by R. E. Carr
“They gave up nearly seventy percent of the salvage,” one of the Phantoms whispered. The Phantom entourage huddled together and murmured for a bit.
“As condition for this more-than-equitable arrangement with the tribe to the west, the Tribe of Beasts hereby vows to never obtain a formal alliance by marriage to the Phantom Tribe—” the Oracle continued.
“What!” the envoy cried. “There was a promise made—”
“Did you get it in writing?” Licia asked sweetly. “I do believe that this decision can only be made by the sitting Warlord, who is still the Great Bear. It is simply not in the best interest of any of the Great Tribes to have two so closely united.”
Kei stared at the Great Bear. “The decision was always yours, Father,” he said.
“Now, on to the matter of your gift,” Licia said.
“We will remember this lack of respect,” the Phantom envoy said as the entire delegation stormed from the room, nearly trampling the one last Oracle delegate still waiting in the hall.
“Father,” Kei said. “While I did not promise . . .”
He trailed off as one of the Oracles walked forward with a little pillow. He caught his breath as he saw a ruby perched in the center. While one side looked smooth and pristine, the other was marked with ash and fragments of bone.
“Your one piece of salvage, Lord Zhanfos,” Licia said.
Kei approached it slowly. He reached toward it, but did not quite dare to pick it up. Licia giggled softly.
“How can you laugh at this?” Kei asked. “I can still smell her in the air. I can—”
“Oh, there was another part of the gift, courtesy of a certain spirit in a lake,” Licia said. “I left it just outside.”
“She didn’t just give us a new Oracle of Earth . . .” Kei could hear as he pushed through the stunned crowd.
He stood, gawking, at the throne room door. He took another deep breath and shook his head. Finally, he dared to shove it open. He found himself staring at the lone girl in the hall. He heard a haunting giggle from under her white hood.
“This must be a dream,” Kei said as he saw fiery red hair. “I must be dreaming.”
“Then I must be dreaming too,” Jenn said as she pulled down her hood.
“H-How? How can this be?” he asked.
“It was CALA,” Jenn said rushing into his arms. “I don’t know how or why, but she took my place.”
“And Rheak? The Lost God?”
“She’s gone too. She must have gotten to Gracow before the ship was destroyed. Everything is so hazy. The next thing I knew, I was back in the cave with Winowa and Licia.”
“You are real,” he said as he sniffed her and squeezed her arms over and over. “I cannot believe that you are real. You said that when you opened the seals that you would . . . that you would go home.”
Jenn grabbed his face and kissed him as hard as she could. “Silly sheep-boy,” she whispered. “I am home.”
“I don’t know officer. He just showed up, buck naked, in the swamp. He doesn’t speak English. I can tell you that,” the fisherman said as the cops tossed a blanket over a shivering form.
Before the North Carolina police could load the trembling man into a cop car, an unmarked black Lincoln pulled up to the docks. The fisherman turned pale as three figures in stark black suits began walking toward the scene.
“This must be Eon,” the smallest one sighed as she flipped up a badge. “I’m Agent Opal, NSA, and we are here to collect him.”
Jenn ran her fingers over the new murals below the Temple Tree. “You made these . . . in honor of us?” she whispered. “They’re beautiful.”
Kei pointed to a painting of a fawn-colored Jar-Elk curled around a basket of herbs. “That is Winowa, over there.”
Jenn pointed to a lion with a red mane and a sword in his paws. “That must be Dailyn, and the polar bear with the prissy face must be Licia.”
“I did not mean for her to look so prissy. Perhaps I should change it after all she has done for us.”
“Don’t you dare,” Jenn said with a smirk. Her face fell a little when she saw the next one. “That tiger must be Saikain. I’m sure he’d be happy with his portrait.”
“Maybe we should go back. You look a little pale—”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just getting used to a rebuilt body . . . again. At least I can still remember how to talk to you.”
Kei wrapped his arms around her. “He is now one of the spirits watching us, guiding us. I am sure that, somehow, he is with my mother and smiling down at us all.”
Jenn nodded. She then pointed to the last pair of murals. “You painted me as a bird—why?”
Kei smiled as he looked at the albatross drifting across a sky with only one moon. “I always expected you to fly away. That, and the fact that you could be pretty flighty. Ow! No fair tugging the tail.”
“Don’t call me flighty, sheep-boy,” she grumbled. “I don’t think I can look at the last shrine. It’s still too painful.”
Kei nodded and pulled his torch away. At the edge of the light, he could just see the brightly painted, feathered serpent writhing on its wall. Beneath it rested the undisturbed bottle of Eon’s blood. “I am sure he moved on to a better place, Ji-ann,” Kei whispered in her ear.
“I’m sure,” she said softly as they left the Temple Tree. She tugged her husband’s hand. Kei raised a brow.
“Ji-ann, what is it?”
“You would never . . . never try to change me, would you, Kei?” she asked.
“Of course not,” he said before kissing her forehead. “What brought this on?”
Jenn smiled and whispered, “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Are you sure that he’s the one, Sara?” an agent in black asked as he watched the violet-haired captive on the monitor. “The lab says he’s human.”
