Planet Sand (Planet Origins Book 5)

by Lucia Ashta

  Then light within me, the kind of light I could send a message on.

  But I hadn’t yet decided what that message should be when it became an entity apart from me. Life separate from me. Something I hadn’t the chance to mold to my satisfaction yet, something that was better raw.

  It flew on wings of air, it skimmed the water.

  Then the light within me exploded, pushing outward from every part of me. Beaming, spreading, growing, stretching into the oblivion of eternity.

  I used every bit of my strength to hold on, to remain within my physical shell, so I wouldn’t die, so there might be something to come back to.

  Because every part of me dissolved into nothing and everything. There was nothing I could do to stop it. Momentum carried me forward, beyond the illusion that I might have control over something this vast, this momentous.

  I did, and I didn’t. I was, and I wasn’t.

  Until the condenser exploded in a beam of light I managed to see even behind closed eyes. With a crisp clarity I could only wish for, it shot from me, from within this space, and out into the sky of this world, which was so much like every other one.

  The building blocks of existence were the same, no matter what shapes, sizes, and colors they manifested in.

  I held on to every piece I could manage to grasp in this world with everything I had in me.

  I was struggling to maintain my very own existence.

  It was the rockiest ride of my life.

  Holographic Convergence

  Tanus and Ilara’s story continues in Holographic Convergence, Book 6 of the Planet Origins series.

  Turn the page for an unedited preview of Holographic Convergence!

  Holographic Convergence Preview

  Chapter 1

  A chorus of shouts emerged from the ringing in my ears, but my brain didn’t manage to string them together at first. I groaned and brought a hand to either side of my head, pressing in, trying to keep whatever I had in there in place.

  Warm flesh stirred against me, but I’d momentarily forgotten who it was, even when I’d earlier believed I would never forget this man now that I’d remembered him—or just gotten to know him, I still wasn’t sure which of the two it was.

  Aftershocks continued to roll through the cold dirt beneath us, proving that we’d long ago left certain ground. In truth, I’d abandoned it days ago, when I chased that lightning storm straight into a mountaintop lake, which propelled me across space and straight into the arms of the man next to me, who was groaning louder than I was. And who, I just remembered, was injured when he stepped in front of bullets to save me from them.

  “Tanus,” I said urgently.

  When he didn’t answer or even open his eyes, my sense of injustice propelled me upward, but I didn’t manage to make it to standing. I slid back down the cold stone wall of the pyramid and straightened my legs out in front of me. The wall behind me continued to tremble, but I spoke anyway. “What the hell were you thinking, Yudelle?”

  Chaos overwhelmed my angry words. The world was falling apart around us.

  Dirt rained down on us, shaken loose from the ancient stones above, making all of us cough. But not Tanus. He still wasn’t responding the way I wanted him to. He should be furious at his mother for what she did, but he wasn’t even reacting.

  “Tanus,” I said again, examining him in the fading light. He had sutures across his body, and I hadn’t decided where it was safe to touch him before I singled out Lila’s voice.

  Lila, mostly recovered from the King Cobra attack and interstellar travel, was back to her prickly self. Since she was aiming her discontent at a woman who very much deserved it, I didn’t mind.

  “Have you no sense of responsibility?” she shouted to be heard over the complaints of the pyramid, which moaned and creaked because it wasn’t meant to move. Based on what happened, it might not be meant to shoot out light or whatever it did. “This isn’t just about poor old you, stuck on a foreign planet for a few centuries. You can’t just activate a condenser, Yudelle, not without understanding what would happen once you do. Just because you’ve lived in the shadow of a condenser for centuries doesn’t make you an expert on it, especially when you’ve never been inside it before today.”

  “Oh, I’ve been inside it all right. I’ve been inside it lots,” Yudelle said, sounding just as angry as Lila, even though Yudelle had been the one to power up the pyramid to do its light explosion thing.

