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Taelen didn’t respond and headed out of the room instead.
“Let’s see what else they hide here,” he said while marching towards the sealed door at the back.
As she complied, Maeve glanced at her scanner, looking baffled. Peering at it explained the source of her confusion. The person she’d seen on the scanner was still in the basement, but this time with Tedrik and the two Syllens. So where did that shuttle come from?
All such thoughts vanished the moment she unlocked the secured room. Unlike the other rooms, this one spread over two stories, allowing it to contain five giant Kandra trees at their full height.
Or rather two of them…
The other three had been beheaded or amputated from multiple limbs. One of them appeared to be dead. All the others—including the two that remained whole—were clearly sick. It wasn’t just that they weren’t in the right kind of soil and weren’t receiving the proper amount of sunlight. They’d been subjected to brutal experiments, as indicated by the probes and nodes still attached to them.
My heart shattered at the soul-wrenching cry the Syllens emitted upon seeing that grim spectacle. Tears welling in his eyes, and his face constricted with pain, Taelen walked to the dead tree and pressed his palms and forehead against the trunk.
“Forgive us Great Mother. We didn’t know,” he said in a broken voice.
My lips quivered as he and his Syllen companions walked to the other trees, apologizing and whispering words of comfort in their native language. When they tried to connect with the trees through their veris, the Great Mothers retracted theirs, refusing the bond. Instead, the trees who still had leaves shook them weakly. It dawned on me then that they rejected that comforting connection to protect the Syllens. They were too sick and risked infecting them that way.
That broke my heart even more.
“Can they be healed?” I asked softly.
“No,” Taelen said, his voice filled with a deep anger mixed with pain. “It’s too late. We can only grant them peace.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
From the corner of my eyes, I spotted Maeve hesitating. Since bonding with her Edocit mate Helio and gaining her own veris, she’d developed a strong affinity with the flora. She wanted to go comfort the trees and bid them farewell but seemed to think it might be inappropriate and intrusive under the circumstances. Off-worlders inflicted the pain they were going through.
The Syllens formed a circle around the first tree, their fists pressed on the trunk, and their tails connected by their veris. If not for the risk of infection, they would have connected with the tree as well. Instead, they started humming a soft melody. At a visceral level, I understood that it was a farewell, to which the tree responded with a rustling of leaves that struck me as both a goodbye and a thank you.
Although I didn’t see the darts shooting out of their wrists’ veris, their distinct bullet impact sound resonated in the room as they penetrated the tree. The Syllens’ soft humming shifted into a dreadful low sound that chilled me to the bone. Simultaneously, a series of spikes exploded from inside the tree, splitting it down the middle and fracturing it in every direction. The leaves shuddered, then all went still. The way the spikes protruded at random angles, it stunned me that none of the Syllens had gotten hurt by one.
Tears trickled down their faces as their fists opened, and they flattened their palms on the trunk. Their veris spread, not connecting with the tree itself, but with the spikes that had killed it. The spikes shrank. But instead of resorbing into the small darts they’d been, they narrowed into long rope-like vines that spiraled around the tree. They tightened, restoring its shape, so that it would stand in death in what glory it still had in its last hour. The Syllens pressed their foreheads to the trunk, kissed its bark, then detached from each other and the tree.
They repeated the same ritual with the three remaining living trees, granting them a long-overdue peace. Without a word, Taelen marched out of the room while angrily wiping the tears from his face. It hurt that he didn’t take my hand or even look at me as he walked past me. I desperately wanted to comfort him. But like Maeve with the trees, I didn’t know if he would welcome any sympathy from an off-worlder right now.
We followed quietly. As we walked past the room that previously contained the Laurellis bushes, activity outside the window caught my attention. A group of Elijinns were dragging the destroyed shuttle back to the shore. I didn’t know if the pilot—and any other potential passenger—had survived their ordeal. But if they hadn’t died in the crash, after what we’d discovered here so far, they would soon likely wish they had.
We got back into the elevator. Maeve took us to the third floor. My spine was so tense with fear of what we would find here that the slightest touch would snap it in half. I peered at Taelen’s face. He was staring straight ahead at the closed door of the cabin. The crushing silence felt as if the very air had been expelled from the confined space.
With words failing me and not knowing how else to be there for him, I carefully slipped my hand in his. I braced for him to yank free of my touch. Instead, he gently squeezed my hand, closed his eyes with a pained expression, and exhaled a shuddering breath. My selfish side breathed a sigh of relief that he hadn’t rejected me. But my empathetic side ached for him.
Just as I was moving closer to my man, the cabin door opened.
Chapter 18
Taelen
Unlike with the lower floors, a long corridor splitting the space into two sections didn’t greet us. There also weren’t glass walls dividing different labs. We came face to face with a solid white wall. It felt cold, ominous, and almost suffocating despite the five meters of vacant space separating it from the elevators. Two thick silver doors, each with an even more advanced-looking biometric lock, indicated the presence of two separate rooms.
I swallowed hard as I led my mate towards the door to the left. My heart wanted to pound its way out of my chest as we quietly waited for Maeve to bypass the lock. My hand tightened even more around Mirella’s as I mentally prepared for what might be an even more devastating scene.
The memory of the Mothers’ pain would haunt me for a long time. So far, none of the off-worlders seemed to possess as keen a hearing as we did. They couldn’t hear the screams of agony of the trees, how desperately they pleaded for us to give them peace. Those wretched invaders didn’t understand how much suffering their ignorance and greed inflicted upon this world. Even if they did, I doubted they would care.
Mirella does…
And so did Maeve and all the UPO and Enforcers we’d interacted with of late. I needed to constantly remind myself of this not to completely give in to anger and destroy them all.
But my Shevraya understood what I needed in my grief. Not empty words that wouldn’t resolve or change anything. A comforting hand, a loving touch, the confirmation that she was there by my side in my time of sorrow gave me far more strength than she would ever realize.
