“Time-bend now, Selina.”
“Yeah, we’ll figure out who’s on which side, and who we should try to contact.”
So I did my thing and they worked. By the time they were satisfied with what they’d accomplished and told me to release my hold, Coreg’s pale green uniform wasn’t so pale. It had darkened considerably, not recycling his perspiration. Yuk.
Coreg uploaded coordinates and other data unto his thumb ring. We had a long list of who was playing both sides, government and resistance, and who was not.
“And the new plan is …?” I held my hands out, palms up.
Coreg gave his ring a final twist and said, “We wait.”
“Great plan.” I swished a hand through my hair and pulled at a few tangles. “What are we waiting for?”
“We’ll monitor news feeds. Once it’s discovered that your vehicle has crashed and you two are missing, we’ll see if my father reports that I was with you. Then we’ll know if we can trust him or not.”
“You don’t know if you can trust your own father?”
Coreg ignored my question. “If the First Commanders decree that your brother go to Gleezhe with the purlass capsule you’ve built that’s one thing, but if they decide to use him as … as a father … then our plan changes and we’ll need to gather up all the females intended for population regrowth.”
I don’t know how many times I said “wait, wait, wait” while I processed this incredible piece of news. When I had first entered the girls’ pod after I arrived on Klaqin I’d been reminded of a harem, but seriously? Renzen and Makril and Sama? Set apart for reproduction services? Of course that wasn’t what was foremost in my mind. But I couldn’t in a million years think of my little brother as a stud. His voice hadn’t completely changed; there wasn’t a whisker on his chin; I didn’t know if he even noticed girls yet.
“Selina,” Alex said, “it’ll be all right.” He hummed a simple melody and took it a few bars longer than usual. I stared at him, listening and scrunching my lips to one side, thinking, trying to get a grip.
Coreg clucked and gave me a push. Alex grabbed his arm and stepped between us. Whoa, testosterone standoff.
“Okay, okay, okay,” I said, “what’s the rest of the plan? We’ll get the girls and what? Keep them away from my brother?”
“Marcum trained them, didn’t he? We’ll be a small band, but with our pacing and your bending, we should be an effective force. Especially if we bring along the Earth ships and their weapons.”
“You mean an out and out attack on Gleezhe?”
“Right.”
That didn’t jibe with everything else, but my head was swimming, and though I would never completely trust Coreg I did trust Alex and he was standing there nodding his head as if he grasped every angle … so … all right, we could wait.
Wasn’t long. Maybe another single Klaqin time unit, an hour or an hour and a half Earth time. A patrol ship that monitored land vehicles reported our transport disabled halfway between Plickkentrad and Cormenor, no signs of life. Coreg played aloud every report as they came in at one unit intervals the rest of this endless Klaqin day. Most were robotic-sounding and full of numbers, which he had to translate for me. Apparently the evacuation exodus was reversing and people were returning to the cities. He jumped to his feet when his father’s voice came through, directing an order to this very resistance command center. But Coreg thought it was a code.
“Should we respond? Tell him we’re here?” Alex said.
“Not until we figure out the code and know exactly what he’s ordering.”
“Is it recorded? Can you play it again?”
“Of course.” Coreg took one of the thin plaques he’d examined before and wiped it with his arm. He flicked out a pointed nub on the underside of his thumb ring, ready to write on the plaque. With his other hand he pressed a couple of controls and Merlig’s voice boomed into the room again, slower this time. Coreg deftly wrote the message onto the plaque, right hand spread over it like he was performing an incantation, the tiny ring point working like a pen. When he finished he slid the plaque onto the top of one of the trays and an image of what he wrote projected into the air in front of us.
Hieroglyphics, I thought. Alex concentrated on the pattern and asked Coreg questions about words and individual letters and if there were homonyms—explanation made and homonyms dismissed—or if any of the words were out of order. No again.
As far as it made sense to me the message I heard was an order to keep the club closed until further notice.
