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“I didn’t mean it literally,” I said.
“Oh,” Stari said. “Then why say it?”
“It’s a joke.”
“But it’s not funny.”
“It would be back on Earth. A little.”
“Oh. We’re heading to the emergency base. It’s where we planned to pull back to if our original base was compromised.”
“You built a base down here?” I said. “How did you even find this place?”
“We didn’t build it. Nature carved it from the rocks and the earth and the stones for us. This is where we came from.”
“You came from this place?”
It seemed like a pretty dingy place for a species to evolve.
“We’re underground creatures. Our eyes are perfectly adapted to the dark. We only came up to the surface when our population became too large and we needed to spread out. It took many years for our eyes to adjust to the sunlight. When they did, we found an entire world left to be explored.”
“Now you’re returning to where you came from,” I said.
“It’s the only safe place we have left.”
They’d put their future and all their hope into their plan to fight the Changelings and force them off the surface of the planet. And now, because of the Changeling siblings’ hidden trackers, their location had been exposed to the Changelings.
Now they only had this place to launch their attack from.
“How much longer before we’re there?” I said.
My voice echoed, bouncing off distant walls, on and on without end.
“We’re there,” Stari said.
She turned to those assembled.
“Activate the torches and prepare the houses,” she said. “There’s going to be a lot of Yayora on their way and it’s going to get very cramped.”
The soldiers got to work. I felt like a spare wheel.
“What can I do?” I said.
“You’ve got the most important job of all,” Stari said. “You need to come up with a plan for us to defeat the Changelings.”
“How?” I said.
“That’s up to you. A situation like this has never happened before. If you want to see your beloved Chax again, you’ll come up with something. Oh, and you’ve only got a few hours.”
Great torches were lit. The fire burned brightly and triggered a chain reaction, with dozens of torches filling the monolithic craggy walls like a starry night sky.
The light revealed a writhing mass of Yayora. They filled the cavernous space already and more were filing in by the minute.
They were all relying on me.
If I didn’t come up with something soon, the Yayora would have no choice but to endure another long generational war with the Changelings.
And that was if the Changelings didn’t discover this place and wipe it from the map.
