“Thank you,” Petas said finally, eyeing everyone around the table. “Now that we have our volunteers, we may adjourn.”
I stood for my chair, but, before I could file out of the room behind everyone else, Zuran rounded behind me and grabbed my arm.
“I need to talk to you,” he whispered.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Zuran
Phoebe fell back and allowed the rest of the group to push on ahead until we were the only ones left in the room. I closed the door and turned to her.
“I need to leave,” I said bluntly.
She blinked. “To go where?”
“I must return to Ka-lik’et,” I explained. “I need to get a message to Venan.”
There was a moment in which I was not sure she heard what I said. Her eyes were blank, uncomprehending, and her mouth was iced in a circle. Then, understanding dawned across her feminine features, and she became angry.
“Are you crazy?” she cried. Though the door was closed, the room had a slight echo, and I became concerned anyone outside would be able to hear us. “You're going to get yourself arrested! Isn't it enough that your brother is in jail? Do you really want to join him?”
“My brother should not be imprisoned at all,” I asserted.
“It doesn't matter if he should or shouldn't be. The point is, he is, and you're going to end up there too.” The greenness of her orbs had darkened to an ominous jade, not unlike the color of Sevani’s skin. I would have enjoyed seeing such strength and fierceness on her face had it not been directed at me.
I narrowed my eyes at her. “It may not matter to you whether he is in prison or not, but it matters to me.”
“No,” she said quickly. “That's not what I mean. I just mean that whether he's innocent or not, which I know he is, is irrelevant because they're still going to keep him there anyway. And I don't want you to be kept there too.”
“I have no intention of getting arrested,” I told her. “I only wish to tell him he needs to rescind his request to hasten his trial.”
Phoebe closed her eyes and pressed the heels of her hands into her sockets. I knew not whether she was frustrated with me or feeling helpless, but her displeasure was evident. When she looked back up at me, she sighed heavily. “Maybe this is a stupid question,” she said, “but shouldn't he be allowed to do what he thinks is right?”
“What he thinks is right is not right at all.” I had never been more serious about anything in my life. “Venan has lived with a skewed sense of morality, but, rather than being skewed in the negative, he is willing to sacrifice himself for what he considers a moral cause when the sacrifice itself would be immoral.”
“Like a criminal,” she commented. I ogled her, prepared to defend Venan once again, but she continued to speak. “A lot of people justify their bad choices because they perceived something as injustice. You’d think it would be something mostly psychologists deal with, but I saw it a lot when I worked in the emergency room back home. Especially on holidays. Someone would say something that offended someone else, and, the next thing you know, there’s a fork in a hand.”
“Venan is no criminal,” I said, “but I understand your point.”
She propped her fist under her chin and studied me. I waited. Eventually, she asked, “You’re going to do this no matter what I say about it, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I replied honestly.
“Then, can I ask why you bothered to tell me at all? Why didn’t you just go?”
I had not expected this question, and it seemed a strange one to ask. It was unfathomable to me to leave without saying a word to her, and I had assumed she would have understood that without explanation.
“You think I would be so rude as to disappear without a word?” I challenged.
“I think you feel you need to do this,” she clarified. “What I don’t understand is why you feel you need to tell me.”
Now, I was becoming irritated. She was interrogating me, and I felt as though she was trying to force me to say things I did not wish to say. “I thought it best someone knew in the event I happened across misfortune along the way,” I told her indifferently.
If she had a response to my answer, she failed to display it on her face. Her features remained unmoved. The black centers of her eyes were still burrowing into me, and her mouth was still turned down in a chastising frown. “I don’t buy that,” she returned. “You could’ve told anyone, Zuran. Why me? I need to know.”
“Why must you know?” I charged.
“Because your answer will determine what I do with this information.”
I raised an eyebrow, and steely rebellion seared my throat. Lowering my voice with menace, I murmured, “You intend to betray me if I fail to answer your inquiry to your liking?”
“Of course not,” she snapped back immediately. Her face did change this time, flashing with anger at the insinuation. “I’ll help you, but only if you’re doing this, if you’re telling me this, for the right reason.”
I was startled into momentary silence. “Help me? How do you plan to do that?” I eventually asked.
“Well, I’d come with you.” She shrugged as she said it as if to indicate it was the most obvious decision in the world. “If you’re just telling me about your plan so you can use me in some way to your advantage like if you want me to cover for you if anyone asks where you are, I’m not interested. I’m nobody’s puppet. But if you’re telling me for another reason, a valid reason, I want to help.”
“What do you consider a valid reason?” I queried quietly.
Phoebe hesitated. Her mouth closed tightly like she was trying to keep her response tamped down within her, and her gaze dropped to the floor. I knew what she was thinking without an answer; I could feel it pulsing through her body as viscerally as if she had pressed herself to me. My front warmed with the memory of my body poised over hers, our noses touching and our breaths mingling.
“I am not using you for my own gain, Phoebe,” I said, still speaking just as softly. “Anyone else, I would do so without a second thought if I believed it necessary, but you? I am incapable of that.”
