“Tell me everything you know about the Outliers’ plans,” he told her.
She shrugged. “From what you said to Talya, you know as much as I do. He sent bands of searchers over the Divide to explore Avitras territory. He wanted a complete map of the territory, but the searchers were too ignorant and stupid to do the job. He wanted me to do it so he could get an accurate picture of the landscape.”
“Did you agree?” he asked.
“Of course I agreed,” she shot back. “Being selected for that job by Old Ponchy himself was a great honor, just as great an honor as selecting the sacrifice. I would do anything for Old Ponchy—anything.”
“You picked for the sacrifice one of the young men,” he told her. “Why did you pick him?”
She turned her head away. “That’s for me and only me.”
He waited, but she didn’t say anything else. Finally, he squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. “Stand up, Lilith.”
She took a considerable time getting to her feet, and then she tottered on her feet in obvious pain. He waited until she balanced on her feet before he took one of her hands and swept her up onto his shoulders. He took to the air and flew to the branch where he left Talya.
She floated some distance from the tree, waiting for them. She smiled at Roshin, but paid no attention to Lilith riding on his shoulder. The two Avitras flew up out of the trees into the starry sky. They circled south and headed for the towering peaks of the Western Divide.
End of Book 5
Book 6: Sarai
Chapter 1
Roshin touched down to the ground and folded his feathers against his back. He set Lilith on her feet next to him, and Talya landed at his other side. “Why are we stopping here?”
Roshin doubled over and propped his hands on his knees while he caught his breath. Sweat dampened his feathers, and he gasped for breath through gritted teeth. Lilith weighed him down so much he flew shorter and shorter distances until he could barely fly at all.
He’d flown all the way from Rolling Ridges to the top of the Eastern Divide. He set Lilith down there to rest, but he took one sweeping glance around the surrounding countryside, picked up Lilith without resting, and flown another hundred miles out of their way to the north without a word of explanation.
He didn’t stop again until he traversed the plain northwest of the Ursidrean Mountains. He exhausted himself flying as fast as he could without rest. He barely made it this far without collapsing.
“You said you would take me to Avitras territory,” Lilith pointed out. “What are you planning now?”
Before Roshin could answer, a cloud of dust rose across the plain and a group of people moved into view. They moved fast, faster than seemed possible. They skimmed along the ground, and only the low angle of the late afternoon sun catching the rising dust of their feet warned Roshin of the approaching strangers.
Talya and Lilith turned to look, but the strangers came so fast no one had a chance to speak before their leader stopped in front of them. A tall woman in light clothing blinked through the dust. “Roshin! What are you doing here?”
Roshin straightened up to face her. “Good afternoon, Aimee. I thought you might be interested to....”
A feral shriek tore from the back of the crowd. Aeifa knocked Allen out of the way and flew at Roshin with her blade bared. It slashed through the air and plunged toward his face. He raised his hand just in time to knock her hand away when Aimee dragged her way from him.
The next instant, Tara rushed forward with her own blade gouging at Roshin. This time, Talya stepped between them and caught Tara’s arm in mid-air, Tara spat in her face and struggled to break free. “I’ll kill him! Let me go!”
Roshin squared his shoulders and braced himself to fight. Aimee and Talya fought the two young women back toward their friends. “No one is killing anyone today.”
“He killed my brother,” Aeifa screeched. “I’ll cut him to pieces.”
“Your brother attacked me first,” Roshin countered. “He would have killed me if I hadn’t defended myself.”
Aeifa would have flown at him again if Taman hadn’t helped Aimee hold her back. His presence calmed her, and she didn’t fight as hard. Allen put his arms around Tara, and she stopped fighting, too. He murmured in Tara’s ear. “Let’s get out of here.”
Aimee shook her head. “Roshin went a long way out of his way to find us. At least listen to what he has to say.”
“I’m not listening to anything he has to say,” Tara snapped.
Aimee faced him. “What can we do for you, Roshin? What brings you all the way out here?”
Tara interrupted with an accusing finger extended toward Lilith. “And I’m not having anything to do with her, either.”
“This is the reason I came all the way here to find you, Aimee,” Roshin said. “I thought you might like to meet her. This is Lilith.”
Aimee’s eyes widened. Lilith stiffened and set her jaw, but said nothing. She glared at Aimee and the young travelers through her one good eye. “Just so you know, I didn’t ask to come here.”
Tara chopped the air with her hand. “Get her out of here. We won’t have anything to do with her....” She rounded on Roshin. “Or you. You killed my cousin. We should cut you down right now for what you did.” She turned back to Lilith. “I don’t care who you are. I’ll kill you the first chance I get.”
Taig stepped forward and laid his hand on her arm. “Calm down, Tara. Just listen to what he has to say. He must have some reason to bring her here after what he did to Ari.”
Roshin swept the group with his eyes. “I didn’t come back here to beg your forgiveness for killing your idiot cousin, if that’s what you think. I won’t apologize for winning a fight to the death. I don’t give a hoot about you. I came here to find Aimee.”
Aeifa and Tara surged forward again, but the others restrained them. “Just tell us why you are here, Roshin,” Aimee told him.