  “That doesn’t mean you should have powered it up without knowing what you were doing! And without asking us first, especially. We weren’t ready for it,” Lila insisted. “Half of us were well on our way to dead just a couple of days ago.”

  “I didn’t power it up.”

  “What do you mean you didn’t power it up? Of course you powered it up. We saw it.”

  “I didn’t power it up, I’m telling you.”

  “Just because you say something doesn’t make it true.”

  “No, what makes it true is that it’s what happened. I didn’t do it. Tanus did.”

  Every single person in that pyramid looked to Tanus then. Lila and Yudelle, Kai and Narcisse, and Dolpheus, who was the one to say what we were all thinking. “Tanus? But... how?”

  Dolpheus, being Tanus’ best friend and the person who knew him best, wasn’t one to discount possibilities just because he’d never considered them before. He and Tanus were skilled at doing things no one was supposed to do, they had reputations to back it up.

  “I didn’t see him do anything to cause it,” Dolpheus said, but I could tell he was already considering, trying to figure out what his friend could have done to cause the pyramid to explode in a beam of light.

  “What is that scraping sound?” Lila said, irritated by all of it.

  I looked up just in time to catch the capstone of the pyramid shifting back into place, sealing us back into this thing that was very obviously not a tomb.

  “Wow,” Yudelle said. “I had no idea the capstone could move. It’s huge and incredibly heavy. How is that even possible?”

  It did seem crazy that the capstone, which must weigh a few tons, could move out of place for light to shoot out of the pyramid, and it seemed even crazier that the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the wonders of the world, was actually some kind of energy transmission tool.

  But there was a more important point to hammer home at the moment. “Yudelle,” I said, impressed that I sounded in control of all my faculties even though I wasn’t sure that the light explosion hadn’t messed me up in some way. I felt... off, and I didn’t understand what was making me feel that way. “What makes you say that Tanus did it? I didn’t see him do anything that would make a pyramid explode.”

  I was impressed with how calm I sounded, even though I wanted to strangle Yudelle, the woman who’d abandoned Tanus to a crummy father on another planet. But to strangle Yudelle, I had to be able to walk over to her first.

  Yudelle laughed. “Oh, Your Majesty, the condenser didn’t explode.”

  I couldn’t decide whether her use of my title—if it turned out I was actually the princess of Planet Origins—was a mockery or not.

  “The condenser gathered Tanus’ energy, condensed it—that’s why it’s called a condenser, you see—and then amplified it out into the sky. With how much light seemed to be going into that beam, it’s possible that it could circle the planet.”

  Yudelle, a stern, intense woman, looked so excited that I almost expected her to clap like a happy child.

  But she was no child, she especially was lacking in innocence. I wasn’t going to let her distract me by this amazing event. I’d ponder what this light emission meant later, when the need to strangle her passed.

  “You’re not going to get off the hook that easily,” I said. “Tanus is your son, at least he was at one point, before you abandoned him.”

  “Tanus still is my son.” Some of her usual ferocity was coming back.

  “Not that I heard him say.” I knew the barb w
ould sting. “You brought your very injured son into a pyramid, having at least some idea of what would happen, and let him power it up? Lila wasn’t exaggerating when she said many of us were nearly dead just days ago. Your son nearly died.” My heart thumped as I thought that he’d done it all for me.

  “Yes, and so did Aletox, trust me, I remember.”

  “I know you do, because I’ve seen you put Aletox before your son many times since we’ve been here.” Was it a fair statement? Maybe, maybe not, either way, I didn’t care.

  Her face, similar enough to Tanus’ to feel familiar, grew tight with anger.

  Good, I thought, uncaring in the moment. This woman nearly killed Tanus, and she wasn’t convincing me that she really cared. All she seemed to care about was whatever the pyramid had done. Now that I found Tanus, through impossible odds, I was going to do everything I could to hold onto him—and hope that I’d have the right to love him, that I wasn’t the wrong woman in the wrong place, an imposter.

