Athan’s face dropped and he took another step toward her.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “Why would he be at my house?”
Icelyn felt her heart fall and she struggled to keep herself from panicking.
“He’s with you,” she said, not a question but an insistent statement, demanding it to be so. “He went to talk to you after training.”
Athan shook his head.
“No,” he said. “No, Icelyn, he’s not here. He’s not with me. I haven’t seen him since the end of training. I left right when we finished the drills so that I could get back to my house and eat and get back to the fields before the rest of the army and set up the afternoon’s maneuvers. Who told you that Malcolm was with me.”
“Bryden,” she said. “He said that Malcolm told him that you wanted to talk to him and that he was going to your house.”
“No,” Athan said. “No. I never said that.”
“Someone must have told him that you had said you wanted to talk to him so that they could get him off of the training fields.”
“Why would they do that?”
Icelyn dropped her voice and told him what had happened in the orchard, speaking as quickly as she could while remaining clear. She couldn’t afford the time it would take to repeat herself. Every second mattered now. Athan’s expression grew tenser as she spoke and by the time that she had finished he looked nearly as frantic as she felt.
“What do we do?” she asked.
“We need to go talk to Mhavrych,” he said. “I’ll have Theia go to your house and stand guard until we get back.”
Icelyn nodded and fell into step beside Athan as they started deeper into the village.
Chapter Seven
“Jane?”
Samira leaned around the door to her best friend’s pod and saw Jane sitting on the edge of the bed, a tissue clutched in her hand. Jane glanced over her shoulder and sagged slightly, gesturing for her to come toward her.
“Hey,” she said. “Come on in.”
Samira stepped into the room and closed the door behind her before crossing to the bed.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
Jane’s reaction when they were talking in the lounge wasn’t unexpected, but it had been unsettling for Samira. She had always been calm and capable of handling difficult situations with grace. That was part of what had brought them together when they were small children and kept them close over the years, even when their lives had taken them so that they lived at a distance and weren’t able to see each other as often as they would have liked. Where Samira sometimes felt overwhelmed and tended to see things through a prism of pessimism, Jane was more even, more collected and able to talk Samira through situations. It was her advice that had led her to finally leaving Randall’s home and seeking refuge with Zuri. Jane had offered to come into town, to find a temporary apartment and help Samira settle into a new life, but Samira had refused. By then she had grown close to Zuri and knew that the professor would accept her into her home. The truth was that she knew if she allowed Jane to come to her rescue, she never would have left. She would have allowed the protective feeling of their lifelong friendship to be her hiding place and wouldn’t have emerged from it. Zuri was a source of encouragement and strength in a different way, pushing her to claim a new life rather than resisting it.
“I’m fine,” Jane said. “I’m sorry for all that.”
Samira shook her head as she pulled a chair up toward the bed and sat.
“Don’t,” she said. “There’s nothing for you to apologize for. Don’t you think that I wish just a little bit that I could yell at myself just as much as you yelled at me?”
Jane laughed and dabbed at new tears that had escaped her eyes and landed on her cheeks.
“I shouldn’t have done that. It’s not your fault that any of this happened.”
“If you need to blame somebody, I’m probably the best person to take on that honor,” Samira said. “I did ask you to help me plan my wedding and I did introduce you to Simran. And I did bring you along with me and the other women to go to the lab when the men had been there for so long.”
“Alright, maybe it is your fault just a little bit,” Jane said.
She laughed again, and Samira joined her.
“There you go. That should make you feel better. At least you can tell yourself that you didn’t get yourself into all of this ridiculousness. That was me. I did it.”
Samira reached up and moved a lock of Jane’s hair away from her face.
“I really didn’t mean to blow up at you like that,” Jane said.
“I know,” Samira said.
“It’s just that I wasn’t prepared for all of this. I couldn’t have even imagined that any of this was going to happen.”
“I don’t think that there is a way to prepare for something like this to happen,” Samira admitted. “I know that I wasn’t prepared for it when I met Ero and I certainly had no idea that when they brought me back to Uoria with them that I was going to fall in love with Ty.”
“Why did you go with them?” Jane asked.
Samira realized that they had never really talked about the issues that had led up to her leaving Earth and all of the changes that had come over her life since that decision. She let out a sigh and eased closer to the edge of the chair.
“Everything with Randall had finally reached a boiling point. I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“I remember,” Jane said. “That’s when you asked Zuri if you could stay with her.”
“Right. But I didn’t move in. I went for a few days and then I went back home. I had hoped that seeing that I was actually going to make a change like that was going to be something that would wake Mom up and make her see that she needed to make a change, too. Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way. Instead, she only seemed to withdraw more, and Randall just got worse.”
“It’s good to hear you be able to say his name. I know that’s hard for you.”
Samira shook her head.
