Spyridon (The Spyridon Trilogy Book 1)

by Lillian James

  “It is difficult to explain.” Eithné handed her a blanket, and Seirsha wrapped it around her bony shoulders. “How are you feeling?”

  Seirsha shrugged, but she wouldn’t meet Eithné’s eyes. “Normal, I guess. But…I’m not normal, am I?”

  Eithné hesitated, and then, “No one is normal, child.”

  Seirsha looked at her then. “But something’s wrong with me.”

  “Actually, I am not sure there is. Before, you seemed frightened. Do you still feel this way?”

  “No.” Seirsha glanced at Mikhél, and then her eyes flicked down to his weapon. “No, I don’t feel that way anymore. You’re not all doctors, are you?”

  She was still looking at him, so he answered. “No.”

  “Military?”

  “Yes.” Although not the military she meant.

  She nodded and then bit the thin, dull skin of her lower lip. “What’s going on? Did I hurt someone else?”

  Someone else?

  But Eithné was shaking her head. “No, child. You did not hurt anyone.” She held up her link. “Would you mind?”

  Seirsha shook her head, and Eithné ran a health scan. She ran it a second time and then turned to Mikhél and murmured in Inakhí, “I see no evidence of the gevenfaen. I don’t understand how. I didn’t have time to medicate her, but somehow she’s—”

  He heard footsteps approaching and held up his fist. Eithné snapped her mouth shut, and the room fell silent. His sedfai was focused on the person outside the room, but his eyes were on Seirsha. Hers flicked to the door and then back to his, and she held herself as still and quiet as the others.

  But she had to wonder why he wanted to keep this meeting hidden.

  When he lowered his fist, she said, “This isn’t a hospital, is it?”

  Eithné said, “It is a medical center.”

  But Seirsha shook her head, her eyes never leaving his. “Not a hospital. Hospitals don’t have soldiers or keep patients a secret. What’s really going on here?”

  And there it was again, that fortitude that made her somehow seem stronger than she could possibly be. She crouched on the bed, staring him down as if she had any hope of defending herself against him. And he began to understand how she’d survived a lifetime alone on an alien planet.

  “If you don’t tell me,” she said, “I’m going to open that door and scream at the top of my lungs.”

  It was a clever threat. She might be bluffing about being able to open the door, but she’d called up a seat after hearing the phrase only once, so he couldn’t be sure. She was small and weak, so she was using the lone advantage she had: her ability to call attention to herself. Damned if he didn’t admire that.

  He said, “You ask the wrong questions.”

  Her brows rose. “They seem pretty reasonable to me.”

  “This room does not matter. When you woke up here, you could see and hear things you never could before. Do you not want to know why?”

  “I know why. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It was a hallucination,” she spat out. “I’m crazy, OK? Is that what you wanted me to say? But I’m not crazy enough to trust you people. Tell me what the hell is going on here, or I’ll have every person in a square mile running into this room.”

  He’d understood only about half of her rant, but as she’d said, it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. “You are not sick,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with you.”

  Her lips trembled, and she pressed them together. Something shifted inside him at the sight, and he found himself gentling his voice when a moment ago he’d been sure she needed the opposite.

  “There is nothing wrong with you,” he repeated. “You are not crazy. You are just not human.”

  CHAPTER 11

  You are just not human. The words seemed to echo in the stale air. Jane waited for the punchline, but Mikhél just watched her in the sudden silence. She glanced at the others, but they were staring too. They were serious. He was serious.

  He thought she wasn’t human.

  She wanted to laugh, but she had the feeling the sound wouldn’t come out in a confident, mocking little trill. It would sound giddy or hysterical or childish. Something began to hum inside her, a strange, dizzying vibration that made her want to jump out of her own skin. She turned to Mikhél and tried for a look of disdain, but she suspected she wasn’t quite pulling it off.

  “Come on,” she said.

  He faltered and glanced at the man with the blue eyes, who said, “She does not believe you. Again.”

