by Megg Jensen
"You need to engage him to trigger the memories," Dr. Anderson said.
The last thing Rell wanted was to remember the day she'd killed him. Those memories needed to stay buried forever. She wasn't sure she could handle reliving it. Not like this.
"Go ahead, talk to your father." Dr. Anderson pushed the device across the table, closer to Rell.
"I miss you, Dad." Tears welled up in Rell's eyes.
"I miss you, too, sweetie." Her father smiled, his cheeks puffy with mirth.
He had loved her so deeply. Rell's father had treated her not as a child, but as an equal. He'd never spoken down to her or expected any less of her because she was young. They'd had a special bond, one Rell had never experienced with her mother.
"Ask him a question," Dr. Anderson said. "Ask him something you always wanted the answer to, but couldn't get after he was gone."
Only one question sprang to Rell's mind, but she couldn't ask in front of Dr. Anderson. Ever since she’d found out she was part fire dragzhi, she was desperate to know if her father knew. Her mother had suspected something was different about Rell's father the night Rell was conceived. A fire dragzhi had entered his body just as the liquid dragzhi had entered Rell's. Rell wasn't fully human, nor fully dragzhi. She was a hybrid of the two and fit in neither world.
"Go on, Rell. Ask him." Dr. Anderson stared at her. "We can only keep this going for a few minutes unless we add more blood to the device. You're running out of time."
"Did you believe in the Menelewen Dored?" Rell asked.
Her father's head hung, his hands swinging listlessly at his sides. Then he looked up at her, his eyes as gentle as she'd remembered. "I believed in you."
She wanted to ask if he knew she was the Key. Something told her he did. That this was his way of telling her without letting Dr. Anderson know what they were talking about.
"I have to go now, Rell. I love you. Always remember that." Her father's image flickered, then faded away.
Rell stared at her hands as they shook in her lap.
"You have to understand, Rell, your father is gone. We are only accessing memories that passed from him to you. In some ways, all we're doing is connecting you with what's already inside you." Dr. Anderson drew the device back to her side of the table, then carefully deposited it in her bag. "I thought this might make you happy, but I see it's only upset you. I'm sorry."
"I'd like to be alone." Rell stood and tapped the button that opened the door.
Dr. Anderson left her room without another word.
Rell watched her walk down the hall and as soon as she turned a corner, Rell motioned for Cordan to join her in her room. The door closed swiftly behind him.
"Did you discover her intentions?" Cordan asked.
"No. Maybe? I don't know." Rell rested her head in her hands.
"What happened? Can you tell me?"
Rell looked up at the cyborg, swearing for a moment she saw genuine concern in his eyes. "Dr. Anderson took my blood, then injected it into a device. There was a projection of my father. I was able to ask him questions. It was surreal, Cordan. The image looked exactly like I remember him. He spoke to me. Is this normal for everyone who uses it?"
"Not quite. The ancestor coupler is often used for this purpose, but it quickly becomes an addiction. People with unresolved feelings toward dead family members will use the device until they drain themselves. Some have died. Others have been so weakened it has taken them weeks, or months, to recover. The ancestor coupler is only to be used in times of great need. It's an illegal, regulated device. I must wonder, what is she trying to learn from your past? Perhaps you don't have the answers, but your blood does." Cordan knelt next to Rell, patting her hand. "I won't let them hurt you."
Rell attempted a weak smile. "I wanted to ask my father if he knew about my true parentage, but I couldn't do that in front of Dr. Anderson. She may not even know I'm part dragzhi. I need to find a way to get the coupler and use it."
"No." Cordan stood. "That is how the addiction starts. You must not do this again. If she asks, refuse her."
"I thought you and Wade wanted to know what they were up to. Why they lied to me about Phoenix's destruction."
"And now we know. There is something in your past, a secret one of your ancestors kept, that they need. It isn't you. They've made you feel isolated by telling you everyone you love is dead. Your home is gone. That would make anyone wish they could speak with the dead. Because the device only allows you to interact with those of your lineage, you couldn't contact your friends, but the coupler would still offer you some closure." Cordan paced the room in a perfectly human-like way. "I will speak with Wade."
