The Faarian Chronicles: Exile

by Karen Harris Tully

So, I ran into a bad apple who was off his meds and thought my dyed hair meant I was worth a shot? Well, at least I knew a little more about what to look out for now. But that didn’t mean I was gonna go find any vampires and cozy up to them, wink-wink. I’d rather hurl.

  “Dr. Souchie, thank you so much for coming. I wish we had more time,” the host said, wrapping up the interview. “Dr. Nereus Souchie, everyone. The book is What’s a Little Blood Among Friends? Get your copy on your link today.” The show faded out to applause and theme music.

  “Are you tired of your drab, ordinary life?” The now familiar “be all that you can be,” fix-your-life-instantly-with-some-medical-procedure, too-good-to-be-true commercial came on next and I turned it off. I swear, every time I tried to find info on anything, that same commercial came on. Plastic surgery for your brain or something.

  As soon as I closed BLIN, a couple of emails popped up. The first was from the Office of Interplanetary Relations, showing my last email to Dad had been so redacted that it barely made sense with all the black-outs, with no mention of the vampires at all. Sheesh, this email system was crap.

  The second one was Dad’s response:

  Sunny, I will do my best to work out a compromise with your mother, but you cannot run away! I’m not sure what you were trying to tell me about it not being safe there, but you don’t know the people, the planet, the environment, the customs, or the laws. You could get into all sorts of dangerous situations that neither of us can imagine, that you have no way to prepare for.

  I snorted to myself. Or, you know, be eaten by vampires. Anakharu. Rogue Afflicted. Whatever.

  No matter how mad you are at your mother, it could be a lot worse. We’ll work something out, but you have to stay there. Please! Email me back right away and promise before you give your old man a heart attack!

  Dad

  I sighed and hit ‘reply’, promising Dad that no, I wouldn’t run away now, and breaking the news about Mom’s arrest. I told him what I knew and that I’d keep them posted, but didn’t know what else to say. My mother was arrested for killing someone to protect me (no need to try mentioning vampires again), and it was all my fault. What else was there to say? I didn’t know if Dad would try to bring me home now, but even if he did, I couldn’t go.

  Why not? I asked myself. Didn’t I want to leave this crazy place and go home still, now more than ever?

  A voice in the back of my head whispered the answer: Your mother tackled a vampire out of a second-story window for you. Don’t you think maybe that means she really does care?

  I groaned.

  Some people aren’t good at expressing their feelings, you know.

  Well, duh. Ya think? I sighed and reviewed what I knew about my own mother. One: she dragged me here without even bothering to ask or care what I wanted. Two: in the short time I’d been here, before she got arrested, all we did was fight. Three: she didn’t even make an effort to get to know me, and she preferred giving orders to having an actual two-way conversation.

  She is a General, after all, and obviously more used to that than being a mom.

  Okay, so her people respected her. Heck most of them followed whatever she said without question. The only people I saw argue with her were me and Great-Aunt Nico, and did I really want to lump myself in with crazy Great-Aunt Nico?

  Four: she was paranoid. She didn’t seem to trust anyone outside the Kindred, not even the news. She got her “news” from an underground, conspiracy-theorist website for crying out loud!

  She’s responsible for the safety of a lot of people. Wouldn’t that make you paranoid? my little voice asked.

  Yeah. And she always put them first. I scraped my fingers through my hair and pulled, the slight pain making my throbbing head feel somehow better.

  Was that the real problem?

  She sure didn’t put herself first. The woman was always working, either out in the field or in her office, and barely took time to eat and sleep. Her apartment showed that she didn’t have a personal life, or even any real friends, beyond Micha.

  What, was I feeling sorry for her now? I snorted quietly at myself. She was in jail, so yeah. And wouldn’t she just hate for anyone to feel sorry for her? But the point was, she did what needed to be done without complaint, and she led by example, and all those other things a good leader does. And when it came right down to it, she dove out a window for me. Was arrested for me. How much more could I ask?

