“It had been three years,” Phaedra protested.
“I never stopped thinking about you,” Jacob said. “I didn’t want to walk away from you. I regretted it the second I did it.”
“Then why didn’t you come back?”
“I was too afraid to. The things that I said to you. The things that you said to me. I didn’t think that there was any chance that you would…”
“That’s why I came for you,” Phaedra said. “When I heard that you were gone, I knew that there was something wrong. It just wasn’t right. I couldn’t get in touch with the company controlling the excavation or even any of the other members of it. It was like everyone had just closed up and weren’t even going to admit that you were ever with them.” She drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “So, I came here.”
“Why?” Jacob asked.
“I remembered that you had studied here and that you still had contacts with some of the people who worked here. I thought that maybe they would have something to do with the excavation and would know more about where you were supposed to be. I went to the History and Anthropology departments first, but none of them would talk. Then I came here. I couldn’t remember what you had done here, so I just walked around talking to whoever I found. No one would listen, until…”
Her voice trailed off.
“Until you found Ryan.”
Phaedra winced at the sound of his name and nodded.
“He agreed to talk to me. I didn’t remember him as someone you knew or who you had worked with, but by that point, I felt like I would have talked to anyone who would listen to me. It had been more than a year since you disappeared and no one had heard anything from you. I wanted to know where you were and if you were alright. It just didn’t make sense to me that you would go away like that without even so much as a letter to let someone, anyone, know that you were safe.”
Jacob’s heart was beating faster in his chest, but he didn’t want to express too much of the emotion that was coursing through him. He didn’t want to betray what was going through his mind if she wasn’t feeling the same things. It was possible that she was only thinking of the friendship that they had had before their brief but intense relationship three years before he left for the excavation when she came to the University trying to find out more about his disappearance. There was something in her eyes, though, that told him that there was more to her determination than just the time that they had once spent together.
“Why?” he asked.
She stared back at him, words that she wanted to say to him hovering there just beyond the glaze of tears that hadn’t dissipated since he had freed her from the horrible tank. He saw her lips part and then close again as if she had started to respond to him, but then rethought the words before she spoke them. She started again, but Pyra stalked into the room, startling her.
“What is he?” Phaedra asked nervously.
Jacob realized that even though she had been a part of the breeding program for more than three years she wasn’t familiar with any of the other species that had been used in the experiments. Somehow that made the situation even more horrifying.
“That’s Pyra. He’s a Denynso warrior.”
“Is he…safe?” she asked.
Jacob could understand why she would ask such a question. Pyra was imposing and did little to try to be less intimidating for those who encountered him. After what she must have experienced as a part of this program, he could only imagine that seeing someone as large and stern as the Denynso leader would be frightening for her.
“He can be loud and is a fierce warrior, but he is above everything the leader of his kind here and those who have joined him. He will do anything to protect them.”
“And you’ve joined him?” Phaedra asked. “Is that where you’ve been?”
Jacob shook his head.
“I’ve only known Pyra since returning to Earth. I’m not formally under his leadership, but I consider myself his ally.”
“Returning to Earth?” Phaedra asked, sounding shocked. “What do you mean?”
“Ciyrs has informed me that the wounded will need at least one more day to recover from their injuries and the healing process. We will have to stay here until they are ready to get to the shuttles and leave. For now, it’s time to get some sleep. We have guards positioned throughout the area and will trade shifts during the night. Men, be prepared for your shift when it arises. Jacob, I’ll need you to stand guard at the stairs.”
The warrior looked at Jacob with significance in his eyes, reminding him that the others crowded into the two other emergency chambers still weren’t aware of what they had discovered downstairs or the women now sheltering in this chamber. It was a testament to the power that Pyra held over these people and the utmost in trust that they gave to him. They were willing to go where he told them and do as he asked without question. While it was unnerving in a way, it was also a comfort to Jacob, reassuring him that the group would be safer and more controlled no matter what decisions they had to make moving forward.
Jacob looked down at Phaedra and she gave him a faint smile.
“Thank you for coming for me,” she said.
“Thank you for coming for me,” he replied.
Phaedra slid down and turned to lie on her side. The position made her hair fall away from her back, revealing the skin to him. Once smooth and beautiful, her back was now marred by deep scars along both shoulder blades. Jacob couldn’t withhold the gasp that escaped his lips and Phaedra turned to look over her shoulder at him.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Jacob shook his head.
“Nothing,” he managed to say, offering a tremulous smile.
She settled back down to sleep and Jacob left the chamber, stopping to extinguish the lanterns as he went. He took a deep breath as he left the room, trying to rid his mind of the awful images that the scars had conjured. They were deep and long, standing out against the perfection of the rest of her skin boldly and unapologetically. It filled him with a combination of grief and anger, and he felt like he didn’t know how to move forward.
