“Or they’ve already been there. Or here.”
“Patty didn’t know about the new spots on the Crystal Map, so maybe not.”
Dean shook his head, peering up from the tablet. “But we have to assume this Lan’i guy has knowledge of their locations.”
“Unless they didn’t share it with one another. I don’t think Ja’ri and Dal’i were tight with them. I get the feeling there were two sides of the Four, alliances if you will. Pairs against one another. O’ri and Lan’i on one side, me and the orange one on the other.”
“Ja’ri,” Dean said.
“Yes?”
“Ja’ri, not Jules. You’re referring to her as yourself, but you’re not a Zan’ra,” he told her.
“I’m beginning to question that,” Jules replied.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You’ve seen what I’ve done, what I’m capable of. These Deities were right to destroy us. The Four should never have escaped,” Jules told him, sure of her words.
“But they did, and somehow you were infused by the long-hibernating Zan’ra, just like my sister has been infused by O’ri. You realize if they didn’t exist, or if the Deities had managed to stop them, you’d be a regular girl right now,” he said.
She almost laughed as they floated in a green sphere above the palm trees on an alien world. There was nothing normal about what they were doing, and there weren’t many normal things about Jules herself either.
“Is that what you’d prefer?” she asked him, feeling the glow from her eyes intensifying.
“Jules, that’s not what I’m saying,” Dean told her.
This was as good a time to talk about those three words he’d told her seven months ago. There was nowhere for him to run to, no way to evade her questions.
“If you had the choice, would you trade the powers? Would you expel the Zan’ra?” Dean asked her before she could mention anything else.
She’d considered that very question in her own mind countless times, but having Dean ask it made her angry. She wanted the older boy to accept her for who she was, not wish for someone different.
“Are you mad?” he asked softly.
“What makes you say that?”
“First off, your arms are crossed, you’re tapping your foot and you’re glaring at the trees.” He laughed, turning her to face him inside the sphere. They continued moving slowly over the treetops, and he opened his mouth to say something else when she saw the image over the tablet screen.
“That’s where she is!” Jules shouted, pointed at it.
“She? The Deity is a woman?”
“That shouldn’t surprise you so much,” she told him.
“I guess I just thought of them as sexless. What’s the point of gender if you’re a god?”
It was a good question, one she didn’t have an answer for. “Where is that?”
Dean used the device, mapping out the location of the tree with the waterfall roaring in the backdrop. A few seconds later, they had it marked, and it was twenty kilometers away. She increased their speed, shooting quickly over the treetops, above a ridge, over another pristine lake, and slowed as they neared their destination.
The tree was extraordinary, the trunk a good five feet wide, with thick white bark. Knots protruded from the base, forming a perfect circle, a symbol for the Zan’ra. This was it.
Jules lowered them, and when their boots touched on the soft moss-covered ground, she flicked the energy bubble off. Dean took a tentative step toward the tree, and she followed beside him, staring toward the crown. Thick branches blotted out the sunlight, the long, vein-covered black leaves danced in the breeze, making a comforting rustling noise. It reminded her of the oak tree back home on Earth, the one she loved to read a good book under on a hot summer day.
This was a far cry from the angry ocean on Desolate, a fitting burial site for a god. The waterfall roared from the left, liquid feeding from higher along the mountainside into the lake behind the tree. This water had fed the tree and kept these great roots strong over the years.
“How old do you think it is?” Dean asked.
“Very ancient,” she answered.
Dean strolled forward, reaching a hand for the trunk, when Jules saw the other girl sauntering up from the lake. She was diminutive: no more than four feet tall, and her hair was cut short, wet and plastered to her head. Her face was round, pleasant, but it was the eyes that made Jules smile.
“Dal’i,” Jules said, startling Dean, who stumbled from the half-naked girl approaching them. Her eyes burned a bright orange, and she grinned in return.
“Hello, Ja’ri. I’ve been waiting for you,” the other Zan’ra said.
