Having approximately half an hour to arrive at the gate, I turn and watch Dale and Jay. They are sitting two seats behind me, both of them looking skeptical in their own little way. Dale turns and smiles at me, but his grin never reaches his eyes. His cheek is still swollen from Jay’s punch.
Jay, on the other hand, seems totally detached from reality, looking down and gloomy. I can’t help but feel a sudden pinch in my chest right below where my heart is. I turn my head away from him and look through the central window of the shuttle.
The space station is slowly getting bigger, a sign that we’re getting closer. An enormous construct, one that can fit over 20.000 class 3 spaceships—which amounts to a lot of crew members—has all its main gates open. Countless vehicles surge out of there like wide rivers of metal. I spend a moment guessing what must be going on in Mosa, but I quickly dismiss those thoughts.
There is nothing we can do to stop the crisis, except maybe continue our investigation. I’m not sure yet, but deep inside me, I feel that everything bad that happened these last weeks has something to do with the cube appearing on Mosa.
I sigh and get on my feet. I need to walk it off, to leave all this stress behind me. I move to the vacant driver’s seat. Silver is still inside the charging hub, but that doesn’t stop her from meddling in.
“Are you okay, Eladia? You seem a bit troubled,” she says.
I know she means well, but sometimes I wish she could stop announcing my feelings up loud.
“I’m fine. And also, you don’t have to talk so loud. Everyone can hear you nice and clear either way.”
Silver doesn’t reply immediately since she’s in the process of recalibrating our route. The traffic is hell and the half an hour ETA can easily become an hour if we’re not careful. Thankfully, Silver is the best pilot.
“I meant to ask you too, Eladia. Are you okay?” Dale’s the one that asks the question now.
Frankly, even a total stranger seems more interested in my feelings than Jay. I’m starting to wish his dark self was here now; at least he always has something to say. I decide to mislead them by bringing up another subject.
“Well, I’m a bit concerned. We don’t have a plan about what we’re going to do next, and the cube hadn't reacted to anything since that night two weeks ago.”
“The cube? What cube? What are you talking about?”
It’s one of those rare moments where I admit to myself that I’ve kinda screwed it up. I only had to keep one secret, and I kinda ended up spilling the beans. Honestly, this whole thing with Jay has messed up my brain.
“The cube’s active,” Jay suddenly mutters.
“What?” Silver and I say at the same time.
Jay finally turns and looks at me. I can’t shake off the feeling that something has changed inside him, a vital part of his personality. Only that now his eyes are not empty like before. There’s concern in there and a feeling I can’t quite place in his limited palette of sentiments.
“As you heard, the cube’s active. It pulsates for some time now, especially when I point it towards the sky.”
Okay, that’s new. I meant to avoid answering their questions, but now I have a million questions myself. But, there’s only one that seems to matter now.
“Why didn’t you say a thing before? We’re in here for an hour now, and you didn’t say a thing. We could have saved some time coming up with a plan or something.”
Jay looks me straight in the eyes. “Because I didn’t want to say something. Also, I didn’t know if we would get out of that place alive. Take your pick, whatever makes you feel better.”
Damn you, Jay. He still thinks I’m just a human trying to patronize him. But I have no time to play family with Jay anymore. The Nusae Artifact has become a priority now after zombies and men with demon masks started appearing.
I crease my brows and turn to face the main console of the shuttle. From that moment on, I start thinking out loud. “The cube pulsating must mean that it transmits some type of signal to somewhere, leading us to the next piece of the puzzle. Before, Silver was able to find the receiver of that signal.”
“Eladia, can I make a suggestion?” she suddenly says.
“Go ahead.”
“I can use the data I’ve collected from the cube and visualize the signal into some sort of a light beam. By using the spaceship’s holographic projectors, we can have a visual of the energy signal as soon as we embark.”
“That would be awesome but for now, can you do me a favor? Do you have enough computing power in this shuttle to calculate the general direction the cube transmits at?”
