Children of Enochia

by Luke R. Mitchell

  Parker looked at me. “I explained that the Seekers offered unexpected aid during our escape, and that circumstances dictated we bring them with us. I’m not sure where the confusion is.”

  Johnny, Franco, and James all turned to me, clearly exasperated.

  “We got into a scrap in the woods.”

  “With them?” Johnny asked.

  “With the raknoth,” I said. “The ones that took Five and Seven and escaped Oasis.”

  Everyone in the circle gave a start.

  “You got jumped by reekers?” Johnny asked.

  “Are you okay?” Elise added.

  “Clearly we survived,” Parker said. “At which point, I summoned the ship and we made our escape.”

  “After your summoning the ship brought the trackers down on our heads and left us no choice in the matter,” I added.

  “Convenient that you left all these little details out,” Johnny said, tapping the side of his rifle with his trigger finger. “Almost as convenient as the fact that the reekers found you in the middle of the woods at all.”

  “I wouldn’t call anything about the situation convenient,” Parker said, looking to me as if for confirmation.

  “Parker fought alongside me,” I admitted, aware as I did so of how much all of this could easily be interpreted as my having fallen for Parker’s grand manipulation. Not that I could prove with certainty that I hadn’t. I decided to stick with the facts instead. “The two were strong, though. They had us pinned when Siren shot one from the trees. Garrett charged in afterward, and we managed to drive them away.” I looked at Parker. “I was hoping the one was down for good once he took a bolt to the brain.”

  “Alone, he might have been in trouble. With Nan’Vala’s aid, though, he will likely survive.”

  “See?” Johnny said. “Alien first name basis with the enemy? Convenient.”

  “They were my clan mates,” Parker said.

  “Yep. That’s pretty much what I’m getting at, right there.” Johnny frowned. “And you’re telling me a pulse bolt to the head wasn’t enough to finish a reeker? Smirks got Frosty with a gropping dagger. What’re us normal folk supposed to use?”

  “Two bolts, perhaps,” Parker said with his most reptilian smile.

  “Also, reekers?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Johnny said, finally breaking his stare on Parker to look at me. “That’s what we’re calling ‘em.”

  “I thought we agreed that’s not what we’re calling them,” Elise said.

  “You agreed that’s what you’re not calling ‘em, lady. I don’t know about you, but I refuse to die because I’m busy shouting, ‘Look out, here comes that Seeker-turned-raknoth-turned-meat-puppet guy!’”

  “Or girl,” Elise said.

  “Or girl,” Johnny agreed, tilting his head. “It’s ridiculous. As opposed to ‘reeker,’ which is clearly syllabolically superior.”

  “Now who’s making up words?”

  Johnny spread his hands. “Well, there wasn’t a word for Seeker-turned-raknoth-turned—”

  “I meant ‘syllabolically,’” Elise said. “Obviotudinally.”

  Johnny scrunched his face up in thought.

  Alton Parker cleared his throat. Or maybe growled lightly. It was kind of hard to tell.

  “Perhaps we should get back to the question of prudent next steps,” Franco said.

  “Which is exactly why I want Haldin to confirm what I have been trying to tell you all along,” Parker said, with the kind of tone normally reserved for children.

  Franco and the others ignored his attitude and looked to me.

  I wasn’t even sure where to begin.

  “We’ve got some problems.”

  “Ha!” Johnny barked. “Problems, he says.”

  “Sarentus?” Franco asked, drawing confused looks from the others.

  “Was actually a raknoth,” I confirmed. “According to Parker’s memories, at least.”

  “Wait…” Johnny looked between us, then to Parker, then back to us. “No. You’re not… You’re serious? The Sarentus?

  “You saw it?” Elise asked.

  “I saw Parker’s memories of the raknoth Nan’Sarentus back on Earth, and I saw Zar’Faenor telling Parker that he’d left Sarentus on Enochia.”

  “So this Earth place is, like, actually real?” Johnny said.

  “And Zar’Faenor visited with Sarentus,” Franco said.

