“Well…” Ellie sighed and sat back. Admittedly, the simplicity of it all was tempting. Give up the Kyroibi, spend the summer mindlessly lounging at the lake, and return to university and all her science drama in the fall. Unfortunately, Ellie knew too well that it wasn’t that easy at all. Even if she didn’t have the Kyroibi buzzing with misgivings and Julian’s warnings of corruption, she didn’t think it was even possible at this point to simply turn her back on the situation and pretend it had never existed.
“I need time to think about this,” she said at last, hoping that her words sounded pensive and not rehearsed.
“I’m afraid time is the one thing we don’t have, sweetie. Svoryk is here and he is relentless. Eventually, he’ll find us. Give me the Kyroibi and I’ll lead him away, back to the Ghowrn system.”
Clearly, Isa had prepared for all possibilities.
“What of Julian, then?” Ellie stole a glance in his direction, hoping he might give her an indication that there was a Plan B.
“What about him?”
“If I give you the Kyroibi and you take it back to Ghowrn, what will happen to Julian?”
“He will return with me and stand trial for his crimes.”
“And until he stands trial?” Ellie asked, partially stalling and partially to see if her mother would answer honestly. “Would he be your slave again?”
“Julian would be under my dominion, yes,” Isa answered in a frosty tone. “Ellie, do not let your compassionate nature be your undoing. Julian is nothing more than a soulless assassin and as undeserving of your sympathy as the bomb which drops on a defenseless village.”
Even Richard, whose relationship with Julian had always seemed strained, flinched at the dehumanizing comparison. The situation was spiraling out of control quickly.
“I really don’t know how to respond to that.” Her voice was quiet, but quaked with hurt and confusion.
“If you would listen to reason,” Isa began, but Ellie stood and shook her head.
“No, just stop. I think we all need to take a little time out.” Julian also stood, but Ellie held up a hand to stop him. “I’m sorry, but I just need to step outside for some air. Please, everyone,” she took a step toward the door as her parents also stood up. “I just… I need a moment alone. Just allow me that, okay?”
Without waiting for a reply, she side stepped Julian and took off out the front door just as a new swell of chatter overtook her brain. This was not the Kyroibi, but the all too familiar dread of an anxiety attack waiting to erupt into full blown panic. The cold grip on her insides shut down all but the most basic fight or flight instincts and Ellie gave in to the overwhelming urge to run.
The cool air and scent of pine were immediately soothing to her frayed nerves as she took off in the direction of the lake. With any luck, the run would clear her mind and give her a fresh perspective. Though as to what that would be, Ellie had no idea. Her world felt as if it were imploding. That she could not turn to her mother, the one person she had always been able to rely on to have her best interests at heart, was heartbreaking.
Julian’s words replayed in her mind and Ellie wondered if he was mistaken. If she too would be corrupted by the power within her. After all, could she even be considered a true Eidyn with only one Eidyssic parent? She pushed back against the unnerving thoughts that threatened to again invoke panic and instead pushed herself to try and outrun her fear.
Soon the lakeside scenery began to blur and fall away, yet her mind refused to empty. She pushed herself to go faster, but something was wrong. She could no longer feel the wind or smell the crisp, spring air. It wasn’t until she noticed a sudden rush of stale air and felt her ears pop that Ellie realized her head clearing jog around the lake had taken a very wrong turn. She came to a skidding halt, but not fast enough to stop from slamming face first into the side of something large that clanged as if made of metal.
That she wasn’t knocked unconscious was nothing short of a miracle, though she did find herself on her back, temporarily blinded by the blow. When her blurred vision finally swirled back into focus, Ellie found herself surrounded not by the pines at the lake, but by tall buildings. She heard a grunt and then footsteps that became louder the closer they came, until a shadow blocked out what little sun she could see overhead.
“Geez, kid, are you trying to get us all killed?”
Chapter 8
Ellie reached up and felt the knotted lump of tender flesh forming on her forehead, thinking she had to be hallucinating as the concerned face staring into hers came into focus.
