by Naomi Lucas
Blinking back the darkness, I take in the shadows hiding my new surroundings.
“We should go back for a flashlight...” I say quietly.
“They don’t turn on without batteries, and the batteries they need, I don’t have.”
“Oh…”
Hmm.
I’d rather he take me into a dark passage than continue telling me about the females of his species. Anything over that. The haunted look on his face as he spoke unnerved me. What he told me was heartbreaking. To lose your entire family the way he has? And not know what happened to them?
I can’t imagine. I said goodbye to my parents at a young age because that is the way of life during wartime. I’ve barely thought of them since. But I know they’re still alive and working on The Grimstep, a colony ship focused on the strength and longevity of the military—including militarized advancement. They’ve had several more children, none I’ve ever met, but I think they all left around the same age.
I’m not… sad about it, I don’t think. I frown.
I don’t know anymore.
I don’t want Vruksha to have to relive the pain of his past because of me. I feel guilty asking about it at all. Even if I want to know him and understand this world he’s living in.
Where he came from...
He frightens me sometimes still—especially when I glimpse the fervor in his gaze when he’s staring at me when he doesn’t think I notice. There’s a wildness in his eyes when he does, and it makes me tense.
It’s those moments that remind me he’s an alien, with alien views, and alien laws different from my own. An alien species that thrives outside society. Vruksha’s a starved male animal, ready to pounce. I smile softly.
The shadows fade, pulling me from my thoughts. Light returns, and it’s far brighter than what we have in the bunker. Soon, flashing beacons of every color are around us, driving back the darkness, and large shapes materialize on either side.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“The tunnels,” he says, sliding us past the blinking lights.
“And these things?”
“Old tech, robots, I think… they’re called server towers?”
Servers? I push up in his arms and stare at the towers. I know what servers are.
“How are they still on? Are they actually running? Is there another generator?”
“They run because energy is being fed to them, as to why, I don’t know. Perhaps there are more generators down here, better than mine. I have never found any. You seem surprised to find the tech running here. Why is that?”
“Because systems die, metal corrodes. Maintenance is needed to sustain tech.”
“The Lurkers didn’t destroy the tech. They destroyed the life surrounding the tech.”
I shake my head, and he continues moving through, like none of this is out of place. “So, you know about the Lurkers.” I strain my neck to stare at the towers behind us as they fade back into the darkness and we turn a corner. We’ve turned multiple corners…
“And these tunnels?” I pry.
“What about them?”
“Do you know why they’re here?”
“The same reason why they’re everywhere I assume. The tunnels have always been here.”
“Everywhere?”
Vruksha hisses softly. “They ssspan for miles in many directions. So many questions.”
I look around. How did I not know this? Do Peter and the others know? They couldn’t. We all had the same briefing. The military facility we came down to investigate was chosen because it was once specialized in Lurker technology. If we were going to find this anywhere, it would be there. Underground tunnels were never mentioned.
Vruksha stops, and I hear the groan of a heavy door opening. The chill deepens when he takes me through it. It shuts behind us.
And then there’s nothing. Nothing but darkness.
I fidget. “Vruksha?”
Light bursts forth, blinding me. By the time I can see again, buzzing has filled my ears. He carries me into the room as I rub the last of the fuzzies from my sight.
My lips part when I get a good look at where I am. I push away from Vruksha’s chest.
“Let me down,” I say, my excitement skyrocketing, and he gently sets me on my feet. I lean against him and his tail coils around my waist.
Screens. A bank of screens covers the far wall, and below them is an old system of computers. Some are blacked out, some are blinking, while others are blurry with static. But the majority of them work and images appear on them. Pictures of the forest, the landscape, and even the facility. Live feeds of the entire region.
This is a… “Security room.”
A well-hidden one.
Vruksha slides to the control panel where there’s an old leather swivel chair. He pushes it over to me, and I grab it.
“Sit,” he orders.
I purse my lips and sit. “Are these the screens you always mention?” I ask, staring at the one overlooking the facility. I see the ship, the tents, the robots, and guards scouting the perimeter. There’s more now. I even see the skiff that carried me and Daisy away from the place.
My stomach churns despite my excitement seeing it all. Knowing life has gone on without me... like I was never important at all.
My fingers tangle together, and I hide the wave of hurt that hits.
“The screens I mention?” he repeats. “This is only a few of them. There are screens everywhere if you know where to look.”
“There are? Like these, not the orbs?”
“Yesss.”
He moves to the control panel and types something in. I watch raptly, awed to see this wild, primitive male, who I once thought was no better than a beast or a monster, use a computer like it’s second nature.
The screens change when he’s done typing, and words appear in large letters across them, but so do people, and images, and… destruction.
Aliens.
