Misha: You're right--either "it" or "that thing" is no way to refer to a living, breathing, sentient being. Yvonne and Pierce go round and round about that in a little while.
That's interesting that Spanish has no "it". I remember being surprised that Irish Gaelic (technically speaking) has no "yes". One answers with the verb in question. For example, "Are you going to church?" is answered with "Going", not "yes".
Sorry I'm complicating things for your mom.
I thought the extra aliens already on Earth were going to be the biggest complicating factor. Between Dee's school friends and all the people at the Army base and all the other aliens.......let's just say there are a lot more characters in Book 3. Methinks Mom is going to be even more upset with me a bit later. LOL!CHAPTER TEN
July 18, 1947, 12:15 p.m.
Proctor residence
“What....happened?” Brivari repeated haltingly.
Emily looked down in astonishment at the hand gripping her wrist as she struggled for an appropriate answer to Brivari’s question. So much had happened since he had been out of commission that a brief answer was basically impossible. Where would she start? The rival aliens? The rescued sacs? Jaddo’s capture? Was he even capable of following such a convoluted train of thought in his present state?
“Hybrids!” Brivari gasped again impatiently.
“Safe,” Emily answered, reverting to one word answers for simplicity.
“Jaddo?”
“Captured,” Emily said quietly.
The hand fell from her wrist, sank back down on the bed. “We think he’s alive,” Emily hastened to add. “But your….hybrids are safe. I know that much.”
Brivari started to sit up. “Have to....go,” he said, pushing himself up with difficulty as Emily watched in alarm. He wasn’t in any shape to walk down the hall, never mind wander out into the desert, in this form or any other.
“You can’t,” Emily said firmly, and was rewarded with an answering glare that made it clear his personality was still very much intact despite his present physical condition. “You’re not strong enough,” she clarified, wondering for the umpteenth time why she had to wind up with the grumpier aliens on the planet. “You’ll never make it.”
Brivari ignored her and tried to stand up, with “tried” being the operative word. Emily pushed him back down by the shoulders. “I don’t know if you remember this, but you almost got caught after you escaped,” she said in stern, parental tones. “Now is not the best time to go blundering about in full view. And don’t even think about turning into something else,” she added, as she perceived his shoulders beginning to recede, although that might have been her imagination. “If you do that, you’ll never have enough energy to get there, never mind get yourself back.”
Brivari tried to stand up again; this time he was more successful, although he had to clutch the bedside table for support. Emily shook her head as he walked unsteadily to the window and looked out at the bright summer day. He looked like hell. She knew where he was going, and he’d never make it.
“Okay, I give up,” she said in exasperation. “Frankly, I don’t think you’re well enough to stand up, never mind go anywhere. But we’ve knocked ourselves out keeping you in one piece, so if you’re foolish enough to go anyway, I may as well help. I’ll drive you there.”
“No,” Brivari said at once, in a steadier voice than he had previously used. “No....offense, but this is....not for you.”
“No argument there,” Emily said tartly, “but if you insist on going right now, you don’t have a choice.”
“I will go alone,” Brivari insisted, his voice taking on an edge.
Emily sighed. “Look, I won’t go into the cave with you if you don’t want me to. I’ll just park at the base and wait. Or if you can’t make the climb alone, and I seriously doubt you can, I’ll do what I can to help you up and then I’ll wait…..”
She stopped, her mouth open, her next word dying on her lips as she stared at the expression on Brivari’s face. His eyes glittered, his expression feral, as he advanced on her with menace in every shaky step. Even in this condition, he could still intimidate.
“How do you know about that?” he hissed furiously.
Emily backed up, stopping abruptly as she reached the wall. A moment ago, she would have sworn he wasn’t strong enough to swat a fly. Now she was seriously reminded of a wild animal who had just discovered some hapless human stumbling into its nest. Could he hurt her? Would he hurt her? After all they’d done for him? For all of them?
“I will ask you one more time,” Brivari said in a dangerous voice. “How do you know of the hybrids’ hiding place?”
“Jaddo,” Emily answered quickly, back pressed against the wall. “He took me there.”
A look of puzzlement crossed Brivari’s face. “Jaddo took you there?” he echoed.
“Yes, Jaddo,” Emily repeated. “And you know him—you know what he’s like. If he took me there, he must have had an awfully good reason.”
Brivari pondered this for a moment. “Why?” he finally demanded. “Why did he take you there?”