“Yes. It will take me a minute, though,” she says.
I lean on the main console and check the incoming data from the energy ray the cube emits when I feel a hand gripping my shoulder. For a moment, I wish it’s Jay’s, but I know inside me that I would have known it if it was indeed him.
I turn around, and my heart sinks ever deeper; it’s Dale.
“I know this must be the worst time possible but can you explain to me what’s going on in here? I thought you were going to spend a couple nights in the station, enough for them to bring the crisis under control, and then return to Mosa and continue whatever you were doing. But now...now you sound like you want to leave the planet.”
His eyes, those deep brown holes that swallow your soul, seem concerned. I can almost feel his worry through his hand squeezing my shoulder. He’s afraid.
“I’ll explain everything to you as soon as we get to my spaceship, Dale. Until then, please bear with us. Nowhere it’s safe to discuss what we’re doing, especially inside the space station.”
He nods but I can see that I did nothing to reassure him that everything's gonna be okay. As a matter of fact, I have no idea what am I doing or if we’re gonna survive this adventure. In the end, maybe I avoid answering his questions because I’m afraid what I might hear coming out of my mouth as well.
When everyone gets seated, we’re finally just outside the space station. The number four is flashing on both sides of the entrance. The shuttle is soundproofed, but the chaos out there has its own, distinctive sound, the kind you don’t have to hear to know it’s bad.
People are running up and down through the entrance hallways, trying to serve the demands of the ship owners and not cause panic at the same time. What I see is pent up anxiety blowing up to hysteria. It’s bad out there and for once, I’m happy we’re heading straight to our spaceship.
I turn to say something to the rest of my crew, but right then I see the giant holo-screens on the walls of the space station. A great part of Mosa is already in ruins, fires raging and moving corpses killing people in their path. The crisis is worse than I expected...way worse.
I then realize that Yaerus is the second planet humanity brought to an apocalypse.
Silver finally ends with her calculations. A sign on the intergalactic map appears before me, a large circle born in the middle of a blank area of the Known Universe.
“This can’t be possible!” I say out loud.
“What? What’s wrong?” Dale asks me.
“The cube transmits straight to a lost planet. That means that it transmits straight to nowhere.”
Everyone’s looking at me as I utter those two sentences. Hell, I have no fucking idea what’s going on.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Jay
Our shuttle arrives at the spaceship without any serious implications. I thought I’ve seen everything back in my days, but corpses walking? That’s a first. Or at least feels like that. Something inside me tells me, though, that if I’ve seen corpses walking in my past life, I would certainly remember it.
Back in the hospital, while we were fleeing from the corpses chasing us, they suddenly stopped. It felt like they wanted us to get away. But, since then, everything else went to hell. Mosa has declared that the city is in a state of crisis, the local authorities trying their best to take control the situation.
We were flying fo
r about an hour in that tiny, metal box and it feels good stretching my feet inside the spaceship. Eladia’s spaceship is big, I admit it, but not as big as mine before it crashed on Primordial Earth. What I wouldn’t give to be there now, repairing it. I never did a good job searching for information related to my past while being there.
And that’s Eladia’s fault. She had to come and romance her way inside my head with her damsel-in-distress incidents and those big, brown eyes.
Damn! I hit my fist against the wall. The rush of pain from the punch helps me clear my head a bit. I turn and see the rest of the crew looking at me. Eladia and Silver look scared (Silver not so much since she’s an android and all), but Eladia certainly looks mortified.
She has that look on her face like I’m one of those monsters down on Mosa. To be honest, not knowing what’s hiding inside me, I feel like a monster. But for her to look me like that? It’s even worse than I thought.
In a sense, we’re all still shocked after a horde of corpses chased us, but Eladia seems like she can’t even recognize me.