  I continued. “You had to realize that Tanus wasn’t ready for this. Shit, none of us were ready for this. But you even told Tanus not to come because he needed bed rest. How could you do this to him, to us?”

  “You might not believe it, and maybe he won’t either, but I’ve never meant to hurt him.” Her gaze lingered on her eldest son, and I sensed that there might be some truth there. But there was a big divide between never meaning to hurt someone and never actually hurting him. “I didn’t know what would happen once we came inside the pyramid.”

  This part was true, I could see it written across her face.

  “Then why were you in such a hurry to get us here?” Lila said. “You pushed—hard—to get us to come here as soon as we did. Tanus was in a hospital gown before we came here, for fuck’s sake.”

  “I was in a hurry to come to the pyramid because I’ve felt the need to come here since you arrived. Don’t you ever get that? A need, a drive, an insistent urging to go somewhere, do something?”

  None of us answered, but I knew I got those intuitions to do things; it’s what had landed me in this situation that was equal parts curse and blessing. I’d heard Tanus and Dolpheus talk about how important it was to them to follow their gut instincts too.

  “Besides,” Yudelle said, “I never asked any of you to come. If you recall, I said I was coming here, you all just said you wanted to come along.”

  I said, “If you’d known your son at all, you would’ve known he’d never stay behind. You would’ve known that he’d insist on coming.”

  “I know my son,” she insisted.

  “Then you knew he’d come.”

  She didn’t respond, proving to me that she was skirting the edge of the truth, if she was dealing in it at all, and that I had to be careful with her. She was intelligent and resourceful, and she obviously wasn’t beyond manipulation.

  “You knew he’d come,” Dolpheus repeated, taking a step closer to the woman.

  Yudelle gave Dolpheus a cautious look—he was big and formidable—and hurried on. “Well, whatever the case, I didn’t realize he’d activate the condenser.”

  “But you’d hoped.”

  “No, not really,” Yudelle said, sounding a bit more nervous with each step closer Dolpheus drew, and this was a woman I didn’t think could get nervous. When I first met her, dealing with armed men like they were playground children, I thought she had nerves of steel. “I had no idea that Tanus would do something like that. I don’t even think he did.”

  “What exactly happened?” Kai asked, the orange of his hair invisible in the chamber that was returning to darkness now that the brightness of the energy emission was fading.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, “but I have ideas.”

  “I know what happened,” Dolpheus said, and now we all looked to him. “Tanus was in the middle of reaching out to mind speak with any other version of Ilara that might be on Sand. To do that, he had to step away from the image of his own physical body. He had to let down the constraints on his own personal energy. If this condenser is able to draw on the energy within the chamber, then it follows that it took Tanus’ energy, since it was no longer contained. The condenser then did its thing, condensing, amplifying, emitting.”

  “And it didn’t use our energy because ours is contained?” Lila said.

  “Exactly. To mind speak, especially in the way Tanus was trying to do it, where he didn’t know precisely where this Ilara might be, or if she’s here at all, he would’ve had to push himself outward quite a lot. He would’ve put his energy out there, searching. And if there was something that could pull on that energy if it was out in the open, well then it did.”

  “I see. I guess that makes sense. And the condenser is designed to respond to energy, so when it sensed enough within its chamber to operate, it powered itself up and did its thing.”

  I said, “But doesn’t that imply that it must have some kind of sensor or something? Some kind of trigger that identifies when there’s enough energy inside it to do its emission?”

  “Perhaps, but perhaps not,” Yudelle said. “From what I understand of the condensers on O, they aren’t just machines. They’re tools, yes, but they have their own form of intelligence.”

  “But you were looking for a control panel when we first got here,” I said.

  “I was, and now I see that was shortsighted.”

  “Wait,” Lila said, “there are no tools with their own intelligence. They don’t exist. That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it?” Yudelle said.

