“Thanks.” I grinned and went to our room to finish getting ready for the day.
27
“Around this way,” Traz whispered to me as we rushed through a brightly lit hallway in the Linguistics department’s underground maze. We’d followed what appeared to be the same stark-white hallways over and over, and my mind spun.
Even though I used my far-reaching senses to keep watch for others who might be nearby, fear of capture pulsed through my veins, filling me with its poison, eating at my sanity and conjuring phantom noises. If they caught us, would I be dissected or studied? My pulse raced so fast I thought it might flutter away into the white ether.
“Here,” Traz said upon stopping at the right door. He stood next to a panel and ushered me closer.
I pushed the white square next to the thin door outline and watched the panel retract up into the wall. With a shaking finger I punched in my security code. The long moments of waiting while the panel processed my clearance were painful. My chest constricted, clamping itself around my pounding heart.
At last, the door slid open.
Traz and I hurried into the room so the door would close behind us quickly. The room we found ourselves in was dim and dusty. A stale smell assaulted my nose and vaguely reminded me of autumn, when the trees dropped their leaves and died until spring resurrected them. My eyes relaxed in the weaker light, but the brightness of everything here was painful. Processing what I saw through the blinding shine of artificial light was taking its toll.
“This way.” Traz weaved through boxes on the floor until he reached an aisle of shelves. Boxes and drawers were piled to the ceiling, each one labeled with a category and a date.
“The Sualwet stuff is back down the first aisle,” he offered.
The temptation to go digging for information about my mother or other captives was difficult to resist, but my fear of being discovered overpowered the urge. “Maybe another time. Let’s just get the tape.”
“Sure.” Traz’s voice was wistful, and I realized it wasn’t for my benefit he had mentioned the Sualwet files, but his.
“I understand you want to know, and I’ll help you find out what I can. But right now we need to find that disk before anyone notices.”
With a nod, Traz increased his pace.
The Archives was larger than I’d suspected. From the door we entered, this repository had looked like just a few shelves in a forgotten dank room. In fact, it expanded far beyond that, into a large space stuffed full of all manner of documents and storage containers.
As we trudged through the aisles, dust and other particles we kicked up floated through the dim air, reminding me of bubbles.
“Where is it?” I asked after we checked the same aisle for what seemed like the fifth time.
“It should be right here.” Traz pointed to a box on the bottom shelf. “This is where they keep the uncategorized items, but all I see is this ‘A’AIHEA’ label.”
“What’s that mean?”
He frowned. “I don’t know. It’s not an Erdlander word.”
“It’s not Sualwet, either.”
We stopped pacing and locked eyes.
As I reached for the box, the excitement of possibility flowed through me. There was something delicious about finding a secret no one else had ever seen. The hunt for sunken treasure, tales about explorers, even my illicit hikes outside of the safety of my cove had all been a search for this sensation. After experiencing so many new things, I thought I would never feel it again. And then there it was.
I struggled to pull the box out to the floor. It was heavy, too heavy to hold mere paper. What could they have had in there?
When I opened the top I discovered what appeared to be a collection of rocks.
“What the hell are these?” I reached in and picked up one of the heavy objects. On closer inspection, its hard surface was gritty and full of pockmarks, like it had been forged but never smoothed. Black soot rubbed off on my hands when I touched it. As I held on, the object warmed my palm. The temperature rose as I examined it to try solving the rock’s mystery.
“Why would they keep this?” I asked, bringing it closer to see it better I could feel the stone’s heat radiating against my face.
“I don’t know, just looks like a rock.” Traz reached out to take the object but pulled his hand back with a yelp.
“How are you holding that? It burned me!” Traz sucked his fingertip for a second before holding it out for me to see the blister forming.
“I don’t know. It’s not that hot.” I placed the rock back in the box and watched the air shimmer from the heat around it. “What a strange thing.”
“‘Strange.’ Riiight, that’s the word,” Traz grumbled before pulling out the next box.
We went through ten boxes and found nothing but papers and drawings, lab reports and something Traz called seismograph readings. None of them referred to a recording, only something called the A’aihea.
I began to think we would never find anything, that I would be late to my first day with Dr. Vaughn at the Hub. Would I be punished? Did they penalize tardiness the way the Sualwet did, by snipping one of your webs so you would swim slower until it grew back?
Lost in thought, I let Traz pull down the next box from the shelf above us.
“Sera.” His quiet whisper called me out of my thoughts.
In the box was a pile of medical reports, weather reports, and a melodisk.
“Is that it?”
“I don’t know.” Traz picked up the disk and studied it. There was no label to tell us what was on it, but it was the first possibility we’d found.
I crouched, balancing on my webbed toes, and began surveying the box’s contents. Within I found the medical report of the man who had been burned, transcribed accounts of what the party had seen, ecological information about the area where the geyser was found, and a report by Dr. Vaughn. It was handwritten in Erdlander and difficult to read. His slanted letters made all the letters look alike. One word stood out, though.
A’aihea.
