“No, you’re playing God,” I interjected.
“It was about time someone did.” Lazar smiled. “Our species hasn’t evolved in thousands of years; we were due an upgrade, and I have orchestrated it. This way, we can step away from in-fighting and petty squabbles and focus on what really matters… peace amongst our people. Maybe even universal peace, with us leading the way.”
“You’re going to wake up one day and realize what a horrible mistake you’ve made,” I said quietly. “You’re going to realize they’ve used you, and that nothing has turned out the way you thought it would. When the planets burn, and every species is forced to bow down, you’ll see that you only have yourself to blame.”
For a split second, fear flickered across Lazar’s eye. “I’ll be there to stop anything untoward happening,” he assured me, though his voice caught momentarily. “I have taken the elixir myself, as have Ezra, Aurelius, and all their top-ranking soldiers. Unfortunately, it can’t repair what has already been taken from us, but it will prevent future injury.”
I gave him a hard stare. “I hope you enjoy eternal life, looking back at this moment and wondering if you could’ve stopped it when you had the chance.”
“I thought you might be in a more celebratory mood, but clearly I was wrong,” Lazar said, moving back toward the bedroom door. He let himself out without another word. We’d rained on his parade, and he wasn’t happy about it.
As soon as he was gone, I turned to Navan. “If they offered it to you, would you take it?”
“The elixir?”
I nodded.
“Why, have you got some stashed away under the bed?” he teased, making me smile.
“It’s more of a hypothetical question. I mean, it’d be useful if you were on a level playing field with the rest of these tools, but then there’s everything else to consider.”
His eyes took on a faraway, thoughtful look. “Honestly, I don’t think I would take it. I can’t validate the sacrifices that were made to create it, and the devastation that’s about to ensue because of it. Even if the blood sample hadn’t come from my daughter, and they hadn’t pumped my beloved wife full of poisonous drugs to get it quicker, I still don’t think I’d take it.” He paused, gazing down at me. “What about you?”
“I might have liked the idea of being immortal, once upon a time, but this little one has changed everything,” I replied, cooing over Nova. “We’ve seen the way she reacts to blood, and that elixir is pretty much entirely made up of blood. Even if she wanted to take it, I doubt her body could handle the potency. If I couldn’t be immortal with you and her, together, then I wouldn’t want to be. An eternal life with nobody to love must be a pretty lonely place.”
Navan smiled, leaning down to kiss me passionately on the lips. “Then I’m glad I’ve only got the one, short life with you.”
That afternoon, while the space station was hovering close to Vysanthe’s orbit, apparently undetected by the Vysanthean forces, I went to visit Mort for my latest checkup with Nova. He never bothered to do anything medical on his morning deliveries, knowing how much I savored my afternoon breaks, away from the stifling claustrophobia of the bedroom.
I was sitting on a stool, waiting for the experimental batch of blackwatch tuber tea that Mort was brewing up for me, the two of us chatting amiably about Nova’s sleep patterns, now that she’d started taking the sweetblood regularly. The shifter was weighing her on the scales, going over a number of checklists that he’d come up with to make sure she was in good health.
“You’re getting pretty good at this doctor stuff,” I commended him.
He smiled. “See, I told you masquerading as Doctor Ulani would pay off. I should make you apologize to him for saying he’d overused the guy.”
“Please don’t. I don’t ever want to see Doctor Ulani again.”
“That bad?”
“I just associate you, as him, with a whole lot of awful memories.”
“I knew you’d come around to my fleshy pools in the end. The ladies always do. Don’t they, Nova? Yes, they do, don’t they? They do,” he babbled, lifting Nova into the air. She squealed with delight, her wings springing out. They were truly beautiful, though I couldn’t help associating them with the girl I’d seen in my vision.
None of the other visions came true. This one isn’t going to, I chided myself, knowing I had to push away dark thoughts. Nova was nothing but purity and light, the epitome of goodness.
“Can you not direct your filth at my daughter?”
