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“In an egg? An escape pod?”
He hunts with a spear, sparks fires with flints. There’s no way his society knows about space travel.
Primitive. Savage. Dangerous.
The words rear up in my mind with another flash of fangs and claws. But every time it does, it feels off. My head still has a big, foggy blankness at the centre of it, but forming just out of sight is something that feels…
Wrong. It all feels wrong.
“So they aren’t my research team, and they didn’t come here to find it either?”
“No.”
There’s something else he isn’t saying. Despite his alien features, I can read it plainly in his face. He’s practically squirming with whatever he hasn’t told me, his big brown eyes full of discomfort. No guile, this guy, no deceit.
“What is it?”
He grimaces, but nods. “When your hut was discovered, my chieftess arranged an expedition to come to it, to find out what Mercenia wanted with our forests. She brought with her three other females. The healer, Grace, Sam, who had spent time in the hut before, and Lorna - the most clever of the females. Lorna knows much about the-” his nose wrinkles as he searches for a word “-machinesthat are in the base. She is also the best atreadingandwriting.”
Although every word he speaks sounds like he’s using my language to me, it’s clear from the emphasis he puts on certain words that they aren’t native to his tongue.
“This Lorna, she’s a scientist?”
Maldek shrugs. “The dreamspace gives me some sense of what this means, my Brooks, but I cannot understand it fully. There is no equivalent in raskarran tribes. They say that Grace is amedic, but that this means the same thing as healer.Scientist, I do not know what this would be similar to.”
“Okay, but she’s the cleverest. She has the most education. Learning.”
“Learning, yes. Lorna says that themachinesin the hut - they are old. Very old. She thinks perhaps fifteen seasons have passed since they were new.”
Seasons. Not seasons of the moons. There are four seasons back home. Would it be the same here? That would mean nearly four years had passed since the base was established. Four years. How much of that spent in cryostasis? How much of it lost in the blank space of my memory?
Panic rises up my chest, making my throat grow tight. I force myself to swallow past it. I might be questioning my superior officers, their intentions, my mission, my entire life’s purpose. But I’m still a soldier. I don’t ever have to question that.
One, learn everything I can from Maldek. Two, go with him back to the Mercenia base to meet these human friends of his. Three.
Three, figure out the rest when you get there.
Sometimes a plan can’t be any more than that.
“So, it’s been a long time?” I say, and I’m glad that my voice comes out steady, calm, not betraying the growing turmoil in my chest. “And nobody knows what happened to the people I came here with?”
Maldek shakes his head. “I am afraid not, linasha. Lorna has been trying to understand how to wake you from your sleep. So that they might ask you the same questions you are hoping to ask them.”
CHAPTERTEN
Maldek
My heartspace is full of anguish as I watch my Brooks take in my words. The way her mouth opens, as if to respond, only to close again, her eyes growing wider by the moment, fear and disappointment and anguish of her own spiralling in her eyes before she takes deep, steadying breaths and wrests her emotions back under control. I wish to reach for her, to comfort her, but in the moment I go to do so, she shoots to her feet, the tent around us disappearing for a plain white room. Like the Mercenia hut, but not. It is as unnaturally straight, but much brighter, and larger, emptier, than any space contained within those walls.
“I have to remember,” she says, hands on her hips. “It was my mission. Protect the research team. I have to know how badly I failed.”
The little voice is right there at the edges of my headspace, ready with a cutting word, but my shock pushes it back. Protect. Failure. Hermission, her duty.
My Brooks suffers the same worries and fears in her headspace as me?
Empathy rises in my chest like the banks of the river in the rains, and I wish I could sweep her into my arms, hold her close. I know what a torment these thoughts are, and I hate that she suffers them as I have.
“I have to remember. I have to.”
