only way I can think to find her. It’s not like she’ll have listed herself in the phone book as ‘Princess of Planet Origins, waiting to be rescued.’”

  “I could try calling out to her through mind speak first, and see if she answers. I tried from Origins, but didn’t get an answer. But there could’ve been all sorts of factors that interfered. It’ll be different calling to her from the same planet.”

  Yudelle turned to look at me with curious, perhaps even impressed, eyes. “Indeed it will. And imagine how loud your call will be using the condenser? If she’s on this planet, if this holographic version of this woman,” she gestured with her head, “exists, then we’ll know with certainty. Because there’s no way anyone from Origins won’t hear mind speak amplified by a condenser, and she’s used to hearing you mind speak to her, I imagine. Tanus?”

  “Yes.”

  Yudelle turned forward. “That’s one I didn’t see coming.”

  I knew I shouldn’t ask, but I did anyway. “What didn’t you see coming?”

  “My son and the princess of Origins. Maybe Brachius’ power hungry ways rubbed off on you.”

  My nostrils flared before I noticed Ilara regarding me. She took my hand. “No,” she said. “Let it be. It’s not worth it.”

  She was right about that. So much about my life seemed worth less than I’d believed before landing on this planet.

  We slowed and finally came to stop. The second the van stopped rolling, I jumped out, or as close as I could get to jumping out of anything, considering my injuries.

  In seconds, Dolpheus and Ilara flanked me. I brought my hands to my hips, where I had no wounds to worry about. “I couldn’t be free of that vehicle soon enough.”

  “That was almost worse than taking the transport machine across space.”

  I laughed even though it hurt, reminding me of everything my body had endured since landing here. “There can’t be anything worse than Aletox’s transport machine.”

  “True point,” he said.

  At least lying in bed unconscious for several days had cleared out the lingering effects of being flung through space in a tin can.

  “Over here,” Yudelle, already in motion, called over her shoulder. “Come on. I haven’t waited more than four centuries to wait on you some more. No dilly-dallying. We have a condenser to jump start.”

  Even though I wanted to resist her momentum—I really did—I couldn’t help myself. Her enthusiasm was contagious.

  We had a condenser to jump start.

  Dolpheus and Ilara offered me shoulders to lean on, and we followed Yudelle as fast as I could go on my shredded calf.

  27

  “Who are all these people?” Kai whispered, sotto voce, but I was certain Yudelle heard him. She didn’t answer as we wove our way through throngs of people armed with some sort of weapon-like contraption strapped across their necks and in their hands, at the ready.

  I withdrew my best arm, the one I reserved for my sword, from Ilara’s shoulders and brought my hand to the hilt of my sword. I was ready too. Even though my shoulder screamed in protest, it wouldn’t prevent me from leaping to our defense if it became necessary.

  I walked slowly, carefully, aware that my b
alance was tenuous with so much of my body compensating for healing wounds. But I forced my eyes to be watchful as ever, grateful I’d refused the pain medicine that dulled my brain, and when a man lifted his contraption to point it at Ilara, I moved to draw my sword.

  Ilara’s hand shot out to stop me. I halted in mid-motion, my sword not yet free of its scabbard, because I feared slicing her hand off.

  “Oh god, Tanus. No. What are you doing?” she said.

  Behind her, Dolpheus’ hand was also on his sword. He could have it drawn and ready to wield in seconds.

  She advanced on the man who was pointing the contraption at her and put a hand up to it. “No pictures.” Even though I’d fought Ilara about covering her eyes with the same kind of lenses I’d made her discard when she first arrived on O, I was grateful the man couldn’t see the cosmos in her eyes. That was something about her I didn’t want to share with just anybody, and I especially didn’t want to share it with this kind of stranger, one I had no desire to meet.

  The man lowered the weapon, but I didn’t trust him to keep it that way. I turned my body to face him entirely and gave him my most menacing look, the one that said don’t-fuck-with-me-or-I’ll-kill-you-before-you-even-see-it-coming.

  He put his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay. I won’t take pictures, I promise. Jeesh.”

  “Good,” Ilara said. “Make sure you don’t.”

  She nudged me to keep up with Yudelle, who forged the way, but I wasn’t about to turn my back on this man who reeked of insincerity.

  “Tanus, come on,” she said. “If we delay any longer, someone will definitely manage to snap a picture of us, and the last thing we need right now is our picture in some newspaper or online somewhere.”

  I wasn’t budging. Even injured, Ilara wouldn’t move me unless I let her. I was twice as big as she was and solid as a rock.

  She leaned in close to my ear and spoke too fast. “I don’t know what you think is going on, but that guy isn’t a threat to us. He’s holding a camera, not a gun. What he wanted to point at me isn’t some kind of weapon. All it does is take pictures. Capture moments for posterity. Kind of like on the newspaper or whatever it was you showed me at your place. Do you remember? The one that said I was dead with a moving image of me on it?”