Dale, the blond doctor, gets closer to me. I look at him sideways; this man smells differently from other men. His scent is fresh and gutsy like it wants to become your friend no matter what. At first, it felt reassuring having him here, but now, I don’t trust him. A man with that strong a scent can’t be trusted.
“Jay, you scared us all down there. It seemed like you couldn’t control yourself, beating those corpses. Is something going on? Do you have something you want to share with us?”
Yes. I want to say how sorry I am that I hurt Eladia, and you, and Silver, and Zan.
Stop the nonsense. You’re an Esuh. They have to respect you.
Here’s that voice again...my voice. Fuck, I’m going crazy. My anger drives me closer to insanity every day.
“No. Nothing. I’ll be in my room,” and I walk away.
I head straight for the elevator at the end of the narrow hallway. I can sense their eyes nailed on my back, but I don’t care. My head feels clouded, and I’m starting to lose consciousness. I’m afraid that something will happen, and I’ll end up waking up like before, in the middle of a blood bath.
The automatic doors open as I stand before them. I walk inside and turn my body around and watch the strange bunch of people standing across the hallway. It’s at that moment that it happens.
My left-hand feels cold and my right hot. I raise both of them and I startle at what I see; a dark substance oozing off my nails, starting to cover my arm while my other arm is burning just by holding the cube, that wretched tool. Before the doors close, I raise my head and see Eladia running towards me.
That’s when the light flashes…
I’m in the middle of a crumbled city with metal and glass buildings, none of them floating in the same peculiar way they floated on Mosa. I look around me and see many of those buildings in ruins. It kinda looks like Primordial Earth, only that it isn’t Primordial anymore.
The sky is strikingly white, so much it makes my eyes hurt.
“Where am I?” I shout at the emptiness of the city.
But nothing. The only thing that replies to me is my voice echoing all the way back to me, just a bit distorted.
Where am I?
Am I….?
I…?
Until it finally vanishes.
I take a deep breath. For some reason, the air is heavy and heady. It’s the same feeling you get on a really hot day. I keep breathing heavily although it doesn’t seem to work anymore. I lean above my knees; every scorching breath feels like the end is a step closer and everything around me is spinning faster.
Follow me.
There it is again. That voice. I raise my head and spot the beautiful lady with the blond hair. The color of her hair matching that of the human doctor, but hers being way more beautiful.
Follow me.
She keeps saying the same thing inside my head in that commanding tone that I can’t refuse. Either way, even if I don’t want to follow her, there’s nothing else I can do. She’s the only one here.
We walk for a while passing in front of many metal boxes with big rubber wheels below them. All of them are black, scorched by flame. But, we don’t stop walking until we arrive at a crossroad with four huge roads intersecting with each other.
Stay.
I stop and look at her standing in the middle of the intersection. A bright column of light falls on her. The sky’s now dark except the spot above her head. The light gets brighter until I can't see anything of her actual figure.
But, as suddenly it appeared, the same way the column of light disappeared. When the bright spot above her vanishes, it leaves behind two humans, one dark and one bright, seeming like a body and it’s shadow at the same time. Only that the shadow has its own body as well.
The dark figure sinks into the ground and disappears, while the bright one falls on its knees and runs away.
I know that the girl was trying to tell me something, but I can’t keep up with her. I feel cold and alone in the middle of this ruined city, and the only thing that comes to my mind is if I’ll ever see her eyes again.
Eladia.
The things I would do if I could see her again.
Suddenly my eyelids get heavy, and I spend a moment breathing in the dark. The cold feeling that covered my hands before has now returned, only that it comes straight from my heart.
A moment later, I’m falling into an endless pit. I stretch my hands above my head, trying to find something to grab onto, but it’s hopeless. I give up and fall to the great darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Eladia
I stumble and fall on the closing doors. I hit my fists on the wall but nothing happens. Jay was just lost in a flood of light and darkness, the light coming from the cube and the darkness from his parasitic transformation.
