“I can’t, Dale, not when I love him so much. You know how it is to love someone and want to give your life to protect him. I’ve seen you do it so many times before. You always run ahead first, eager to die to save everyone else other than yourself. You’re the one with the death wish, Dale, not me.”
He seems surprised; he was sure he was hiding that part of himself really well, only that he probably had never spent a year living with someone else. Dale releases me from his grip, but before I get on my feet and leave, I turn and look at him.
“Please, turn back and save yourself for once, Dale. Return to the person you love and stop risking your life. You’re the best person I’ve ever met, so don’t let your ghosts drag you to hell.”
I turn my head and get ready to leave when I hear him mutter something.
“What? What did you say?” I ask him.
“I said that I couldn’t protect him when I had to. I couldn’t give him what he wanted, so that’s why I have to keep on moving, keep on doing what I have to. I have a plan, Eladia,” he suddenly says, “but you have to promise you won’t stop me if I share it with you,” he says.
Time is pressing. Jay is already on the roof for some time now, and he’s probably in dire danger. I know I’m needed elsewhere, but I can’t move an inch. I keep staring at him, trying to find what he’s hiding behind those blue eyes.
Only after I sit beside him and listen to his plan, I understand. I thought that chasing Jay was my turning point, but I think that now, running up these stairs, I really understand. Letting Dale go is that moment I should learn to live with for the rest of my life.
Now, pebbles of tears coming down my eyes, I run ahead, run and hope I did the right thing.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Jay
I manage to infiltrate the building with only bruises from the laser guns. I have forgotten how thick my skin is now that I’m in this form. After I take two steps inside, a man is looking at me.
His mask is pitch black and resembles a demon, reminding me of the masks that Dale and Pyro wear all the time. He looks a bit intimidating, but being on his battle attire, it makes him human enough for me to charge towards him. I chase him upstairs, trying to find a way to take him down in the meantime.
The building inside is empty. It strikes me as weird at first, but then again, that could also mean that I’m just really lucky. Maybe Pyro was wrong after all and most of their force was amassed in the entrance of the building. They were strong, I’m sure about that, but they couldn’t stop us from barging in.
Shame fills my chest after I realize that I did nothing to help them with their mission. Still, I keep running upstairs, keep chasing the man with the black mask.
The staircase is endless for a two-storey building. The building looked smaller on the outside. He’s always a step ahead of me, and even though I’m trying my best to keep up with him, I’m way too slow. In the end, we finally get to the roof of the City Hall, the place where the final battle is to be fought.
When I open the door leading outside, I see the man standing still on the other side of the roof. He’s looking at me from behind that nightmarish mask, but he can’t scare me. I’m here to unlock the cube and take back my life, even if that means I have to choose to destroy all the humans.
“Congratulations Prime Officer Jasih for making it this far. I commend you for giving it your all even though you’re in so dire a situation,” he says in a thunderous voice.
Strange, he surely sounds familiar.
‘Who are you?”
“Well, that’s irrelevant. I trust you know by now who your friends and enemies are. Eladia made it perfectly clear that we, humans, are the race fit to rule the whole galaxy. The Phadh are some glorified, old men that think they know what’s best for the Known Galaxy only to give in to their illusions of wealth and power. After all, money greases the system better than fear or hope, as it always did,” the man says.
“I’m not here to hear your ranting. If you’re not here to stop me, then move to the side and let me finish my job,” I say to him.
He grins and looks at me like he’s in my head and knows what I’m thinking. Only that he doesn’t. No one does. To them, I’m just a parasite. So beware now that this parasite will conquer the Galaxy.
It takes me a while to follow the events. He grins...like he’s not wearing a mask. His face is not covered by that black thing anymore. So, I see that behind the devilish faucet, a man with black hair is hiding. The same man I saw in the news many days ago. He’s the human that announced the Purge of Yaerus, the ambassador that broke out the news to the rest of the world.
“Oh, it seems you finally recognized me! Well, the feelings are mutual. Go on then, do whatever you have to do. I’ll be standing here.”
He takes a step behind and sits on the floor, crossing his feet, waiting. I don’t like where this is going.
Still, this night is still full of surprises.
The door opens again, only for Eladia to appear this time.
“Get down!” she screams, but for some reason, I can’t hear her. I feel like I’m losing the ground from below my feet and at that moment, everything changes...
...the light comes again, only, this time, it’s not blinding. I can see everyone around me and even feel the air whip my face.
I’m free at last.
Dark Jay, my other side, isn’t strong enough to speak right now. After the cube activated, and for some reason he lost his footing, he also lost his focus for a fraction of a second, just enough for me to take over. Now, I’m the one holding the shining cube, and I will be the one to make this decision.