____________
The ship was quiet at the off hour, and I briefly chatted to the portal guards before entering Light’s Shandra room. The symbols glowed to life, and I waited near the entrance as the doors closed behind me. The mere fact that an entire network of portals existed was mind-boggling. I remembered when Slate and I had first used the one on New Spero, finding Sterona and Suma when she was younger than Jules was now, then using the portal again to kidnap the Empress on the Bhlat homeworld. Leonard had followed me, and I’d been so angry. Turned out I couldn’t have done it without him, and I thought there was a lesson in there somewhere.
I continually tried to do things on my own, and so did Jules, but at the end of the day, we were at our best when surrounded by the people we cared about. I was better with Mary, or Slate, or… I almost thought Magnus, but repressed the memory of the man. Now wasn’t the time to become caught up in an emotional rollercoaster. He was gone. I was here.
I peered at the glowing green crystals beneath the glass sheet, and walked toward them over the smooth black-tiled floor. The entire Shandra network was awe-inspiring, and I stood at the table wondering how it was that an older version of myself was able to track me mid-transfer.
The mere fact that there was a world between worlds was confusing enough. What was that place? Did it exist? Was it some other dimension or a purgatory of sorts? I tried to imagine how old I’d been. I hadn’t seen that man in years, but he’d been slightly wrinkled, hair graying, not unlike my own now. I had aged since then. Was it only five years off my current timeline? Ten?
Somehow Lom knew about it and had tortured the details from me in some future I’d never see. Or had he lied about that?
I wanted to confront him, to face Lom of Pleva inside the portal’s whitewashed world, but I had no idea if he’d try to find me again. Mary had wanted me to stay away from using the network until we’d figured this all out, but I couldn’t. Not with his threats hanging over my head.
I felt the noose tightening around my neck and hoped my stool would hold me up for a while longer.
The gun was holstered at my hip, and I chose the symbol for Earth first.
“Come on, Lom. I have some questions for you,” I said quietly, pressing the icon.
I arrived under Giza in Egypt and saw the guard peer into the room. “Sorry, wrong destination,” I told her.
She nodded, recognizing me, and I found New Spero’s icon, bringing it to life.
Once again, I traveled through without issue, ending inside the mountain’s Shandra room, the symbols glowing hotly in the stone walls around me. “Damn it,” I said, wiping my sweaty palms over my pants. I was dressed casually in a long-sleeved plaid shirt and dark jeans, not wanting this to be official business. Mary would kill me if she knew what I was trying to accomplish.
I thought about staying and going to see Leonard. It had been a while since we’d talked, but I was invested now. I wanted to see Lom.
I found the symbol for Haven. I’d do this all night if I had to. If Lom had been able to track me before, I suspected he was able to do so again. I activated it, white light filling my eyes, and when I blinked, it was still there. I was in the strange region between worlds.
“Show yourself!” I shouted.
Silence.
“Lom, I
know you’re here. I want to talk!”
More silence.
“Maybe we can strike a bargain,” I said. Quite often, peaceful solutions could be found in times of war, and I’d managed to do it in the past, but there were also instances where fighting was unavoidable. Jules had showed me that when she’d destroyed the Arnap. I needed to be more like her in that way.
I heard his laughter, the booming, almost mechanical sounds as his cybernetics kicked in. He floated toward me like before, but faster this time. He was probably getting stronger here, attaining more control. That was good information. If he could master this world, it meant I could too.
When he was near enough to converse without shouting, I moved, willing myself forward. It was the first time I’d done so, and the space around me warped as I floated closer to him.
His flesh eye opened slightly wider, and a half grin met his non-metal part of his face. “Dean Parker. How did you know I’d come?”
I shrugged. “Seems like you’d be watching. It’s what you do.”
He was even more imposing today, as if he’d grown another two feet, and I suspected it was an illusion of this place. Something he’d done to appear stronger, to gain the upper hand.
He didn’t speak, motioning toward me, as if urging me to go first.