  “Over a thousand years ago,” Elise concluded.

  “Yeah, it’s…” I looked around at them, and decided I might as well have out with it all. “Yeah. You guys might wanna sit down for all this.”

  22

  Hard Truth

  Never in my life had I seen a group listen with such rapt attention to words that felt so utterly ridiculous coming out of my mouth. Though, now that I thought about it, maybe that was how I would’ve felt about a standard worship hall sermon, now that I knew what I did. Or thought I did, at least.

  “So basically,” Johnny said when I’d finished, “you’re telling us that our entire world’s a lie, we’re actually sorta aliens, the Sanctum’s basically a mad cult, and even if we somehow manage to sort any of this scud out, Parker’s beardsplitter bosses are gonna come eat our planet whole. Did I miss anything?”

  “The part where we’re wasting our time talking about this,” Parker called from where he was sitting over on his ship’s boarding ramp.

  “Are you positive this isn’t all bullscud?” Johnny asked. “Because it kinda sounds like bullscud.”

  “Unless raknoth minds are playing by totally different rules of telepathy, yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

  “And what are the chances they are?” Franco asked.

  “Playing by different rules?” I traded a glance with Elise, then looked over at Parker, wishing I had something other than gut feelings and a few ancient drawings to corroborate any of this. “Slim. I’m pretty sure what I saw was real.”

  Franco studied me for a few seconds, then nodded. “Then I think we all know what must be done.”

  “Damn straight,” Johnny said. Then he took in Franco’s somber air. “Wait, you’re not saying… You don’t actually think we should move on this scud?”

  “I think we should attempt to find some demonstrable evidence, and embrace the facts.”

  “That’s real noble and all, coming from an information broker, but—”

  “Do you remember how your High General intended to treat the Legion’s relationship with the truth?” Franco asked. “Before the Sanctum pushed her out?”

  Johnny’s jaw tightened, and it was in that moment that I first saw just how much was not okay right now. “I remember. But what we’re talking about… it could tear our planet apart. And that’s if there’s actually any truth to all this, and Alton Parker isn’t just playing another one of his games, trying to get us to throw fuel on the fire.” He looked at me. “You didn’t actually see Sarentus on Enochia, raising Alpha’s sigil with glowing red eyes, did you?”

  “No, but—”

  “That’s why we should focus on finding some evidence,” Franco said. “On tapping into the Emmútari records, getting more than one side of the story.” He gave Johnny a meaningful look. “And on getting Glenbark and the rest of our allies clear of this madness long enough for reason to have its day.”

  “Reason…” Johnny muttered.

  “If you refuse to trust my memories,” Parker said from right behind Johnny and James, who both jumped at his sudden appearance, “perhaps you can at least trust that I do not particularly care what happens to this planet. Certainly, I have no strong desire to watch ignorance drive a species to self-destruction. Perhaps I’d even rather see Enochia find peace and prosperity. But you needn’t trust my word on any of that. Trust simply that I am governed by my own self-interest in escaping my own vengeful masters. What happens to Enochia has little to do with that anymore.”

  “Yeah, super comforting,” Johnny said.

  I could see him warring with
whatever thoughts were in his head, and I completely understood. Even having seen all this for myself, and even having had a day and a half to chew on it all, I still wasn’t really sure what to think about any of it. And any time I tried too hard to figure it out, it all just felt… insurmountable.

  And I was pretty sure that was exactly the thought I was seeing on the others’ faces.

  “What if none of this matters?” Johnny finally asked. “What if it’s just all, you know…” He looked around at us, assessing. “Well, I never thought I’d be the one to say this, but what if we’re just all gropped sideways no matter how we play this? What if we’ve already lost?”

  “The thought has occurred to me,” I admitted quietly.

  “And the logical thing to do in that case,” Parker said, with a pointed look at me, “would be to simply move on to a new problem. A more pressing one, with a more well-defined solution. But what do I know?” he added at the round of unappreciative stares he got. “I’ve only been around a few millennia longer than all of you.”

  “Are you sure we can’t at least find a muzzle for this guy?” Johnny asked.

