In the Between Time

by Krystyne Price

  MER

  MER

  BOOK FOUR: IN THE BETWEEN TIME

  By Krystyne Price

  Copyright © 2018 by Krystyne Price

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America

  First Edition, 2018

  Krystyne Price

  98-820 Moanalua Rd, I 5-1 Ste 745

  Aiea, HI 96701

  www.KrystynePrice.com

  Please don’t forget to feed the author with a review on Amazon or Goodreads! Let everyone know what you think of the book!

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WEBSITE

  PLEASE REVIEW

  Chapter One

  She gasped awake, dreams of Mateo being chased, hunted, haunting her as her mind swam to full consciousness. There was warmth against her right side and when she turned her head, pale pink bloodshot eyes were staring at her. Her heart skipped several beats, for it was clear they were still alone, which meant that neither Ghano nor Omaro had been on Mateo’s heels. While Sirena couldn’t remember lying down upon the bed and falling asleep, she clearly remembered the terror which had seized Mateo in the night. Terror which seemed to have abated, but still showed from deep within his eyes.

  Sirena reached out with her left hand and stroked her finger along his little cheek. “Mateo.”

  He offered a weak smile. “I have hunger, Ima Sirena.”

  “You need not be so formal with me, young one, for though I am ima by birthright, I am not recognized as such.”

  A frown creased his forehead as they rose together from the bed. “Why?”

  She offered the best explanation she could give that a five-year old might understand. “I don’t fit in with the way they think imos should be.”

  There was silence as she moved to the first chamber to fetch food from the baskets she’d brought to the sinpod the day before. Mateo padded in and seated himself at a small table formed by the cave floor itself, which was slightly off-center from the entrance.

  “Sirena?”

  “Mm?” She busied herself bringing out day-old smoked samema and wild borom she’d gathered in the very same wood where she’d first laid eyes on the redheaded child.

  “I don’t fit in either.”

  Her hands stilled, the samema resting upon one of the stone plates the sinpod had left behind, suspended halfway between her height and the table.

  “What makes you say you do not fit in?” She set the samema down before him.

  His eyes lit up and he picked up the food and stuffed half of one fillet in his mouth. So…he had not eaten in some time. Once he’d chewed and managed with several large gulps to get it swallowed, he looked up at her.

  “I do not look like other merans. They are dark of skin, hair and eyes. I am paler and my hair is not the same, neither in texture nor color. My eyes are lighter and Father has been very careful to keep me hidden.”

  “Do I look like other merans?” she asked as she placed the handful of borom on the plate next to his samema.

  “No. But that is because you are an ima. I have no reason for being different.”

  Sirena frowned. Then neither Ghano nor Omaro had yet explained Mateo to himself. They had not told the child of the prophecy, of his place in it. Of what his birth meant and indeed where he had actually been birthed. Whether Omaro was or was not his actual father, she did not know. For if the daris decided to change a meranling within its mother’s womb, it wasn’t to say that those who had borne the child were not his or her parents. It was simply to say that their development had been manipulated by the daris – more specifically in her case, possibly by Aea herself, though the dari had never confirmed this.

  But was it her right to explain all of this to him? And how much would he understand at such a tender age? The concept of the existence of the daris was easy in and of itself. But expecting such a young meranling to grasp things like prophecies and mers and the daris’ hands in the lives of Mera’s inhabitants was, she felt, quite a stretch. Sirena didn’t think she had any business interfering in how Ghano and Omaro were raising the child, so she struggled with what to say which would not be a lie, but which also would not raise more questions than answers in him.

  She turned to the second basket and pulled out two gelips, their curved bodies roasted over an open flame. They were cold but still tender, and she thought Mateo might enjoy them. He grinned through a mouthful of borom when she placed the gelips, long, six-legged little sea creatures with curved, fanning tails, on his plate.

  “Thank you.”

  “You are most welcome.” After arranging samema and borom and a small handful of kekire roots on a plate that’d been broken in half, Sirena seated herself next to the child, her mind still churning to respond his statement.

  “Mateo, each and every meran is born special,” she began after chewing and swallowing the small white kekire, feeling this was the best way to introduce him to all the concepts involved in his existence. He stopped eating and looked intently at her. “You see, your father was born strong so that he may perform great works with his strength. And Ghano was born with wisdom so that he may teach you things such as your letters and numbers, as he told me he’s done.”

  Mateo nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, yes, I can even write my name and Father’s name and Ghano’s name and…I bet I can etch yours, too!”

  She smiled. “Then we shall try after our meal.”

  He tore into the rest of his samema, finishing it quickly, and then picked up his plate, walked to the entry and placed it on the ground just outside. Stilling, he turned back to look at her, his small frame silhouetted by the increasing light of day.

  “When will I find out why I was born special in a way that makes me look so different to everyone else?”