Finally, Pyra approached him, giving Jacob something else to think about to distract him from his torment.
“There has to be more down there,” Pyra said. “These women are only part of what Ryan was doing.”
“I know,” Jacob agreed “There has to be more to the breeding facility than just that room. Whatever else is down there is the cornerstone of what’s going on here.”
“And on Penthos,” Pyra added. “We need to find out what we can. It might help us wipe out Ryan and his army once and for all.”
“I’ll go back down there,” Jacob offered. “During my guard shift I’ll see what I can find out.”
“There might be more Valdicians,” Pyra said.
“I’ll bring my weapon,” Jacob said. “They won’t get past me.”
“I’ll come with you,” Rilex offered as he walked up to them.
Jacob nodded and they started toward the stairs.
“If you need us,” Pyra said, “yell. We’ll come as fast as we can.”
Jacob glanced back over his shoulder at Pyra and nodded once more before he and Rilex began down the steps.
Chapter Eight
“What do you know about the Valdicians?” Rilex asked when they reached the door to the false clean room.
“Nothing,” Jacob admitted. “I’d never heard of them until today. Why?”
Rilex let out a sigh and shook his head as if he wasn’t entirely sure what it was that he wanted to say.
“I’m not sure,” he finally said. “There’s just something about them. I don’t know what it is, but it’s been bothering me since I first saw them. I feel like…”
“Like what?” Jacob asked.
“Like I’ve seen them before. But I know I haven’t. There were no Valdicians before I came to Earth and since being here, there have been no invasions or alliances with such a species.”
“
Did you read about the Nyx 23 mission?” Jacob asked.
“Some, but the sources that I read never mentioned the Valdicians by that name. They would only refer to the enemy army or the enemy species.”
They walked through the clean room and observation room for the torture chambers before stepping back into the breeding facility. The machines were still making their low humming and beeping sounds, the rhythm somehow more ominous now that the tanks were empty. It was as if the machines were taunting them, telling them that it wasn’t over. It didn’t matter that they had freed the women. It didn’t even matter that they had released the survivors of the battle. There were more.
Jacob crossed the room and found another door. Like the one leading into the breeding room, this one was unlocked and he was able to open it easily. It led into a long, narrow hallway lined with doors. Together he and Rilex began opening the doors on either side. As they forced the doors open they found empty chambers that looked like a cross between examination rooms and small efficiency apartments. At the end of the corridor they found a door that was larger than the others and didn’t feature the same narrow window. This door had a lock pad beside it and Jacob hesitated.
“It might be linked to the same controls as the first,” Rilex suggested.
Jacob tried the door and found it unlocked. He gave a sigh of relief. He had had enough of Rilex’s starlight for now. The last thing that he wanted them to do was bring attention to their presence in the secretive section of the building, which is exactly what would have happened with the vibrant light and explosive sound.
When he opened the door, Jacob found himself standing in an office. The rich leather and dark décor of the space stood in stark contrast to the pristine cleanliness and bright white and metal of the rest of the facility. He crossed to the desk and sat in the massive chair. This had to be Ryan’s office for when he was spending time in his hidden facility. That meant that this would be where they could find out any information that might be available.
“Look at these,” Rilex said from the far side of the office.
Jacob looked up from the drawer that he had opened and saw the other man standing beside the wall, his hand rested on what looked like a handle embedded in it. Rilex took hold of the handle and pulled. A section of the wall came toward him and he took a few steps backwards to open it the rest of the way. The movable section of the wall was comprised of shelves from the top to the bottom, each lined with files. Rilex turned and pulled on the next section of the wall, revealing another movable set of shelves, it, too, filled with files.
Rilex took one of the folders off a shelf and opened it.
“What is this?” he asked.
Jacob stood and walked over to him.
“It’s a file,” he said. “It holds papers and information. This is how offices and hospitals and such would keep their records organized before everything started being kept on computers.”
“So why aren’t these on computer?”
Jacob shook his head and took another of the files from the shelf. He opened it in his hands and sifted through some of the papers. He checked the date on the top and noticed that it was from several years before. He checked another and found that it was more recent. The next was from only a few months before, the next nearly 80 years old. He couldn’t understand the organizational method or what the symbols and numbers on the front of each of the files meant.
“Some of these are from long before Ryan was alive,” he said, “but there still would have been computers. Why would he go to the effort of taking all these notes and keeping all of this information by hand?”
“Did you see the screens beside each of the tanks?” Rilex asked.
Jacob nodded as he took out another of the files and opened it.
“I didn’t understand any of the codes on them,” he said. “I thought that they might tell us something, but they didn’t make any sense.”
Something suddenly occurred to Jacob and he looked up at Rilex.
