by D L Frizzell
Chapter Thirteen
My hands still shackled behind me, I rolled to a kneeling position and pushed myself onto the bench, keeping my eyes on the blurs the whole time. Maybe the glow was an after-image of the train’s spotlight on my retinas. No, I’d had plenty of time to adjust to the darkness. There they were, unmistakable tiny specks of glowing silver in the pitch-black compartment. Their light winked out momentarily. When they became visible again, they had the luster of tears.
“Kate?” I said.
Yes?
“Yes?”
“Why do your eyes glow?” I asked.
I am T’Neth, Alex.
“I am T’Neth, Alex,” she said, finding my hand and squeezing it.
“That’s…” Maybe my brain was rattled. This wasn’t the first time that her voice echoed inside my head. I pulled my hand away.
Do you hate me?
“Do you hate me?” she asked.
I didn’t answer.
Her eyes narrowed as she studied my expression. Could she see in the dark?
The T’Neth are monsters.
Wait. Was that my thought…or hers?
“The T’Neth are monsters,” she lamented, clarifying the matter. Or did we both think it at the same time?
“The T’Neth are monsters,” I repeated, not in agreement but accusation.
That is why I left them. “That is why I left them.”
Her words overlapped in my mind, as if two people were speaking to me at the same time. I shook my head to clear the unsettling dissonance, but quickly regretted the sudden motion. A wave of pain radiated through my head, probably because Redland hit me with that rock. I’d never had a head injury before. I pressed my palms against my temples in a vain attempt to reduce the throbbing pain.
Kate pulled a glow stick out of her pocket and activated it. I closed my eyes, took a calming breath, and opened them slowly. I expected the light to intensify the pain. It actually got better. Not much, but a little.
In the dim light, her eyes took on the familiar blue-green tint I’d always known. No longer were the silver lines visible, though they would probably reappear if the cabin went dark again. In the dark her eyes looked like Xiv’s, and I now suspected his glowed in the dark as well. Funny how a little detail like that never came up in a hemisphere where the sun hadn’t set in eight thousand years.
Kate looked concerned but did not reach out to me again. She kept her hands folded dutifully in her lap.
You are quiet, she said. “You are quiet.” Her words overlapped again, this time with less discord. Her lips only moved on the verbal part. The mental part, what she said in her thoughts…in her thoughts…was just as clear as her words.
The pain in my head eased a little.
“T’Neth aren’t human,” I said, mirroring the words that Norio and Redland said just a few minutes earlier. They seemed so sure, but I hadn’t believed them at the time.
We are not, she agreed. “We are not.” Her words and thoughts, so close together now that they were nearly synchronized, were becoming easier to understand. The pain in my head lessened as well.
I stared at Kate. Was she really part of an alien race, a species that came from somewhere other than Earth? The T’Neth looked oddly similar to us, and even shared some of the same character traits. In retrospect, the differences were obvious. I turned my gaze back to the window. Though dark outside now, I could still tell that we were moving incredibly fast. I must have made a mental association between the creaking sounds of the train and the intense wind that was washing past it.
I looked back at Kate. If the T’Neth were the beings that colonized Arion before the Great Cataclysm, that meant they were traveling between the stars long before mankind discovered the wheel. They were telepathic, to some degree at least. They were faster, and stronger, and more brutal. Whatever violent tendencies people had – and I’d seen the worst that humanity had to offer in the last six years - T’Neth atrocities far outweighed them in viciousness and scale. They’re conquerors, I realized, taking any planet they wanted as if it already belonged to them. I wondered how many other intelligent species they’d found on their colony worlds and wiped them out. A part of me, the lawman part I think, wanted justice. Another part wanted payback. The rest of me just wanted some damned answers. Kate and I were finished, I thought coldly, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t use her. “Tell me about the T’Neth,” I said. “Don’t say it out loud. Just think it.”
