by Isabel Wroth
Moments later a fresh breeze wafted across her cheeks and though it came in harsh pants, breathing became marginally easier. "D-down. Please put me down."
Azurryn very gently lowered her down and helped steady her until she was able to stand on her own. The ground shook and she heard the deep, familiar baritone of Izax's voice, felt the darker shadows of him and Arkhan both as the three warriors stood protectively over her.
The dark, violent images carved with such beautiful precision flashed through her mind, but soon Astaria's face became Dr. Travis'. The nine creators became the worst of the guards and scientists, the wedge shaped alien ship became the Concord, the bodies of the valo turned into the human victims her family's company supplied for experimentation.
It seemed this place wasn't as wholly alien as Deja had assumed.
LONDON...SIX YEARS ago
Deja's heart drummed so hard her entire body quaked with the percussion of it, her hand shaking badly enough to interfere with the scan of her bio-lock.
No one had followed her, she was sure of it, but the urge to wildly search for any sign of a looming figure bearing down on her surged through her in relentless waves of paranoia.
Two cab rides in opposite directions, an hour spent on the tube system huddled in the corner to avoid making eye contact with anyone, then another cab ride around the city. No one could possibly know where she’d been tonight. No one could possibly know what she had done.
Deja took a deep breath, grabbing her wrist to force her palm flat to the lock screen. It gave a soft chime. With one final furtive look up and down the hallway, Deja slipped through the door and shut it behind her as quickly as possible. As though some monster would leap out of the shadows to shove its way inside the flat with her.
Little did she know, the monsters were already waiting.
"You're out awfully late tonight, Deja." The deep voice made her shriek in surprise.
She whirled, forcing herself to laugh when she saw her uncle seated in the living room. The light of the buildings across the Thames was behind him, the thick drapes on either side of the bay windows casting him in a sinister shadow.
"Uncle Martin, you startled me! Why are you sitting in the dark? Is everything alright?" Deja knew why he was here, but couldn't help to at least try and pretend it was just a social call. At three in the morning.
She commanded the lights up, praying her expression conveyed concern, innocence, but the image of her uncle staring at her with cold intent left her feeling weak with trepidation.
He sat with one foot casually balanced on the opposite knee, his left hand splayed across the side of his face, the fingers of his right hand drawing circles on the arm of the chair.
Nothing in his posture screamed an obvious threat, but nevertheless it wafted from him like an odious cologne. There was no mistaking the irritation narrowing his eyes.
He knew.
But how? How could he know?
"Come and sit." he ordered softly. The glance he flicked to her left made her realize they weren't alone.
Greer, her uncle's all around henchman, stood with his gloved hands clasped in front of him, staring at her like a rabid dog about to be let off his leash.
She was close enough to reach out and touch him, yet she hadn't seen him or sensed him standing there when she opened the door.
Of all the things in this moment that frightened her the most, the thing that had panic crawling its way up her throat were those slick black gloves covering Greer's hands.
There were few reasons why her uncle's henchman would be wearing gloves, and she didn't think they were for doing the dishes.
"Deja." Uncle Martin said her name again, this time with a hint of warning, the one word daring her to make him ask her a second time to sit.
She put her satchel down, calling on every ounce of schooling she had received to cross the room without stumbling. Greer followed, towering over her as she lowered herself to the sofa.
"You were far more careful than I would have thought you capable of, dear. Unfortunately, not careful enough." Martin waved his hand to activate the telly screen.
"We're here at Ace's High, a popular nightclub in downtown London where the body of investigative journalist Porter MacEgan was just discovered. Witnesses tell us he was found in the alley behind the club, and preliminary reports have confirmed his death to be a brutal homicide."
Sound drained away as Deja watched as the yellow jacketed EMTs wheel a sheet covered gurney out from the doors she had not three hours ago walked out of. She swore she saw a familiar face in the crowd of onlookers, briefly caught on camera.
Otto, Greer's intensely terrifying partner.
"I have to say, your little investigation into the services our company provides was quite thorough. If you had been as careful to switch cabs and tube lines on the way to meet Mr. MacEgan as you were coming home, he might have been able to get his story out in the morning news.
“I'm ever so grateful that wasn't the case, though you've created quite the mess for me to clean up. Tell me, dear, did you make any other copies of the data disk?"
A hot trail of tears spilled down Deja's cheek. "If I say yes, what will Greer do to me?"
Martin gave a humorless laugh. "Nothing. How many?"
"Four. I sent one to mother last week. Put another in a safety deposit box. Paid an elderly woman on the tube a hundred pounds to take the disk to the police. Told her it was evidence of my husband's abuse, but I couldn't take it myself. She seemed sympathetic."
Martin hummed, his brows hitching briefly as he reached inside for a familiar, coin sized disk in a clear plastic sleeve.
"An investigative journalist, your mother, a safe deposit box, and a random lady on the tube. Clever. Enough so that I might not have found out until it was too late.
“I hadn't realized you had skills beyond mixing up lotions and potions for the cosmetics division. In fact, if someone had told me you even knew how to utilize our computer systems, I'd have laughed them out of my office."