“They didn’t make any sense to us,” he said. “Maybe that’s the point. Even the most secure and encrypted computers can be hacked if someone knows what they are doing. That means that any information that someone keeps on a computer system, especially one that is in this close of proximity to a research university, is vulnerable to someone else seeing it. If someone didn’t want what they were recording found…”
“They wouldn’t put it in a computer,” Rilex said. “They would write it down and put it in one central location.”
“Exactly,” Jacob said. “Ryan’s experiments are something that he doesn’t want anyone to know about. He’s gone to extensive lengths to prevent people from finding out what he’s been doing. He keeps these files so that he’s the only one that can read them.”
Jacob’s eyes scanned over the top page of the file and then he flipped to the second page.
“We need to go talk to Pyra and Eden,” he said, gathering as many of the files he could hold in his arms.
Rilex grabbed a few others and they hurried out of the office and back down the hallway. Jacob’s blood was rushing in his ears and his breath was tight in his chest. Suddenly he felt like he had uncovered the reason that he had been drawn here with the others, and what he needed to do.
They found Eden pacing outside of the emergency chambers, gently bouncing Lysander in her arms as she tried to calm the baby to sleep.
“Where’s Pyra?” he asked as he approached her.
“He’s patrolling the rest of this level,” she said. “None of us had gone to the other side, and he wanted to make sure that we are really safe staying here until Ciyrs says that we can leave. Why?”
“We went back down into the breeding facility and we found something that I think both of you need to see.”
Eden nodded.
“Let me bring Lysander back in to the women and we’ll go find him.”
Jacob, Rilex, and Eden crossed the large space carefully, unsure of what they would find as they went. They found Pyra inside what looked like another of the emergency chambers, going through boxes of supplies from one of the shelves. Jacob spread the files out across the floor and explained what they had found to Eden and Pyra. He flipped open one of the files and pointed to the papers inside.
“This is all the personal information about one of the women that he brought into the breeding program. It’s not just a few little details, it’s everything. Her address, her contact information, her birthdate, where her family lives, her medical history. Everything.”
“I would think that he would want to know as much as he could about the women who he was using to breed,” Pyra said.
“But there’s more,” Jacob said. “These papers,” he said, pulling out a few sheets from one of the folders. “They have dates on them that are after the medical record sheets from here. This is a lease for an apartment and utility bills. This one is letters supposedly written between this woman and her family. It’s just like what the excavation company did about me and the others when we went through the portal. They didn’t want to explain to our family that we just disappeared and they had no idea what happened to us, so they made up new lives for us. Ryan was doing that for the women that he put into the program.”
“I don’t think I’m following,” Pyra said. “Why would he need to do that?”
“I didn’t have a choice when I went through that portal,” Jacob said. “I just disappeared and they had to cover their asses. It’s the same thing. These women had no choice. If they had volunteered to become part of the program, their families would already know what was going on and that they were a part of something, even if they didn’t know exactly what it was. There wouldn’t be any reason for Ryan to fake things like a new apartment for them to live in or letters to the family. The only reason that he would do that is that the women came into the program involuntarily and he didn’t want anyone looking for them.” He looked down at the files and picked up one. He had been debating with himself whether he was
going to show them, but decided that he needed to. “I found this,” he said, offering it to Eden. “It’s from almost two years ago.”
Eden took the file from his hand with a quizzical look.
“What is this?” she asked.
Jacob gestured at it.
“Read it,” he said.
Eden opened the folder and looked at the first few pages.
“What the hell is this?” she asked. She looked up at Pyra. “It’s about me. He started a file for me.”
“In case you came back with my blood,” Pyra said. “He was going to force you into the breeding program.”
Eden nodded.
“That’s why he was so happy when he found out about Lysander. We had handled the breeding aspect for him. We already had what he thought that he was going to have to force out of us.”
“None of the women knew,” Pyra said. “They didn’t know what he was doing to them.”
“They don’t know anything about the program,” Jacob said. “Phaedra didn’t even know what you were. If they knew about Ryan’s plan, she would be familiar with the different species that he was using.”
“We didn’t know.”
Jacob turned sharply and saw Phaedra standing at the doorway to the chamber. He stood and crossed to her.
“Phaedra,” he said, taking her hands. “What are you doing here?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I looked for you at the stairs, but I couldn’t find you.”
Jacob led her toward the others.
“This is Phaedra,” Jacob introduced.
“We didn’t know anything about what was going on,” Phaedra said without further greetings. “He took me captive when I came here to talk to him about Jacob. I don’t even know what happened. I was here talking to him, and then I woke up in a cage. I didn’t get much of an opportunity to talk to the other women here, but when I have they’ve told me similar stories. None of them knew what was happening when they were taken either.”
“What’s been happening to you?” Eden asked. “What has Ryan done?”
Jacob & Phaedra's Story (Uoria Mates IV Book 2) Page 5
