~ * ~ * ~
When they reached the area where Samoo’s ship was lost, Rafian donned a spacesuit with magnetic boots and walked outside and onto the wing. He looked around and stretched out his arms and then closed his eyes to feel his teacher. The seeker blood that was his mother’s had given him gifts he couldn’t control. He hoped to feel something while he was out there and he stood in that position for a very long time.
“We have always watched you, Rafian,” a voice whispered into his ear and he opened his eyes, looking around for its source.
“Who is that? Camille, is that you?” he asked, touching his comm so she could hear him.
“Hmm? I didn’t say anything, Raf. I’m just in here wondering what it is you expect to happen out there.”
“I’ll be back inside in a bit, Cammy. I’ll explain everything.”
He shut off the comm and looked around. Something had whispered a question to him and it wasn’t Camille playing around.
“Samoo,” he whispered, but deep down he knew it wasn’t his teacher. He waited another hour for another whisper but when none came he walked back along the wing to the airlock where he removed the suit and rejoined Camille inside.
They were on their fourth day and needed to start back, so she turned on the engines and plotted a course back to Helysian. The trip back was full of conversation just like it had been when they started. Rafian found that he loved everything about her and was dreading their return, so he probed his mind for a plan for them to be together officially.
“Can I admit something to you, Cammy?” he said as she decreased their speed a bit and looked over at him in the other pilot’s seat.
“I like you, no, Maker I hate how awkward this is,” he said, but she lifted her eyebrows and slatted her eyes as if she was expecting negativity. “Oh, that sounds like I’m, ugh, no. Thype, I am terrible at this sort of thing, but I’m in love with you. There, it’s out, I’m in love with you, and I cannot thyping function without you around.” He exhaled steadily, as if he had just removed a tremendous weight off his chest.
Camille met his words with a mysterious gaze, and when it got to be too much, Rafian tried to fix the odd air by continuing. “It’s just that I think about you all the time. Help me out here.”
Camille kept staring, and it made him uncomfortable until eventually she spoke. “Me, too,” she said meekly. “I mean that I love you too. Always have – kind of.” She said it in her standard, neutral but nasally cute way, but the way it came off gave him pause.
“You know, you don’t have to agree with me, Cammy. I just wanted to let you know,” he said, suddenly embarrassed at how vulnerable he felt.
“What are you talking about? Do you think I would wait on the docks day after day after day for just anybody?” she chuckled, “Maker, I held your hand after that frightening ambush because I needed to feel you. I thought I was going to die without telling you how I felt. Every day, I’ve looked forward to hearing your voice, and to see the way you look at me. So shut up and accept my love,” she joked and Rafian sighed with relief.
Memory 12 | Dark Education
It was now a year since Rafian and Camille had sworn love to each other and about six months since they decided to push ahead with a move instead of the constant visits they made to each other’s apartments. Rafian’s influence had grown and he began receiving invitations to the spy network in Virulia. Camille was given the post that the legendary Helga ATE had held as commander of air to ground assaults (CAGA), and she, too, was being wooed to become a Virulian spy.
The invitations were a tremendous honor for the couple, but even though they were the best in their respective Special Forces divisions, they didn’t think they would ever be recruited. Nobody on the ship knew people who became spies, and when they had encountered them in the past, it was always such a brief and hurried introduction that it was difficult to form a real opinion of them.
Rafian had fought alongside one before, and the man had moved and fought like something beyond human. He had always wondered whether spies were outfitted with cybernetics or were made to be on a drug of some sort. To fight like that man would be a dream come true for him. However, with the mystery of the Virulian spy network and rumors about their order, he hesitated in accepting the invitation for fear of the worst.
“You know if we do this, it may not be the same between us, right?” Rafian said to Camille on one of their many evenings together. The pair could normally be found embracing and talking on the wing of Rafian’s Alpha X Pterodactyl whenever they were both on leave. These moments were rare, private, and precious for them, since they barely got to see each other during the week.
“Being spies would take us off of the front lines, Raf,” Camille replied, her golden hair gleaming under the lights of the dock, making her seem strangely elfish. Her hair had been cut when she became CAGA, and she styled it into a tiny Mohawk, which Rafian found to be very cute.
“Don’t look at it. You know I thypin’ hate it!” she declared as he looked over her hair with a smile on his face.
“I don’t care what you think about it. I like it, and I think it makes you look like a badass.”
Scoffing at him while rolling her eyes, Camille wouldn’t admit that she appreciated his words, but she shoved him in the arm to remind him to stay on topic. “When are we going to decide on these invitations? You know that people who turn them down normally disappear.”