  Gymnastics…. Yeah. Gymnastics. I wasn’t okay with that. But maybe… maybe I could be okay with her.

  I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and came back to find Micha flopped out on my bed, belly exposed and snoring. I was starting to like Micha, but not that much.

  And shoot! I was supposed to ask her about that Anakharu being alive in the casket. I shook her shoulder, but she only lifted her head and gave a sleepy snarl, eyes still closed, a clear “don’t bug me, I’m sleeping” response. She snorted, rolled over, snuffled her face into my pillow, and resumed snoring. Oh well, I guess it could wait till morning.

  I tugged at the quilt I’d brought with me from my old room, gently at first, a corner of it stuck under Micha’s girth. She didn’t respond. I pulled hard, and when one last great tug sent me sprawling on the floor with my prize, I found out why it reminded me of home. A hand-stitched label on the lower back corner stared up at me.

  Stitched with love for my new daughter-in-law, Vaeda. Love, Ellie Price.

  Ellie Price, Dad’s mom, who’d died the year before I was born. Mom had given me Grandma’s quilt.

  I wrapped it around myself and missed home, and my mother, and everything I still didn’t know or understand about her, all at the same time.

  Chapter 28: Dreams and Nightmares

  Attempting to sleep in the chair sucked. I slept even worse than the night before, waking over and over from several bad dreams. The first was of him as if he was getting in the last word on his own death. The creepiest part was that I seemed to be seeing the story through his eyes, in the blurred-around-the-edges night vision of a dead vampire.

  I saw her first, he thought petulantly as he scaled the wall to the Brown-Hair’s room - my room. His fingertips suctioned to and released the brick without even having to think about it, making climbing easy. For a moment he marveled to himself over his new-found abilities as a Rogue, wondering why he hadn’t gone off his meds earlier, before returning to his immediate goal.

  I just want a little taste. I never get any of the good stuff back in that place, only cloned or animal blood – Yech! Research hospital, hah! More like research prison. The fact that more of us haven’t tried to escape is ridiculous. Afflicted have rights too, you know! At least that’s what the law says. In reality, it’s all crap. Don’t do this, you can’t do that. And don’t even think about trying to enter Glass City. Ha! We’ll see about that.

  He reached my open window without being spotted, and looked in to see me sleeping fitfully. He yanked the screen off and tossed it over his shoulder, climbing inside. And then I saw the whole fight through his eyes. When my mother appeared, his vision of her was frightening. The mutant General Telal-ursu herself, her orange, cat-like eyes glowing in the dark room as she tackled him right out the window.

  That was completely unnecessary! he thought. I hadn’t even done anything to the girl – yet – and it wasn’t like I was planning on killing her! I was just going to help myself to a little of her sweet smelling blood, knock her out, and deliver her to Glass City. I had it all figured out. She’d be a good little girl and play my “escort” along the way, and I’d promise to let her go when we got there. I wouldn’t have, but I wasn’t going to kill her. Probably. That wasn’t part of the plan, anyway. And now General Freak had to come along and ruin it all.

  She landed on top of him, crushing his skull into a rock - which hurt worse than conversion had – hard enough that he immediately entered stasis. She got up, proceeded to prod his limp, broken body with the toe of her boot, and cursed.

/>   The next thing he knew he was in a white marble coffin, reserved for martyrs that the Afflicted rights people wanted to show off.

  Wait a minute here, I’m not dead yet! he screamed internally. Give me a few days and I’ll be up and around again, good as new. Open the box! He tried to rouse his resting body long enough to move and let someone know he was still alive, but couldn’t even do that much.

  What the…? I should be able to wake up if I have to. Someone immobilized me. I probably looked fully dead, he realized with growing horror. Her. I never should have trusted her. She’s going to kill me. He heard loud growling outside and felt the coffin jump and shudder. Oh no. If that thing doesn’t get to me first. Ahatu were so touchy, and this one was really mad. She could tell he wasn’t dead yet and wanted to kill him herself.