The cube starts growing around me, growing fast enough that I thought it would enclose the whole planet inside it. I can’t feel the tips of my fingers anymore, and everything around me is frozen still. The building is collapsing around us, and Eladia has jumped towards me, trying to save me. The black-haired man is still grinning like everything is going according to his plan. Maybe it did go according to his plan until now. Now that I’m here, though, I can take matters into my own hands again.
“Jasih...” I hear a female voice calling me.
I raise my head and look at her; she’s even more beautiful than she was back then when she gave her life to protect me.
“Lenora...you’re really here,” I say.
“It has been a long time since we last saw each other. You’ve changed quite a bit. You’re...different.”
She’s right; I don’t feel like the man I was before.
“Lenora...I’m sorry that I’m asking you this, but can you please save her? I don’t want her to die here if it’s possible.”
With a nod, she envelops her with a radiating light and slowly moves her away from the crumbling building. When she makes sure she’s safe, she returns to me.
“Now, tell me Jasih. What is your choice? Will you choose war or peace?”
I take a moment to savor her image; her hair are golden, and her face seems serene. She doesn’t blink, she just looks at me, stoically. Regret overtakes my feelings, but I don’t let it consume me. I’m here to stop the cube from killing anyone, and that’s the only thing I will do.
“I choose nothing, sweet Lenora. I choose life. Only that. Peace and war are two sides of the same coin like me and Dark Jay was all this time. You can’t have the one without having the other. Peace can be maintained only if there’s life, to begin with, so I choose life, and I leave the other choices to the world.”
Lenora smiles. “Then, that’s the way it will be.”
She lowers her head and looks around her; countless lights shine throughout the city. If I have to guess, then I think that she used her powers to cure all those who could be cured, and lay to rest all those that should have laid so long ago.
After this is over, she looks at me one last time. “Now, the cube needs a new guardian. You have an hour before you have to surrender yourself to the cube; an hour reserved for goodbyes. Use it well, Jasih.”<
br />
And just like that, she vanishes into thin air.
I look around me and see the building exploding in pieces. It seems that I’ll spend this hour moving up and down this space frozen in time. I decide to head towards Eladia when...
...when I manage to take control of our body once again.
What? How...how did you do that?
Jasih is panicking inside my body, trying to understand.
“Well, my old friend, your wife never meant you. I’m the new guardian of the cube; I’m the sacrifice needed for all those people to come back to life. That’s the only reason I ever lived in the first place. Your wife brought me to life all these years ago only to die right here, right now. I was never meant to love or be loved. I was just a helpless parasite,” I say out loud.
I never thought possible for a man like me to shed any tears, but in the end, I do just that.
Chapter Seventy - Epilogue
Six months later….
Alyce
“People believe what they want to believe. You, Jean, a professional journalist, I’m sure you understand what I’m talking about,” I say slowly and clearly to Jean, the hostess of the special online tribute titled ‘Mosa—the City that Came Back to Life.'
I was the only public onlooker of the incident so my opinion matters to the rest of the world. I still don’t understand why, but it does.
She laughs warmly although I know she’s faking it. She only invited me to throw dirt at the Phadh as a species, but I won’t let her shame me like that. I had to fight with my father many times to allow me to come here today. It’s the least I can do to honor his memory after all.
“So, you’re telling me that things didn’t happen exactly as you reported to the Known Galaxy’s Alliance council?”
A special wooing sound comes from the speakers. We’re alone in the studio, but it still feels like we’re sitting in front of a big crowd.
“I’m just saying that people tend to believe what they are naturally inclined to believe. For example, journalists wanted to believe that this attack was a conspiracy of the humans trying to overtake the First Rank and gain control of the Galaxy, but it’s not as simple as that. You can’t blame a whole species for the wrongs of one man.”
No crowd effects; I’m doing okay it seems.
“Hmm. Okay. So why don’t you tell us more about the person that managed to warp the system around his fingers?”
“Mr. Terasaka is a bright man, Jean. He always was and, unfortunately, always will be. However, being bright doesn’t mean that he isn’t an intergalactic terrorist, the first of his kind. Finding him and dealing with him is a pressing matter, one that every member of the Ranked Species are trying to attend to as efficiently as we can.”
This is the formal answer of the council to the world. If I even changed one word, my dad and I could be prosecuted and spend the rest of our days in a prison somewhere in the corners of the galaxy. Agreeing with every word makes it easier to lie to the world.
“That’s awfully familiar; I believe you just quoted the formal answer of the council to the letter, Alyce. Don’t you think it’s a highly suspicious tactic when you have to fall back into the official report to answer a question?”
Once again, she laughs like we’re the best friends since we were kids. Only that she was born two hundred years too late to challenge me. Situations like this are routine for the daughter of the ambassador of the Phadh.