“It’s not anymore,” she said with a smile. “That sounds so crazy and I can’t even really believe that I’m saying it either, but it’s really not hard for me anymore. That’s what all of this has done for me. There was a huge blowup with him and I knew that I just couldn’t do it anymore. There was no point in trying, no point in continuing to put myself through that. By then Zuri had already left for the exchange program on Uoria, but she had given me the keys to her house and told me that if I needed to go at any point, that I was allowed to. She was supposed to be gone for weeks, but she showed back up after just a couple of days and explained to me that she hated it there and that the Denynso were awful to her.”
“Really?” Jane asked, looking shocked at the revelation. “She seems so completely in love with Ero.”
“She is,” Samira said, “but that was the problem. The Denynso are great when you get to know them. They really are. But that doesn’t change their nature. They are vicious and violent. They can even be cruel, especially when they aren’t tempered and when they have gotten near their mate but haven’t yet completed that bond. Ero really struggled to come to terms with the fact that he knew that he was in love with a human woman. It wasn’t something that he was prepared for and he didn’t feel comfortable with it. The biggest problem was that he didn’t feel comfortable with himself. Ero is the smallest and the youngest of the warriors. He had always been teased by his brothers and to fall in love with a human, especially a human woman who is so much taller and bigger than the other human women he had already seen, was challenging. What was worse, though, was when she heard him making fun of her and decided to leave Uoria. He realized then that he couldn’t live without her.”
“So, he followed her to Earth,” Jane said.
Samira nodded.
“He did. He was the first of the Denynso warriors to voluntarily leave Uoria. When he got here, he found out what happened with Randall and confronted him. Zuri had already decided to
go back to Uoria and they invited me to go with them. Everything had already changed so much, and I finally felt free from Randall. I had been so envious of Zuri being able to participate in such an amazing opportunity to learn about this planet and the people on it, and now I had the chance. I couldn’t turn it down.”
“I can understand that. Were you worried about your mother?”
“Of course, I was. But there was nothing that I could do. I hadn’t been able to change her mind my entire life. What was I going to do now? I figured that I would spend some time on Uoria and then come back here. From there I would figure out what I was going to do and try to help Mom. I just felt like I needed a break. I needed to be totally separated from my life for a while.”
“But you actually ended up finding your life.”
Samira smiled thinking of Ty. She nodded.
“I did,” she agreed.
“You know,” Jane said. “When we were little and talked about how we were going to find the perfect men and get married and go about our lives together, I really thought that that would mean on Earth. It wasn’t that I necessarily figured that the men would be human. Especially with you and all of your science work, it occurred to me that at least one of us might marry a different species.”
“You just thought that maybe it would be a species that we had at least seen once or twice?”
Jane laughed and nodded, the tears now dry and her eyes shining again like Samira always remembered. This was the friendship that had always been so precious to her. This was the person she trusted and who had been there for her when she felt like no one else in the world had. Hearing Jane laugh again took away the anxiety and tension that Samira had been feeling. She could pretend that they were back on Earth, sitting in Jane’s first apartment, feeling so grown up despite the meager furniture and dinners that were comprised largely of instant meal packets, rather than waiting in a ship on the surface of a desolate planet for any word for if their crew had prevailed. Jane’s eyes softened, and she tilted her head, looking suddenly nostalgic.
“Thank you for asking me to help you with your wedding,” she said. “I don’t know if I ever told you how much that meant to me.”
“Of course,” Samira said, reaching out to take Jane’s hands in hers. “There’s no one else on this planet – or any other – who I would want to be by my side on my wedding day more than you. I know that we haven’t had as much of a chance to spend time together since you moved, but you’re still my best friend. More than my best friend.”
“Well, now that I’ve found Simran…” Jane started.
“We’re sisters!” Samira exclaimed, coming to the realization for the first time.
They embraced, laughing through fresh tears. Suddenly a thought flashed through Samira’s mind and she pushed back from the embrace to look into Jane’s face again.
“What is it?” Jane asked.
“That picture,” Samira said. “The one that you showed Simran and that he brought to Eden and Pyra? How did you remember that?”
Jane shook her head as if she wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to the question.
“When I looked at the Denynso warriors they looked really familiar. I thought that it was because I might have seen pictures of them, but that wasn’t it. The more time that I spent with Simran, the more that I knew that I had seen something that looked like them before, but it wasn’t exactly the same.”
“What do you mean? What was different?”
“I don’t really know. I don’t know how to explain it. There was just something that was different. I finally figured out that it was the picture. I still can’t exactly explain what’s different, but it’s not exactly the same.”
“Because of the hybrid breeding,” Samira said. “That picture had to be one of the Denynso that was a part of the early program. It had been mixed with something. Remember what Eden said about Ryan? He had been splicing human DNA with other species to try to convert it into a hybrid. That might be what they did to that warrior.”
“Or he was just a child when they brought him to Earth.”