“You know,” I said, “maybe it’s not a code. Maybe it’s exactly what it sounds like: an order not to let the returning citizens resume this abominable practice.”
They ignored me. I huffed. I hadn’t survived being ignored on Earth to travel a zillion miles and be ignored some more. “Guys, listen. Merlig obviously expected someone to be here to get that message. We should be thinking about why no one is here and—”
I didn’t get to finish because another very loud clang preceded a new alert. A deep male voice provided stilted updates on population movement, missing persons—us, Coreg included—and safety measures.
Alex nodded at Coreg. “Your father must have reported that you were with us. So that means we can trust him, right?”
There was no way to interpret Coreg’s face. He held his emotions tighter than a new uniform, but there was no misinterpreting his answer. “No.”
“Why not? He’s probably worried about you.”
“No. If we could trust him he would have sent his own people to look for me, but he released my name as missing with you and therefore he betrayed me.”
“I don’t get it,” Alex took said, “why is that a betrayal?”
I watched Coreg’s face for clues. He held everything in, his expression blank. The moment stretched without my help.
“It is forbidden to raise your voice to your father.”
The undercurrent to that simple statement gave me goosebumps.
He went on, “After my mother died I got into shouting matches with Merlig. I blamed him for her death—I still do—and I hated him for being different, having one arm. Every other boy I knew had a father who was whole or no father at all if he’d died in the Wars. That would have been preferable to me. But my father became a ruler and everyone knew I was his son. I ran away.” Coreg glanced at us. I kept my face as slack as possible and waited.
“You might as well sit down. It’s a long story.” He took one of the chairs and Alex and I sat together on another. “You saw the basket of animated toys? I didn’t just bring them home. I stole them. I used my time-pacing ability when I ran away. It was very useful for surviving and made thievery quite simple. Toys were simple to pilfer. So were arc-guns and spikers. The punishment, since I was a child of barely fourteen solar orbits, was prison or service. If I’d been older…” he paused and I imagined a more permanent punishment.
“Anyway, the First Commanders were made aware of my time-pacing and I was sent to pace for the pilots who made runs to the dark side of Klaqin.”
I guess my eyebrows shot skyward at that part. He answered my unspoken question with a brief summary of what it was like to time-pace for those sent to mine frozen elements in the dark and super cold areas beyond the Edges. It sounded unbearable.
“My father intervened and brought me home, but he kept the stolen toys around to remind me that I could be sent back at his command. He taught me everything he had learned in the Academy.”
“Is that where he lost his arm?” Alex asked.
“No.”
I couldn’t help interjecting a question, “I know from my grandfather’s stories that he was born with only one arm, but how did he make it into the Academy that way?”
“He wasn’t a Commander there; he was an instructor. He rose up to be consultant to Commander Dace and then ruler of Cormenor until my mother died. Then he was sent to rule Plickkentrad. And I ran away.”
“And you were sent into s
ervice until he brought you back. Then what?” I said, trying to get the story back on track. I imagined a small anguished emoji.
“Merlig—my father—taught me a lot so I’d be the next ruler someday and not have to go to the Academy. I used to roam around Plickkentrad and rule it in my own way.” He stopped to laugh, but there was no humor in it. “You could say that I was forced to join the space school. Quite suddenly.”
We sat there mulling that over, waiting for him to finish, but he said no more. Alex asked, “So, back to my original question: why is it a betrayal for your father to tell anyone that you were with us?”
Before Coreg could cluck or speak another clang cut the air and the same low voice came through an invisible speaker to report that Coreg had been found.
“What?” Alex said in two musical syllables.
“That’s my father’s doing. See? A betrayal.” Coreg checked his thumb ring. “Huh, remotely disabled. Shouldn’t be long now.”
“What shouldn’t be long?”
“Our capture.” He made a guttural noise, rendered more expressive by Klaqin phlegm in his throat. “My capture, at least. You could hide.”