“Vito? But how in the world did I…?”
“That was one heck of a boom, Ellie.”
“Yeah, I think I ran into the bins. Sorry,” she tried to smile an apology, but it set off another pain in her head. “Guess that must have been pretty loud?”
“Loud? I didn’t just hear that entrance, I felt it!” He raised his eyebrows and held out a hand to help her up. “You gotta be more careful than that, kiddo. Dead people in outer Cygnus probably felt that pulse.”
“Pulse? Is that what I just did? Wait…” She swayed for a moment, stumbling as she realized exactly what Vito had said. “You know about pulse travel?”
“More than you do, apparently,” he muttered, fishing in his front pocket for a cigar. “Look, Ellie, I wasn’t kidding. You gotta get outta here. It’s only gonna be a matter of minutes before whoever it is you was running from traces that trail back here. Go on. Just be careful this time.”
“What? I don’t understand.” Ellie was tongue tied in shock. “So is everyone on this bleeding planet an alien?”
“Well, if you want to get technical—” he began, but his words were cut off as another shadow blocked the alley’s sparse sunlight.
“I’ll take care of this, Vito.”
Ellie spun around fast, which was a mistake since she was still a bit woozy. She reached out intending to steady herself, but pulled back, realizing she’d rather wobble than voluntarily touch the grimy trash bin again. Julian strolled down the alley as if he had just been out for a walk. Unlike her sonic entrance, she neither heard nor felt his arrival.
“I’m afraid this is my fault,” Julian explained with a disarming smile. “I’ve taken measures to mask as much of the pulse as I could, but if Isa shows up—”
“I’ll play dumb,” Vito finished around the stub of his cigar. “Get on outta here.”
Ellie had several questions, all jostling to be first off the tip of her tongue, but before she had a chance to ask anything, Vito had already gone back inside and Julian was dragging her toward the wrong side of the alley.
“Stop! That’s a dead end,” she warned as their pace quickened. She tried to pull away, but Julian’s grip was strong. Surprisingly, even stronger was the compulsion to follow him despite the solid wall looming ever closer. Just when she thought she would have yet another bump on her head, Ellie felt a now familiar shift in pressure and the wall before them fell away. Seconds later the entire city melted into a background blur as they pulsed away at breakneck speeds.
“Where are we going?” she asked, noting that her voice had a hollow, far away quality that was disorienting.
“Anywhere we can,” Julian replied, most unhelpfully, as he came to an abrupt halt in the middle of what looked to be a desert. Unable to stop in time, Ellie slammed into Julian’s back, likely adding another bruise to her growing collection, but Julian barely noticed the impact.
Before she could ask where they were or what they were doing, she was pulled away again. Moments later, they arrived in the middle of a bustling Asian city. By the third stop, a familiar Los Angeles neighborhood, she had learned to recognize the change in pressure and could at least come to a halt without plowing into Julian.
“Can we please just stop for a moment? What are we… oh… oh my…”
Ellie stared with wide eyes at the breathtaking view materializing in front of her. Snowcapped peaks jutted up from a blanket of fluffy white clouds
at her feet. She felt as if she was standing on the top of the world. Likely, she probably was.
“We’re creating a strong pulse trail,” Julian explained as he steered her away from the idyllic scene and unceremoniously dropped her into the middle of a crowded South American city. “With enough false trails, your pulse signature will be masked and we can safely hide you to buy us some time. Though considering how strong your initial pulse was, we may have to visit an unstable energy field. In fact…” He looked around, pulling her through yet another densely populated metropolis. “This should be enough. Let us do just that.”
“Do what?” she asked, but Julian had already taken off, pulling her once again into the blur of travel. This time, however, the hop was so short that Ellie missed the subtle cues and kept running. Fortunately, Julian caught her around the waist before she ran head first into a brick wall.
“We’ll spend a few moments here,” Julian explained when he noticed she was braced to pulse again.
