“What is this?” he asked.
Zaren was already reaching for the box. She opened it and pulled out a small object. A red light pulsed with every new sound coming from the box.
“My people are coming,” she said softly, looking up at him with an apologetic expression. “They’ll be here soon.” She took his hand again and squeezed lightly. “They can’t find us together; we would both get in trouble.”
“Worse trouble than the Elders?” Kris asked, trying but failing to make the words teasing.
“Much worse,” she replied grimly.
He couldn’t stop himself from taking her hand, just to hold it one last time. “I wish you didn’t have to leave,” he said.
“I wish I could stay,” she replied, just as quietly, and leaned closer to press a fleeting kiss to his mouth.
“Will you come back?” he asked when she pulled away again.
He held his breath as he waited for her answer. He still didn’t quite understand why she couldn’t stay with him—she had said she wanted to, after all—but if she really had to leave, maybe she would return. Maybe even soon.
“I don’t think I will be able to,” she said, and while the box that spoke her words sounded the same as it always did, her voice, the words Kris didn’t understand, were filled by a sadness so deep it spoke to the wolf inside him, and made him want to howl. “I’ll try,” she murmured. “But, Kris, you must go now. They’re close. They can’t see you.”
The object with the red light was chiming faster and faster now. Kris pulled Zaren into a tight hug, then quickly let go. He took two steps back and shifted to his wolf form, then ran off into the nearby woods.
He stopped when he was in deep enough to be hidden but not so deep that he wouldn’t be able to see the clearing. For a few minutes, nothing happened. Zaren stood by the edge of the lake, alternating looking up toward the sky and toward Kris, although he didn’t think she could still see him. Not going back to her was harder and harder with each passing moment. He didn’t realize he had stepped forward until, across the distance, he saw her smile at him. The next second, she looked up again. Kris followed her gaze and couldn’t help taking a step back at what he saw.
A large, gleaming object was flying over the lake and toward the clearing. It was the same shape as Zaren’s shuttle, although bigger. It slowed down and came to a standstill in front of Zaren, then one side opened, like a door. Suddenly, it was so bright that Kris could barely see.
Soon, the door closed again. The light faded. The shuttle flew away.
Zaren was gone.
Kris howled toward the moons.
* * * *
Zaren still hadn’t figured out what she would answer when Ilona Brink suddenly said they had to go back and finish the hearing. Confused, Zaren accompanied her back inside. Was Brink going to ask her the same questions again, make her tell the whole council about Kris? Even now, Zaren felt a little guilty about betraying her promise to Kris; she didn’t want even more people to know. And she didn’t want to talk when her mind was swirling with the most important decision she had ever had to make.
“Let’s resume,” Brink said coolly. “When you managed to make contact, you mentioned that natives were approaching. Did you have any contact with them or did you manage to elude them?”
Zaren blinked in surprise. She hadn’t expected this, not now.
“Like I said in my report,” she said slowly, “I activated the shuttle’s camouflage and then I ran into the woods so—”
“Why not stay in the shuttle?” another council member asked. “You’d have been invisible inside it.”
“I wasn’t sure the camouflage would work. Electronics seemed to be going on and off. I figured it’d be safer if I hid in the woods.”
“A smart decision,” Brink commented. “It was a difficult situation, one that experienced observers would have found challenging, but you kept a cool head and followed your training to the letter. A credit to your mentor, certainly.”
She inclined her head toward Loic, and he suddenly sat up straighter at Zaren’s side, his pride filling his voice when he thanked Brink.
Brink went on to declare that these routine proceedings were taking much too long, and just like that, it was over. A couple members of the council threw questioning glances at her, but none of them said anything.
Loic seemed puzzled as well, and as he followed Zaren out of the council room, he asked her in a quiet voice what she and Brink had talked about in the gardens. He had tried to join them to assist Zaren if she needed his help, he explained, but Brink’s assistant had stopped him.
“We just… talked,” Zaren said with a small shrug. “She was an observer when she was younger. She was telling me about that.”
They stepped into an elevator together, and Zaren could tell that he had more questions for her, but she didn’t give him time to say anything else.
“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I’ll go and get some rest.” And because she didn’t want Loic to ask anything more, she added, “Ilona said I should take a few days to clear my head.”
One more lie, the smallest, maybe, but she apologized for it with a quick hug. As she said goodbye, she realized it might be the last time she talked to him, and her heart tightened a little. She had learned a lot from Loic. She wished she could have thanked him now without arousing his suspicions.
And if she was thinking like this, maybe she had already made up her mind even if she hadn’t admitted it to herself yet.
The observer trainees all lived in a building nearby. As she walked there, Zaren tried to figure out what she’d tell her family and friends; she couldn’t disappear without a word.