The thought was chilling, and Samira tried to push it out of her mind.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, trying to change the subject as quickly as she could.
She didn’t want to think about this anymore. She knew that she couldn’t ignore it. It was undeniable that all of this was happening and that she was an inseparable part of it. Until she was back in Ty’s arms, though, she wanted to do anything that she could to distance herself from it and not try to do anything that might carry her deeper.
“I guess I could eat.”
“Come on.”
Samira and Jane walked out of Jane’s pod and started toward the kitchen. They had nearly reached the end of the hall when they heard someone in Jacob and Phaedra’s pod. Samira knew that they hadn’t taken as much time to get to know Phaedra as she felt that they should and stepped up to the door, intending to ask her to join them for dinner. When she knocked on the door, however, there was no response from inside. The sounds stopped, but no one came to the door.
“Hello?” Samira called. “Jacob? Phaedra?”
There was still no response and she reached for the control to the door. It slid open, revealing the room. It appeared empty, but a bag was sitting on the bed, items from inside scattered around on the mattress. Samira stepped inside, uncomfortable about the scene. Unlike the ship that she had taken from Earth to Uoria, this ship was equipped with pods containing beds and other furniture along with the passenger units, allowing the passengers to remain safe and secure during takeoff and landing, but also permitting more comfort and homelike living during longer journeys. Despite this difference, she knew that there was only one exit to the room, ensuring security. This meant that if they heard someone shuffling inside, there was no way that that person could have gotten out of the room without she and Jane seeing them.
Jane stepped into the room after her and Samira noticed that she stood in front of the door as if blocking the exit with her body. Samira continued further into the room, looking around carefully. Suddenly the narrow door to the closet opened and a figure burst out toward Samira. She was so shocked by its sudden appearance that she stumbled back, nearly falling onto the bed, and shouted at Jane. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jane brace herself and push back against the figure as it ran toward the door. Samira scrambled toward the door and grabbed the person around the waist, launching him back away from Jane.
“Shut the door!” she shouted.
Gathering all of her strength, Samira pulled the man back with her into the room so that Jane could close the door and take her place in front of it again. Though the man was larger than her, Samira was able to get him to the floor and climbed onto him, holding him down with her knee in his chest. He was wearing a hood and she pushed it aside, revealing the face of the pilot who Pyra had asked to bring them to Penthos. Samira felt stunned.
“Frederick,” she gasped.
The older man looked up at her with an expression of defiance in his eyes.
“I can explain,” he said. “This isn’t what it looks like.”
“It isn’t? Because it looks like you are in here digging through Jacob’s bag. That’s not what you were doing?”
Frederick hesitated
“I was,” he admitted. “But I have a reason.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Samira said. “You were supposed to help us.”
“I did!” Frederick said frantically. “I did help you. I got this ship here, didn’t I? Now I’m trying to help you again.”
“By demanding that we follow your rules and then digging through our belongings?”
“I told you that I have a reason.”
“I’m not the one that you need to be giving that reason to. You’re going to have to explain to Jacob why you came into his room and invaded his privacy like this.”
“No one has privacy that is protected from the leader of their ship.”
“We told you,” she said through her gritted teeth. “You are not the leader of this ship. You are a pilot. Nothing more. You were not chosen because of some amazing military history or because we needed someone to gather us together and whip us into shape. You were chosen because you were there and you knew how to operate the ship. That’s all.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“I do,” Samira said. “Because it’s the truth.” She glanced over her shoulder at Jane. “Help me get him back into the closet.”
“What do you mean?” Frederick demanded. “What are you doing?”
The two women struggled to pull Frederick to his feet and started trying to wrestle him toward the closet. The pilot resisted them, trying to fight away from them so that he could go toward the door. Finally, Samira managed to get him into the closet and started to secure the door back into place. Frederick surged forward like he had out of the closet when he was hiding, and Samira screamed, launching herself forward again to try to force him back. Behind her she heard the door to the pod slide open and a sense of relief washed over her.
“What’s going on in here?” Jacob shouted from the doorway.
Frederick maneuvered his way out of the closet and past Samira, starting toward the door to the pod.
“Don’t let him get out!” Samira called to Jacob.
Jacob grasped Frederick by the tops of his arms and forced him back into the room. He struggled with him, finally gaining dominance over him and forcing him down into the chair positioned in between the two passenger units. Samira ran to the bed and grabbed the coil of rope that she had seen on the mattress, evidently pulled from the bag that Jacob had filled with supplies in the basement of the laboratory building. Together they coiled the rope around Frederick, securing him into place on the chair. The man looked furious as he stared up at them, but he stopped struggling against the ties.
“What’s happening here?” Jacob asked.
“Jane and I were going toward the kitchen and we heard him in here digging through your bag,” Samira told him. “He tried to run, but we kept him here.”
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