She was right, of course. The invitation was more of a summons. They had done something in the past to attract the network and now they were being summoned for training.
“Any marine would jump at the chance, so why are we so hesitant?” Rafian asked. “The spies I have met are like gods, but from what I know, to get there, they have to give up a part of their souls.”
Camille sat up and then got to her feet to stand next to him. She walked over to one of the thrusters and began playing with its surface, her mind working rapidly as she went over the decision and what it could mean to them.
“I know this isn’t very soldierly of me, Rafian, but I just don’t want to lose you. I can deal with death, but spies are rumored to always be alone. I’m afraid they will separate us and I can’t let that happen.”
“I’d love to see them try to take you away from me,” Rafian said. “What can they do to me to force me to stop loving you?”
It was a question he should never have challenged the fates to answer. When the pair sent back word of acceptance to Virulia, two agents in black 3B suits immediately came to visit them at their apartment. The odd thing about the arrival of the spies was that they didn’t come from a ship, seeing that none had docked on Helysian for weeks, and they had never seen them onboard.
The man was a big guy, but he moved like a cat. The woman was slight, but her eyes indicated she, too, was very much a predator. The man stepped forward and introduced himself as Michyl, a midlevel agent in the organization, and the woman was Ren, a recruit who had just gotten her clearance and held the rank of “person,” which seemed an odd rank to have.
The introductions were brief but turned awkward when Camille asked about packing a few things. Michyl stopped her short, shook his head, and produced a device that resembled a very tiny silver capsule. “A spy owns nothing” was all the couple heard before the light consumed them, and they were unconscious.
When he awoke, Rafian found himself standing in front of a graying old man in a stark white room with padded floors and walls. The room was large, and the ceilings seemed taller than the Vestalian standard. He also noticed that the gravity level was lower than it should be for humans, and it made him wonder if his eyes and mind were deceiving him.
“Am I dead?” Rafian asked, half-joking due to the irony of the bright, white room and the old man—also dressed in white—who looked at him as if he could read him.
“Do you know how you got here, boy?” the old man asked suddenly, his voice as deep as an earthquake, with confidence as sharp as a knife.
“First of all, you will not address me as boy; I am Captain Rafian VCA of the Helysian. Do not make that mistake with me again.”
This brought a smile to the old man’s face, and he shook his head with amusement. “You see this?” he asked, indicating nothing in particular. “This right here never gets old to me, and I have been doing this for an extremely long time, boy. You recruits come in, you spout out all of the honors that weaker men and women have afforded you, and you expect to get respect.”
As soon as he said “respect,” he made a fist, and Rafian felt a crushing pain inside his chest that caused him to cry out. He then noticed that he was in the air, floating, as the old man’s magic hurled him across the room into one of the padded walls.
The old man seemed annoyed. “Let’s get to it, shall we? That move I hit you with just now is a skill that I picked up from Jenua when I jumped in as a defender of the Skale Republic. They faced genocide so we went in to help. That was maybe about 150 years ago.”
“Jenua. What system is that?” Rafian managed to ask as he climbed to his feet and wiped the blood from his mouth. “Is that a city in Geral? You learn your tricks from the Geralos lizards?”
The old man got up from his seat. His flowing white robes sparkled with silver gems and was awesomely accented by black-and-red trimming. Despite the torture and pain he had felt in his chest, Rafian thought the man looked beyond impressive. He thought about the meeting he’d had with the spies and wondered if he was now in the spy recruitment center.
“The Geralos lizards are the least of your concern, young Rafian.” The elder said his name this time with a respectful tone and seemed to admire Rafian’s bravado, despite the blood and the obvious pain the young man was feeling.
“So you aim to torture and kill me, then?” Rafian asked, misunderstanding the intent of his words.
“How boring a thought, boy. Pay attention. The Geralos are a plague in THIS galaxy, Anstractor, but there are many galaxies and many planes of existence that need our help.”
“Planes of existence? Is this a joke? I thought the spies were a military organization. This is beginning to sound like a cult.” Rafian became visibly angry, fearing that he was being indoctrinated into a religion and the worship of some ideology that would yield little results and keep him from his goals.
“As usual, the disbelief,” the old man said passively. “The countries I mentioned, the war, the skill I demonstrated are all from another plane, you see. We jumpers—or as you call us, spies—have the means to jump to the various galaxies and on rare occasions jump to other planes of existence.”
