“Did you destroy the digital versions?” I asked Arnia.
She nodded. “I had Ezhno hack the system and do a run-through when I was done.”
I nodded. “Good.”
“Oh.” She pulled out another folder from the bag. “I found this too, and you’re not going to like it.”
I took the folder and opened it. My eyes widened as I looked at the files. “By the goddess…”
“These experiments haven’t been let out of the fortress yet. I’ve seen them from time to time inside, and it’s not good,” Arnia said.
Ryoko looked at me. “What are you two not sharing?”
“They’re using my DNA…” I whispered in disbelief as I flipped through the papers. They were the same, every single one of them. A sense of dread fell over me. This was not good.
“But there’s something different about them,” Rylan said as he joined me by my side and looked at the papers. He was one of the few I would ever allow to look at these. I didn’t share my DNA information. I didn’t like thinking about what I was. “These, whatever they are, aren’t exact copies. They’re different. Even though they share the exact DNA as Laz, they’re engineered differently. Their attributes are much more… lethal.”
“Why?” Blaze questioned. “What’s so special about Eira? No offense.”
Rylan and I looked at each other. I shook my head, and he nodded in understanding. No one was to know unless I said so.
“Um… a better question is why are they being made and why are our files suddenly popping back up?” Ryoko understood why we were avoiding his question, and I was glad she was sticking her neck out to change the focus.
Arnia shrugged. “Not sure, but they’re gone now.”
“Or are they?” Everyone looked at me. I was getting a bad feeling about all of this. Something wasn’t right.
“What are you talking about?” Blaze questioned.
I threw the files in my hand into the fire I had made on the floor and watched them burn. “Jasmine told me something once. It was so long ago I forgot until now. She told me there was a secret place where files were stored and only certain people had clearance to access this place.”
“Are you saying there might be a computer backing up the files we destroy?” Arnia asked.
Without answering, I threw the basement door open and rushed down the stairs. I needed to figure this out, and there was only one place to find my answer.
Chapter 16
The giant metal doors creaked open as I moved them with everything I had. These doors were made specifically to require more than one person to open them, unless you were Ryoko, so this task was quite difficult on my own. The others had yet to catch up with me, but their whereabouts weren’t my main concern.
People stared as I dashed across the room. Aurora stared in surprise when I appeared at her computer station. “Hey there, babe. What—”
“No time,” I interrupted. “Give me the computer.”
She squeaked when I nudged her roughly out of her chair and took over. “You know, you don’t have to be pushy.”
I ignored her and typed away on the keys. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew what I had to do. After a few moments of failing to make any progress, I sighed with defeat and looked at her. “I need you to help me hack the fortress’ computer system. I need to find something.”
“Oh, well, why didn’t you say so? That’s easy.”
I blinked in stunned silence as she took over the keyboard and hacked into the system within seconds. I chuckled. “Did I ever tell you, you’re the best?”
She laughed. “Yes, but it doesn’t hurt to hear it again. Now tell me what is going on. I’ve never seen you so frustrated before.”
I sighed and moved objects around on the screen with my fingers. “Arnia came by with files.”
“Okay, what’s so frustrating about it? Were they not what you were expecting?”
“You could say that.”
“Babe, what are you not saying?”
Before I had a chance to say anything, someone spoke for me. “I found things… that shouldn’t exist anymore.”
Aurora swiveled her body. “Hey there, Arnia.”
I glanced up at Arnia as she placed her hand on my shoulder and the other on the computer station. She was panting. “You know, you’re really hard to keep up with when you have your mind focused on something.” I chuckled and continued to search. “Find anything yet?” I shook my head. “I told you I—”
I touched a file and my information came up. “You were saying?”
“Impossible…” she breathed. “I swear I destroyed it when I found it earlier.”
“I know,” I replied as I pulled up more files that should no longer exist. “And I swear Aurora made sure it was gone the first time it was deleted. Isn’t that right, Aurora?”
“What the hell is going on?” Aurora demanded.
“Eira thinks there’s a computer backing up the files,” Arnia explained.
“You can’t be serious,” Aurora laughed. “That computer is only a myth. I’ve searched for it myself.”
“It’s hidden. It takes a lot to find it and even more to get into it,” I commented.
She looked at me. “You can’t seriously believe it exists.”
“Jasmine told me it was there and I have never doubted her in the past, so I’m not about to start to now.”
“Then tell me, did she tell you how to find it?”
I sighed and sat back in my seat. “Yes and no. She told me a riddle, but it didn’t make any sense and now I’ve forgotten most of it.”
“What do you remember?” Arnia asked.
“A door that’s not really a door but holds the key to the hidden door…” I mumbled.
Aurora snorted. “That’s helpful.”
“At least I remembered something!” I shouted.
She flinched. “Okay, okay, sorry…”
“Well, let’s figure out what the door is.” I looked up at Ezhno, who was leaning over the top of my chair.