Large, lumbering bipedal beings covered in leathery green skin. They’re nearly human in appearance if it weren’t for their tails or the reptilian faces. Some are holding spears eerily similar to the one Vruksha carries.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” he says, returning to the question I asked earlier, as I stare at what’s playing out before me. Explosions, fires, devastation, men in gas masks shooting guns, miles of forests disintegrating into ash, people running. And Lurkers, thousands of them, ignoring the humans begging them for help, ignoring the crying babies. “I’ve never seen someone like me, ever, on any screen. I have never heard another naga speak of our origins either. I assume we have always been here, but perhaps that’s not the case. If what you say is true.”
I’m watching the final hours of news feeds of Earth and realizing this, my stomach drops further. This is something I thought I’d never see. Never wanted to see. Has anyone seen this besides Vruksha?
There had been calls for help, messages from Earth that survived and were archived in history logs, but so much was lost, never to be found again. And live feeds? None of that made it to the colonies. But here it is, playing out in front of me, stored like it has been waiting all this time to be found.
It’s the images of the Lurkers that frighten me the most. The death.
“What I say is true?” I repeat absently. My heart grows heavy.
“That maybe we’re not supposed to be here. That Earth isn’t supposed to have sentient life, female.” Vruksha straightens, and my eyes cut from him back to the screens and the death playing out there.
So much death.
“Vruksha, you have watched this?”
“Many times.”
The man reporting is sweating bullets as ‘Breaking News’ flashes on the screens. He wipes his brow as a new video feed rises behind him, showing thousands of ships taking off from Earth.
I know it’s the Lurker ships leaving like the monsters they are, abandoning all to die. There are other ships, thousands of human ones, and at once, the Lurker ships assault them wit
h their weapons, destroying all of them.
Every last one.
The sound cuts out as the Lurker ships vanish, leaving nothing but dust clouds behind. Silence fills the room as only a picture of Earth from orbit remains, slowly graying, dying before my eyes.
Billions of lives lost in hours. It took two more days before those that escaped were able to contact the colonies. By then, there was nothing left to be done. Nothing anyone could do. And the years after? Only more death.
Humanity was nearly wiped out to extinction.
It’ll happen again if the Ketts can’t be held back.
“Turn it off,” I beg.
A rumble leaves him as he does what I ask. The gray Earth disappears as the feeds of the forest return. I sag in the chair. “Why did you show me that?”
“You asked me, earlier, if I was a Lurker. I’m not. You also asked what a naga was, and I can’t tell you that… because I don’t know. I don’t know what I am, and this—these old images—is all I have, all any of us have here in explaining our origins. I can’t tell you because I don’t know, and I would like to… know.”
I swallow as I take in Vruksha. He’s looking at the screens like they hold all the answers.
“I want to know too,” I whisper.
He turns to face me. We share a look, a despondent one. The truth is likely ugly. Do we actually want to know?
“I need to go back,” I say.
Vruksha’s face hardens. “No.”
“You don’t understand—”
“What is there to understand? I won’t let you leave.”
“The facility might have the answer.” I glance at the screens. “Daisy is somewhere.”
His tailtip coils around my wrist. “No.”
“You just said you wanted to know about yourself, and my people need this information. They need to see this.”
“They need history? And not the technology that wiped you out the first time, the same technology you’re trying to uncover, right? It’s what you want to steal from us.”
My face scrunches. “It’s not like that. It’s also not your technology.”
“It is our technology,” he snaps, sending shivers down my spine. “We have protected it, learned a little from it, valued it for what it is—but we don’t use it. It is evil. Explain to me why it’s so important that your people would trade you for it, female.”
“We’re in the middle of a war,” I blurt out. I rise to my feet but nearly fall and catch my body on the chair. Vruksha’s tail releases my wrist and curls around my middle again. I push it away. “A war that could do what you just showed me all over again, but this time, on an intergalactic level. And you do use the tech,” I accuse. “The Lurkers on the screens carried the same spears you wield!”
Vruksha’s nostrils flare, and he moves to meet me head on. I straighten.
“You are mine. You belong with me. I won’t trade you for an answer to a question I didn’t care about yesterday. No amount of curiosity will change that. This is all the past, the past! Not the future.”
“Then you shouldn’t have shown me this,” I say.
Because now that I know, I have to do something.
“I will not allow your life to be endangered again.”
“That isn’t your decision to make. You were so willing to trade your precious knowledge with us for me. Why can’t you do it for me, instead?”
Vruksha hisses. “You are not being fair.”
“What is it you gave them, that first day? In the box?”
“Scraps. Odds and ends that have no use.”
“Scraps,” I guffaw. “My people can’t use scraps. They’ll be back for more. You understand that, right? Once they figure out what you gave them was useless, they’ll search for you.”
“We’ll kill them if they do. We’ll kill them all.”
“Kill us? There are millions of us.” I can’t hold back my shock, my fear. For him. “You live in ruins. Humans have battleships the size of the moon. How can you hold us back from taking the technology from you by force? We outnumber you.”
Darkness etches across Vruksha’s face, like he and the other nagas have already thought of this. It confuses me until I realize why.
They knew what they were in for all along.