"Thank you. I think I'd like to rest for a bit. Do you mind?" Rell nodded her head toward the door.
"Of course not. I will be outside if you need me." Cordan reached down, cupping Rell's chin with his cool, gentle hand. "We will come up with a plan, I promise."
Cordan left Rell alone in her room with her thoughts.
She closed her eyes to sleep, but in her mind she saw flames dancing over her father's body, taking his very life away. Every breath shallower than the last. His chest heaving. His eyes sad, but unafraid. He reached out to her, as if he knew it wasn't her fault. He still loved her. He always had.
Rell's heart ached. Why had Dr. Anderson opened these wounds Rell had worked so hard to close? Physicians were supposed to heal, not harm. Everything Dr. Anderson had done had only hurt Rell over and over again. The lies about her friends. The lies about Phoenix. Speaking with the memory of her father. None of it made any sense. Wade and Cordan had to be right. There was something valuable Rell knew, or had access to, that had led the doctor and the admiral to use her in this way.
She wished she could give it to them. Then maybe they would send her home to her friends and the planet she loved.
The doorbell rang, and Rell sighed. Who was it now? Couldn't they leave her alone?
"Rell, it's me, Joshua. I need to speak with you. Please let me in." His words barely made it through the door and to her ears. Joshua was the last person she wanted to talk to. If he would just leave her alone...
The bell rang again.
Rell stalked over to the door, pushing the button to open it. Cordan stood between Joshua and Rell.
"I can make him go away," Cordan said.
"No, it's okay. Let him in."
Cordan sidestepped as Joshua stormed past him into Rell's room. "I need to talk to you."
"What is it?" Rell said as she closed the door.
Joshua knelt down on one knee, his head bowed.
Not this again. He had to stop worshipping her.
"I had a vision," Joshua said. "And in it, you died. I have come to protect you from all that seek to harm you. You are the Key, a being of the gods."
Rell yanked on Joshua's arm. "No, I'm just me. A buried girl. Your vision was one of paranoia. Now stand up."
Joshua rose to his feet, slowly, his eyes locked on hers. "It was a true vision. I need to protect you."
"No, you don't," Rell said.
Behind them, the door opened on its own, and a high-pitched whistle rang out in the quiet. Joshua leaped in front of Rell, knocking her backward. He toppled to the floor like a felled tree in the forest. Rell crawled to Joshua's side. She wrapped her arms around him, pressing her hands on the wound in his chest. Blood gushed between her fingers, warm and sticky.
"Cordan!" Rell screamed. She looked out the doorway and glimpsed the crown of Cordan's head on the ground.
22
Torsten couldn't believe what he was seeing. The barges the tark drove around the desert in a tornado of sand, rusted and decaying, hadn't prepared him for the pristine, spherical spaceship the tark kept hidden deep inside one of the mountains.
"Pick up your jaw, big brother," Leila said, pushing up his chin. "You're embarrassing the rest of us."
"I've never seen anything like it," Torsten said. "I've never even conceived of such a thing."
"I can't wait to find out!" Malia held her hands in fists at her sides, like a child who was eager to open a gift, but knew they had to wait.
"Hey," Leila stood in front of them, her arms crossed over her chest, "don't get too excited. We're about to board that thing with thousands of dead bodies. I don't know about you, but I am not prepared to be social with a bunch of zombies."
Torsten ignored her and took a few steps closer to the ship, reaching out with one tentative hand. He turned to Denestra. "Tell us about your ship."
"It is too complicated for your human brains to understand. Do not ask again!" Denestra floated past Torsten and into the ship. "We will board as soon as the others are rounded up. Then we will launch. The sooner we find Rell, the better."
Torsten followed Denestra through the entryway. The ship was made of some kind of translucent material, similar to glass. Though he kept his mouth closed, Torsten's eyes grew to wide globes, mirroring the shape of the tark ship. It rose so high, he couldn't see the ceiling. A floor made of metal ran along the bottom of the orb and in the center stood a control panel with a screen. He turned to his friends, who had slipped in behind him.