Sara Jorgenson sighed as she put down her coffee. “Seriously, after everything you’ve seen, you have to ask? He’s what escaped when Jenn should have come back. Now he’s corroborating evidence of another world.”
The man next to her shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, though. The project is over and our funding has been cut in light of recent events,” he said.
Eon looked straight into the camera. His violet eyes sparkled in the fluorescent lights. Sara squinted at the stranger in the monitor, running her eyes along what she could see of the metallic tattoo that draped from his shoulders over his back.
“I know you are there,” Eon said, but his Mayan speech fell on ignorant ears.
Sara loaded one more video onto her tablet. On her other monitor, the static-filled images taken from the radio telescope in Arecibo continued to download. She watched with tear-filled eyes as Jenn rested her head against Kei’s neck.
“Kei, there is something I need to tell you—” Jenn whispered in the transmission, her voice barely audible.
Transmission terminated.
Epilogue
“How hard is it to find one Mayan translator with security clearance?” Sara snapped into her phone. Across the table, the mysterious man with naturally purple hair and piercing violet eyes watched his captors slowly. He took particular notice of the badge pinned to his female captor’s suit. “Agent S. Opal,” it read.
Next to her, a broad-shouldered blond with a scruffy beard but an impeccable black suit tried his best to tower over the prisoner. Eon maintained a passive, almost childlike, look on his face.
“I told you that we should have cleared at least one, babe,” the blond with the name tag that read “Agent W. Rubine” sighed.
Sara tucked her phone into her pocket. She took a deep breath and straightened her blazer before daring to speak. In a dangerously low, calm voice she muttered, “It was your idea to tell them it was a student film, dear.”
>
“I still think he remembers how to speak English,” Rubine said. “Don’t you, Eon? We heard you on the transmissions. You can’t fool us.”
Eon smiled broadly. In his native tongue, he said ever so sweetly, “I have nothing to say to any of you,” before cocking his head and looking at them both inquisitively.
Sara narrowed her eyes and leaned over the table. “I’ve watched you for years, you murdering Mayan fuck-face,” she said in her sweetest little voice. “I’ve seen all your dirty little secrets in the unedited files—not the nice ones we show the brass and the posers up there, so don’t play dumb with me. I also know that you don’t have any of that technorganic crap in your system, so you are truly stuck here unless you play nice.”
Eon smiled blandly. “You should have learned Mayan,” he said in his native tongue. He eased back in his stiff metal chair, somehow making his baggy orange jumpsuit flattering as he cracked his knuckles and made his handcuff chains jingle ever so pleasantly.
Sara pushed away from the table. “You know what, Will?” she asked.
“What?”
“I think our alien-Mayan-god-host friend will talk. He just needs a familiar face to show him that we really want to work with him, not against him,” Sara said.
“You think it’s time?” the blond agent asked with a raised brow.
“Oh, it’s past time.” She whipped her phone back out and typed a message with blisteringly fast thumbs.
Eon turned his attention to picking at a hairline crack in the industrial putty-colored paint on the cement-block walls. Just as he was finally getting purchase and lifting up a patch roughly the shape of Ohio, he stopped cold and leaped to his feet. He stared intently at the face staring coldly through the window of the interrogation-room door. Any pretense of idiocy dropped from his face as he saw a long braid of ginger hair and big, pleading brown eyes.
“Ji-ann,” he whispered as a hauntingly familiar woman slipped into the room.
Both agents stepped to the side to let the painfully thin, pale woman with raccoon eyes saunter up to the table. Like Eon, she wore a bright orange jumpsuit and little black slippers on her feet, but no restraints hampered her movements.
“You’re real,” the redhead choked out.
“We’ll be right here, Jenny,” Sara said as she tried to rest a reassuring hand on her old friend’s shoulder. Jenn slipped to the side.
“What if I don’t want you here?” Jenn asked, never taking her eyes off the stranger across the room.
Agent Rubine had slid his hand to the holster at his side, narrowing his eyes when he saw how quickly their formerly passive visitor had leaped to his feet.
“Jenny—” Sara started.
“I want to talk to him,” this Jenn said.
“Of course.”
“Alone . . . ,” Jenn growled.
“He only speaks Mayan now for some reason, Jenny,” Sara said. “It’s going to be a one-sided conversation.”
“We will be right outside, Jenny,” Rubine added. He nodded to the cameras in every corner. “It will be perfectly safe.”
Both agents slipped outside the door. Jenn slowly, methodically pulled out a chair and sat down. Eon mimicked her movements until they were staring eye to eye.
“Ji-ann—” he started.
“Jennifer,” she snapped. “My name is Jennifer Ann MacDonald. At least it is here.”
“Jennifer,” Eon said slowly, rolling each syllable off his tongue.
“You don’t seem nearly as surprised to see me as I am to see you,” Jennifer said, raising a brow. “Then again, I watched you die on camera. You never saw me bite it.”
“I knew that we would see each other again,” Eon said softly, now using Jasturian-accented English.
The supposedly soundproof walls weren’t thick enough to block out Sara’s cry of “I knew it!”