He chuckled. “She doesn’t mind. Look how happy she is to be with Uncle Mort!” He set her down on the table, swaddling her in a blanket as she beamed up at him, her slate eyes sparkling. “Have you heard much about the invasion, tucked away in your nutjob box?”
I shook my head. “Not a word, other than, ‘We’re doing this all for world peace, we swear.’ The usual crap that starts wars and normally ends in genocide.”
“Ooh, you’re dark today, Riley Idrax.” He whooped. “Well, let me be your harbinger of doom, then. From what I’ve heard on my snooping expeditions upstairs, the rebels are planning to attack old Brishy-britches first.”
“Makes sense, after what Gianne did to the North. I doubt there’s much left to fight for.”
“Exactamundo. Only problem is, Ezra keeps threatening to kill me once we land, as a little entrée to get him riled up for the battle to come. Some fellas need help with that, I hear,” he joked, though there was real anxiety in his voice. “Anyway, I’ve been looking for a way out, but I’ve come up empty. For once in my life, I’ve got no plans for wriggling free, and you know how I love to wriggle.”
“I do… I’ve seen you do it way too many times to block it out of my memory.” I was trying to keep things lighthearted, but, truthfully, I was worried about him. After how protective he’d been of Nova, and all the things he’d done to help with our shared addiction, I trusted him wholeheartedly. Against all odds, he’d become a friend, someone I enjoyed being around.
“You got any suggestions for me locked away in that sweetblood-addled mind of yours?”
I smiled sadly. “Navan and I want to get Nova out of here, too, but it looks like we’re all coming up empty.”
“Well then, how’s about we work together on this little jailbreak?” He waggled the flesh above his eyes. “If we can nab an escape pod, we might be able to make it to Mallarot. It’s the perfect spot to keep our heads down for a while. Nobody goes there, even folks looking for fugitives. It’s too boring for anyone to bother with, unless you’re a gumshi enthusiast.”
“You’re forgetting one thing,” I said, as Mort offered me a cup of the blackwatch tea.
“What’s that?”
“We have to get off Vysanthe alive, first.” There appeared to be a lot of ifs involved, which made me very uneasy. On a mission like this, I longed for certainties.
Mort flashed me a grin. “Fortunately for you, I know the oldest trick in the book. Eczema and his brownnosing chum might just be too absorbed in seeing whose is bigger to even notice they’re being duped.”
“What’s your plan? We’ll have to come up with something pretty quick if we want to get out of here before this thing lands,” I whispered, sipping my tea and pulling a face. It tasted disgusting, but if it helped curb my addiction I’d down the whole damn thing.
“On Earth, did you ever see a glorious film called Star Trek IV?”
I shook my head. “No, Star Trek was never my thing.”
Mort grinned wider than I’d ever seen him grin before. “Well then, you’re going to love this.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Dim lights flickered above me in rapid succession, dancing across my eyeballs in a dizzying projection, the thrum of the levitating gurney vibrating underneath me. The thick white sheet covering my face and body smelled sterile, and the fabric was coarse against my skin. Beside me, I could hear the scuff of boots on the floor and the occasional disgruntled remark as we passed, but nobody st
opped us. I couldn’t move a muscle, relying on my senses to figure out where we were. Now and again, my body would sway ever so slightly in one direction or the other, letting me know we were turning around a corner, but so far every strip-lit corridor looked the same from where I was lying.
Mort was controlling the gurney, masquerading as Doctor Ulani for the sake of appearances. The coldbloods didn’t like to see a shifter wandering about; it was why Ezra insisted he stay in his Ulani form unless he was in the clinic with me. He was walking at the top end, behind my head, pushing the gurney where it needed to go, while Navan walked beside it, carrying Nova. She was crying loudly, Mort deliberately keeping the sweetblood from her to cause a distraction, while Navan was sobbing—pretty convincingly, I had to say. We just had to be careful not to draw too much attention to ourselves. If this worked, she’d be safe. This had to go the way we wanted it to.
“Hey, Ulani!” a voice called. My heart jumped into my mouth. “What’ve you got there?”
“What?” Mort replied tersely.