“Can you read this?” I passed the paper to Traz, who was rummaging through the rest of the box, pulling out items that interested him.
“I’ll try.”
He studied the words on the paper in silence for a moment, his forehead wrinkled in concentration. When he was done, he flipped the page and read the rest of the document. My impatience was getting the best of me. I wanted to smack the paper out of his hands and scream at him to tell me what it said.
Traz finally looked up at me. “This doesn’t make any sense.” He flipped back to the first page and read it over again.
“I will choke you with my bare hands if you don’t read that aloud this time,” I threatened, beyond annoyed.
“Oh, right, okay.” He read:
Regarding the incident at Kelmeta Geyser, it has been determined that the A’aihea are responsible for the assault on our exploration team. The mountain area has been long uninhabited, and the remaining A’aihea presence was thought to be rumor. It is clear, however, that they still control the region and are intent on maintaining their autonomy.
The Council has ruled that no further exploration of the area be permitted based on the danger to both body and mind. In addition, the explosion of Kelmeta Geyser coincided precisely with the seismic activity discovered by the Science department. The activity originated beneath the Nalastran Mountain Ridge, the suspected home of the A’aihea.
How the A’aihea have been able to so accurately affect this geological occurrence remains a mystery.
After the incident in which Camp Member Kreenal was injured, three members of the team separated from the group to explore a cavern exposed by the earthquake. They have reported that upon entrance they heard the “Song of Shah’aye.”
The stories regarding this song have long been disputed. Based on the exploration team’s experiences, their inability to avoid following the song is consistent with documented accounts of contact with the A’ai
hea. This, in addition to their violent reaction to our presence on the Nalastran Mountain Ridge, leads us to believe that the A’aihea are no longer dormant and pose a direct threat to our way of life.
The Academic Divisions recommend the Council implement a strategy to eradicate the A’aihea. Previous attempts to integrate or interrogate members of this race met with tragic and violent results. To ensure our continued prosperity and dominance, this threat must be removed.
“I don’t understand.” I shook my head before taking the paper from Traz and reading it myself.
Whatever the A’aihea were, the Erdlanders knew about them. Were they dangerous, or were they just defending themselves the way the Sualwet had done before the love of war overpowered their reasoning?
“Where’s the Nalastran Mountain Ridge?” I wondered.
Traz flinched when my silver eyes focused on his own. “You can’t go there. It’s dangerous.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Didn’t you read that? Whatever those A’aihea are, they attacked Kree and then tried to kidnap the others.”
“Did we read the same thing? That’s not what this says at all!”
“It’s right there. The A’aihea are dangerous, and you shouldn’t go anywhere near them.”
“Fine.” I stuffed the paper into my pocket before reaching out for the melodisk.
Traz pulled the disk out of reach and met my gaze with a determined glare. “No way. This has to stop. Now. It’s too dangerous.”
“You can’t believe anything in that report. All we know is other people are out there. People the Erdlanders want to eradicate. I didn’t read anything that says they were doing anything other than defending their home, if they were even doing that! And who’s to say that music wasn’t a coincidence and the explorers weren’t even supposed to hear it?”
He leaned in closer, spitting the words as he spoke. “And who’s to say they aren’t monsters trying to overtake the Erdlanders?”
“Like the Sualwet?” My voice was calm and steady.
Traz blanched and pulled away from me, confusion flashing across his features.
“Like me?” I paused, waiting for him to look me in the eye again. “Like you?” I pressed when I had his full attention.
Traz looked around the dark aisle, panic rolling off of him as the fear of being caught gripped him, slamming him with the reality of his situation.
“Tonight we’ll listen to this disk and show Tor the report,” I said. “Then we’ll talk about what to do. Right now, we have to get to our jobs.”
Traz didn’t answer but began tossing things back into the box.
When the boxes were back on the shelves and arranged facing the correct direction, I exhaled, releasing a breath I hadn’t meant to hold. We walked out of the Archives and back to the main hall in silence. I guess neither of us had much we could say aloud at the moment. Traz had to face the reality of what he was, and I could only think that maybe we’d found the key to Tor’s genealogy.
Back in the white hall, we hurried through space without resistance. For a moment, the emptiness of the semiglowing walls and the monotony of the endless gray floor removed me from the danger we were both in.
As we neared the elevator, I sensed someone coming down the hall. It was a girl, small and young, but I couldn’t get a sense of who it was.
I grabbed Traz’s arm and whispered, “Someone is coming.”
“Jikmae,” Traz breathed just as a figure rounded the corner ahead.
I smiled and waved to the girl, hoping she was who I thought. “Kit? Hi! It’s me, Sera,” I called.
Traz stopped midstride and turned to stare at me in shock.
“You know her?” he hissed.
“Shush.”
The girl waved back and increased her pace to reach us.
“Yeah, hi! What are you doing down here?” Her sweet, open face tilted to the side, no comprehension that we could be doing something nefarious.
“I have to admit—I’m a little lost. Lock had to go to Life Services this morning, so my friend Traz offered to walk me.”