  She swallowed, wishing she could just spill the whole story to him. But something in her gut told her the time and place were not right and she couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that it wasn’t something she should be the one to tell him.

  “You will find out, young one, when the time is right for you to find out. The great universe in which we live has its own timing for all of us, and for the things that we must know. We cannot fathom it in our small ways but we must trust that it will not let us fall.”

  “And yet it has let my sinpod fall.” His face fell as much as the cadence of his voice with the utterance of those words and she rose, her own samema forgotten, and moved to stand before him. Kneeling down, she took hold of his arms and held onto them gently.

  “What do you mean? Where are Omaro and Ghano, Mateo?”

  His eyes welled up with tears and he leaned into her, pulling his arms from her hands and wrapping them around her neck. “I don’t know. Ghano ran and ran and ran with me. We left Father behind in the wood. When night came, Ghano placed me inside a small outcropping like a cave with no front, and told me to sleep and he would return before I awoke.” Tears spilled out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks. “But as he was leaving, as the rains were falling, I heard him yell and then I heard no more.” He heaved a couple of deep, sobbing breaths and met her eyes.
“I was frightened.”

  “Why did you run here, all the way from wherever you had traveled to? Why did you not remain where Ghano told you to remain?”

  “Because you were here,” was his simple reply and she could do naught but hold him close and wonder what to to next. Strike out with him to look for Ghano and Omaro? Would that be too dangerous for Mateo? What kind of protection could she, an untrained ima, offer to him out in the derah? How would she even know where to begin looking for his sinpod?

  And what in the name of her mother’s unruly hairs would she do if they found both men dead?

  The braying of a lemdi caught Sirena’s attention. Mateo’s, too. He extricated himself from her embrace and stepped outside the cave. “Look!” He pointed off in the distance. She rose and joined him, eyes following his hands. “It’s Gacia, our lemdi!” Mateo took off at a dead run toward the lemdi, who was by herself and lumbering toward the cave.

  “Mateo!” she called out, hurrying to follow him.

  The rain had let up just enough that she could see his copper-red hair in the distance and the bulky form of the lemdi as he greeted her with his hand on her flat nose. Sirena heard him babbling excitedly to the beast and smiled. At least they would have the means of making travel less difficult if it came to that.

  She looked down to ensure she wasn’t going to step in any holes or ruts created by long-dead tree roots as she walked. Sirena had done that one too many times, tripping, spraining her ankle and one time even breaking the little toe on her right foot. Prone in one way or another to clumsiness, it seemed, she’d learned from the time she was a meranling to watch where she was going, especially if she was in a hurry.

  A strange squawk from up ahead made her wonder if the lemdi had brought a brightly colored pegan with it. Now that would make a fine meal indeed for her and the boy! She looked up expecting to see lemdi, pegan and Mateo headed her way.

  But all she saw was the lemdi.

  “Mateo?” She looked around in the gloom and rain but didn’t see him. “Mateo?” Running forward with little care for where her feet were being placed, she drew closer and closer to Gacia but still there was no sign of Mateo’s signature red hair. “Mateo!”

  The rain was her only response until someone grabbed her from behind, hands gripping her breasts painfully. It was a man, and he slammed her backwards into his body, large, muscle-bound arms holding her tightly. Sirena screamed and kicked and tried to pummel her captor with her fists but he merely laughed in her ear.

  “Well, well, well, what have we here?”

  “You know what Vago said. Bring her to the lemdi.”

  Sirena tried to bite him when he moved his arm, but one well-placed back-handed slap to her cheek stunned her enough that for a few moments she saw stars among the raindrops. By the time her head had cleared enough for her to try to figure out who these men were, her hands were being tied behind her back and her ankles were being tied together at the same time.

  There were two of them. They were large men wearing pakans and…masks.

  Oh, no.

  Her stomach sank to the soles of her feet. She knew as well as any woman what the Lunan did to them.

  “Where is Mateo?”

  “That neraked up mutant with the red hair? That’s its name, huh?”

  “He’s a he, not an it,” she ground out through clenched teeth. Beastly men, the Lunan.

  “He’s right here, little ima.” This came from a third man, also wearing a mask, who emerged from the other side of the lemdi with Mateo hiked over his shoulder, his wrists and ankles also bound. The fear projecting outward from him and written on his face tore through Sirena’s being.

  As they tossed both her and Mateo across the lemdi’s back, Sirena could think only one thing: she had failed. She had barely had Mateo with her for a single night and she not only still didn’t know where Ghano and Omaro were, but she had allowed the most heinous gang that existed on Mera to capture them both.

  Would they recognize Mateo as prophesied? She doubted these baruos could even read, never mind have been taught the more gentile ways of merans. With any luck they wouldn’t figure it out. But that didn’t make things any safer for the child, for the stories of the Lunan raping didn’t always just stop at them doing so to women, nor to full-grown merans in general.