She listened to me motionlessly. Then, her shoulders rolled back and her spine straightened. She raised her eyes until her chin was lifted rather loftily, and she said decisively, “I am coming with you.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Phoebe
Zuran tried to talk me out of accompanying him to Ka-lik’et. He told me I didn’t need to get in trouble if we got caught. He said he would be meeting up with people who were less than respectable. He even went so far as to claim having me with him would be a hindrance because he’d be able to travel faster alone and the “associates” he was going to be seeking probably wouldn’t trust a human. It didn’t matter. Nothing he said swayed me out of my decision. I wasn’t going to let him do this alone.
My determination was due to a number of factors, but the biggest reason was the most emotional. I cared about him. I didn’t want him to get in trouble, and I wanted to make sure he didn’t get caught. Moreover, I was respected by the Elders; they wouldn’t have chosen me to work in the hospital trying to cure the Novai if they didn’t respect me. If the worst happened and the Elders found out about Zuran’s plan, I was a source of validation for his actions. I was like the expert a defense attorney brought in to exonerate his client. Venan was making an uninformed request, and I was the source of information he was lacking.
I admittedly also wanted to go with him because I was curious. Zuran and I had come close enough that I definitely considered us friends, and I was craving to know more about him, even the darker side. I wanted to see the life he led before me, before humans even set foot on Albaterra. Since Kharid’s death, Zuran’s laid-back demeanor had fallen by the wayside most of the time, only to be replaced with a more serious, brooding A’li-uud. I accepted him either way, but I knew the personality change was only because he was distressed, and I hoped his being with friends from a former life wo
uld extract the untraumatized part of him still lingering deep down.
It wasn’t until we actually left, though, that I realized a third and completely unexpected benefit to going with him: I was able to get out. I hadn’t acknowledged how cooped up I’d felt until I stepped outside and realized I wasn’t going to have to go back in after a few minutes or hours. I was free until we were either caught or the deed was done.
We left in the middle of the night two days after he first broached the subject with me. He’d spent those two days trying to convince me into staying behind, but he’d been unsuccessful, and we were side-by-side as he closed the door behind us, and we took those first steps toward Ka-lik’et.
“Why do we have to sneak out?” I whispered to him. There wasn’t really a reason to whisper since everyone had been asleep for hours and the resting quarters were on the complete opposite side of the building, but I felt like I needed to be as quiet as I could. “It’s not like nobody knows we’re going.”
Zuran had wanted to keep everything a secret, even our leaving, but I’d insisted that was a bad idea. It wasn’t like people wouldn’t notice we were gone, after all, and that would definitely spike alarm more than if we made up a reasonable explanation. I ended up spinning a story that Zuran had an obligation to check in on the colonists, and I would be going with him to ensure nobody was displaying symptoms of mutacorpathy. Antoinette bought it hook, line, and sinker and even begged me to come along.
“I’m so sick of this place!” she whined. “Please, can’t I come? I just want to see something besides this.”
Dr. Griep hadn’t been so easily convinced. “Maybe a doctor should go,” he suggested. “If there does, in fact, appear to be signs of a breakout, a doctor is better equipped to handle it.”
“I agree with you, Dr. Griep,” I’d told him smoothly, “but I think it’s more important our most knowledgeable members of our team remain here to tend to the Novai who we already know to be ill, don’t you? I mean, nobody in the colony is probably sick anyway, and that would be several days lost without your or another doctor’s expertise here. I’m just going as a precaution, and, that way, you can keep doing what you’re doing without interruption.”
He had still seemed reluctant, but he’d relented. The rest of the human staff was a mixture of indifferent and envious, and the A’li-uud healers appeared not to care at all. By the time we were ready to go, I’d experienced very little suspicion and only the single incident of kickback. We were set.
“We are not sneaking out,” Zuran said. “It is wisest to travel across Dhal’at at night.”
“Because it’s cooler?”
“Yes. And because the guards are not on patrol,” he answered.
I looked at him with wrinkled eyebrows. “You mean, the guards are all sleeping or whatever at night? There’s no security?”
He laughed wryly and shook his head. “I wish that were so,” he remarked sarcastically. “No, there are plenty of guards at night, but they are assigned to single stations rather than a moving patrol. During the day, you can often find warriors in groups of two or three walking the desert, even in the remotest parts. At night, guards are posted around Ka-lik’et, or their respective towns. They do not canvass whole regions.”
“Wouldn’t that make it easier for criminals to do…whatever they do?” I asked. I was picturing policemen driving their cruisers all around Cleveland in the daytime just to gather around City Hall at night.
“Actually, it makes it significantly more difficult to transgress,” he disagreed. “It is easy to learn a guard’s patrol route. Once you know where they will be at any given time, you know when you have the advantage. Smugglers, in particular, are skilled at this. At night, however, they do not move. You cannot work around them. They are stationed on every street, leaving not a single corner of the city unobserved. To sneak by them unseen and engage in any illicit activity requires a great amount of stealth, sense, and, most of all, luck.”