"Will we all be stuck in the bottom together?" Leila gazed upward. "I don't want to be that close to the dead. I shared a room with Andessa's..." she took a shuddering breath, "body. I don't want to do it again."
"You don't have to go," Malia nudged Leila back toward the door. "Stay behind."
Leila pushed back, her eyes on fire. "No. I'm going with Torsten. Why don't you stay?"
"I'm not the one who's afraid." Malia reached for her shotgun.
"I'm not afraid." Leila glared at Malia, but Torsten could see his sister's hesitation. Her shoulders were slightly hunched, not pulled back in her normal proud stance. Her hands shook at her sides.
"Let's not do this." Torsten rested a hand on Leila's shoulders, pulling her gently away from Malia.
"You do not have to worry about your precious standing space." Denestra floated over to them. "The others will be there." It pointed up.
"What, are they just going to float?" Rutger asked.
"That's what Isobel did, remember?" Torsten said.
"Great. Thousands of dead bodies are floating above us in a giant bubble. It's like one of my crazy nightmares." Rutger shook his head.
Malia took his hand. "I'll protect you."
"We'll protect each other," he said with a dashing smile.
"Just no repeats of your make-out session like when you thought we were going to die in the shuttle." Torsten rolled his eyes, trying to make light of the situation and take their minds off the horrors they were facing to rescue Rell.
One by one, the tark floated in, each holding hands with a human—a dead human. Though now they were all animated, their eyes open, mouths smiling, and limbs floating as if they were underwater.
Torsten and his friends moved away from the entrance, giving the aliens and their human revenants space to move. They floated up toward the top of the orb until all Torsten could see were the bottoms of their feet, slowly replaced by layers upon layers of more tark and revenants.
Torsten tried not to think of how old, despite their appearance, some of the bodies were. The humans had been on Phoenix for two hundred years. Had the tark stolen all of their bodies? And how? They had all been buried underground.
"We tunnel underneath your cemeteries and harvest the bodies from below." Denestra sneered, as if reading Torsten's mind. "That way you were not alerted to our presence. We are most ingenious."
"Why did you take them?" Malia asked. "Obviously, you were getting along fine without our dead bodies before we got to this planet."
"We used animals before you came. Their bodies were not as sturdy. They fell apart too quickly. Yours proved to be quite hardy, particularly once we began to embalm them. Humans bodies can stay fresh for a very, very long time." Denestra motioned to the corpses suspended above them. "See, they look just like you!"
Leila shuddered. Torsten wrapped an arm around his sister's shoulder, but she shifted out of his reach, turning to the outside of the orb, resting one hand on the clear exterior. Her lips moved, but he couldn't make out what she was saying. She turned back to them. "Are we almost ready to leave?"
The space above was filling quickly, bodies packed together.
"Yes. Only a hundred or so more," Denestra said. "Then we launch. I suggest you stand close together. It may be a bumpy ride until we are in orbit. A little absorption can be good. We are sensitive creatures."
Torsten held in a snort. Sensitive creatures? They looked like porcelain, but he had yet to see so much as a chip in any of them.
The parade of tark and revenants ended soon enough, the dirty bare feet of the humans floated just inches above Torsten and Rutger's heads.
"Hold on!" Denestra yelled. The message was repeated by each level of tark until Torsten could hear only a whisper of it far above.
Malia wrapped her arms around Rutger's waist. "I hope you don't mind if I hang on?"
"Of course, it's fine since I already planned on hanging on to you." Rutger leaned down, kissing Malia on the top of her head.
The tender moment made Torsten more determined to find Rell. He held out his arms to his sister, but Leila braced herself against the exterior wall. Torsten shuffled next to her, doing the same.
The orb shook as Denestra engaged the controls. At least, Torsten assumed that was what it was doing as it ran its fingers over the transparent wall. There were no mechanical controls to be seen, nor did the wall change colors to indicate touchscreen activation.