Roshin took a deep breath. “After these kids left our village...”
“We aren’t kids,” Taig growled. “We’re the same age as you.”
Roshin shrugged. “After you left, I remembered something you said about the Outliers’ camp. I recognized your description of it, and I went to have a look for myself. They’re camped at Rolling Ridges, which is close enough to Avitras territory to make an incursion across our border. They’ve acquired Ursidrean weapons. They’re planning to attack our territory.”
Aimee frowned. “Does Piwaka know about this?”
“I explained it to him, but he wouldn’t listen to me,” Roshin replied. “That’s why I had to go see for myself, and I was right. Now Lilith has confirmed my suspicions, but Piwaka only cares about the peace agreement. He’s left our border unguarded.”
Tara burst out, “That doesn’t mean....”
Roshin rounded on her. “I found something else when I went to investigate the Outlier camp. I found Lilith tied unconscious between two trees and beaten black and blue so she could barely stand. Does that sound familiar?”
Tara opened her mouth and closed it again without saying anything.
Roshin nodded. “After she helped you escape, she got caught. The guards she drugged woke up and told what happened, and the Outliers prepared to sacrifice her in your place. That’s what they would have done if I hadn’t taken her with me.”
Aimee studied Lilith with a curious expression on her face. “I’m so sorry for everything that happened to you. You’ve had a rough time. I would do anything to make it right again.”
Lilith pulled her head down between her shoulders. “I don’t need your sympathy. I heard how you and Piwaka denied me.”
“I never denied you, Lilith.” Aimee’s lips quivered. “And Piwaka doesn’t even know you exist.”
Lilith turned away.
Aimee took a step toward her. “Look at me, Lilith.”
Lilith glared at her and blinked away the sting of moistur
e in her eyes.
“I’m your mother, Lilith.” Aimee’s voice quavered. “We searched for you for over a year, but we never found any trace of you. I thought you were dead, or I would never have left you out there all this time. I would never have given up searching for you if I thought you were alive.” She held out her arms to Lilith.
Lilith compressed her lips and didn’t move. “I’m not a baby anymore. You can’t erase the years that have gone by with a pat on the back.”
“I’m not trying to erase them,” Aimee replied. “I only want to welcome you back. Let me take you home.”
“I have no home,” Lilith muttered. “I’m an Outlier.”
Taig interrupted. “You were never an Outlier. If you were, you wouldn’t have saved my life.”
Lilith shot him a nasty glance and looked away just as fast. “You don’t want to take me home. I killed my brother and ate him.”
Aimee smiled. “No, Lilith. You didn’t.”
Lilith’s head whipped around.
Aimee laughed out loud, but tears welled up in her eyes. “Your brother is alive.”
Lilith’s shattered mouth fell open. “But I was there. I took part in the feast.”
“You must have wandered away from your home in Lycaon territory,” Aimee began.
“Lycaon!” Lilith exclaimed. “I’m Avitras.”
Aimee shook her head. “I’ve given birth once in my life, to twins, a brother and a sister. Their father was a Lycaon warrior, and he took them to live with him in the mountains along the Lycaon norther border. When they first learned to run, the little girl disappeared, but her brother remained at home. He’s lived with his father all these years.”
“That’s impossible,” Lilith countered. “I was there. I watched them kill him, and then I sat down with them and shared the feast.”
Aimee took Lilith’s hand. “It must have been horrific for you then, and you’ve been living with the guilt all these years, but that boy who died was not your brother. Some other people must have taken you with them to the Outliers, and the boy they sacrificed must have belonged to them. He must have resembled your brother, and you replaced your brother with him.”
Lilith shook her head in wordless astonishment.
Aimee waved toward the group of travelers behind her. The group parted. Taman and Allen stood aside, and a young boy barely taller than Aimee’s waist stepped forward. “This is your brother. His name is Sarai.”
The boy stopped next to Aimee, and she laid her arm around his shoulders. She hugged him against her side and petted the side of his face.
Lilith stared at him. “How...how is this possible?”
“I can only assume you developed faster than he did,” Aimee told her. “Angondran children develop faster, so he must have more human genes than you.”
Lilith couldn’t take her eyes off the boy. He stared back at her with a child’s direct curiosity. Then he smiled at her. Lilith’s mouth contorted in a painful spasm. Then she turned her back on everyone.
Aimee sighed and gave Sarai another squeeze around his shoulders. She nodded to Roshin and turned around to face the young travelers. “We’ll camp here tonight.”
Taig looked around. “There’s no shelter or water anywhere nearby.”
Aimee pointed to the west. “There’s water down in the canyon, and the sky is clear. We’ll be all right for one night. We can burn the scrub bushes down by the stream.”
Chapter 2
The travelers sat around their meager fire and ate the provisions Donen gave them in Harbeiz. He welcomed them back with the greatest hospitality, especially Taman and Allen, but he could only shake his head when they carried out their plan. The Ursidreans’ technology could not locate their parents’ tracking devices anywhere on the surface of Angondra.
“They can’t have just disappeared,” Tara insisted. “They must be somewhere.”