  She shivered and realized they’d put Mateo nearer the lemdi’s shoulders and Sirena more across the middle of its back. His face turned toward her and in her mind she heard a voice, a very small male voice, whisper, “Help, Sirena.”

  “Mateo?”

  In spite of the fact that the men were now leading Gacia away from the cave, and that she and Mateo were tied up and uncomfortable at best upon its back, Mateo grinned so widely she feared his face would split in half.

  “You can hear me!”

  She shook her head in disbelief but then nodded. “Yes. I can.”

  He rested his cheek against the lemdi’s short fur. ”You’re the first one who ever could.”

  This new knowledge and ability to speak within their minds offered no solace in their current predicament. But Sirena would take it as a positive sign, in spite of the fact that they might very well be headed to their deaths.

  Or worse.

  Sirena closed her eyes and called out to Aea in fear and despearation as she had done only once before. Fighting to keep that memory at bay, especially when Aea did not answer, proved as futile as escaping the nightmares she’d had about it for…had it been two years already? It seemed like only weeks ago that she’d encountered these bandits for the very first time.

  She had tired of her life and of the raving woman her mother, Anala, had become. Sirena knew her mother’s reasons for being so vocal in the female liberation movement, but what had been planted when imo after imo had rejected Sirena after spending the better part of a year traveling the lands of Mera to seek them out, hadn’t just grown…it’d grown completely out of control. At least, that was how Sirena felt.

  For all her mother opined that the equality of women needed to be addressed because of the treatement her fledgling ima had received, the very first ima to be birthed on all of Mera…for all that her mother claimed that standing on a stump in the middle of a derah’s central kampun and yelling was a means to an end that would create a better world for her…for all Anala spouted facts about how men treated them as naught but possessions like they would a lemdi or a chair, all she ever gained in return for the endless days spent traveling from kampun to kampun was the ire of merans…both woman and man alike.

  Over the past many years, many men had tried to have Anala handled by hauling her before the governor’s council of whatever derah they happened to be in at the time. But there were no Codes addressing outspoken women, largely because such a thing had never before occurred. And so the council was always forced to let her go. However, those incidents had led to yet another coalition forming, one which threatened to set women back even further in society by implementing Codes detailing precisely what roles women had and were not allowed to have, and what their place in the scheme of existence was.

  Good intentions were leading to an even stricter and more rigid life for women if the coalition got their way. As it was, Sirena had been ostracized by her peers since her earliest memories, simply because she was the exact opposite of them. With white hair and piercing blue eyes, and skin that wasn’t nearly as dark as that of other merans, one look at her usually sent her fellow meranlings, meranlees and even meranlans scuttling behind their parents and pointing. And the grown mers never helped, for they shunned her as badly as her peers. As a near-adult that had begun to change, with younger children more interested in than frightened of her, but the stigma was still there, and she couldn’t escape it because it was who and what she was. After all, ima or no, a meran could not change their own visage.

  She had often asked Aea why this had been done; why a female had been touched in her mother’s womb to create an ima rather than the traditional met
hod of touching a male to create an imo. But Aea’s response was always the same line of “Traditions need to change.”

  Alone, not for the first time, Sirena was seated in a small dilapidated hut that her mother had found for them to spend the night in the derah furthest east called Tamur. Shortly after Anala had left her there to forage for food, Sirena watched from a distance as men from the kampun where her mother had been advocating all that day, seized her and declared they were taking her before Governor Wilako’s council.

  It was always the same thing. Anala was carted away sometimes on foot, sometimes via lemdi. She would be gone for at least two days, sometimes more. Sirena would have to fend for herself and keep out of sight lest she be set upon by bullies and haters once they set eyes on her countenance.

  That night as insects buzzed the darkness into being and clouds parted for the first time in weeks, Sirena lay on a makeshift bed which was nothing more than stacks of long grasses pulled up from the land surrounding them. There were three other huts nearby but her mother had advised they’d all been abandoned as well; that this fourth one was in the best condition, which was why she’d chosen it for their sleeping.

  And so Sirena had drifted off, crying herself to sleep as she did so many nights. It wasn’t merely the hormones of being a meranlan that weighed her down and forced too much emotion to the surface. It was her very existence. Aea was never comforting and never responded during moments of grief, and because of this Sirena had begun to wonder if even the daris themselves had given up on her.

  Some hours later Sirena awakened for she knew not what reason. She sat up on the grass, lower back protesting the unforgiving hard dirt that lay beneath. She rubbed it ruefully and got to her feet, only then realizing that there were voices nearby. Quickly she ran to the hut’s uncovered doorway and peered out into the darkness to find men carrying torches – which she had only seen one time before in her young life – and using them to set fire to the three empty huts. Then she blanched because apparently the huts hadn’t been as empty as her mother had proclaimed or perhaps another traveler had decided to use one for the night as they had – but either way, whoever the man was being carried by two masked men toward the middle hut which had not been set on fire as yet, looked injured.