“Where exactly is here?” Ellie turned, taking in her bleak surroundings. The seemingly abandoned city was something straight out of the zombie apocalypse. Everything was gray and crumbling. Yellow grass grew up between the cracks in the sidewalk and scavenger plants dotted the concrete walls of the remaining architecture.
Most unnerving was the eerie silence. Despite the urban setting, there were no cars, no people, no constant thrum of power generators, or anything, for that matter, that would suggest the ruins were anything more than a relic of some past civilization, despite their modern appearance.
“Pripyat,” Julian answered, staring out across the square over her shoulder with a faraway look. The name meant nothing to her, but his distracted stare caused a flutter of panic and she turned her head, but noted that they were still alone and all that stood behind them was another crumbling building.
“The site of the Chernobyl disaster,” he clarified, which only caused her fluttering concern to blossom into full blown panic.
“Is this really a good idea?”
Ellie knew of the disaster. She’d learned in high school how the land surrounding the power plant had become completely uninhabitable due to the radiation levels. She wondered if they were slowly poisoning themselves to death.
“Radiation is now low enough that guided tours are allowed and as you can see, without human invasion, the wildlife is flourishing,” Julian explained, pointing to a pack of wolves that eyed them warily from behind a low brick wall. “Besides, your Eidyssic heritage makes you a bit tougher than you realize. Your molecular construct is unaffected by radiation bombardment. Though I suppose after the Himalayan summit, this reminder of human fallibility makes for a poor respite, but I assure you, we are well hidden here.”
“Okay, so we’re hidden. From what?”
“Svoryk,” Julian replied. “Pulsing within a planet’s atmosphere can leave easy to follow trails if measures are not taken to mask them. You left a particularly strong trail to New York.”
“Sorry,” she said with a sheepish look. “I only meant to go around the lake.”
“You can’t be blamed for things that were out of your control,” Julian said, but Ellie wasn’t paying him any mind. Instead, her eyes were fixed on the wolves. “I sense only curiosity from the cubs,” he added, but Ellie didn’t seem to hear. Her entire posture had gone rigid. He noticed then it wasn’t the wolves that had her attention, but the large warehouse-like building in the distance. “Ellie?”
“Huh?” Ellie turned to Julian and gasped, as though waking suddenly from a dream in which she was falling. He had been speaking. Explaining something, but if she’d heard anything he said, she didn’t remember.
“Ellie, are you feeling okay?”
“I… I don’t know,” she stammered, turning again to the building. Something was wrong. Her skin felt as if it was on fire. “Are you sure the radiation can’t hurt us? I don’t feel so great.”
“I promise we’re safe, but we can leave now,” he assured and reached out to take Ellie’s hand in his, but as he did, she collapsed with a shriek.
A blinding light disrupted her vision, causing Ellie’s head to explode in pain unlike any she’d felt before. Images, sounds, concepts, and ideologies pummeled her brain with no discernable purpose. There was no rhyme or reason and most of what bombarded her made no sense at all. It was as if someone had hijacked her mind and was ransacking all of her knowledge and memories in an attempt to find something specific.
“What’s happening to me?” she gasped. Trying to regain control of her thoughts only made the pain worse.
Julian watched in horror as every diode on Ellie’s skin erupted in a blinding flash of light. It wasn’t the radiation that caused her to suffer. He didn’t know how or where she’d picked up the tracking beacon, but there was no time to worry about that. Ellie was compromised and if he didn’t get the transmitter implanted within her deactivated, they wouldn’t be hidden for much longer.
He reached out, the white dots on the tips of his fingers glowing brightly in the darkening twilight, but Ellie recoiled from his touch.
“What the hell are you doing?” Between the pain and the colliding torrent of information, rational thought was impossible.
“You have a tracker inside you and it just activated,” Julian explained. “I need to deactivate the transmitter before we’re found.”
“Stay away from me!” Ellie growled and shut her eyes against the impossibly bright light issuing from her skin. If only she could as easily shut her mind.
“Ellie, I’m not going to hurt you,” he assured, keeping his voice calm and soothing.
“Please don’t…” she sobbed, flinching violently as she felt his fingertips brush the side of her head.