“Hide—?” Alex broke off and turned his head abruptly toward the door. I hadn’t heard anything, but an instant later the door burst open and a gust of sooty air rolled into the room. Coreg’s head swiveled like a compass needle trembling toward true north. He produced an arc-gun in the smoothest cowboy move I’d ever seen, but he let it drop when four odd-looking Klaqins entered the room.
No, I take that back. They had to be Gleezhians with their faces shaved, day old stubble up to their lower eyelids. The weapon packs on their backs were obvious camouflage for their humps. Of course it was their hands that gave them away.
I heard the thump of Coreg’s arc-gun hit the floor. I continued my time-bending … just because I could. In the very opposite reaction of my life long avoidant personality behavior I studied their eyes. Wild donkeys, I thought. They’d taken Coreg by surprise though obviously he and Alex heard them before I did. Now weaponless, the great and wonderful white warrior was powerless to save us.
All right, we’d better get on with this. I released my hold only to be nearly blown away by all these males panting like dogs. At first I thought both Coreg and Alex had gone into time-pacing, the rush of air was so great, but that wasn’t it.
“Blerf canna biotti,” the ugliest Gleezhian said, moving his free arm in expressive gestures, making grimy dust stir from his black cape.
“Tubah,” Coreg answered in the negative.
I looked to Alex and he shrugged. “Accent.”
Coreg clarified, “His Klaqin is poor, but he’s saying they want our help in the revolution to free the Gleezhian refugees.”
All that in three mispronounced words and a bit of sign language? Clever Coreg. He relaxed and for a person who was being held at gun point he bravely retrieved his arc-gun. I held my breath, but the Gleezhians allowed him to pick it up, lowering their own weapons as if they were surrendering to us.
“You still have time to hide. These males aren’t here to capture anyone. They want help getting back to their planet.”
I found myself wondering what Marcum would do. Why he popped into my head was anybody’s guess. I couldn’t shake it though and I expected a vision or at least a déjà vu moment.
The Gleezhian spoke again, holding gnarly fingers up to hide half his face as if showing Coreg who he was if he’d still been bearded.
I never expected Coreg to swear in English, but he did and continued in English so there was no chance they’d understand. “I know this male. Marcum and I infiltrated their selco in the farming region. We spent a few double-moons there collecting data. Of course our disguises made us look more like Gleezhians than theirs make them look like us. He has recognized me now by my scent.” He huffed a laugh and grinned at the reddened faces in front of him. In Klaqin he said “Hotah” and finished with a choppy string of Gleezhian sounds. Their unintelligible responses included two unmistakable syllables: Mar-cum.
“You’d think they would have stuffed their hands in five-finger gloves,” Coreg said to us before mixing a sequence of words from two languages and gesturing strenuously. He reminded me of how a poor student might use Spanglish to try to make himself understood with limited vocabulary.
He struck his chest. The four mimicked the move, turned and marched themselves out the door.
“Come on,” Coreg said. “I’ve made a deal.”
CHAPTER 12
#Visions
GOLD AND BROWN brush crackled beneath our feet and misty drops glittered on the heads and capes of the Gleezhians we followed. Alex pointed my attention upwards to the sky where two full black-lined moons crossed paths. Klaqin’s steady sun made the moons’ edges glow like an eclipse. I’d seen this on the few times I’d been outside during a misting, but this time there was an ominous portent. Not that I’m superstitious, because I’m not.
There were a number of transportation vehicles lined up outside a short distance away. They looked like bundled porta-potties, kind of like a chariot or carriage designed by someone who thought you could get more passengers on if they had to stand instead of sit. One vehicle had an animal harnessed to the front. Horse power, or rather xanx power. But this xanx was larger than the singing kind that prowled around me at the art ritual before I was kidnapped—seemed like so long ago.
“Those destined for death, to death,” Alex quoted, “those for starvation, to starvation, those for captivity, to captivity.”