  Mikhél turned back to her. “We do not have time for this. You know the truth of what I say.”

  Now she did laugh, and it sounded little better than she’d expected. “OK, fine. If I’m not human, then what am I?”

  “You are Nhélanei,” he said. “Of Spyridon.”

  Spyridon. There was a click deep inside her, as if something was falling into place, and the strength left her legs. She plopped onto the bed and pressed her fist against her chest to slow her racing heart.

  Spyridon. She knew that word. She knew that place.

  He wasn’t kidding.

  And she had to say it. She had to know how it felt leaving her mouth, as if that might allow her to find something that had been missing her entire life. “Spyridon.”

  “Take a moment, child.” It was the old woman who spoke. She gave Mikhél a reproachful look and then smiled at Jane. “Your heart will remember. You were very young when you left, but your heart will remember.”

  And it did. Jane knew it made no sense, that none of this should feel right or logical or sane. But what the old woman said rang true.

  Her heart remembered.

  And then she realized she’d dreamed about it: a panel of stars spinning behind a woman with toffee-colored eyes and a gentle, murmuring voice. The stars had slowed and stilled until they framed a planet of blue, white, and green. At the edge of the atmosphere, a trio of golden spheres hovered, glinting with the light of the sun.

  The dream had been like a dozen others that had plagued her over the last few months, vivid and compelling and too impossible to be real. Except this one was real, because it wasn’t just a dream.

  It was a memory.

  “Tell me about it,” she whispered. “Tell me about Spyridon.”

  Mikhél said, “There is no time.”

  “Please.” Her voice trembled, and she pressed her lips together and then tried again. “I need to know.”

  He stared at her, his face unreadable. Then he turned to the old woman. “Quickly.”

  She nodded and murmured again in that strange, fluid language. A light shot out of the device on her wrist. The light became a sphere, and the sphere took on color and pattern until a small digital globe spun in the air between them. Much of the planet’s surface was covered in water, with small bits of dark scattered among the blue. As the image turned, four large patches of land came into view. And there, near the top of the northernmost continent, three shimmering dots hovered above the surface.

  The golden spheres.

  “Where is it?”

  “Near the center of a neighboring galaxy.”

  “So far away,” Jane murmured.

  “It is not far, child. Not for us.”

  Not for us. She looked up at the old woman and then at the others. And she realized something she’d been too frightened to notice before.

  She’d never seen anyone quite like them.

  It wasn’t their features. If she just looked at their bone structure, she would have assumed them human. Their foreheads were smooth, their cheekbones prominent, their noses a little flat and wide. But they were taller than anyone she’d ever seen. Especially Mikhél, who had to be closer to eight feet than seven. And their coloring was so vibrant, their hair and eyes in jeweled tones framing skin that seemed to glow under the dull, flickering lights.

  “You’re not human either, are you? That’s why you aren�
�t afraid of me.”

  And the old woman’s eyes paled visibly. They went from bright leaf green to iced mint, and Jane couldn’t suppress a gasp.

  “We are not human,” the old woman said. “We are Nhélanei, like you.”

  Jane looked down at her hands, the gray-yellow skin pulled tight over bone with the flaps of flesh between the fingers. She touched her hair, a steel-wool mess for as long as she could remember. She thought of her eyes, so muddy they almost claimed no color. And she shook her head.

  “You’re nothing like me.”

  Something shifted in the old woman’s eyes. Kindness, perhaps, or understanding. She said, “Your coloring is clouded because of malnutrition. The planet you were on did not have all of the nutrients your body needs. We can help you here. As you regain your health and your strength, your colors will begin to change.”

  Malnutrition. She stared at Eithné, but all she could think was that this wasn’t how she was supposed to look. She knew it was superficial, but it felt like a revelation.

  She wasn’t a monster.

  “Is that why everyone’s afraid of me? Because I’m not human?”

  “It is called the valfaen. It’s common when one thinking species encounters another. It happened to you when you arrived on Earth. It fades over time, but you might still have some memories of it.”