Determined not to look as unnerved as she felt, Emily pushed herself off the wall and took two steps forward to stand directly in front of him. Two steps were all she could take. “A lot has happened since you were captured,” she said, keeping her voice steady with effort. “You disappeared seven days ago. You were held prisoner for three days before you escaped, and you’ve been unconscious for all practical purposes for the past four days. Now, I can stand here and go through the whole story if you like, or I can drive you out to the cave and do the storytelling later. You’re the guardian. It’s your call.”
Brivari stared at her for so long that Emily began to doubt he would speak at all. She forced herself to hold his gaze, determined not to be the one who blinked first. A torrent of emotions was crossing his face: Confusion, anger, fear. She kept her eyes locked on his, watching his feelings roll past like numbers on a carnival wheel, wondering where it would stop.
Finally he spoke. “Take me there.
Emily nodded. “Give me ten minutes.”
“No. Now.”
“No,” Emily replied firmly. “I need a few minutes to make arrangements for someone to look after Dee while I’m gone. I’m her guardian. That’s my call.”
She saw him turn away in frustration as she walked out of the room, watched him sink into the rocking chair as she rounded the doorway. He was back to looking weak and helpless, all traces of strength gone. Could he really have hurt her, or was that all an act? Emily decided she’d rather not know. If it was an act, it was a damned good one.
Hurrying down the stairs, Emily headed for the phone. Dee was playing at Anthony Evans’s house; perhaps Dee could stay there while she was out. Dee would be disappointed later that she missed the trip, but she really didn’t want to drag her daughter into all of this again while she was happily engaged in something normal.
Picking up the phone, Emily dialed the Evans’s number, tapping her foot impatiently while the phone rang. This would be so much easier if it were Jaddo that were here now. He knew what had happened; he’d brought her to the cave himself. It would take ages to explain to Brivari what she wouldn’t have had to explain to Jaddo at all.
Ironic, isn’t it? Emily thought, as she waited for someone to answer the phone. Who would have thought the day would come when she was desperately wishing she had Jaddo to deal with instead of Brivari.
******************************************************
Eagle Rock Military Base
Jaddo stared at the human female as soldiers pulled her backwards toward the door to his prison. Her eyes were wide with incomprehension but, to her credit, she wasn’t panicking like the rest of them. Humans, Jaddo thought derisively. They were capable of so much, and they accomplished so little. Ordinarily, discovering that he was able to have a semi-private conversation with one of his more sympathetic captors would have been good news. Under the circumstances, however, it meant nothing. It would not change what was coming.
The female was literally pulled from the room as more agitated humans swarmed in, some dressed in uniforms, some in those glaring white coats. The soldiers ringed his bed, pointing their loathsome weapons full of drugs at him, while the white-coated variety, who appeared to fancy themselves some sort of healers, excitedly checked their machines, applied strange instruments to him, and chattered nonstop to each other. Jaddo ignored them. He rolled his head back to face the far wall and resumed his motionless pose. Let them play with their new toy. He would not give them the satisfaction of twitching so much as a finger.
As the humans dithered amongst themselves, Jaddo pondered the information the female had given him. So....Brivari had escaped. David Proctor had been right. The girl’s father had argued against Jaddo’s rescue attempt, saying that Brivari might escape all by himself, and it appeared he had done just that. So all this was for nothing, Jaddo thought bitterly. I am captive for nothing.
At least now his course of action was clear. Uncertain as to whether or not Brivari remained captive or even lived, Jaddo had wavered over whether or not to attempt to postpone the inevitable. If he were the last remaining Warder, it was his duty to keep himself alive as long as possible. Now that he knew Brivari had successfully freed himself, that question was settled. There was no point in prolonging his agony. He could just let go.
The humans’ chatter abruptly stopped as another human male entered the room. Jaddo recognized him—this had been the first face he had seen when he initially awakened. This one was of higher rank, and it showed; he did not get excited and flap about as many of the other idiots did. His gaze was thoughtful. Appraising. Challenging.
Jaddo was careful not to look directly at the higher-ranking human; his Covari peripheral vision enabled him to observe the human quite closely while still appearing to stare fixedly at the wall. The human studied him in total silence for a very long time, causing Jaddo to feel a passing admiration for his level of self control. Most of the humans he had seen here were excitable, high-strung creatures. This one was different.
The human circled him several times, staring at him with that measuring gaze. At one point he knelt down directly in Jaddo’s line of vision, and Jaddo carefully fixed his gaze on a hair on the human’s head to avoid looking him in the eye. He knew that if he did look the human in the eye, he would lose his own self control, and that would do him no good. Because nothing was working; he could summon no energy to free himself from these restraints. He couldn’t burst the glass containers that held that vile medication in the soldiers’ guns like he should have been able to, or dim the lights, or use any of his enhancements. Most horrifying of all, he could not shift. He was trapped, in this form, in this room, with these contemptible creatures, and he did not know how.