Dark Jay is once again awake and now, more than ever, I’m not sure how I feel. Even so, it’s never good when he is around, and it’s certainly not good that Dale saw him change. Now, he has to come with us no matter what. He knows way too much to be safe on Yaerus.
Zan and Silver arrive at the same time behind me. The young boy seems overly energetic like he’s happy that Dark Jay woke up, but I don’t share his feelings.
“Eladia, Eladia! You have to follow him,” he says to me.
Why should I be the one that goes after him? He can come and find me himself if he wants. I won’t make the same mistakes I did before. But, something in the boy’s voice draws my interest. Those two were always somehow connected. When the one felt danger, so did the other. And Zan was always somehow protective of Jay and the other way around.
Maybe he’s right.
Dale suddenly appears next to me. He has something to say, I can tell, but I stop him. “Look. I can explain everything to you, but you have to decide now. If you’re staying with us, then you have to stay with us until the end. If you don’t, then it would be better for you if you fled Yaerus for some time, at least until the crisis is sorted. What’s your decision?”
I know that I should have asked him earlier, but he can’t stay on Yaerus, and if he doesn’t want to come with us, then he has to flee the planet until the men with the masks get as far away as possible. Either way, we’re losing time. We should have been on our way to the blank spot for some time now.
I stare him deep in the eyes, and I see he’s trying to avoid my eyes. He’s on a dilemma, a pretty bad one at that. But, as he probably knows already, there’s no time for him to procrastinate.
“Yes or no, Dale?” I push him until the man gives me a slight nod.
At that moment, I hear the engines of the elevator working, only, this time, it’s coming down. Silver gets in front of us and opens her arms wide, ready to use her fencing ability if needed be. I’m not sure that all those precautions are needed, but you never know with him.
When the elevator finally arrives and the doors open, Dark Jay is lying on the floor, and his white hair c
over his face. He’s sleeping.
“Thank god. I couldn’t have handled another monster today,” Silver says in her robotic, emotionless voice.
How she manages to have so much character in her voice without tone variations is above me, but still, she’s my best friend. And I’m certain that this fact says way too much about me.
Dale suddenly rushes forward, pushing Silver and me out of the way. He checks his vitals and opens Jay’s lids to check his irises.
“He’s okay. He has just passed out. Now, is someone going to explain to me what’s going on here?”
We all look at each other, but none of us takes a step forward. Well, I and Silver don’t move. Zan, on the other hand, has other plans.
“This Jay, he’s bad. He kills and frightens Silver and Eladia. But, he talks more. The other Jay is good, but doesn’t like to talk.”
He said everything with such a serious face that I burst out into laughs, thinking that it’s a joke. Dale flashes a wry smile at me, but Zan doesn’t seem to get what’s going on. Soon, my laughter fades and only the memory of it remains as I move to Dale’s side.
“Silver, we’ll move Jay to his room. Can you start the engines and get us on track to the blank spot? Also, let me know when you have an ETA. Okay?”
She nods and disappears behind the closing elevator doors. Now it’s just Dale and me in the small room.
“I’m not sure if I’m doing the right thing telling you what’s going on with Jay, but it’s the best thing I can do to thank you for helping him back at the hospital.”
He looks at me with the same confused eyes as before. He opens his mouth, ready to talk, but I don’t let him. This is a long story he’s asking me to share with him, and that’s without answering all his questions.
Soon, we’re in the middle of the upper floor hallway, him carrying the heavy upper part of Jay’s body, me his feet, talking about my past like we’re old friends.
During our way to his room, I explain to him everything that happened between us during our short adventure on Primordial Earth. I tell him about the dangers of traveling to a primitive planet, and Silver accidentally picking up the signal to his crashed ship. Then, I describe everything in great detail, how I helped him out of the cryo-pod, and how he changed to his dark self to kill those predators.
Jasih: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Àlien Mates Book 2) Page 16