“I said, what have you got there?” an unfamiliar voice said, presumably a guard.
“Dead body. Needs to be lobbed in the incinerator before it starts to stink the place up,” Mort explained, barely missing a beat.
“Well, you need to get clearance from Aurelius before you start disposing of remains in the incinerator,” a second voice chimed in.
“Say that again?” Mort shouted, pretending not to hear, though it was fairly hard to hear anything above the sound of Navan and Nova’s din.
“I said, you need to get clearance first, before you can take the human to the incinerator!” the second guard yelled back.
“Can you shut those two up? People are trying to sleep in here. Some of us have got a fight to prepare for,” another voice bellowed, a door creaking open. We were being too loud, causing too much distraction—someone was going to catch us, I just knew it.
“Hey, pal, they’re not my problem!” the first guard sniped.
“Yeah, we were just doing our duty, telling them they couldn’t chuck any dead bodies in the incinerator without Aurelius’s say-so,” the second voice added. “So keep your beak out of it and go back to bed.”
Mort sighed wearily. “I’d love to ask Aurelius’s permission, but in case you hadn’t noticed, he’s leading the first wave of you meatheads down to Vysanthe. Look out a window. You might learn something.”
“He’s already started?” The first guard sounded confused. “No one told me.”
“Yeah, he’s ejecting the first bunch of fighter ships as we speak, sending them toward Brisha’s palace. What’s left of it, anyway.” Mort chuckled to himself. If anyone could talk us out of this mess, it was my shifter buddy.
“I wonder if I’m supposed to be down in the hangars,” the sleepy voice mused.
“How should I know?” Mort replied, pushing the gurney forward again, away from the clustered guards. He’d done it—he’d broken us free of them. It wasn’t far to the escape pods, which were more or less in the same direction as the incinerator, by Mort’s reckoning, but we weren’t quite out of the woods yet. Although it was a short walk, there was still a lot of space station between us and freedom.
We’d just turned the corner, my body feeling a gentle sway to the left, when another voice ricocheted through the air like a gunshot. My blood ran cold at the sound. Of all the people we could have run into, why did it have to be him?
“You, shifter!” Aurelius boomed.
The gurney slowed while Mort whispered an expletive.
“What’s the meaning of this? I’ve just come past a group of very confused guards who seem to think I’m away, leading the charge toward Brisha’s palace,” he continued sourly. “As you well know, the invasion has yet to begin.”
“I heard from one of Ezra’s guys that he planned to start sending ships at nine o’clock, and it’s a quarter past now. I presumed you’d be involved in it.” Mort feigned ignorance, lying as though it were second nature to him. “Are you not?”
Aurelius grunted in displeasure. “You heard that?”
“I did, Chief Aurelius.” The added “Chief” was guaranteed to butter up the vile worm.
“Well, I have heard nothing about it. I must find Ezra and figure out what’s happening,” he muttered. “In the meantime, you haven’t answered my initial question: whatever are you up to? And why is Navan Idrax crying?” I envisioned the snaky sidekick narrowing his eyes.
Navan made a loud honking sound that made Nova scream even louder. “She… She… She’s gone! She’s gone… and you… you did this to her!” he wailed.
“What?” Aurelius hissed.
“Riley is dead, Chief,” Mort replied sadly. “She collapsed shortly before dawn. Navan tried to resuscitate her and called for help, but because everyone has been so busy, and their bedchamber guards have been stationed elsewhere due to lack of numbers, nobody came to assist. He couldn’t get her heart started again—considering how puny it was to begin with—and she expired just as I arrived to deliver some meds. I shocked her heart and did what I could, but I got there too late. She’s dead, I’m afraid.”
“What could she possibly have died of? The birth didn’t kill her, like we thought it would, so what would have caused her to collapse? Lazar said she was absolutely fine the last time he checked in.”