  She didn’t, but that didn’t matter. Her heart was pounding again, and this time she didn’t bother trying to slow it down. People feared her because she was different, but that didn’t make her wrong. For the first time in years, it was beginning to seem possible that there was nothing really wrong with her at all. Just as Mikhél had said.

  Nhélanei, she thought. I’m Nhélanei. Of Spyridon.

  And it was high time she figured out where she belonged.

  She looked at the digital globe still spinning in the air. “It looks like Earth.”

  “It is similar in topography,” the old woman said. “That is one of the reasons you were sent to Earth. Your chance of survival was much better on a world so like your own.”

  Jane set her fingertips against the gentle heat of the image, and the globe stilled. She moved her hands, and the image spun with her.

  “I saw these,” she said as she ran her hands over the golden domes. “I think I’ve dreamed about them. I didn’t know it was a memory. I didn’t know they were real.”

  “The Towers,” Blue Eyes said, and his face softened. “She refers to Lan’Vercai.”

  “The three towers,” the old woman said, and her eyes paled even further. “You saw our Royal City, child. It is good you saw that.” She fell silent, her hand patting absently against her knee. And then, softly, “Yes, it is good that you saw Lan’Vercai.”

  There was something aching in the old woman’s quiet, a sorrow that blanketed the room until even the brilliantly colored people before her seemed to dim. She thought of the woman she’d just remembered, the haunting bleak of those toffee-colored eyes. She realized with a pang that the woman must have been her mother. What had made her so sad?

  Was it the same thing that even now drew the woman before her into herself, so she seemed to have forgotten everyone else in the room?

  “What’s your name?” Jane asked softly.

  The old woman started and then flushed. “My apologies. It was shameful to begin this discussion without the courtesy of introductions. I am Dhújar Lana Eithné. Dhújar is my family name. My given name is Eithné. This is Valaer, and Leima.”

  She gestured to the young woman at the foot of the bed, a pale, dewy-skinned beauty with winged brows over eyes the color of mercury and a waterfall of straight, deeply purple hair. When she glanced at Eithné, her eyes took on an animal sheen, and a shimmer of magenta glinted in her hair.

  Valaer was Blue Eyes, a gilded creature with burnished hair. His golden, weathered skin sat perfectly along features too refined to be anything less than gorgeous. Jane tried for a friendly smile, and she could have sworn he smirked at her in response. His expression smoothed so quickly she told herself she’d imagined it, but there was something in the pale of his eyes that had her looking away.

  “And this,” Eithné finished, “is Endet Niyhól Mikhél.”

  Mikhél looked as if he hadn’t moved. Or, rather, he looked immoveable. His feet were shoulder width apart, his arms motionless at his sides. His face was still unreadable, the square jaw set but not angry, the brown eyes still watchful but not wary. He was muscular but not disproportionately so. And yet there was something about him that gave the impression of insurmountable strength. Perhaps it should have intimidated her, but she could think of little else when she met his eyes but the way he’d brushed the tears from her cheeks.

  The thought had her face warming, and she nodded and turned back to Eithné. “I’m Jane.”

  Eithné paused, and then she said, “That might be what they called you on Earth, but that is not your name. If you wish I can tell you the name you were given at your birth.”

  Jane could only stare. Her real name. When was the last time she’d wondered about that? As a child she’d had no way to know that Jane Doe was an odd name. By the time she’d learned it was a name for the lost, she’d had bigger problems to deal with. The Change. Living on the streets at sixteen, finding food, defending herself from those who feared her—and those who didn’t.

  And eventually, as she huddled in the cold and the wet, wondering how she was going to make it to the next morning, she’d realized how horribly apt that name was. And she’d stopped wondering what it had replaced.

  Now this old woman she’d just met wanted to tell her. And she was thrust into the surreal experience of having a stranger introduce her to herself.

  She nodded jerkily, and Eithné smiled and said, “You are Seirsha. Enan Seirsha.”