“A bargain. What is it you really want, Lom? Perhaps there’s another alternative,” I told him, feigning a little desperation. It wasn’t difficult to accomplish.
He laughed again, the sound equally disturbing. “At times, you seem to understand me, and at others, you fail miserably.”
“There’s always a concession to be had. What do you want?” I asked.
His smile dropped. “I want you dead.”
“Out of all the people you’ve had altercations with, what about me has set you so over the edge?”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Earth was ours.”
“The Kraski? I know you sold them the hybrid technology, and the idea, but what was in it for you?” I pressed him. This was good. What I wanted. To get him talking.
“There have been a lot of threats over the millennia, Parker. Most recently, the Arnap, the Kraski, the Bhlat, but countless before them. Money is made in times of war, not in peace. When you came along, waving this idiotic white flag, you somehow managed to thwart everyone, and not only did you prevent the Kraski, then the Bhlat from owning you, but you ended up working with them. The Alliance of Worlds. You can understand how problematic that is for someone like me.”
“You were gone before we formed an alliance. It’s not about that, is it?” I asked, but it reiterated he was being fed information from someone here in my timeline. We’d already assumed that, though.
“You want to know what I’ll do?” he asked, his frown vanishing.
“What?”
“I’ll move on right now, if you sacrifice yourself,” he said softly.
Goosebumps covered my arms under the shirt sleeves. “Is that so?”
“Yes.” He drifted closer, the space around him dark and ominous over the white backdrop. He was huge, and I had to convince myself to stand firm. I knew at that instant the pulse pistol at my hip would do no good here. If it was possible to be killed, he’d have done it already.
“What does that entail?” I asked.
He sneered. “You go to Udoon Station. Alone. Meet my contact, Viliar.”
“Then what?”
“You come to me, and you die,” Lom said.
“And you’ll stop messing around with all this time merging, end-of-existence crap?” I asked, unable to hide the tremor from my voice.
“Dean Parker, I swear I will stop once I have your head on a platter,” he said.
“I’ll think about it,” I told him, turning away.
“Don’t think too long.” I heard his voice as the brightness filled my eyes, and I blinked them clear, finding I was inside Haven’s portal room.
Twelve
The fire roared, snapping and cracking as the green wood sizzled under the extreme heat. Dal’i’s eyes were bright orange, and Jules thought the fire’s reflection amplified their intensity.
“Tell me again,” Dean said, and the girl shrugged in such a universal gesture. His helmet was on the ground beside hers, once Dal’i had convinced them nothing here would harm the human body.
“Look, I’ve already told you what I can,” she said, using English.
“That you have no idea where the other two are, but that Jules had the ability to track the Four,” Dean said, his tone clearly disbelieving.
“I don’t know how to do that, Dal’i. You’re going to have to teach me to project myself, and whatever else you can recall,” Jules told her.
The Zan’ra laughed at this, as if Jules had made a funny joke. “Are you truly not in there, Ja’ri?”
Jules shook her head, tapping her temple with a finger. “This is all Jules Parker. I wish I could remember some of it, but I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“It might be better this way,” Dal’i said quietly.
“Why’s that?” Dean asked. The fire crackled, and a piece of wood flew toward Dal’i. It stopped in midair, and she smiled at it as it burned to ashes a foot from her face.
“Because the Four had to do some terrible things to survive. How far would you go to preserve your race, Dean?” she asked him, her grin predatory.
“I guess I’d do whatever was necessary. That’s our instinct, right?” Dean changed the subject. “Tell me about O’ri.”
Jules glanced to the sky, seeing nothing but distant stars in the black backdrop.
“O’ri wouldn’t stay hidden. He was such a fool. At one point, he vanished, and then I heard about some race called the Stor. Apparently, one of them found his essence, much like Jules here discovered Ja’ri. The young man grew powerful, tapping into the strengths of the Zan’ra. He helped raise the people to new levels, healing them, fending off invaders at one point, and then”—Dal’i snapped her fingers loudly—“he disappeared. He was gone for a hundred years, or so the tale goes, but his fame only grew among the people in that time. They built statues for him, using purple emeralds as his eyes.”