Except that once she reached her dorm room, she found a call waiting for her and Ilona Brink asked her to do exactly that.
“I didn’t even agree to do it yet,” Zaren protested, taken aback.
On the holo screen, Brink huffed lightly. “Are you saying you don’t want to?”
Zaren opened her mouth. She closed it again without a word and sighed softly.
“I’ll do it. But I have to tell my parents. They’d look everywhere for me if I just vanished. They’d find me. And you don’t want that.”
Brink steepled her fingers in front of her, a deep frown accentuating her wrinkles. Someone off screen said something that Zaren couldn’t quite catch, and Brink nodded.
“Call them now,” she said, her words sharp and precise. “I’ll stay on the line to listen but I’ll go blank. This is what you are allowed to tell them, and if you say anything more I’m canceling the entire thing regardless of the consequences. Do you understand?”
Zaren nodded, her throat too tight for words.
“All right. Tell them you are going on a special mission. Tell them in three days a report will be issued about your OV crashing and that they should dismiss it as untrue.”
“What about—”
“Nothing more.”
“What about telling them I found what I was looking for when I joined the observer training?” Zaren insisted. “Can I tell them that?”
Brink considered her for a long moment before inclining her head. “In those terms and nothing else, yes. Go ahead and place that call now. Keep it brief. We have no time to lose.”
Her image disappeared from the screen, but she was still on the line. Zaren took a deep breath before placing a call to her parents. When her mother appeared, she was smiling brightly. After taking one look at Zaren, however, her smile wavered, her expression turning anxious.
“Zaren? What is it, sweetie?”
“Can you call Dad, please?”
Moments later, when they were both looking at her with the same question in their eyes, for the first time Zaren hesitated. What if she was making a mistake? What if those Elders refused to accept her into the village? What if she found herself alone, isolated—exiled?
Like Kris was.
She wouldn’t be alone, she reminded herself. He’d be there. Her resolve firm
ed again.
She told them what Brink had said she could, and not a word more. They had questions, of course; her father, especially, insisted when she refused to say any more. He quieted when her mother laid a hand on his arm and murmured something to him.
“As long as you’re happy,” she told Zaren, a question in her words.
Zaren smiled, her eyes blurring a little with tears. “I will be. I love you. I have to go now.”
As soon as her parents disappeared from the screen, Brink reappeared. She watched Zaren in silence for a few moments before she said, “There’s a land shuttle waiting for you outside. It will take you to an OV. Do not bother packing, you’re not allowed to bring anything with you. We can’t introduce new materials or objects to their culture. Even the medicine has been repackaged so that nothing will be left when you’re done treating them. Good luck, child.”
Zaren felt a little stunned when the screen turned off. As though in a daze, she left her room. The shuttle was there, like Brink had said. It brought Zaren to the docks, where a ship similar to the one that had rescued her was waiting. They were slower that observation vehicles, but much more spacious.
The same woman who had piloted the shuttle provided Zaren with clothes and shoes woven from natural fibers; they didn’t feel anywhere near as comfortable as those Elea had let her borrow, but they were close enough not to look out of place in the village.
Zaren felt a pang of excitement at the realization that she would soon be back there. Everything was going so fast… Not two hours had passed since Brink had first raised the possibility of this when the shuttle took off to bring her back to the fifth planet of System fifty-nine.
Back to Haldae.
It was probably better that way, she told herself. Better if she didn’t get enough time to think about it and maybe start questioning her decision. She had made the right choice, she was sure of it, and she didn’t want to ever regret it.
This part of her life was over; she was about to start anew. She knew already that it wouldn’t be easy, that she would miss many things—especially her family and friends—but it would be worth it. Just as long as she found Kris again.
Returning to the planetary system took a day and half; quite enough time for Zaren to slip on a short-spectrum-impulse headset and learn Kris’ language. The information recovered from her translang had been analyzed and processed, and while the translang hadn’t been exposed to enough of the language to provide a complete dictionary, in a few hours the headset implanted the basics of the language directly into Zaren’s brain. She would learn the rest the same way she had learned her first few words, by listening to others—to Kris, she hoped.
When Haldae finally appeared in the distance, Zaren reminded the pilot about the moons. They had to wait four hours until they were hidden on the other side of the planet, presumably where they wouldn’t interfere with the electronic equipment. Only then did the shuttle slowly descend toward the surface. When Zaren saw a large body of water under them, she realized she was back where she had been picked up, at the lake where she had spent her last few hours with Kris.
While the woman did the final checks, Zaren’s eyes kept flitting to the closed door. She felt a little silly for hoping, but in her mind Kris was outside, waiting for her to come out.