  No, don’t open the box! As the coffin lid opened, he expected to feel large teeth wrapping around his throat and tearing it out. That’s a difficult one to recover from. But instead, he only felt a tiny needle prick to his neck and then… nothing.

  I woke up with a jerk and frantically checked that I could move and was me again. Just a dream, just a dream, I thought. A whacked out nightmare for sure, but just a dream.

  It took me a while, but I finally dropped back off to sleep. The next dream featured not one, but two vampires – women this time, thanks no doubt to Lyta and Otrere telling me that a male Anakharu was rare – planning to kidnap me and use me for research. I struggled against the dream’s fear paralysis as I heard their clinically cold thoughts getting closer and closer. Soon, they said. It would be soon.

  Micha left at dawn. I could have gone back to my bed, but despite still being tired, I decided there was no point in trying to sleep any longer. Teague and Sarosh woke to find me curled grumpily in an uncomfortable chair in the living room, wrapped in my grandmother’s quilt.

  “Couldn’t sleep, huh?” Sarosh asked.

  “Mmph no,” I grunted groggily and made my way to the bathroom, hoping a shower would wake me up. I returned to the living room in slightly better spirits, but opened the door to find Teague and Sarosh deep in conversation about my mother.

  “But, without her giving memory evidence,” Sarosh was saying with a worried look, and stopped talking the minute I entered the room. She immediately went back to reading something on her link.

  “Oh, come on!” I exclaimed in exasperation. “Look, why don’t you just tell me what’s going on? Then you won’t have to stop talking every time I walk in the room.” They only stared at me, pretending they didn’t know what I was talking about. “I know my mother’s been arrested for accidentally killing that vampire – Anakharu, Afflicted, whatever. And that she should have been back yesterday. They’re still just questioning her, right? I mean, how long can they hold her?”

  Teague snorted darkly. “What do you know about it?”

  She was right. I was using my basic knowledge of the American legal system. I had no idea how it worked here.

  “So explain it to me! She was arrested for trying to help me, because she thought I was too weak to do it myself! And so it’s my fault that she’s being questioned for murder!”

  “Tried,” Sarosh corrected quietly. “She’s being tried for murder.”

  “Sarosh!” Teague chastised, but I was reeling from the news that she was actually on trial.

  “What? The girl deserves to know the truth. This whole mess is because everyone was trying so hard not to say the wrong thing that no one explained reality to her.”

  “No one knew she would attract them,” Teague argued.

  “No, but we know now, and keeping her in the dark isn’t going to help anything.”

  “Hey!” I interrupted their arguing, “I’m standing right here. Talk to me.”

  Teague sighed, then motioned at Sarosh to go ahead.

  "Okay Sunny, let’s start with you telling us what you know,” she said.

  “I know that a vampire chased me, then later climbed in my window while I was asleep and attacked me. I almost had him, but my mother tackled him out the window where he hit his head on a rock and died.” Should I mention that in my dream he was only in stasis? “And really, the guy was about to kill me, so are we supposed to feel sorry for him? I don’t think so.” They didn’t comment.

  “Anyway, then she was arrested. Oh, and after they went out the window, the whole thing was caught on video and Alten sent in the footage to prove Mom’s innocence. She said she would be back yesterday evening, but… she’s not.”

  “I think she thought they’d question her and that would be it,” Sarosh said.

  “But instead they’re going to try her for murder,” I said. She nodded. “How long till her trial? Can I go testify for her? Would it help?”

  If possible, Teague frowned even more and Sarosh gave a little shudder. “No, you can’t testify, at least not in the one way that could help. Your mother would never allow it. Besides,” Sarosh’s expression turned to pity for me, “her trial is taking place soon, today.”

  “Today? What do you mean she’s on trial today?” I demanded. “How could it happen so fast?” I’d been worried she would be in jail awaiting trial for months, but this – this was way worse. “How can they possibly have all the evidence already? And why aren’t we there for her? I’m her daughter. I should be there!”

  “Not when the General ordered you to stay here with us,” Teague growled.