Whatever it was doing, it seemed to work. The orb rose and floated across the cavern until moonlight streamed in from the outside. The orb emerged fully from the side of the mountain, then sped upward toward the sky.
Torsten swallowed hard, keeping the food in his stomach down. The sensation was worse than when he'd teleported with Rell to the dragzhi ship. They'd spun, but at least they'd had each other to hold on to. Torsten felt himself lift along with the ship, and his hair touched the feet of the body above him. He tried not to think about the corpse on his head and closed his eyes.
Rutger threw up next to him, his vomit splashing over Torsten's shirt, dribbling down his pants to his boots.
"Sorry." Rutger wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Be glad you weren't making out with Malia when it happened." Torsten winked at his friend, attempting to keep his bile where it belonged.
"Do you travel like this often?" Malia yelled to Denestra.
"No. I have never flown this ship. In fact, this is the first time we have used it for thousands of years. I hope it takes us into space without exploding into millions of pieces." Denestra ran its hands over the clear wall, and the ship accelerated faster, hurtling them through the outer reaches of the atmosphere.
23
Torsten sank to the floor of the orb as it stabilized. Space. Surrounded by a vast blackness, faraway stars, and the faint light of two moons peeking out from the opposite side of Phoenix, more than anything Torsten was relieved he was still alive.
The tark didn't seem to care their ship was old and untested. Panic belonged only to the humans. The living ones. Those above blinked and moved, but Torsten knew it was only thanks to the tark holding their hands. He didn't want to think about the dead, but he couldn't stop. How many faces would he recognize? Would he feel the pain of their deaths all over again? He'd barely had time to mourn his friends, and now he'd joined their murderers on a quest to save the woman he loved.
"Torsten?" Malia rested a hand on his shoulder.
He slowly lowered his head, meeting her gaze. "Yeah?"
"What do we do next?" Rutger asked.
Leila stood next to them, her eyes expectant.
Torsten stared back, at a loss for words. It was a valid question. One he couldn't answer.
Denestra pushed aside a few bodies to float beside Torste
n. "The answer is obvious. Next, we find Rell.”
"Where?" Leila asked. "We've come all the way up here. We're the only ship I can see. Do you want me to ask a space rock? How about one of the moons?"
"Insolent human. We ask them." Denestra pointed outside the ship.
Torsten squinted, trying to see something, anything. "Who?"
"Them!" Denestra yelled. "Don't you see it?"
Torsten held back the urge to scream. "I don't see anything." He turned to his friends. "Do you?"
Everyone shook their heads, just as confused as he was.
A body floated down next to them, a tark clutching her hand, dressed in clothes Torsten recognized, though they were torn in many places. It was Archer. The woman who had asked him to give her a chance when he came back from helping Rell. She'd felt something for him, and maybe he had liked her, too.
An arm lifted, and a finger pointed. "If you look closely, you will see space is distorted in that direction. Hiding there is a dragzhi ship. It has folded space and hidden within it," Archer’s dead body said, her lips slack.
Torsten followed the tip of her finger, finally seeing the strange distortion.
He turned back to Denestra, trying to ignore the dead woman who'd spoken. That's all she was now. A body. The Archer he'd known was gone.
"Do you know how to contact them?" Torsten asked.
"Yes, we have communication systems." Denestra waved its arm in an arc. "Can't you see the gloriousness of our ship?"
Torsten looked at the ship again. He could only see the clear orb filled with bodies. No wires. No electronics. He had no idea how the ship propelled itself, nor how the tark controlled it.
"Stupid humans. Your technology is so basic, you could never understand ours." Denestra's eyes glowed red. "Yes, we can communicate with the dragzhi. We could blow up their ship if we chose. But today, we will not. Today, we will take their knowledge and use it for our needs."
Denestra held its hands up, and the giant orb hurtled toward the wrinkle in space. Torsten braced himself against the wall as Archer's body slammed into his. He closed his eyes, trying to ignore her, as her shoulder pressed against his spine. It's not her, he repeated over and over in his mind.