If he had been banished from his village as he had feared, this was certainly too close for him to be safe. And still, she couldn’t help but wonder if he remembered those few hours they had spent on the edge of the lake as well as she did; enough so, maybe, to return there in the past couple of weeks, and think of her.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” the pilot asked suddenly. “You can still change your mind.”
Zaren blinked and looked at her, smiling faintly. “Yes, I’m sure, and no, I can’t.” She slipped the bag full of medicine over her shoulder; although smaller, it felt very much like the bag of fruit she had carried in the forest with Kris. “Will you open the door for me?”
Rather than reaching for the controls that would let Zaren out of the shuttle, the woman continued to look at Zaren, now almost wistfully. “I envy you,” she murmured as she turned away. She didn’t watch Zaren leave.
Hurrying a small distance away from where the shuttle had landed, Zaren looked at it as it rose above the lake, then flew away. The last link to her universe had been severed. And still she couldn’t begin to regret her decision.
She looked away from the sky; she belonged on Haldae now. When she saw the silhouette of a wolf, dark against the background of glittering water, she thought her heart would stop, and she pressed a hand to her chest.
Maybe it was just a wolf, she told herself as she took a hesitant step forward, then another one, then a third. Maybe getting too close was a terrible idea, especially since the wolf had clearly noticed her and was approaching her, just as slowly as she approached him.
The thought came to her that if she was mauled to death now, not only would no one ever know, but the villagers would also never get the medicine.
She didn’t stop.
It wasn’t just a wolf; she was sure of it now. A wolf wouldn’t have looked at her with such warmth in its gray eyes. It wouldn’t have stood in front of her, head high and tilted to one side. It wouldn’t have suddenly changed into a man, so that in no more time than it took her to blink, Kris was standing in front of her, a wide, happy smile on his lips.
He said her name, and his voice was just as deep as she remembered it. Just as warm.
“Kris,” she replied, and it came out as a whisper. “I missed you.”
His smile widened a little more. “I missed you, too. I…” The smile vanished, replaced by an expression of pure surprise. “You speak my language!”
Zaren grinned. “I do. I don’t know all the words yet, but maybe you’ll teach me.”
He took her hand and squeezed it, then brought it up to his mouth. The soft press of his lips on her knuckles was better than an answer.
“How long are you going to stay?” he asked, now hesitant. “I saw your shuttle fly away. Are your people hiding…”
He trailed off when she shook her head, and his eyebrows rose questioningly.
“The shuttle is gone,” she said, watching closely for his reaction. “My people will not return for me.”
She could tell the exact moment he understood. His face lit up with pure happiness. Pulling gently on her hand, he drew her closer and into his arms. On her last night on Haldae, when they had sat by the lake, she was the one who had kissed him. He hadn’t responded at first, and she had wondered since then if, maybe, it was a thing his people just didn’t do. Whether it was or not, he was now the one pressing his mouth to hers in a longer, sweeter kiss.
“I am so happy you returned,” he said when he pulled away. “There’s so much I wanted to show you.”
She laughed softly, warmed by his excitement. “And you will. But first we need to go back to your village.”
Shadows chased away the joy in his eyes. “We can’t. I’m not welcome there anymore. And neither are you.”
She patted her bag lightly. “We will be. I brought medicine, enough for everyone in your village. No one will have this sickness again.”
The look of wonder on his face put the brightness of the sun above them to shame.
The first time she had seen the village, it had been bathed in moonlight, and no one had noticed her and Kris. This time, when they walked up the main street hand in hand toward the center of the village and the Elders’ building, it was full daylight. Villagers came out of their houses to watch them, and soon they had a growing escort accompanying them. Elea’s cry of joy echoed through the crowd, and she joined them, hugging Kris, then Zaren, before she took Zaren’s free hand.
This was it, Zaren thought as she watched the people around them, as she tightened her hands over Elea’s and Kris’. This was why she had come back. This was why crashing on Haldae had been a blessing in disguise, why she had always wanted to become an obs
erver. She looked at Kris, and he looked back, smiling. She had found her place.
The end
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Thank you,
Angela
About Angela Yseult
Being a teenager can be complicated.
Being a teenager when you happen to be a Shifter, when the universe is your playground, when you live with vampires or your world is under siege by demons is even more complicated.
Or at least, that’s what Angela’s characters tell her; her own teenage years were fairly uneventful… and still, rather complicated at times, too.
You can catch up with her on her blog or Facebook, or email her at [email protected]
Copyright © 2013 Angela Yseult
All rights reserved. This eBook is not transferable.
It cannot be sold or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
All characters in this publication are purely fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Edited by Donna M.
Beneath the Twin Moons of Haldae Page 12