“Oh! Hi, I’m Kit.” She blushed and held out her hand in greeting.
Traz raised an eyebrow at me before taking the hand and smiling back. “Hi.”
“Well, you certainly aren’t supposed to be down here.” Kit’s perky reply belied no suspicion of my intentions. How could a people so trusting be capable of the kind of hatred I had read in the report?
“I’m trying to find the Hub.” I grinned, faking self-deprecation with a lift of my eyebrows.
“That’s down another four levels. I can take you,” she offered.
“Really? I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“Really.” Kit continued smiling and put her small hand on my arm.
Her sweetness fed the anger in my heart. The Erdlanders weren’t evil; the ones who made the decisions, who taught people like Kit to hate, were.
“Thanks so much! Traz”—I turned to him with a wide smile—”do you mind if Kit takes me to the Hub? I really appreciate you walking with me this far.”
“Sure,” he replied with a nod and a last smile at Kit. He maneuvered past her and disappeared around a white corner.
“Wow,” Kit breathed, staring after him. “Is he your Match?”
“Traz? No, why?”
“I heard you were Matched is all, and he was here, and he’s so... strange.” Kit’s voice sounded wistful as she guided me back in the direction of the Archives.
“Strange? How so?”
“Yeah, there’s something about his eyes.” She giggled. Even though she was probably only two or three years younger than me, her innocence shone as brightly as the blinding walls.
“His name is Trazla. He studies Sualwet culture,” I offered, figuring her distraction meant less questions about me.
“I couldn’t imagine doing that. It’s bad enough having to listen to them all day, let alone actually trying to understand them.” She pulled her face into a tight grimace before laughing it off. “But I guess we all have to do something, right? It’s not like we pick where we work!”
“I guess.”
We eventually came to a black square on the floor at the end of the hall. I stood in the center while Kit punched in the code that would take us down to the Hub. The ground dropped beneath me, and we rushed toward our destination.
Once we stopped on another identical floor with white walls and gray walkways, I started to wonder if the entire building had only one floor and everyone was just playing a huge practical joke on me. Maybe we weren’t even underground.
At the end of the short hall was one door with one panel.
“Thanks.” I grinned at her before punching in my code.
“Bye, Sera. It was nice to talk to you.” She turned and strode away.
“Wait!”
Kit turned but didn’t step closer.
“Aren’t you coming with me? I don’t know where to go!”
“Oh, me? I’m not allowed in the Hub. You’ll figure it out.” Her smile was sincere, and I wished this were another world where she could have been a friend. A world where she wouldn’t hate me if she ever found out what I was.
28
The Hub was massive. And loud. It consisted of one huge room with instruments, computers, and other technology I’d only read about in books. I’d never seen so many screens and buttons in my life, and the idea that all the information of the entire Erdlander culture had been stored within these machines terrified me.
Everyone seemed to be speaking all at once, either in Erdlander or their mangled version of Sualwet, which I was growing to despise. Recorded voices rang out as well, intermingling with spoken words to create an overwhelming din. People stood at the middle of the Hub, alternately talking and then listening to some device in their ear. One man even had papers spread out on the floor and appeared to be studying them among the chaos.
None of this meant anything to me. I only had eyes
for the glass wall on the other side of the room. It covered the entire length of the chamber and held back a massive underground river. Looking at the rushing water, I could almost feel it cascading across my skin as I imagined myself diving in and absorbing the moisture I craved.
Drawn by the majesty of my mother’s genetics, I walked straight toward the transparent barrier. Ignoring the man on the ground, I moved like a starving person drawn to a feast. In the middle of the wall was something I couldn’t quite see, but before I made it closer, Dr. Vaughn stepped in front of me.
“Amazing isn’t it?” he asked, having no understanding of just how astounding it was. “The small springs all pull from this underground river. We discovered it when we built this camp. We have been able to infiltrate the Sualwet communication systems by sending beacons down this river. Plus, access to it gives us better conduction for listening to their intelligence.”
I nodded, trying to get a look behind him, barely registering the information he rattled off. My admittance into the Hub was risky, but if given enough thought, it posed important questions. Why was I here? Why was I allowed this level of access? The moment snared me, and I became too lost in it to stop and consider the implications.
Vaughn gestured to the glass wall without moving out of the way. “This area is caged in, which allows water to flow through it, but nothing can get in or out. This lets us keep our friend contained in his preferred element.”
Vaughn stepped aside and swept his arm to show me his prized possession. The object in the water was a young Sualwet, perhaps only eight or nine years old. I swallowed my horror, unable to look away.
“He’s quite a find. Too young to fight us but old enough to possess valuable information. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about him yesterday. When you mentioned having studied with Dr. Rhine, I knew instantly we could pull you in on this project, Security is very tight, so I had to get the correct signatures before you could be allowed to know. Perhaps you will have more luck than us in getting him to talk about his people. Your accent is so... authentic.”
Two Moons of Sera Page 18