Kate opened her mind to me, but she didn’t give me what I expected. She didn’t think about the T’Neth. She thought about us. She thought back to the day we met, how I was just another human to her until I showed her compassion on the road to Maglev Canyon. She remembered how we developed a rapport, how she learned to trust me and how I grew to trust her.
I didn’t know she was a T’Neth at the time, but she felt that was the one thing she couldn’t tell me. It was understandable in some respects. She had been born to their society, to their cruelty. She was ashamed, but couldn’t bring herself to tell me. That was the lie that eventually tore us apart, I realized. T’Neth minds are transparent to one another. They can be nothing less than absolutely truthful, yet Kate had kept the truth from me because she feared how I would react. After five years of courtship, declining my marriage proposal was the hardest thing she had ever done because the only thing stronger than her love for me was her guilt.
“I’m sorry,” she cried.
I sat there in stony silence. If she’d only told me the truth back then, we might have had a chance. As it was now, she was only being truthful because she couldn’t help it. Would she still hide things from me if she could? I wondered. Could she even be hiding something from herself? That line of thinking went down a path I had no frame of reference for, so I put it out of my mind. But, I thought, maybe I could use her guilt to my advantage.
“Wait a second,” I said, drawing closer to Kate in the dim light. With the rocking and swaying of the train’s cabin all but forgotten, I focused my complete attention on her. “Don’t think about you and me, okay? Think about the T’Neth. Tell me who they are.”
“I don’t want to,” she sniffled.
I had expected that reaction, but I was prepared for it. “Kate,” I said, “I know the T’Neth are killers. You know it, too. Can you imagine what they would do to us if they thought we were a threat? What do you think they would do to me?”
“No,” she cried.
I felt her anguish shutting her thoughts down entirely, and I couldn’t let that happen. “I’m sorry,” I said hurriedly. “I shouldn’t have put it that way. Just tell me something about them. Anything. Please”
She paused, trying to collect herself. I sensed discomfort, a heaviness in the air, and then…resignation. The words flowed from her mind like the words of a song, though her lips remained pressed together in a thin line. We call this planet Dralta’Ir. We have been trapped here for many thousands of years.
“Dralta’Ir,” I whispered. I could actually visualize the name written in alien letters.”
“Yes!” she shrieked. “You do hear me!”
I jerked backward at the full volume of her voice, hitting my head on one of the metal posts by my seat. “Ow!” I said, feigning a laugh as I rubbed the sore spot. “I wasn’t ready for that.” As she blushed in embarrassment and closed her mouth again, I studied her carefully. Many people in human history have claimed they had the ability to read minds, but they were all charlatans in my opinion. This was real. It was frightening, to be sure, but it was an opening, nonetheless.
“Yes,” I said. “I hear it when you think it and when you say it. The sound of your voice is like an echo.”
More tears, this time accompanied with a palpable wave of joy. And then, confusion. How do you hear me? She thought.
“I haven’t got a clue,” I answered, speaking truthfully. “Do you hear me, too?”
“Please share your thoughts with me,” she pleaded.
I st
eeled myself. This would be the real test. Reaching out with my mind, I asked a question. Kate, can you hear me?
She gazed at me expectantly.
“Maybe I’m doing it wrong,” I said. Putting all my mental energy into the attempt, I said, Hello, Kate. Hello!
Nothing.
“Can you hear me, Kate?” I asked aloud.
“No.”
Her expression fell. It was too much to hope for. You are just like all other humans. Closed to our mind.
I put my hand on her knee, and she didn’t pull away. Giving her a comforting smile, I said, “Maybe I just need to work on it for a while.”
Okay.
I could tell by her thoughts that she wanted me back in her life. As I briefly contemplated what that could mean for me, the hair on the back of my neck bristled. She had said ‘our mind’ as if the T’Neth functioned as part of a singular consciousness. It wasn’t just telepathy; it was an unbreakable mental bond. “Kate,” I asked, trying not to sound worried, “do the T’Neth control your thoughts?”