“Those aren’t song lyrics,” I whispered. “And they’re pretty disconcerting.” Where was the Alex I knew? The guy who always hummed an encouraging note and buoyed my spirits?
“No, not lyrics. They’re from a book I wish I’d finished reading.”
I wondered at that. Had there been a book among the data in the technicians’ room? Probably.
I walked a little slower and tugged on Alex’s elbow. I mouthed my simple escape plan: Let’s. Get. Out. Of. Here.
I quirked my eyes and my head in various directions trying to make him understand that we could slip off in one of three directions and be out of sight of Coreg and his Gleezhian friends before they turned around, especially if he paced.
Alex shot me down with a slow wrinkling of his forehead and a negative shake.
Crap.
We reached the strange transportation. The beast—a white xanx—was hobbled with a strap around its back two feet. Its wide-set eyes flicked over us and settled on one particular Gleezhian. Faint reddish marks rippled along its back where the driver must have hit it. I recognized the scent in the air: perfumed fur, calmingly pleasant. The xanx struggled to stand, splitting the still air with a cry as shrill as a whistle and as sorrowful as a donkey’s bray. Alex’s fingertips found mine.
Coreg spoke to the leader before telling us to climb into separate balas. He motioned to the individual upright coffins. Balas, he called them. I returned Alex’s smirk; we knew a kid in chess club named Bala.
I opened a skinny door, stepped in and closed it. My unit had hand holds which I grabbed right away. Good thing, too, because the carriage rocked as the others got in and it was scarcely a moment later that I heard the gnarly-handed Gleezhian shout at the xanx to stay down.
There were tiny windows to see out each side. There was no glass or purlass in them so I could clearly see and hear Coreg conversing with the Gleezhian.
“We hoped for peace,” the Gleezhian said in pretty fair Klaqin as he unhobbled the creature. “Treaties break. Now our hope is in Marcum.”
Marcum … right. I may not be the brightest person on Earth or Klaqin or outer space, but hearing this alien refer to Marcum was a tad unbelievable. I strained to make out the rest of what he said, filling in the mispronounced or missing words as well as I could.
They stood together on the driver’s platform, like chariot drivers. The Gleezhian used the hobbling strap like a whip and made the xanx pull us, slowly
at first to get started, and then it picked up speed. The animal’s strength bordered on the extreme.
We bumped over rough terrain. I hung on tight and listened to Coreg and the driver. I heard the phrases time of healing, guilt of our fathers, false visions, execution order and delusions of their own minds. I clearly understood Coreg’s responses to him: he affirmed that both planets were having problems with famines. Interesting. Alex had quoted something concerning starvation and captivity. And death.
I pressed my ear through the window, but all I heard was time-bender before they stopped talking. I checked in the other directions. A bright reflection of light bounced off something behind us. Great, we were being followed. Probably it was whoever was sent to capture Coreg or maybe it was a search party sent to find me and Alex.
I didn’t like being cocooned in this burrito, especially when the carriage nearly tipped on a tight curve. We came to a stretch of water or maybe it was purlass. The surface gleamed. At first I thought it was a creek, but as the xanx splashed in and started swimming I could tell it would pass for a decent river. Our contraption floated and we were on the other side and back on land pretty quickly. No doubt Coreg paced.
Another few bumps and turns and the xanx pulled us up a hill then down. And down farther. The light waned, faded, then disappeared completely. We were underground.
The encompassing dark made me feel disembodied, quite alone and prickly with fear.
The carriage jolted to a stop and my door popped open. I wasted no time in stepping out into blackness. And by stepping out I mean tripping and falling to my knees. My hands hit the ground too. Damp, spongy, smelly. My lungs weren’t working nearly as well as my heart. My breaths came in short, labored gasps that I tried to suppress out of fear of detection. I knew there had to be a Klaqin monster in this darkness, eager for human meat.
After a moment my eyes adjusted and it wasn’t so black. With no effort at all my throat let out a squeaky protest. I lifted my fingers from the unknown surface and said, “Eeew.”
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