Mort snorted. “That one-eyed coot knows nothing about human anatomy, or medicine, for that matter. Let him stick to lotions and potions, while I make my medical assessments,” he replied firmly. “I did a quick three-dimensional report with the postmortem scanner, and it looks like she suffered from a case of cardiac engorgement, exacerbated by a form of globulus vasculitis in her veins. There were some endo-skeletal fractures to the left thoracic epithelium and intercostal bone tissues, as well as in her pelvicular regions. This could well have caused some internal hemorrhaging that we didn’t catch in time—she did look fairly puffy the last time I saw her, but I presumed she was filling up with that weird human milk she insisted on feeding the child.”
“Why would such a thing have happened?” I could hear a note of suspicion in Aurelius’s voice that chilled me to the core.
“The growth serum, perhaps. That kind of stuff isn’t made for inferior beings like her. Her insides were a mess, I’ll tell you that much.”
I was too frightened to laugh, but the impulse remained. Mort’s medical jargon had gotten way more expansive since the last time he’d had to talk himself out of a diagnosis. The only problem was, I wasn’t sure Aurelius would buy a word of it.
Hands brushed the edge of the sheet covering my body. I kept my eyes closed. The sheet was thrown back a moment later, my face exposed to the bright light of the station hallway. I didn’t move a muscle, but I could feel Aurelius breathing close to me, scrutinizing my corpse. To my disgust, his cold hand rested on my chest, feeling for a heartbeat. I wanted to recoil, but my body couldn’t have moved even if I’d wanted it to.
“It seems you are correct,” Aurelius mused, pulling away. “What a terrible waste. We could have created all sorts of curios had she lived.”
We’d taken a page from Brisha’s book of tricks, Mort pilfering a high-energy electromagnetic device that, when used on a person, resembled a “sleeping death.” It was used on soldiers who’d been badly injured, keeping them in a kind of stasis until they could receive proper medical attention. The high-powered beams shivered into the body’s genetic structure, holding everything still, similar to the way Stone’s third eye froze anyone in its line of sight without killing them. Only, with the device being much closer to me, tucked under my spine, it had a far more intense effect than Stone’s third eye, giving the impression of death without the actual act of it.
“Now, can I take her to the incinerator before she starts to rot? She was dead in that room a while, and this station is boiling hot,” Mort complained, while Navan’s wails intensified.
“I suppose so. I imagine she’d have ended up dead in
the battle anyway,” he replied, followed by the soft scuff of his footsteps retreating. He’d let us pass; we’d gotten away with it.
The moment Navan took the stasis device out from under me, I’d have a couple of minutes until my bodily functions returned. I could feel him doing it as Mort started to push the gurney forward again, which meant we’d have to act fast. It wasn’t as though I could hold my breath and fool the rebel leader that way, if he came snooping around again. Besides, as soon as I got up and ran for the escape pod, the jig would most definitely be up.
“Hold up there, shifter!” Aurelius’s bark cut through the air again, just as we’d begun to move off.
“Yes, Chief?” Mort was as cool as a cucumber, his voice giving nothing away.
“There’s one more thing,” he purred, sending a shiver down my spine. “What’s the bag for?”
“Bag?”
Aurelius chuckled coldly. “Yes, that bag you’re carrying on your shoulder—what is it for?”
“Oh, this? Nothing, just some of Riley’s clothes and stuff, to chuck into the incinerator along with her. I thought it best to burn it, in case there was some sort of disease lurking,” Mort replied, but the lies were wearing thin.
The truth was, the large bag was filled to the brim with sweetblood vials for Nova, plus a stolen comm device for long-range transmissions.
“Let me see,” Aurelius demanded.
“It’s just a bunch of bloodied clothes. You don’t need to see that,” Mort replied.
“Let. Me. See.”
Mort sighed. “You asked for it.”
With the sheet no longer covering my face, I opened my eyes in time to see Mort swing the bag around as hard as he could, smacking Aurelius in the side of the head, the clatter of vials jangling within. I hoped they were sturdy enough to withstand the impact, but I knew Mort wouldn’t have risked Nova’s food source unless he was sure the vials would survive in one piece. After that, everything became a blur. Mort took off down the hallway, pushing the gurney along at full pelt, while Navan sprinted alongside, clutching Nova tight to his chest.