Jennifer and Eon stared at each other for a good long time. She finally gave him a familiar smirk. “I know, I got older and meaner and my eyes are brown. But you still recognize me, don’t you, Eon?” she said with a sad little laugh. “They say that thirty is the new twenty now.” She shook her head and continued with, “You look just like you did in the transmissions . . .”
Eon looked at her quizzically. “I do not understand.”
“Hours and hours, years upon years, of messages from outer space,” Jenn snorted. “And you know what those messages were?”
“Ji-ann—”
“Jennifer!” she barked. “I’m the original, OK? You call me Jennifer.”
“Jennifer, are you a prisoner here too?” Eon asked as he pointed to her jumpsuit.
Jennifer shook her head sadly. “They say I’m not,” she snorted. “But I can’t really leave either, just . . . like . . . you.”
Eon reached his hands across the table. Jennifer recoiled.
“I know what you are, Eon,” she hissed. “You’re a copy. You’re a fucking 3-D printed Trojan horse, just . . . like . . . me.”
She devolved into frantic-sounding giggle. Eon’s face softened. “Ji—Jennifer, what has happened to you? How are you?”
“Oh, you’re looking at the intergalactic snuff film princess. Do you know what it’s like to watch yourself die over and over and over again? You might actually, if they show you the greatest hits tape. Then again, I don’t know if it’s worse to see yourself get killed or sucking face with a snake god . . .”
“Jennifer—”
“I had almost gotten it into my head that this was a sick joke, some psychological experiment gone completely ape shit, but no! You turn up! You show up and prove that somewhere—out there—there really are other places, other civilizations, other versions of me!” she snapped. “Wow, that means that somewhere out there, I really did have a close encounter of the furred kind.”
“You’re not Ji-ann—” he said softly.
Jennifer laughed until tears streamed down her face. “Nope. I’m not Jenn, Ji-ann, Ann, Jenny from the block, Jo-Jo, or any of the other dozens of me that got dumped across the galaxy. I am just plain old Jennifer, the template for the worst hunk of interstellar spam that ever got shot into the universe. And who knows? Maybe you’re out there too now, Aj’Chatan-Eon-Kukul-whoever-the-fuck-you-really-are-kan!”
Eon slumped against his chair, dumbstruck. Jennifer shook her head slowly and sadly. “Welcome to my world,” she said with a sigh before motioning to the cameras for the agents to come inside.
Agents Sara and Rubine led Eon back to his eight-by-eight cell in the bowels of a government bunker. Once he was unlocked and shoved inside, Sara shook her head at him. “You need to understand that we have to keep you here,” she said. “We don’t know why there were so many copies of Jenn made or why we keep getting transmissions, but you are now our only piece of corroborating evidence—”
“It’s natural to fear what you don’t understand,” Eon said placidly.
“You are just as exasperating as your transmission logs.” Sara sighed. “I don’t know what Agent Esmeralda drools about, other than your abs. Look, your transmission is the only one that has lasted more than a few weeks. In yours, it’s suggested that this Rheak program might actually have gotten loose, so if you want to get out of the hell of being stuck here for the rest of your life, you had better start telling us everything you know.”
Eon smiled placidly. “I will take it under advisement. Good night, Agent Opal—or is it Sara Jorgenson?”
It was Sara’s turn to give a fake smile. “I’m sure your Jenn told you all about me. Now, would you like to give us a little more information on what really happened in those transmissions?”
Eon hopped on his bed and sat cross-legged. After a few moments of pointed silence, Sara rolled her eyes and banged on his cell door. She gave him one more eye roll through the porthole for good measure.
Once she was gone, Eon slid across the room to peek outside. He stared into the cell across the hall. A pair of sad brown eyes stared back at him.
“
I felt like staying in this one tonight,” Jennifer said. She gave him one long, hard look before disappearing into the shadows of her cell.
He crept back to his cot. As he stared at the ceiling, a smile crept across his lips. “Hell, you say?” he asked. “I think not.”
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the amazing Bite Club who took time away from reading vampire novels to try out a little Sci-Fi. Kate, Katie, Kris, DJ, Hezzo, Deb, Spindocked, Jenn, Mandy-Pants, Emmers, and especially the heartless Shannon, you all made The Download what it is today. Furthermore, the author also must thank the Westborough branch of a certain coffee chain for keeping her loaded with tea while she edited day after day. Of course, since a book is always judged by its cover, big thanks must go out to Reginald Atkins for another brilliant work of art on the front. Lastly, the author would like to thank the talented Stacee Lawrence for correcting all the things and the stuff that were wrong in the draft.
If you would like to know more about the writings of R. E. Carr, or simply be warned when more is coming out so you can run in terror, you can sign up for her newsletter at www.rachelecarr.com. Conversely, you can follow her on Twitter @TotalRECarr or Facebook at www.facebook.com/totalrecarr.
Also by R E Carr
RULES UNDYING SERIES
Four
Six
Ten
Point One Five
Zero
One
FALSE ICONS: From the Tome of Bill Universe
Second String Savior
Wannabe Wizard
OTHER WORKS
GIRL: Guy in Real Life