Rafian stared at the old man intently, waiting for him to burst out laughing at the joke, but what he read in his face was that he spoke the truth. It made him feel like a tiny, irrelevant gnat on the surface of a world too big to appreciate his existence.
“For all your rank and respect, Captain, you are a mere toy soldier in a very real war to protect humanity. I guess you realize now why your titles, your accolades, and your petty revenge do nothing to impress me.”
Rafian ignored the slight to ask, “So what’s on the other side?”
“Things that I cannot begin to explain to you. But the catch with jumping planes is that we cannot control it. We can only stay for a time or come back at will using warp crystals, but we cannot open a new tear on our own. The openings to other planes are controlled by a higher power; we take advantage whenever the opportunity is presented to us.”
“So, what is a tear, and when and where do they open?”
“About five hundred years ago, during the first conflict, there was a Meluvian scientist by the name of Genda who found a large crystal on a dead planet near the third meridian. The crystal was a curious thing, as it produced a tiny ripple, and when Genda tried to touch it, he noticed that his hand would go through it. Genda took the crystal to a secret base on Vestalia, and he and a number of other important people would go through that first tear and make contact with the people of the planet on that other plane.”
The old man went back to his chair and sat down, rubbing his bald scalp as he continued his tale of the warp crystal phenomenon.
“That other plane had a world that was ancient, but the people could do miraculous, magical things. Their technology was very different from ours. While the professor could take things into the tear with him, he noticed that it would only allow small things to be taken out. Carrying a tiny bit of the crystal itself inside the tear allowed him to warp back to this side just by exposing it to the right amount of light. Don’t ask me to explain much of how this all works.
“That was our first contact with one of the other planes before extreme experimentation and study allowed us to learn of its miraculous properties, giving us faster-than-light travel, spirit jumping, and so much more. To say it in words that you will understand: with the crystals we can jump to galaxies, resurrect ourselves through cloning, and explore other planets throughout the known universe.”
The education on the warp crystals was intriguing, and as Rafian listened he understood why the jumpers seemed so cold, distant, and elitist. Knowledge of things they were unable to explain to the standard galaxy would make the common soldier appear insignificant to the powers that be and largely irrelevant to the bigger picture.
The jumpers had learned how to expand their survivability through cloning, and had learned to manipulate powers that were beyond human thought. The biggest eye-opener to Rafian, ever the martial student, was that knowledge gained through missions within a tear was forever grafted into one’s DNA.
Jumpers were not limited to the tiny brain capacity that a standard human being was—that part he didn’t want the details on, as it was all too much to process already. Rafian wondered how Camille was taking all of this and whether there was a white-haired, old woman in her padded room running down the crazy powers that she was about to be given.
The tutelage went on for hours, and then he was escorted from the room to a facility that housed a number of men and women who looked wide-eyed and stunned from the “education,” as they called it. The room was all white and had tall walls, as if it were built to house giants or starships.
There were tall, cathedral-styled windows that depicted jumpers in various poses, and Rafian could not shake how religious the whole place felt. Light spilled into these windows, illuminating the hall in an ethereal way, and each space between windows was a circular column that had a patchwork of digital lights that danced upon its surface.
Along the walls were seasoned jumpers, all dressed in white 3B suits that left no part of their perfectly sculpted bodies to the imagination. The ceiling was painted with a diagram of what he assumed to be the universe. He tried to find Anstractor and realized that it was the smallest of all the galaxies.
When they got all the recruits together (there were twenty of them), he saw his beloved Camille, but as they were hustled along through the hallway, she would not look up to make eye contact. They were taken to the cloning lab, where a specialist downloaded their data. As if to answer the question that was on all of their minds, they were given a demonstration via vid on how cloning worked.
Next, they were given a live demonstration by the old man who had spoken to Rafian. He squared off against a younger jumper, and while it was an impressive display of skill, Rafian wondered how it would end. After minutes of fighting, the elder produced a knife from his robes and stabbed his opponent in the throat, causing him to fall and thrash about in pain.
It had to be one of the cruelest kills Rafian had ever seen. Gasps and horror covered the faces of everyone watching, but within minutes, the man’s death throes had ceased and he emerged from one of the clone stations, happy, unscathed, and very much alive.
The dead body took on a grayish hue as the blood continued to pour from the neck. Rafian stared at the clone, trying to see if the man was merely a twin, and this a trick of some sort.