He was a handsome young man with an athletic build, short black hair, lavender eyes, and olive skin. He had a cup in his hands, and from the smell of it, I assumed it was filled with coffee. I didn’t mind him being here. Ezhno wasn’t actually bad, unlike the main portion of Raynn’s team. He was quite nice, really, and hated cheating. It was a shame he was forced to take orders from Raynn.
“Well, if you have any bright ideas, I’d love to hear them,” I told him.
He pointed to the computer. “We should look at the screen and see if we can find anything out of place.”
Sitting up in my chair, the four of us looked at the screen. I chuckled when heavy boots clomped on the cement floor as the wearer jumped up and down. “What’s wrong, Ryoko?”
“I can’t see!” she complained. “I wanna help look too!”
I chuckled. “Ryoko, I’d love for you to help, but there isn’t any more room. You’ll just have to sit this out like everyone else.”
She sighed and kicked a metal box. “Fine…”
“Don’t get down, Ryoko. This means you’ll be needed for something more important later,” Rylan encouraged.
“Yeah, it’s not like they’re going to find something,” Blaze stated. “They’re—”
“Hey, what’s that?” Arnia asked.
“You were saying?” Ryoko muttered.
“What’s what?” Aurora asked.
Arnia pointed to a small distorted file. “That.”
“Looks like corrupted data to me,” Ezhno mused.
“I don’t know…” Aurora reached and touched the screen.
The file that Ezhno thought was corrupt reacted and the screen changed.
My brow furrowed. “What
’s going on?”
“I don’t think that was a corrupt file,” Arnia commented.
“Aurora, you’re a genius,” Ezhno said.
Aurora blushed but didn’t say anything. I looked from one side of the large screen to the other. There were all sorts of symbols and numbers running across the screen. “Does anyone know what these strings, of whatever, are saying?”
“No,” Ezhno and Aurora replied in unison.
Arnia and I looked at them. Aurora’s face was red as a tomato, and Ezhno was scratching his head nervously. I shook my head and went back to focusing on the computer. I didn’t want to know.
“If I had to guess, though, it’s what you’ve been looking for,” Ezhno stated, recovering from his strange situation.
“The door that wasn’t really a door is this?” Arnia asked.
Aurora clapped her hands together. “I get it!”
“Good, ‘cause I don’t,” I remarked.
“The door that’s not really a door… It’s a passageway,” she told me. “They can look like doors, but they’re actually not.”
“Then what does the key mean?” Arnia asked.
“A passage can sometimes be referenced as a key,” Ezhno stated. “It leads to the real door, and in order to get to the door, you have to go through the passage, just like you can’t open a locked door without its key.”
Arnia crossed her arms “So will this lead us to th—”
The screen went black and a small box popped up.
“It wants a password,” Aurora murmured. She pushed me out of my seat and took her computer back. “Ezhno, I’m going to share this with your station. We’re going to need to work on this fast before we’re booted from the system.”
“Why would you get booted?” Arnia asked.
“We can only be in the system so long before we’re shut out,” Ezhno explained. “If we’re in too long, we’ll be caught and then it’s all over, so the security system was set up to kick us out after a certain amount of time.”
Arnia nodded with understanding.
“Laz, you wouldn’t happen to know any clues on the password, would you?” Aurora asked as Ezhno headed back to his station.
I shook my head. “That’s all I remembered. I know she told me you had to have special clearance to get to the actual room where this computer is stored, but I don’t recall the part of the riddle about a password.”
Aurora nodded and began typing away. A small image of Ezhno appeared on the screen as she worked and I watched them slowly work together. I knew this was hard, but I wished they’d figure it out faster. This was too important to take our time with.
Aurora sighed and leaned back in her chair. “I give up. I can’t figure it out.”
Ezhno sighed as well. “I’m with you. This thing is locked down too tight.”
I did my best to control my anger. I needed to get into this. I needed to know what was going on.
“Sorry, Eira,” Arnia said. “I know you wanted to get whatever was in here, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. It’s too bad we can’t talk to Jasmine.”
A light bulb lit in my head. “Maybe I can.”
“What?” Arnia tilted her head in confusion.
“That’s right!” Ryoko exclaimed. “Laz is a shaman now. Maybe you can ask her.”
I nodded and dropped down in my meditative pose.
“That looked like it hurt,” Blaze commented.
“I doubt she felt it,” Rylan replied.
Ryoko shushed them and I smiled. I needed as little distraction as possible. I synchronized my breathing with my heartbeat and felt for the thin line that separated the living plane from the spiritual one. I prayed I could find it. I didn’t have much training in this. My blood ran cold when I found it and could feel my soul being pulled from my body. My body’s natural instinct to fight back kicked in, but I forced it away. I needed to do this. I just wished I had been more willing to learn how to in the past.
I opened my eyes and gazed around once my body and spirit separated. The room I was in was now cold and gray. The people around me moved slowly as if time moved faster here. I stood up and searched for Jasmine.