  “Perhaps you’d be more grateful for my bite,” Parker said, “if you knew what I’ve done for your sister.”

  Johnny went rigid, his gaze flicking to me. “What’s he talking about?”

  My mouth went dry.

  Parker turned his smug attention on me. “She was this one’s sister, was she not?”

  I couldn’t find the words.

  As explosively insane as our breakout had been, I hadn’t had time then or since then to really assess the decision I’d made to lead Parker to Annabelle—to let him sink his fangs into Johnny’s ailing sister to Alpha knew what end. Thinking about it now, though, seeing the disbelief in Johnny’s eyes, I felt sick. What had I been thinking?

  “Hal, what’s he talking about?”

  What if Parker had actually made things worse?

  “I developed and delivered a solution I believe will undo the hybridization process,” Parker said, before I could find my tongue. “A biological entity not unlike what your parvobiologists would call a retrovirus.”

  Johnny’s face was a mess of emotion. It shifted from confusion, to gradual comprehension, to tentative hopefulness. Then to dark realization. “You believe?” he growled.

  Parker scowled at him. “I never imagined I would find myself needing to undo the process. It wasn’t a simple solution. But, I imagine the treatment should begin to—”

  “Wasn’t… simple?” Johnny was shaking in a way I’d never seen, his face red, his eyes wild, and riveted to Parker. “You used my sister as a…”

  Parker’s knees were hitting the soft forest undergrowth almost before I registered that Johnny had just put a pulse bolt through each of the raknoth’s legs. Johnny stepped forward, rifle leveled at Parker’s head, too caught up in his rage to realize a pair of holes in the legs wouldn’t keep a raknoth down. Elise was already darting forward to stop him even as I reached out and held Parker down with telekinesis.

  “You bastard!” Johnny roared, struggling against Elise’s bear hug, his eyes still locked on Parker, whose face was fixed in a snarl of either violence or pain.

  The raknoth’s skin had taken on a dangerous tint of green, and he was beginning to struggle against my telekinetic hold.

  “That’s enough,” I said, shoving Parker back and stepping between him and Johnny.

  To the right, Elise stepped back from Johnny, who’d stopped struggling but now turned his glare on me.

  “What did you let him do, Hal?”

  A thousand answers ran through my head, none of the them right. None of them sincere.

  I faced my friend and told him the only thing I could. “She was dying, Johnny. We both know it.”

  His jaw clenched. His face working like it couldn’t decide whether to scream or cry. I’d never seen this look in Johnny’s eyes—the depth of the pain and despair.

  “I wish there’d been time to talk about it,” I said. “To let Therese run the tests, or figure out some other way. But there wasn’t time. The entire damn base was trying to kill us, and something told me that even if we survived, that was the last chance we’d have to see Anna before it was too late. I’m sorry, Johnny. But I only did what I thought was best for her.”

  He just stared at me with lost eyes, trying to process. Elise was still standing there with her hand on his shoulder, not quite blocking him from me and Parker, but there all the same. Johnny’s gaze shifted from me to Parker, and I could see what he was thinking. That if things took a turn for the worse, he’d like nothing more than to be the one to put a few bolts through Parker’s head.

  But he wouldn’t. I could see it in my friend’s face as he backed away from Elise and turned to stomp off into the woods. He was just too good on the inside. Myself, on the other hand…

  “Pull a move like that again,” I sent to Parker. “And I might just kill you myself.”

  He didn’t respond with words, just climbed back to his feet and regarded me with a bored, unimpressed stare. Some corner of my mind pointed out that maybe I should be glad I could still feel this level of distress and revulsion over a matter of a few individual lives after seeing the scope of the destruction that had so clearly jaded Parker to such relatively trivial matters. But the fact that any part of me felt the need to point that out at all was nearly as disturbing as if I’d already gone full cold-blooded.

  I needed to get my head grounded. I needed a clear mission to sink my teeth into.