I plodded beside him, my shoes sinking into sand with every step. I could already tell my calves would be killing me by the time we got to our destination because walking through the thickly-massed grains was not much different than walking through water, and it was a heck of a workout. “Well, then it sounds like we definitely shouldn’t be leaving at night,” I declared. “You know, seeing as we’re basically going to Ka-lik’et with the intention of breaking the law.”
“We are not,” he corrected. “We are going to Ka-lik’et to entreat another into breaking the law.”
“That’s the same thing. Like a murder-for-hire. Yeah, the person who does the killing is committing a crime, but so is the person who asked the killer to do it in the first place,” I argued.
He looked down at me. It took my eyes a moment to focus in the ruthless darkness before I could dimly make out his features. His pearly, slanted eyes were squinted into mere slashes with perplexity. “Why would anyone ask another to kill? Why would he not just kill the enemy himself?”
“Because he doesn’t want to get caught, I guess,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t know. I’ve never done that before.”
Zuran grinned, “Of course you have never done such a thing. You have always done what you were told, I am certain.”
I felt a riffle of indignation. Being a “goody-two-shoes,” for lack of a better term, had never bothered me. In a lot of ways, I was proud of the fact that I’d been so diligent in going by the book and following the rules of life to accomplish everything I wanted to accomplish. During high school, I was known as the smart one who always did her homework and raised her hand to answer teachers’ questions and aced tests, and that didn’t bother me. I didn’t have my first drink until I turned twenty-one. I lost my virginity to the college sweetheart I’d thought I would be with forever. Sneaking out, experimenting with drugs or skipping class never even crossed my mind because those behaviors my peers considered normal were only obstacles in the path toward my goals. Hearing it come from Zuran’s mouth, however, was different. For some reason, it mattered to me that he felt that way. His amused tone made me feel plain and unimpressive, and I didn’t like it.
“If that’s the case, then why am I out here in the middle of the night with you on my way to finding one of your criminal friends?” I asked hotly.
He gave me a sidelong smirk and shook his head. I wished I could wipe that look right off his face like a dirt smudge.
“Because you don’t want to do what you’re told anymore,” was his sly answer.
Maybe he was right.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Zuran
“How do you know where to go?” Phoebe asked. “We could be anywhere right now.”
“No, not anywhere,” I contradicted.
“Okay, fine, not anywhere. We’re definitely in Dhal’at. But we could be anywhere in Dhal’at.”
I stopped walking. The sky overhead was a blanket as black as Novain hair, but it was perforated with so many white, winking stars that it cast enough light upon us to offer a semblance of sight. It was the darkest time of the lunar cycle, so we were without the silvery rays, but I could see well enough. I bent down, licked the pad of my forefinger, and pressed it into the sand. When I straightened up again, several grains stuck to my skin, and I extended them toward Phoebe.
“What do you see?”
She grabbed my wrist and pulled it closer to her, squinting down at my finger. “Nothing,” she said.
Human eyes were far more insensitive than A’li-uud eyes, so I reached for my sheath. Extracting the dagger, I twirled it in my free hand to rest the blade flush against my palm. This left the hilt exposed and facing Phoebe, and the geodes embedded into the crafted handle shone a delicate ruby aura onto her soft cheeks.
“Now?” I pressed.
“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “Little dots, I guess. Sand.”
“Look closer.” I raised my finger closer to her face, also bringing the dagger nearer to better illuminate my demonstrat
ion.
She shook her head exasperatedly and said, “I don’t know what you want me to be seeing, Zuran. I’m not a warrior or anything; I didn’t even do Girl Scouts. It just looks like sand to me.”
“It looks like sand because it is sand,” I replied, crooking a brow. She crinkled her face in return, but I was not deterred. If she was to tag along with me on this expedition, she would have to learn a thing or two in the event we were separated. “I am asking you to examine the sand. Notice its size, its shape. What do you see?”
Her frustration melting away, she seized my wrist again and twisted it at an unnatural angle to peer only inches above my fingertip. She was silent for a long moment, and I remained equally still and silent to avoid interrupting her. Finally, she said, “They’re square. And small.”
“Yes.” I pulled my hand away and bent down again, this time scooping up an entire handful of sand. I held it out to her and nodded my head, indicating I wanted her to take the pile. She cupped her hands together, and I poured it onto her palms. “Now, feel it. Roll it around, push on it, rub it on your skin. How does it feel?”
“Rough,” she grimaced, curling her fingers into the grains and massaging.
“What does that tell you?”
She looked at me with genuine confusion. “I don’t know.”
I gathered her hands in one of mine and tipped them over, spilling the sand back onto the ground. “It means it has not been broken down, eroded, like other types of sand. Its edges are jagged, and the grains are still large, relatively speaking. This indicates we are somewhere that is not heavily trafficked, and the weather is mild.”
Zuran: A Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance: Albaterra Mates Book 6 Page 11