“I’m sorry, El’iadrylline. Forgive my disobedience.”
“What the…” Ellie’s question hung unfinished, her voice having left her as her eyes snapped open and refused to close. She watched, unable to take her eyes off Julian as his appearance rippled and shifted. His pale English complexion deepened to a dark, yet icy blue that made the previously camouflaged white speckles as starkly pronounced as hers.
His entire appearance was a curiosity, but it was Julian’s eyes that held Ellie captivated. The once soft brown irises disappeared into inky and bottomless pools of black, ringed by circles of pale gold that seemed to spin in slow, hypnotic circles. So hypnotic, in fact, that she was held enthralled, unable to look away even if she wanted, but the more she stared, the more Ellie realized looking away was the last thing on her mind.
Her pain vanished. The jumbled thoughts that had bombarded her mind slipped into the distance. In fact, the world itself faded into the background as her focus narrowed. Nothing mattered but the sudden sense of calm that overtook her. It was a new level of bliss and Ellie never wanted that feeling to end.
Julian watched, not daring to make a move until the light in Ellie’s eyes clouded over and her muscles went limp. Once relaxed, he injected her with a mild toxin, ensuring she would feel nothing before he set to work, ignoring the klaxon-like warning in his mind that what he did was wrong. More than wrong, it should not have been possible.
He shoved the disturbing thoughts aside and placed his fingertips against the side of her head, lining up his transfer diodes with hers. The sudden bombardment of disconnected thoughts and images took him by surprise and he quickly braced himself for the waves of nausea that followed the spillover of data. It was all he could do not to disconnect and cut off the unintelligible stream, but he held steady. It should have come as no surprise that Svoryk would try neural extraction to get at the Kyroibi. It seemed the Emperor knew even less about the power he coveted than Julian had suspected.
Still, sifting through the clutter inside Ellie’s mind was a setback that they couldn’t afford. The beacon had been transmitting long enough now that Svoryk had to know their location, but he didn’t dare risk moving her, knowing their every move would now be tracked. Finally, he located the link an
d relaxed. The transmission was older, slower, and Julian was able to sever the connection with a single command.
Ellie’s diodes faded from a blinding beacon to a soft glow. He still needed to remove and destroy the transmitter completely, but they could do that elsewhere, once they were again safely hidden. Julian lifted her in his arms and set off again, carefully pulsing them through areas of high energy to keep the trail masked.
Taking her back to her mother would likely upset Ellie, but it was for the best. Soon enough, he would have to carry out El’iadryov’s final orders and it would be much easier to do so if he had El’iadrylline and Isaverlline in the same place. Especially considering the trouble he expected from Isaverlline. Julian began plotting a course back to New York, but just as he was about to pulse them through a European nuclear power station, Ellie’s diodes blazed to life again. He altered his path, bringing them to an uninhabited arctic region where he could assess the damage without interruption.
Julian spat out a curse. Several thousand nanotransmitters were embedded under Ellie’s skin and had attached themselves to her diode matrix. Disabling them all would take time and time was something they didn’t have. Had she been fully Eidyn, he might have been able to administer a low level electric shock, but without knowing the full intricacies of her Korghetian physiology, Julian could not risk stopping her heart long enough to disable the transmitters at once.
Taking her off planet was the only way. It was a risky move, but he was quickly running out of options. Already the hair on the back of his neck prickled in warning and Julian knew they wouldn’t be alone for long. He lifted Ellie’s unconscious form and pulsed away, just as the wind picked up, heralding the arrival of unwanted guests. He didn’t bother masking their trail as he pulsed to the opposite side of the globe, where his ship sat hidden just off the coast of Antarctica.
Inside the vessel, Julian placed Ellie into a chair and activated the personal acceleration inhibitor before accessing the ship’s security log. After a long moment, the glow dimmed and he removed his hand from the console, closed the status report, and engaged the displacement core, flashing away from the planet as quickly as possible.
A Space Girl from Earth (The Kyroibi Trilogy Book 1) Page 8