I cannot help it, she thought. When I’m around them, I can think only the way they do.
“What do they think about?”
Kate knelt beside me. “They think. They make me think. They do. They make me…” Her voice trailed off, but her anguish grew and clouded her thoughts again. Was she afraid to remember something?
“How do the T’Neth think?” I urged, grabbing her by the arms. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know. How do humans think?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. It then occurred to me we didn’t share a common perspective. Speaking for her is as unnatural as mindreading is for me. I let go of her and slid back onto my seat.
Kate sat across from me and rubbed her arms where I grabbed her. She was silent for a long minute. “You think with your mouths,” she answered.
“And you speak with your minds,” I said, glad that she hadn’t completely shut down. “It makes sense you would perceive it that way. Can you hear the other T’Neth now?”
“No,” she replied.
A dull throb permeated my head, not as painful as before, but increasing. “I think I need to see a doctor,” I said, rubbing my temples.
Kate looked at me sympathetically. “I understand. This is all new for you.”
“Very new,” I agreed. “Kate, could you try to get Norio’s attention, please?”
“Why?”
“I need to ask him a question.”
Kate frowned, but moved to the door and pounded on it a few times.
With her back turned to me, I focused all my energy into a mental image of the dead caravaners I’d seen in the canyon. I conjured up the hate I felt for them at that moment, added my hatred of Redland on top, and imagined gunning them all down.
She stopped pounding the door and turned back to me curiously. “How can I tell if they heard me?”
“I’m sure they’ll be here soon,” I said, now confident that my own thoughts remained private. “Just wait for them.”
Chapter Fourteen
Kate fiddled with the doorknob while we waited for the others to return, unaware that I was watching her and listening to her thoughts. Was I really listening to her thoughts, though? I asked myself. Memories of our time together flowed through my mind, memories we had in common, things she wouldn’t need to communicate because I already knew them. Maybe I wasn’t reading her thoughts. I’d heard that married couples were often able to finish each other’s sentences or think about the same things when neither was talking. I’d known Kate long, and though we had never been intimate, I did sense that we had become attuned to each other on some level. That could explain why it seemed like we were communicating in a non-verbal way.
The door opened a minute later, with Norio flanked by Hathan-Fen and Redland. Norio came in and hung another chemical lamp while the others remained in the doorway, staring suspiciously at me.
“I have a question about the red flowers in Edgewood,” I told Norio.
Norio nodded and turned to Kate. “Young lady, would you please give us some privacy?”
Kate looked at me expectantly. When I nodded, she wiped the tears from her cheek and dutifully walked out. Redland and Hathan-Fen blocked the door as she worked her way down the corridor. I stared at my hands while we waited.
“Red flowers,” Norio said. “You remembered the watchword.”
I didn’t feel like wasting time throwing accusations or speculation around, and why I’d been knocked unconscious and brought on the train. “I had a few thoughts,” I said flatly.
“Which are?” Redland asked.
“For one thing, Kate doesn’t know where we’re going” I said.
“She told you that?” Hathan-Fen asked.
“No,” I replied. “I sensed it in her mind.”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” she said.
“You knew she was telepathic,” I said. “You left her with me to see what happened.”
Redland took a piece of beef jerky out of his duster and began chewing it. “You and the girl are close. Or were, from what I’ve been told.”
“We were never that close,” I said.
“Yet, you seem to hear her thoughts,” Norio countered. “You must have some kind of bond with her.”
“I never heard her thoughts before,” I told them. “I’m not sure why I can now, or even if I can. Whatever it was I just experienced, I am convinced the T’Neth communicate through telepathy.”
“What does that tell you about our present situation?” Hathan-Fen asked.
“It means Kate is a liability,” I said. “It means you think I’m one, too.”
“Bingo,” Redland said, making a fiendish grin that made me want to kick his teeth in.