  Sarosh looked at me with sympathy. “Alten said you’d insist on being there, so she told us not to tell you until it was too late to get there.” She looked away, as if there were something else she wanted to say, but decided not to. “Anyway, Alten and some of the others are there in the audience, but there’s not much anyone can do,” Sarosh said. “She did send the security video ahead to the justices, but only one type of evidence matters to their kind.”

  “Their kind? Wait, so she’s in vampire court? Anakharu court?” I asked.

  “No, the court’s for everyone, but it’s run by Molinidae now.”

  Teague’s gaze hardened. “The Molinidae have been taking over for years, Sunny. Slowly. Sneakily.”

  I knew that people here weren’t fond of the Molinidae, but the anger in her voice surprised me. Surely John and his family weren’t included in that.

  “A lot of Faarians don’t want to believe that anything is wrong, that we’re not still equals in running the planet and the justice system. The Mols make incremental changes and no one notices, but if you look at it as a whole, you can see the power grab. They also make up the vast majority of scientists and tech experts, and they’re at the forefront of the Afflicted rights movement.”

  “And all Anakharu are Molinidae,” I said, remembering what John had said.

  “Yes,” Sarosh nodded. “Anyway, we’ll be watching the trial from here.”

  Watch from here? They just wanted to watch my mother’s trial on TV?

  Sarosh set her link next to the wall across the room and explained the basics of the Molinidae justice system.

  “They have a method of extracting memory testimony from the people involved in any incident. Then they show it as a hologram in the courtroom and the justices – there are three - make a ruling. They say there’s no way to fake a memory, and it makes the court process much faster.”

  “But, it’s invasive and painful to Faarians,” Teague added.

  “Not like they care,” Sarosh said. “They’re demanding her memory.”

  Oh God, I envisioned them sucking her blood and spitting it into some machine that then projected her memory.

  “The General has been arguing that it’s not necessary if they’ll only watch the video, but they’re so dependent on their “fool-proof” memory testimony that they’re claiming that her refusal is proof of her guilt. I’m not sure if your mother has the clout to get them to watch the video. They’ll insist on seeing her memory of the event.”

  “And she’ll refuse,” Teague injected.

  “Well, what’s the evi
dence against her?” I asked. “I mean, the dead guy can’t exactly testify.”

  “He already has, Sunny.”

  “What? How?”

  “Their kind are able to project their thoughts to communicate telepathically with each other. Before he died, he apparently sent his version of events to someone and that memory was submitted to the court. Without your mother’s testimony in the same way, they’re unlikely to believe her.”

  “You don’t think she stands a chance, do you?” I accused them.

  They exchanged a look. “I don’t know, Sunny. I just don’t know,” Sarosh answered.

  “Then she’ll have to testify their way,” I said.

  “You don’t know your mother very well, do you?” Teague asked. “The General is a very stubborn woman.”

  “Usually it’s a good trait.” Sarosh smiled wryly.

  “The real problem is that your mother’s not known for her sympathy toward the Anakharu - er, the Afflicted,” Teague corrected herself.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “They think she’s prejudiced,” Teague answered.

  “Uh, they’re vampires. Who wouldn’t be?”

  Sarosh shook her head. “You can’t talk like that, Sunny. Not with this Afflicted equality movement that’s going on. People feel sorry for them, like they have a disease, and as long as they stay on their meds, and out of Glass City, they can control themselves. Look at what’s happening to your mother. Talk like that will get you in trouble, especially since you’re apparently going to have to protect yourself from them. No one else around here has to worry about that.

  “Live coverage of the Vaeda Katje trial,” Sarosh ordered her link, “half size.” A holographic image of a large room sprang up against the wall with an annoyingly perky reporter in front. Rich, Glass City protestors held signs that proclaimed, Vaeda Katje: Afflicted Killer.

  “It’s only an hour until the start of the trial of General Vaeda Katje for the murder of the Afflicted man known as Drazen. In a bizarre turn of events,” the reporter said gleefully, “General Katje is reportedly refusing to give memory testimony in her own defense. We can only speculate what that will mean for her case, but-”