  “You’re suggesting that pyramids are some sort of sentient being?” I said, letting the absurdity of my question speak for itself.

  “Is that really so impossible? I can’t be certain, but the condensers on O gave me the impression that something like that might be going on.”

  “You went inside the condensers on O?” Dolpheus asked.

  “A few times, but I never was allowed to study the mechanisms like I would’ve wanted. Brachius kept too close an eye on me. Even though I was his wife, I don’t think he ever trusted me.”

  “Theoretically, you still are his wife,” Dolpheus said, and Yudelle glared at him. The soldier didn’t even flinch, he stared right back. “And theoretically he’s still Tanus’ father.”

  “Yes, an unfortunate and unplanned fact.”

  Dolpheus was about to keep going, never one to back down when it came to the defense of his friend, so I jumped in. There were more immediate things to focus on. For now, Brachius was back on Origins, where he couldn’t cause any of us harm. “I need to understand,” I said, “what did the pyramid send out? Was it Tanus’ message? What was it?”

  “I want to know this too,” Lila said.

  “I’m not entirely certain,” Yudelle said, “but I imagine that the condenser emitted a concentrated version of Tanus’ energy. It’s also fully possible that it carried his message and transmitted it across the globe, or however far the light or energy could travel. That’s assuming that Tanus managed to get the message out before it happened.”

  “Oh he managed it,” Dolpheus said, and I couldn’t help but smile. Dolpheus would stand up for his friend no matter what it was about.

  “So then we can assume that Tanus transmitted his message to whatever holographic version of Ilara might be on this planet. Although I don’t know that the condenser is able to transmit a signal so strong that it can reach the entire surface of Sand, it’s the best chance we’ll have. I think that after this, if another Ilara doesn’t answer, Tanus can safely assume that there is no other one on Sand.”

  But Tanus wouldn’t assume anything, I thought, even though a great part of me wanted him to give up the search. I wanted to be his princess—at least I did most of the time. The rest of the time I realized what I knew deep down, that I’d never be able to move forward without knowing for sure who I was—and wasn’t.

  Narcisse stepped into the middle of the pyramid chamber. Even so, he was barely visible. The light of Tanus’ energy
, which had been so bright as to temporarily blind me, was nearly gone. “We should go. We need to get out of here before the Ministry arrives to ask questions we don’t have answers for.”

  “Yes, we should go,” Yudelle agreed. “The Ministry has been giving me a hard enough time lately without this.”

  Lila fell into step behind Yudelle and her younger son, but Dolpheus and Kai headed over to Tanus and me. When Dolpheus crouched down in front of his friend, I asked the one thing I was afraid to ask. “Will he recover this energy he lost?”

  A few beats passed while I held my breath and waited. Never did Dolpheus’ eyes leave the face of his friend, its edges sharper than usual in the darkness. Finally he said, “I think so. He should be able to replenish no matter how much energy was taken from him. He just needs time to heal and recover.”

  I nodded, trying to convince myself this was the case, that Dolpheus knew what he was talking about. My eyes flicked to Kai, towering above me. He was nodding too, and I recognized that he was doing the same thing I was.

  Tanus and Dolpheus were his heroes. He needed them both to survive just as much as I did.

  Chapter 2

  We emerged from the pyramid to more chaos and more blinding light. After the darkness of the Great Pyramid’s inner chamber, the bright sunshine of Cairo was enough to make my eyes water. But I had far greater concerns than that. The gunned guards that descended upon us when we first emerged from the Sahara Desert were back, and though I only recognized one of the men as having been part of the original patrol, it was clear that they all knew who we were and what we’d done—or a version of who we were and what we were doing that a guard on Earth would believe.

  A member of these guards had shot Tanus, and I remembered all of what we’d done to them. Undoubtedly, the missing guards were convalescing, just as Tanus should be. Tanus, Dolpheus, and I had stabbed, kicked, and otherwise knocked the shit out of the guards.