“But he hurt them when he went home,” Jules whispered.
Dal’i nodded, poking at the fire with a stick of orange energy. “We have no record during those years, because I never saw him. Neither did Lan’i. But it had to be bad, evil. When he once again returned to the Stor, they heralded him as a god, a hero, but he enslaved them. Eventually, I took it upon myself to stop him.”
“You sealed him away?” Jules asked.
“I had a little help,” she admitted.
“The Deities?”
“Good guess. I let mine out. Tricked her, really. They have such a singular focus on destroying the Zan’ra that it was simple enough. I left her tethered to the coffin, and she removed the essence from the boy that O’ri had been restored into,” Dal’i said.
Jules stared at her, scared but excited. “Are you saying that these gods can split me from Ja’ri? I could be… human again?”
“If you don’t mind living unresponsive for the rest of your miserable life,” the girl said. “The kid was catatonic, and lasted just a few years under someone’s care.”
“How did he die?” Dean asked, but Jules had a good idea.
“Self-inflicted,” she said quietly, and Dal’i nodded.
Jules was tired, but she had too many questions for the Zan’ra. It was surreal being with someone else like her, and while the initial rush of adrenaline had subsided, her curiosity was still growing.
“I just want to get my sister back in one piece,” Dean told her.
“It may be possible, but we’d need to offer something to the Deities that they couldn’t refuse,” Dal’i said.
“What about Lan’i? Is he evil?” Jules asked. She did recall him trying to strangle her father, but she might have done the same thing if their roles had been reversed. Self-preservation was an extre
mely powerful instinct.
“Lan’i means well, but he’s always been impetuous,” Dal’i said. “He wants nothing more than to keep the gods buried, and he’s making his rounds with O’ri to ensure this. They’ve been here, but there is one more location they haven’t gone to yet.”
“Desolate,” Jules said.
“Is that what you call it? That seems fair, though the name of that world was once Uleera. Our home,” Dal’i said, breaking her eye contact with Jules. She stared into the flickering flames in silence.
“What? Desolate… I mean, Uleera is the home of the Zan’ra?” Jules asked. The hair on her arms stood up, and she glanced around, suddenly feeling vulnerable. The tree swayed proudly a few meters from them, and the background noise of the waterfall continued, though she barely noticed it now. Her gaze drifted to the base of the tree, where a coffin was buried ten meters below, the roots likely grown through the box, clutching it firmly in place.
“It was.”
“How is it you are still you? If O’ri and I were lost, how did you remain Dal’i?” Jules asked.
Dal’i peered up again, the orange in her eyes even brighter. “It hasn’t been easy. Ja’ri couldn’t handle eternal life, and you know about O’ri. Lan’i and I were the only two out here for a very long time,” she said.
“Do you trust Lan’i?” Dean asked.
“I have no choice. We’re all in this together,” Dal’i replied.
“Why didn’t you two stay close if you were so tight?” Dean fiddled with a pebble, rolling it over his knuckles.
“We tried, for a while. But spending thousands of years with someone you disagree with isn’t an easy task.”
Jules tried to understand her explanation, but one thing Dal’i kept deflecting was her queries about the Deities. She needed to expand on this. “The Deities destroyed us? On Desolate?”
“That’s correct.” Dal’i peered over her shoulder, as if making sure this ancient god was safely buried beneath the tree.
Jules thought about all the bones of her people… No, not her people. The Zan’ra. She was human; the powers inside her belonged to one of the Four. She was still Jules, daughter of Dean and Mary Parker. Sister to Hugo. The idea that those people died because a group of gods changed their minds about their creations was sickening. “Why did they make the Zan’ra, then destroy them?”
Old Secrets (The Survivors Book Thirteen) Page 12