  “What’d we miss?” called a voice from the direction of the hollow. Garrett. “Why’d the mouthy ginger look like someone just shot his—Oh. “

  The ex-Seeker drew up short at whatever he saw on my face as I rounded on him. He had an arm slung around Siren’s waist, and they both looked half drunk on whatever it was they’d just concluded in private.

  “So serious,” Siren whispered conspiratorially to Garrett, who looked notably less amused, like he could sense there’d been real fighting here only moments ago.

  I couldn’t deal with them right now. Or anything else, for that matter.

  “Ten minutes,” I said, starting off after Johnny without a backward glance. “And maybe someone could figure out what the scud we’re supposed to do next.”

  I found Johnny sitting on the thick trunk of a recently fallen oak tree, staring sullenly at the quiet forest beyond. He hadn’t gone all that far from our shipside circle, nor did he look up with his red-rimmed eyes or seem particularly surprised when I walked up and sat down beside him. For a while, we just sat in silence. Even if I’d had any idea where to begin, something about the weight of the moment made me feel like it wasn’t my place anyway.

  Finally, Johnny gave a wet-sounding sniff and straightened up. “Well this is a first, huh?”

  I glanced at him, not needing to wonder about which part of our mess he was referring to. The situation here was simply backward, no matter which way we looked at it. Throughout the years, I’d always been the one to lose it, and he’d always been the one to come set me straight. And now… it felt wrong, seeing my unshakable friend break like this.

  “Johnny… whatever you’re feeling, whatever you need to say to me… you can say it. I probably deserve it.”

  He looked at me in earnest for the first time like he wasn’t quite sure what I was talking about.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “About all of this. Parker. Anna. Glenbark.”

  He thought about that for a little while, then shook his head and muttered to the trees, “There you go again. Hal versus The World.”

  “No.” I shook my head in kind. “I’m not saying this is all on me. Or that I could’ve changed the way things played out. But I’m sure I could’ve done better. And I’m sorry if I made the wrong call.”

  “I hate that smug bastard,” Johnny said after a while.

  “I’m not a fan either. Trust me.”

  The look Johny gave me left little need f
or words. It was a look that said he wasn’t buying my bullscud, nor was he amused I’d even try to ship it his way.

  “I didn’t have a choice, Johnny.”

  “We always have a choice,” Johnny said. “I’m pretty sure you’ve told me those exact words before.”

  He wasn’t wrong. In some form or another, they were the words my dad had told me time and time again, and the same words I’d echoed to Johnny during any number of our debates about the proper place of rights, wrongs, and good old-fashioned discipline in service to the Legion.

  “All you had to do was leave him in that cell,” Johnny said. “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because Auckus’ attack hounds came to kill me before I could finish extracting what was in that bastard’s head,” I shot back before taking a breath to cool my head. “The things he showed me, Johnny… words can’t adequately describe it. All I know is that my gut’s telling me we can’t ignore these rakul any more than we can allow the Sanctum to move ahead with this bullscud war.”

  He stared into the chittering forest, saying nothing.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  He frowned. “Of course I believe you. If I honestly thought you’d let that monster slaughter good men and women…” He shook his head, apparently unsure as to what he’d do in that case, and the quiet settled back between us.

  “Are you okay?” I finally asked.

  “I’m fine,” he muttered.

  It was my turn to give him the no-bullscud-accepted-here look.

  “I will be fine,” he amended. “It just hasn’t been easy. With Bells. And Glenbark. With any of it, really. And if that scaly bastard’s solution doesn’t work…”

  “It will,” I said. “I really think it will. He didn’t offer the cure out of the goodness of his heart.”

  “No scud.”

  “I’m pretty sure it was a bribe,” I continued. “Just another calculated move to win some of my trust.”

  “Also, no scud.”

  “Point being, I don’t think he would’ve offered at all if it wasn’t going to work.”

  “Yeah, I pretty much figured the same. I think that’s the only reason I didn’t pull the trigger a third time back there.” He looked at me, serious. “But Hal, we should probably talk about why he’s willing to do all this just to earn your good favor. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but mass-murdering sociopaths aren’t really…”