Of course he would have. Uncle Martin thought her degree in chemistry and xeno-horticulture was absolutely useless for anything other than growing hybrid plants for their cosmetics.
Granted, her computer skills were obviously not up to par, seeing as how she had been caught. But they were good enough to do a database search and get into the secured data files.
"Do you know where you went wrong?"
Deja twisted her fingers in her lap, her spine so straight it could have snapped.
"Mother."
"Indeed. She's quite cross with you for having involved her in your little scheme. I'm sure it will comfort you to know, she asked me to be lenient with you,"
As though they had rehearsed this entire script, Greer yanked her head back and drove a needle into her throat, the liquid he forced into her vein felt like ice. It happened so quickly, Deja didn't have time to do more than gasp before the poison went to work on her body.
"Though I fear, my darling niece, when you wake, you will wish I had not been so kind. You meet the genetic requirements for a very tall order that just came in."
The words echoed through her mind as the lights across the river turned to blurry blobs, her pulse slowed, and nothingness swallowed her whole.
Her family, her uncle and mother, had founded what on the surface appeared to be a multi-level company with fingers in many different pies. Deja worked with her mother in the cosmetics department, and over the last four years Orchid Organics had been the leader in the cosmeceutical beauty and skin care field.
The Orchid Company owned and ran businesses that spanned the market. From age-defying beauty products, pharmaceuticals, to R and D for medical progress.
Deja had thought her uncle's section of the business provided security to private databanks, but after having overheard a conversation she wasn't supposed to, Deja had taken a look at what the Orchid Company was actually providing.
The reality had been horrifying.
&
nbsp; Not risk management or data based security for medical usage. Her uncle provided human subjects for illegal experimentation.
Orders were created for a specific gender and type of human being, like someone ordering their preferred dish from a menu. The Orchid computer program then sought out men and women within the prison system who met the requested genetic criteria and did one of two things.
The person in question was set up to ensure they were tried and convicted of a crime and sent to prison. Once incarcerated, they were offered a reduced sentence in exchange for voluntary participation in what was being portrayed as Genetic Enhancement studies. Or, more preferably, they simply ceased to exist. As though they had never been born.
Through the Orchid's system, all records of them were erased, electronically wiped from existence, which meant they couldn't be missed.
Once flagged, the Orchid Company was paid a percentage for their data, the ghosts they had created extracted from the prison system, from their homes, and taken to illegal research facilities.
After having tried and failed to expose her family's legacy for what it was, Deja woke up in one such facility. As she lay strapped to a cold steel table, paralyzed by a cocktail of drugs being pumped into her system, Uncle Martin's parting words came back to her, and he was right. She had wished he had not been so kind to her.
The IPS Concord was a space station, a privately owned prison, where the laws pertaining to humane treatment of prisoners did not exist.
On Earth, genetic manipulation was one hundred percent illegal. Up here, there was no such thing as illegal, and the genetic manipulation experiments were more like genetic mutation.
They were prisoners who did not exist in any system, so they had no rights. They were not people; they were tools in scientific experiments.
Because of Deja's total lack of pigmentation, Dr. Rose Travis had selected her for a program she called, Total Eclipse. Dr. Travis had needed someone with Deja's genetic disorder for her experiments.
There were others with albinism; in that, Deja wasn't unique and she had in fact been one of twenty-four other men and women with varying degrees of albinism on board the Concord.
Unfortunately for her, something about Deja's specific genetic code had intrigued Dr. Travis.
For six years, Dr. Travis had been trying to infuse her skin cells with some kind of synthetic protein that was supposed to make Deja invisible. Not see through per se, but unseen to the spectrum of light visible to the naked eye.
Invisible to things like heat sensors, or security cameras. The science behind the experimental treatments were lost on Deja.
All she knew was that something had gone seriously wrong, and all the painful skin grafts, radiation baths, and injections hadn't done anything other than turn her own body against her.
Already prone to sunburns due to her albinism, the experiments Dr. Travis had conducted on her had made Deja's minor photosensitivity so extreme the tiniest amount of white light, or light saturated with UV rays found in sunlight, on her bare skin caused her flesh to blister and bubble.
Dr. Travis' tests to determine which frequencies and wavelengths of the visible spectrum were the most harmful had been...thorough. To the point where often Deja felt like her entire body was one massive third degree burn.
The only wavelengths that didn't burn her to a crisp were indigo and violet. The microscopic bit of humanity Dr. Rose Travis had, caused the monstrous woman to create a pair of goggles with specially formulated indigo lenses for Deja.
They meant Deja could shade her face in the deep hood of her special issue sweatshirt, and be able to see through the protective lenses without having to worry she would go blind from the harshness of the halogen lights that lined the corridors.
Not a day had gone by that Deja didn't wish her uncle had been a little bit more of a bastard.
PENUMBRA...PRESENT day.
"Marahi, what can we do?"
Arkhan's question drew her from her memories. Her gaze rested on a long line of slowly trudging valos as they moved through the streets in single file, in perfect tandem, like downtrodden machines.