“It looks like we were right to worry,” Hathan-Fen said.
“It only works one way,” I said. “I can hear her, but she can’t hear me.”
“Are you sure?” Hathan-Fen asked.
“Pretty sure,” I replied in full honesty. “She would have been overjoyed if she thought I was telepathic, too.”
“Yes,” Norio agreed. “She has always regretted her decision to leave you.”
Tell me something I don’t know, I thought to myself. Not that it makes a difference now.
“She came to us when she sensed a T’Neth pair pass near Celestial City,” Hathan-Fen explained. “They sensed her as well and read each other’s minds for a few moments.”
“What did they communicate?” I asked.
“They’re rounding up their own,” Hathan-Fen said. “Kate said the pair wasn’t in a position to stop at the time, but they expected to come back and retrieve her later.”
“The T’Neth have been showin’ up in a lot of strange places lately,” Redland said. “They’re up to somethin’.”
“Nobody can hear Kate’s thoughts besides you,” Hathan-Fen pressed. “Do you know why?”
“No, I don’t,” I replied. “Like I said, I never heard her thoughts before.”
“Have you been approached by other T’Neth?” Hathan-Fen asked. “This is important, Alex.”
I looked at Redland. His grin had disappeared, and the flash of terror on his face was priceless. He stiffened, glancing back and forth between me and the major. He hadn’t told them he was working with Xiv. I was going to tell them the truth, and it would be like dancing on his grave. “Two weeks ago, right after I crashed my aerobike.”
Hathan-Fen gasped. Norio stayed quiet. Redland turned away. I could imagine him cursing me with every fiber of his existence.
“Did you know about this when you caught up with Alex?” Hathan-Fen asked Redland. He turned back to her, his face a mask of what he was surely thinking. He hesitated.
“His name was Xiv,” I cut in before Redland could speak. “He was in the area and saved me from walking into some kind of trap left by Oliver Jarnum,” I explained. “That’s the name of the escapee I’ve been chasing. Xiv identified himself as a lawman, so I assumed he
was after Jarnum, too.”
“T’Neth are mercenaries,” Hathan-Fen spat. “They have no lawmen.”
“I’m a mercenary,” I said. “The only difference is that my work is sanctioned by the Council.”
I noticed the relief on Redland’s face. I had just saved his ass from some uncomfortable questions. Don’t think I won’t use this for leverage, I thought as I stared at him. He read my expression and frowned. That’s right, asshole. Let’s all get along now, shall we? Satisfied that he understood my unspoken threat, I turned back to ask Hathan-Fen a question. “Where are you taking Kate?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Hathan-Fen said. “This trip was her idea.”
“Kate’s running,” I acknowledged, “I got that much from her thoughts, but she’s not leading the way,” I said to the major. “You are.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Don’t try to con me, Major.”
“I believe we can trust Alex now,” Norio said.
Hathan-Fen scrutinized me. “I’m not so sure. Do you know how far this telepathic link works?”
“I have no idea,” I replied. “I don’t hear her thoughts at all now.”
“So, thirty meters maybe,” Redland said.
“Maybe for me,” I said, “but I’m just a human. If I understood her correctly, the T’Neth have a much stronger link.”
“Hmm,” Hathan-Fen said. “I would expect they can transmit…or whatever they call it…farther than that. Did you hear this Xiv’s thoughts in the forest?”
“No.”
Norio shifted suddenly on his seat, and we all looked at him as he pulled out a brass pocket watch. “The train should have started slowing down by now. Marshal Redland, please check with the driver.”
“Do it yourself,” Redland said. “I’m stayin’ here.”
“You are the only other person who has operated this vehicle,” Norio explained. “If he needs assistance…”
“Marshal, just get back there and help the man!” Hathan-Fen shouted.
Redland pounded his fist on the wall and stole a glance at me. “Fine,” He slammed the door as he left.