They knew and they still risked themselves for me? For Daisy?
He slides to me, silently, like a shadow, and towers over me. “We have our ways.”
All at once, the part of Vruksha that frightens me, returns. The exacting intensity he wields sharpens every scale and ridge of his muscled body.
“Ways?” I whisper, mouth going dry. “You not only know where the Lurker tech is,” I breathe, remembering what he just said, what he said and I ignored. “And you know how to use it as well…”
The Earth turning to ash, the leathery reptilians ignoring the cries of children as their giant ships blast all of ours… the images unfold again before my eyes. It was like we—and all that humans had achieved—were nothing.
Whoever had that kind of power—terrible power—could cause massive destruction and should be feared.
Vruksha and the other nagas aren’t just part of a primitive sentient species. They hold that power. The power humankind thinks could change the tide of war.
Something flashes across one of the screens, stealing my attention. Vruksha says something I don’t quite make out. Familiar faces distract me. “Something’s happening,” I say, focusing on the flurry of activity. Vruksha goes quiet beside me.
It’s the facility. My eyes narrow.
Men and robots rush across the cleared yard and toward the forest, past the barrier. I see Peter, Collins, and even Shelby. They’re scrambling and pointing, screaming at something I can’t make out.
“Can you enlarge it?” I stumble forward, using Vruksha’s tail to keep me upright. “Where’s the sound? Does this have sound? I need to hear what they’re saying.”
“Not the live feed,” he rumbles, leaning over the panel again. He presses a couple of buttons, and the footage from the facility takes over the whole wall.
The skiff appears. It’s trying to take off but is far too close to the forest to clear it. The others chase after it. Peter is barking what I assume are orders for the robots not to shoot it down. Whatever it is that’s allowing me to see what’s happening focuses on the skiff, following it as whoever is in the cockpit tries to fly it too high too fast. They’re trying to take off.
“You’re not going to make it,” I breathe, my heart thundering. The bottom of the skiff hits the tops of the trees. “You’re not going to make it!” I gasp.
The skiff jerks upward, hovers, skims more trees, and jerks again. It clears the next several trees and bounces higher. My fingers curl into my palms as it steadies. I forget my colleagues at the facility and focus on the ship, trying to see who’s flying it.
A shock of long blond hair is all I can make out through the blur.
My throat constricts.
“Daisy.”
Twenty-Three
Mate
Vruksha
Gemma refuses to let me carry her back to our nest.
She struggles in my embrace as I do so anyway. She’s not always going to get what she wants.
“I shouldn’t have shown you,” I growl. I regret giving her a view into the secrets of this place, this world I live in. The tunnels are known by all the nagas, like the Lurker technology and the old human ruins, but the secrets within them? Those of us who know of it, always kept those close.
Because what you know, what you have, makes you powerful in my forest.
The little bit of technology we handed over to the humans had been nothing more than cast-off bits and baubles of broken tech that no longer respond to us. To anything. Zaku and Vagan had made sure of it.
“I’m glad you did, but that’s not the problem right now. Daisy is. That skiff can’t save her! She’ll never make it past the stratosphere, not without a miracle. We need to go back! Please,
Vruksha.” Her voice heightens. “You would have kept this from me?” she says, straining in my arms. “Something so pivotal?”
“It’s not your passst.”
“How can you say that? Of course it is. It belongs to humans…” her voice trails off at the end, and I peer down at her. Shadows distort her face, but I can see enough of it clearly to know she’s thinking.
“Or perhaps it belongs to no one and should be forgotten,” I grit.
We slip through the tunnels in silence going forward. When we’re back within my bunker, and I shut the door behind us, some of the tension leaves me. I set Gemma down on a crate, and she swings her legs over the side, stands, but quickly leans back against it.
I glimpse my spear perched against the wall by the exit.
I always knew it wasn’t made by humans. When I wield it, it’s like an additional limb, one that not only uses the muscles trained for it, but also your thoughts. Only Lurker tech does that, not human tech.
And Lurker tech never deteriorated, not like the cheap creations of the humans. Which, like Gemma’s brought up, usually rusts and corrodes, or loses its power source.
I never minded showing Gemma the tech until now because I didn’t think there would be any harm involved in doing so. It intrigued her so. Besides she’s mine, and that alone once assured me she could never, or would never, use it against me. Now I’m not sure.
“Maybe you’re right,” she says abruptly. “Maybe some of what you and the others guard is too dangerous… But that won’t help Daisy right now.”
“Mmm.” I coil my tailtip around her leg. “Who’s Daisy?”
My female throws her hands up in the air. “The woman who was with me on the plateau! The other female who ran from you, terrified for her life.”
“I forgot there was another female.”
“How? Err, never mind.” She rubs her brow.
“I’ve only ever seen you.” I do recall this other female now that she mentions it, but I recall nothing else about her. No other female interests me.
“If I wasn’t so upset with you, that might have made me happy, but as it is, there was another woman, and we need to save her.”