“Unless the devices were destroyed somehow,” Donen suggested.
“What could have destroyed them like that?” she asked.
Donen looked down at the floor. “I can’t think of anything. Maybe if they’d fallen into a volcano, we would lose their signal. Or if they were struck by lightning, I can’t think of anything else that would do it.”
“Emily and Faruk wouldn’t both have been struck by lightning,” Taig pointed out. “And a fissure couldn’t have opened up in the surface of the planet and swallowed the whole village, man woman and child. We would have noticed that.”
Donen couldn’t look at any of them. “Stranger things have happened.”
Taig and Tara exchanged glances. “There must be some other explanation. We’ll just have to keep searching.”
“Stay here,” Donen urged. “I’ll see to it you have everything you need until we find your parents.”
“I’m not staying here,” Reina broke in. “I’m going back to my own people.”
“You can’t go alone,” Aimee told her. “You’d never find the way, and the Outliers have penetrated into that part of the country. They would recapture you.”
“If you two are going,” Taig added, “I’m going, too. I don’t want to stay here, and I don’t like the idea of you two traveling through Outlier territory alone.”
“There is no Outlier territory,” Aimee told him. “Its Ursidrean territory, but the Outliers will be looking for you there.”
“If Taig is going,” Tara interrupted, “I’m going, too. I’m not letting what happened to Ari and Aeifa happen to us.”
“If you two are going,” Allen told her, “we’re all going. We won’t be split up now.”
“You’re making a big mistake,” Donen countered. “You’ll be much safer here. I’ve arranged for Taman and Allen to go into the army, and...”
“I’m not going into the army,” Taman returned. “I’m going to be a doctor like my father.”
“Your father wasn’t a doctor,” Aimee reminded him. “He was a medic with the border patrol.”
“He had all the qualifications of a doctor,” Taman replied. “And I’ve already arranged with the Labor Pool to enter the medical center to receive my training.”
Donen squared his shoulders. “Then you have no reason to go traipsing across the world searching for a needle in a haystack.”
Taig swept the group with his eyes. Then he faced Donen. “We can’t rest until we find out what happened to our parents. None of us can move on with our lives until we get them back.”
“You might never get them back,” Donen pointed out. “I lost my parents in the war when I was younger than you. You’ve just got to set it aside and get on with your lives.”
“If we find out they’re all dead,” Taig replied, “we’ll move on from there, but we can’t do that until we know for sure.”
“You might never find out what happened to them,” Aimee reminded him. “You might search for the rest of your lives, the way I did with Lilith, and come up with nothing.”
Taig nodded. “That is possible.”
Donen frowned under his heavy eyebrows. “You really aren’t going to give this up, are you?”
“Not yet,” Taman replied. “We have some more searching to do, and Reina wants to go home. We’ll take her there, and then we’ll decide on our next move.”
Donen couldn’t do anything more to dissuade them. He couldn’t do anything but supply them with provisions and send them on their way. The group headed back down the steep mountains, leaving behind the security of Harbeiz, into unknown wilderness crawling with Outliers hoping to recapture them.
Taig glanced back. Aimee stood in close conversation with Donen on the observation platform. “What do you think they’re talking about?”
Allen looked over his shoulder. “Maybe she’s telling him she’ll take Reina home and then bring us back.”
“Why don’t they take us seriously?” Tara asked. “They think we’re crazy to keep looking for our parents.”
“You
gotta admit,” Taman pointed out, “it looks pretty hopeless after the tracking technology turned up nothing.”
Allen rounded on him. “How can you say it’s hopeless? How can you give up so easily?”
“I didn’t say it’s hopeless,” Taman replied. “I only said it looks that way.”
“It doesn’t look that way to me,” Allen muttered.
“How do you explain it, then?” Taman asked.
Tara answered. “The tracking devices could have been disabled somehow. There could have been a solar flare, or a power failure, or maybe the tracking devices don’t work so far outside Ursidrean territory. There could be a dozen explanations why we couldn’t detect them.”
Allen shook his head. “You saw the read-outs. The tracking devices of the surveying teams along the border were still operational. A solar flare or power failure would have knocked them all out. And the tracking devices are designed to work all over the planet. Our computers can detect them even when they aren’t functioning. Those tracking devices no longer exist. Our parents disappeared off the face of the planet. If I thought it was possible, I would say some alien species came along and transported them in a group to a space ship and flew away with them.”
“You mean like the Romarie?” Tara asked.
Aeifa threw up her hands. “This is nuts. No aliens flew away with them.”
“That’s as likely as a fissure opening up and swallowing them,” Taig returned.
Tara and Allen sat together now on one side of the fire, and Aeifa and Taman sat on the other with their arms around each other. They didn’t talk about the possibilities anymore. Aimee’s presence, and now these strangers, quashed all conversation. None of them would talk to Roshin at all.
Tara settled into the crook of Allen’s arm and rested her head on his shoulder. Roshin watched them. Then he scooted over closer to Talya. He whispered in her ear, and she smiled and nodded. They joined hands and rose off the ground together.
The New Angondra Complete Series Page 18