“I don’t want this,” said one of the fe
male members to nobody in particular, and the old man spun and threw the knife into her head, causing her to instantly drop dead! Again, there were gasps and expressions of shock until she cloned and popped up out of the machine looking scared, angry, and red-faced.
“YOU HAD NO RIGHT!” she was shouting, tears streaming down her face. She was all fire and unaware of her nakedness as she ran out to face down the old man while giving the recruits a full-on display of her goods. When she realized her nakedness, she froze and panicked. One of the aides brought her a robe to cover up, and she quickly hustled away.
“Very appropriate,” the old man began as he paced the metal floor, looking at each of the recruits who now stood at attention.
“Appropriate because jumpers are to be removed from the shackles that are sexual commitment, personal possessions, and, as much as humanly possible, matters of the heart. Your bodies belong to the organization now. I own you all.”
That statement elicited a reaction from Camille, who had found herself next to Rafian, both of them observing the horror of the membership they had signed up for. The couple was holding hands, and the old man glanced at them as he spoke. Rafian balked at the thought that they would be punished somehow for revealing their togetherness, so he unhooked Camille’s hand and made a mental note to stay away from her to avoid further suspicion.
The recruits were then made to partner up with each other, preferably with members of the opposite sex. The general idea was that partners were to have sexual relations at some time every week and were not to develop any attachments from it. Refusal meant expulsion, which in reality meant permanent death. As jumpers, they were to do as commanded until they prove themselves worthy to be given the rank of person.
They were next given number designations as names, which were to be used on missions and in espionage operations. Names were only given to jumpers who had proved themselves worthy of being regarded as persons. Rafian became number three and Camille was number eleven. He saw her get paired with a large, redheaded man who was number thirteen, and it crushed him to think about what would be happening to her moving forward. The thought of Camille in another man’s arms made him truly feel the horrors of his new position. For the first time in years, he felt completely helpless to play the part of savior.
The girl he was partnered with was the spitfire who had gotten herself cloned. They were escorted to their room, which seemed very mundane compared to the stark white aesthetic of the rest of the building. It was a metal-walled cell with full-sized plasteel beds that took up the majority of the space.
Based on the size of the room, Rafian realized how close they would be forced to be. He tried to figure in his mind how he could make things less awkward between himself and his new partner.
“I could just die,” the girl said. She was pale, with dark brown eyes and long, shiny black hair. Her name was Tayden Lark, and she was given the number five by the supreme leader who had killed her. They found out that his name was Arn Stryker. He seemed to be more feared than respected by the veteran jumpers, and in his presence, nobody talked without permission.
The girl was a first grade starfighter on her own ship, and leader to a squadron of rangers known as the Screaming Ayries. Rafian had fought alongside them in the past, but the situation had been so intense that there was no way Tayden would remember him.
“Tayden, you are a leader of men, you have to come to terms with this,” Rafian finally said after listening to her complain for what seemed like hours.
“Thype this schtill. What if I don’t want to come to terms with this lunacy? Cloning, teleporting, and forcing rape on us weekly?”
“Whoa, who said anything about rape?”
“It’s sex that we don’t want, right? That’s the definition of rape, oh great ‘leader of men!’” She stared at him angrily, as if he were the dumbest man alive. “Do you or your girlfriend want to be made to cheat on each other every single night? Or are you a creep happy for the opportunity to nail every girl in here? If it’s the latter, then cheers to you, mate. This is a rapist’s paradise.”
Rafian shook his head and retreated to his bunk to process everything that had happened since they were taken. First of all, if Tayden noticed that he and Camille were together, then everyone else would have noticed, too. He thought of everything the old man had told him and tried to see the good in being a jumper. There were some serious perks to this new job, but the killing to prove cloning and the forced sex were not what he imagined the “good guys” would be doing.
“How can they know if we are having sex, Tayden? Do they have capture vids in here or cameras?”
“I guess they didn’t catch you boys up, eh?” She hopped off of her bunk and gestured in front of him as she explained.
“We have been sterilized. You may want to check yourself to see if you feel odd because I’m quite sure they’ve taken away your reproduction capabilities. A jump’ah does not procreate without permission, apparently a little item they forgot to add to the recruitment paper we signed. Oh, and in terms of sex? We women will be checked for evidence of intercourse every week, and upon failing said test, will be summarily punished for noncompliance.”
“Drop the attitude. I’m not the one forcing you to do this schtill. My ignorance is not due to me ignoring the signs. Like many of the other people out there, I wasn’t told. Do you think I’m enjoying this any more than you?”