“So, you would rather I lie than specifically quote the truth, especially when it’s a report issued by the council? I think you’re a pretty clever woman, Jean. If you’re hunting for a juicy topic, then I’d honestly beg you to do it in your own free time, not the time your viewers dispose to watch the news and learn the truth.”
No crowd effect again. She’s making me sound like I’m a bitch, which doesn’t do wonders for the Phadh image right now. Humans and the Phadh have openly started hostilities against each other, hostilities that could easily lead to an open war soon. The fact that I was kidnapped in the middle of a crisis management meeting, it doesn’t make things better. Maybe we got off one crisis by nullifying the cube threat, but this Terasaka guy obviously had another trick up his sleeve.
“No, no. You’re right, Alyce. But these are questions that our viewers do to us all the time, and we thought who better to answer them than the public face of the Mosa Incident? But, if I’m correct, you didn’t do everything alone. You had a dedicated crew of assassins and Chroniclers and even an alien that could change the color of his skin or something. What part of these stories are true and what part is just fiction?”
She’s trying to change the subject by opening up an even harder one. She can’t match me in political speech, so she just turned our interview into pure gossip. The truth is that she has some pretty strong sources to be able to find reports about Jasih and Eladia and even the Organization.
“Well, as you probably imagine, there are many things that are true and even more things that sound true but certainly are not. For once, people on Mosa weren’t all undead zombies that came back to life as you’re letting the world believe. When we arrived, most of the danger has been regulated by the local forces. We just tended to the survivors.
“Also, there’s a great misinterpretation of the word assassin. In the report, the word is written with the first letter in uppercase. So, the Assassins is a mercenary group that was hired by the local forces to take care of the last details of the cleaning operation before the Purge. As for the Chronicler, again, we’re talking about a misinterpretation of the title. There was a Chronicler’s Assistant, an abandoned android that helped with the operation by providing it's highly advanced scanning services and knowledge of the Known Galaxy Archives. But that’s it.
“As for the last part of your question: pure fiction. There was no alien we haven’t encountered yet, especially not one changing colors or whatsoever.”
I smile at the end of my answer, hoping I did my part to conceal the story from the rest of the world. The less the publicity of this incident, the easier it’ll be in the future for the Humans and the Phadh to start peace talks. However, how long in the future, I don’t know.
Also, I hope I helped Eladia and Jay spend the rest of their lives unfettered. As for the Organization...well, let’s just say that Pyro was quite convincing when he told me that the Organization isn’t something that the rest of the world has to know.
“Phew, that is a relief of some sorts. This is the first report we take from an official member of the council regarding the questions about the saviors of the galaxy, but it seems that we were wrong again after all. Thank you for clarifying our mistakes, Alyce. Now, I have one last question for you, the most pressing of them all.”
Shit. I thought we were done with all these questions.
“The report states that there was a Nusae Relic retrieved from the foundations of the City Hall on Mosa. Is that in any way connected with the terrorist actions of Mr. Terasaka or it was found there by pure accident?”
I should have anticipated that this question would appear on the show. After the retrieval of the cube, Chroniclers analyzed it and easily unlocked it to reveal technology that vastly improved our space travels. But, for the relic to appear at a place like that, in the eye of the storm, it surely drew much unneeded attention to the incident. Many people think that the Alliance is trying to conceal the fact that not only Yaerus was in danger, but the whole galaxy.
Well, they’re right, but are they really expecting us to tell them the whole truth about the incident? Panic would erupt in every planet of the Known Galaxy and the hostilities would climate to war almost instantly. Yeah, I have to lie about it...again.
“Pure accident. Think it like that. Even in the middle of a great loss, the Nusae Relic is a bud of hope, giving us the power we need to get over this misfortune. Intergalactic travel is now optimized. Already, ten missions are preparing to start a journey to the outer rings of the Known Galaxy. It was an exaggeration to
talk about a United, Known Galaxy when we haven’t even explored half of it. But, with those new engines, we’ll make sure we expand our reach to the outer rings of our current reach.”
The crowd suddenly cheers and claps, probably signaling the end of my interview. I want to sigh and run out of the set as fast as I can, but the cameras are still rolling. Jean sends me off with a long and tear-jerking monolog, but she doesn’t hesitate to hint that ‘being an elected member of the council means that I’m probably bound to the council’s opinion.’ At that moment, she introduces a popular conspiracy theorist, probably the same person that spouted every kind of nonsense about the incident. It’s his job, after all, something to do for a living.
I get out of the set and walk outside. Mosa is still in a very bad shape, but people have returned, and even new businesses are booming. To be honest, it’s a miracle that not more people died. Eladia managed to brief me up about everything that happened before fleeing with the platinum-skinned Jasih. How the cube instead of destroying cured the people; how Jasih woke up back to his platinum self, unable to change back anymore; how Dale gave his life to save everyone.
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 102