  Seirsha.

  Jane waited in vain for that click of recognition, but instead there was distance. As if she’d been too long without the name for it to fit anymore.

  “It means freedom,” Mikhél said.

  “Seirsha,” Eithné said, and then she paused. “May we call you Seirsha?”

  Jane hesitated. She thought they meant well, but they were destroying one identity as much as offering another. She’d been Jane Doe for twenty-six years. She couldn’t stop just because a stranger said so.

  And she was right: the name didn’t fit her anymore. Seirsha wasn’t just any name. It was a name for a woman with purpose. She hadn’t been that type of woman in such a very long time.

  But…didn’t she want to be?

  So she said, “Yes.”

  And then immediately felt like an imposter.

  Mikhél said, “We are running out of time.”

  Jane glanced at the door and then back at Eithné, her mind racing with all of the questions she still wanted to ask. She blurted one out before they could decide to end the meeting. “Why did we leave Spyridon?”

  Eithné opened her mouth and then closed it and looked at the globe between them. Her eyes filled, and she sighed and shook her head.

  “There was something my mate used to say, Seirsha, and it always seems to come to mind when I think about what happened to us. He would say, ‘It is freedom when a government allows its citizens to have their own opinions. It is power when that government asks for them to be shared.’”

  Someone behind her made a noise, and Jane glanced beyond Eithné to see Valaer staring out the window, his eyes pale. Leima glanced at him, and her cheeks were wet. Mikhél was still watching Jane, and she found herself trapped in his gaze until Eithné spoke again.

  “Cyd loved Spyridon. He appreciated it for what it was. I am afraid I never really did until it was too late. And now, when I have neither the time nor the liberty for such memories, all I can see is his face. And I have little strength to resist the mire of what should have been.”

  She murmured in that other language, and the globe winked away. When she pulled her sleeve down over the device on her wrist, her hand shook. Jane
was almost afraid to ask, but the question couldn’t be ignored.

  “What happened to Spyridon?”

  Valaer said, “We were attacked.” He stepped forward and put a hand on Eithné’s shoulder, and she looked up at him with a small, tremulous smile. She squeezed his hand and turned to Jane.

  “Yes, we were attacked. Weeks after you were born, by a race known as the Meijhé. Our government was destroyed, our land overrun. In a matter of weeks, the Meijhé claimed everything that had once belonged to the Nhélanei. Those who survived were enslaved and made to serve the Meijhé. Except for the child who escaped.”

  “Me,” Jane whispered.

  “You,” Eithné confirmed. “Your mother sent you away to save your life.”

  “She came with me.” The image flashed through her mind again. Sad, toffee eyes backed by starlight. “She died when I was a baby. Here on Earth.”

  Eithné paused, and Jane had the feeling she was about to say something vital. But then she said, “I see.”

  “The rest of my family. Do you know where they are?”

  “They died in the attack. I offer my deepest sympathies, child.”

  Jane couldn’t bear to meet the pity in that gaze, and she looked everywhere else instead. She told herself she should be grateful to have at least gained a memory of her mother, but the woman she pictured was a stranger.

  She truly was alone.

  “Why are you getting me now?” she managed. “If I have no family left, who sent you? How did you know where I was?”

  “We used a communication device to find you. A Saroyan locator.” Eithné motioned to Leima, who pulled the box from an opening hidden in the wall. “I assume you recognize this. We have the missing piece.”

  Jane’s hands trembled as she reached for her mother’s jewelry box. It hadn’t occurred to her that it would be here. She worried that the stone would be missing, but it was there, snug against the lustrous lining.

  “I didn’t know there was a missing piece.”

  “The bottom panel of the box. It gave us your location. You must have noticed the light flashing on the lid.”

  “I did.” She hadn’t imagined the light. She wondered if all the things she’d thought were hallucinations were, in fact, something else entirely. “Things have happened to me that seemed…impossible. I thought I was imagining them. But I wasn’t, was I?”