With that he moved over to the refrigerator, where he found a bottle of chilled Virulian rum and a flask of purple berry juice. He poured the liquids together into a couple of glasses and shoved one into the hands of the exasperated Tayden.
“How about we drink to you being the first badass woman to be cloned in our company?”
Tayden accepted the drink and gulped it down desperately and after two more glasses she was completely calm and relaxed. Before long, the two recruits were chatting, and then they were joking, and the joking turned into friendly touches, which became a wrestling match.
Giggling carelessly, and with too much to drink, they began kissing each other in the fiercest way. When Rafian gained consciousness in the middle of the night, he found a naked Tayden sleeping soundly on his chest. Realizing what had happened, his heart skipped a beat as his mind went to Camille and number thirteen.
“What have we done, Cammy, what have we signed up for?” he whispered and placed his hand on Tayden’s back. She stirred in her sleep and tightened her embrace and he reached up and stroked her hair affectionately, disgusted at what he had become.
Memory 13 | Blackout
One of the lowest days Rafian had ever experienced occurred a week later, when he got a chance to sneak off to meet Camille. The shame and guilt that they both felt was overpowering, and it was as if they were strangers talking for the first time, with long pauses and silence as they held hands and stared at each other, trying in vain to cope. It was Rafian who decided to clear the air and address the giant elephant in the room.
“Let’s just be honest about—”
“How many times have you guys done it?” Camille cut him off to ask the question that had been irritating her all along. Most of the women had chosen to go against the promiscuity and had suffered the penalty--which they learned later on wasn’t death--while the ones that did it were very open about discussing their partners. Tayden had admitted to doing it but refused to give any details. This had made things worse for Camille and she found herself needing to know.
“Only a couple times, Camille,” he lied, hoping that she would let it drop. Her face immediately became pallid, and she balled her fists and stared at the ground.
“How about you, Cam? How many times?” he countered realizing that he wasn’t ready for the answer.
She took a deep breath and surrendered a “two” before staring at him intently. He reached out to hug her, and she stepped into his arms and he held her there for a long time.
“This sucks,” she whispered, and Rafian agreed but he didn’t reply immedi
ately.
When he finally spoke, his voice was angry and full of regret. “This test they have us doing here. These sex games. The goal is for us to give up our bodies. When we came here, you worried that things would change between us due to the conditioning, and it’s happening, isn’t it? They’re making it hard for us to look at one another.”
Camille adjusted her face so that she could look at him, and he kissed her lips longingly. His heart was thumping since they were meeting in secrecy, and it only increased when the familiarity of her touch became reality. He threw all care to the wind and pulled her in, desperately needing to get them out of the temple. “I’ve been thinking about breaking us out,” he whispered, “stealing a ship and—”
“Stop it, Raf, don’t be foolish. You know they have ears everywhere. We committed to coming, so let’s slow down a bit. We’re strong enough to get through it. We’ll be okay, I just know we will.”
Speak for yourself, Rafian thought as his conflicted mind worked to keep his feelings at bay. “I don’t owe these crutas my allegiance, Cammy. All I care about is you. They cloned us, beat us, and will kill us without a moment’s hesitation. Right now the only thing we own is our minds. I haven’t stopped thinking about you since I got here, and they took you away from me—”
“No!” She cut him off with a hammering punch to his shoulder. “They haven’t taken me away from you. Schtill, Raf, I haven’t seen you in a week, so kiss me and shut up about this horrible place.”
“One day,” Rafian whispered with his lips pressed against Camille’s neck, so that only she would hear it. “One day I am going to gut that old bastard. Mark my words, for all this schtill, I will spill his blood upon my blade.”
Camille was suddenly afraid. The implications of the treason he whispered would see him skinned if ever the jumpers were to know his intentions. But she, too, was fed up, and after listening to Rafian she felt a sense of peace that made the idea of martyrdom seem like the most beautiful thing a human being could do in his or her lifetime.
“Good,” she replied, “we’ll bathe in his blood.” They held each other in the tiny corner of the library for a few more minutes. They spoke of happier times and then they separated and snuck back into their rooms.
Rafian felt a twinge of satisfaction, having rendezvoused with his girlfriend right under the noses of his masters. He slid through the circular window of his cell and replaced the glass before bolting it. He locked the grate and finally took a breath.
“So how did she take it?” Tayden asked. She was awake and sitting up in his bunk.
“She was upset, of course, but it was good seeing her. Now my mind is all over the place.”
“This is confusing for all of us, but we will get through it,” Tayden said and she shifted the covers to invite him in.