Deja saw her uncle's face, Greer's, the reporter Deja had tried to speak to, only to have failed and been responsible for his death at Otto's hands.
It overwhelmed her in an instant, filling her with terrible grief and anger. Body and soul she was consumed with helplessness.
She had been powerless to do anything to change her situation; imprisoned, her humanity stripped away day by day aboard the Concord, with no one to help her or even care what happened to her beyond her general health. To ensure she was able to continue being used as Dr. Travis' plaything.
Deja had wrangled with her fears and uncertainties with her new situation here on Sonhadra, but worrying about things beyond her control were a waste of energy.
Her life on Earth was over, had been, from the moment she sat down at her data terminal to begin investigating her family's company.
The Concord had somehow traveled through space, she vaguely remembered hearing Dr. Travis muttering about another doctor and black hole experiments once the detached radiation lab had crash landed on this alien planet.
Deja had no idea if the station itself had survived, but even if it had, she would never have voluntarily gone back to it. Was there a way back to Earth? Probably not. And truly, what did she have to go back to? Her family? Ha!
The plain fact was that this planet, this city, was her new home.
Her duplicitous family was gone, her tormentors also gone.
The Concord was no longer her prison and had never been a home. Izax said she belonged here now. This place, this beautiful, unearthly city and its inhabitants? All hers.
A familiar prickling sensation skated down her arm and Deja turned, shivering to see Azurryn in his natural form, his prismatic eyes searching her face as though he could read the painful thoughts consuming her.
His touch ghosted across her skin, his dark hand rising to brush her tears away, but all she felt was the cool kiss of his shadow.
"Where are your heartstones?" she asked hoarsely, her turbulent emotions settling as a plan took form. Azurryn tilted his oval shaped head, mute and unable to answer her.
"Before her departure, Marahi Astaria took them to the City of Noon." Izax answered, having dropped to one knee just behind her.
"Why would she take them there?"
"To ensure they remained beyond our reach."
Deja frowned, half turning from Azurryn to look up at Arkhan. "Beyond your reach, how?"
"We, the Shadowed, are powerless in the light. Our exoskeletons become immovable until darkness once again falls.
“The city follows the midday sun, bathed perpetually in light, meaning even if we were to scale the walls we would become trapped, frozen and vulnerable."
"Alright. Tell me everything you know about this place and where we can find it."
SEVERAL HOURS LATER...
"So let me see if I understand you correctly." Deja found herself walking in circles around the pink globe in her suite, frowning so hard she was giving herself a headache. "There are three cities of Light. Dawn, Noon, and Middling, each of them is mobile, in constant motion, carried the length and breadth of Sonhadra on the back of a giant animal called a molo."
"That is correct, Marahi." Arkhan inclined his head, kneeling beside Izax while Azurryn floated nearby in his natural shadowed form.
Azurryn seemed to have decided to abandon his armor in favor of being able to remain closer to her.
Odd wasn't it, how terrified she had been of the shadows that fateful night in London?
Now the constant feel of Azurryn's eyes on her from where he lingered in the deeper shadows was almost comforting. An assurance perhaps, that if he waited within the darkness, surely nothing malevolent could lurk without his knowledge.
Pressing her fingers to her temples, Deja made another turn around the globe. "You're certain your heartstones are hidden in the City of N
oon, Arkhan?"
"We are." Arkhan rumbled.
Marvelous. Each city was constantly bathed in light. Dawn, glowing with the radiant beams of the rising sun, Noon, perpetually ablaze with the brightest light, and Middling with the soft splendor of the setting sun.
The common theme and biggest problem among the three cities, not taking into account the fact the cities were constantly on the move and perched atop the back of a giant beast, there was nowhere for Deja to hide if she was exposed to the light.
The beasts traversed the entire planet in a repetitive path, apparently called to stop for a handful of minutes by the ringing of special bells located all over Sonhadra.
"How far away is the closest bell?"
"Not far,” Izax said. “Arkhan and I will take to the shadows and report back as to the current location of the molo."
Izax and Arkhan moved as one, reaching up to twist their helmets aside, shedding their exoskeletons to disappear out into the shadowy hallway.
Very well. Conversation apparently over, Deja sighed and walked through the open arches to her bedroom, throwing herself back on the alien made mattress, grimacing when her boobs slipped out the sides of the slick material of her dress.
This posed more than just a wardrobe malfunction. It brought to light—pun intended—an extreme vulnerability.
If Deja went into the City of Noon in the clothes she was wearing, or any of the clothes in the wardrobe, she wouldn't make it more than a meter before her skin started to burn and peel off her bones.
Astaria seemed to have delighted in showing her three tits off and exposing her legs all the way up to her crotch. There wasn't one solid outfit among the entire lot, which was saying something, as there were hundreds of skimpy items.
Even the bedsheets were sheer. Oddly warm, but sheer. Maybe if Deja layered, she could find a way to cover herself adequately.
The alternative made a fine sheen of cold sweat break out on her skin. Goosebumps rose as unforgettable memories choked her as she recalled what the harsh light of day does to her bare skin.