A female voice chuckled. “Behind you.”
I spun around and my heart stopped at the sight of the thin woman with long black hair and single blue streak. “Jasmine…”
Her lavender eyes danced with amusement behind her thin-rimmed glasses. “It’s good to see you again. Unfortunately we don’t have time to catch up.” Her hips swayed as she walked closer to me. “Take this.”
She grabbed my hand and placed something light and soft into it. When she pulled away I looked at the strange orange and red feather in my hand. I opened my mouth to speak, but she spoke first.
“He will be reborn.”
My brow furrowed. “What?”
“I’m sorry, we really don’t have the time for me to say much more.”
“But how is this supposed to help me?” I asked. “This is too important to put a time limit on. I need your help, Jasmine!”
She smiled and began to fade. “All of you are smart. You’ll figure it out quickly.”
My chest hurt. Seeing her go hurt me more than I thought it would.
“One last thing, my darling niece,” her disembodied voice said. “Listen to your heart. It may have been placed in a cage, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be trusted.”
What? Before I had a chance to think on it more, my soul’s need to continue to live sucked me back into my body.
I took a deep breath of fresh air. Because there was no need to breathe on the spiritual plane, an untrained body stopped breathing the longer they stayed there. The more a shaman trained to go to and from the spiritual plane, the easier it was for them to train their body, but due to some of my issues, that kind of training wasn’t something I had at the moment.
“Hey, you okay?” Arnia inquired.
I nodded and relished every breath I was breathing in, even though it was polluted.
“So did you talk to her?” Ryoko asked.
I nodded. “Yes, but she wasn’t as helpful as I would have liked.”
“What did she say?” Arnia asked.
“He will be reborn,” I replied.
Ryoko threw her hands in the air. “Like that’s any help. Why couldn’t she have told you something that made sense?”
I opened my hands. “She also gave me this.”
Ryoko peered over my shoulder. “A feather?”
“Strange-looking feather if you ask me,” Arnia said.
“It’s unique to say the least,” Ezhno said. “But what does it mean?”
I stared at the long feather. The colors started out a dark red at the base that then lightened in a gradient fashion to the orange-yellow tip.
Raikidan stretched out his hand. “May I see it?”
“Sure.” I handed it over and watched him inspect it carefully.
“Not something you’d find out in the woods, that’s for sure,” he said. “It looks like a feather that would come from a creature of legend.”
My brow furrowed. Something of legend? What type of creature was feathered and thought to be a myth? “Phoenix…”
Aurora blinked. “What?”
I pushed past Arnia and took the computer from Aurora. Staring down at the keys, I began to type out the password. The feather was one part of the key. Jasmine’s words were the other. I hit the Enter key once I typed the last letter.
Aurora gasped as the computer read it and accepted my entry. “You did it…”
“What was is it?” Ezhno asked.
“Phoenix Reborn,” I murmured.
Arnia tilted her head as files started to scatter across the screen. “That’s weird. Wer
en’t you sometimes referred to as Phoenix?”
I nodded. “Yes, but this isn’t about me. Jasmine referenced ‘he’, meaning whatever these files are linked to, they’re about a man.”
Aurora pressed files as they appeared and opened them. “It looks like they’re backups to every experiment made or, at least, experiments that had files.”
“But what’s the point to it?” Ezhno mumbled. “Why have backups?
“I don’t know, babe, but we’re about to find out,” Aurora said as she went about messing with the files.
I noticed a red flashing object on the screen and pointed to it. “What’s that?”
Aurora tilted her head and touched the flashing file. The screen flashed and the files began to move around the screen. In the center of the files an outline of a man appeared.
“Is that who I think it is?” Rylan asked darkly.
“Zarda,” I growled.
It was only an outline, so his face wasn’t defined, but I recognized him regardless. Anger boiled up in my chest.
“Why is he in here?” Ryoko grumbled. “What does he—what are those files doing?”
I watched in stunned silence as the files of experiments became larger to show a photograph of them and then shrank as the large image of Zarda absorbed it. A computer’s voice read off the experiment’s name each time and stated they had been compatible.
“Compatible? What are they compatible with?” Ezhno questioned.
I growled when I realized what this was. My anger boiled higher and my mind began losing its grip on reality. I stepped away from everyone. I couldn’t believe he was doing this. It isn’t right.
I cringed when my hand pierced metal. I had let myself go for a split second and had punched a metal crate. I yanked my hand free, bringing severed and active wires with me.
I stared down at my hand in shock. Not only had I lost control of myself, but I had done one thing I had always strived to not allow to happen. My hand had warped, stuck in an in-between phase of metamorphosis with a larger and bonier appearance than my normal hand. My finger joints were more defined than they should have been, and my nails were slightly longer and sharper. My skin’s texture had changed in areas, appearing almost scaly. I enclosed my transformed hand in my normal one protectively. I didn’t want anyone to see.
Pieces Page 14