When he had first awakened and realized his limitations, Jaddo had thought that maybe the humans had obtained one of the five-sided devices that Amar had used during their confrontation. Although he had watched the human soldier destroy the device, that did not mean there weren’t more of them. But that device had not prevented him from shifting, and its effects had felt different. Fighting Amar, Jaddo could still feel his power building within him—he just couldn’t release it, like water held back by a dam. Now there was no water; no power surged within him, no energy, nothing. It wasn’t a case of something unable to break free. There was simply nothing there to begin with.
But no matter. His enhancements were relatively new; a Covari’s real weapon was his ability to shapeshift. Power or no power, he could still change his shape to something no restraint could hold, could make himself look like anyone or anything and make his escape. But his cells refused to respond to his attempts to expand or contract them. At first he had written off this failure to exhaustion, but even then, he had known. Even when too tired to shift, he should still be able to feel his cells attempting to obey him. Instead he felt nothing, and realizing what that meant he had panicked, thrashing about like the caged animal he was only to be drugged again, sinking back down into an oblivion that was curiously welcome. Consciousness would be far worse, he was certain.
And it was. Lying here, strapped down, trapped in every imaginable sense of the word, he had his first real taste of how humans existed, and it made him hate them all the more. How did they stand being trapped in one shape? How was it possible that their brains held such enormous potential and they used practically none of it? They were weak, wasteful creatures, like animals with technology they didn’t even know existed, much less know how to use. We should never have come here, Jaddo thought bitterly. They aren’t worth it.
Jaddo watched from the corner of his eye as the high-ranking human continued to study him. The gun-toting soldiers and white-coated “healers” had been dismissed. They were the only two left in the room.
“So,” the human said in a wondering tone. “You responded to our nurse. That’s interesting.”
Jaddo ignored him, continuing to stare at the wall in the waking trance he had lapsed into over the last few hours as a refuge from the rage boiling inside him.
“We can have her come back, if you like,” the human continued.
When Jaddo neither moved nor spoke, the human sighed. “Perhaps we should start over again,” he said with exaggerated patience. “I know you can hear me. I know you can understand me. I know you could respond if you wanted to. Your EEG readings—a kind of brain scan—make it clear you’re conscious and alert. You’re not responding because you choose not to. I can understand that. But eating doesn’t require responding; refusing to eat hurts only you. If you don’t eat, I’ll have to force you to eat. There are those here who would enjoy watching that. If I were you, I wouldn’t give them the pleasure.”
Curious, Jaddo thought. That was the same argument the female healer had used. It was a valid argument, one that would have resonated with him under normal circumstances....but these were not normal circumstances.
“I’m not one of those who would like to see you suffer,” the human continued. “My name is Daniel Pierce, and I’m a doctor, someone who helps people’s minds and bodies get well when they’ve been sick. Those in my profession don’t hurt people, and I have no interest in hurting you or watching others do so. I would like to learn about you and your people, and in order to do that, you need to be alive and healthy.” He paused, leaning in closer. “I should point out that most others don’t share those opinions. I could protect you from a great deal of.......unpleasantness. You would do well to ally yourself with me. ”
Unlikely, Jaddo thought acidly, keeping his eyes averted. After a moment the human straightened up and sighed dramatically.
“Very well then. Think it over. And do keep in mind that you will eat, one way or the other. We can do this the easy way or the hard way; if you’re as intelligent as I think you are, you’ll choose the easy way.”
My ‘choice’ is irrelevant, Jaddo thought as the human left the room, and so is yours. Because he could not shift, and every Covari knew what happened to those who could not shift.
They died.
******************************************************
1 p.m.
Pod chamber
They look dead, Brivari thought, as the door slid shut behind them.
He and Emily Proctor stood in the pod chamber staring at the sacs, all of which had now split into four pods just as Valeris had predicted. They were propped against the far wall, taking advantage of the heat from the Granolith chamber, but just a glance was enough to tell Brivari that hadn’t been enough to save some of them. A little over half of the pods were glowing brightly; the rest glowed dimly, or not at all. A few had turned black.
Brivari glanced at the human woman standing next to him. He had been silent on the drive here, trying to recover, trying to consider what extraordinary circumstances could have occurred that would have induced Jaddo, of all people, to bring her here, of all places. “A lot has happened since you were captured,” she had said. Indeed. The planet must have all but stopped rotating if Jaddo had seen fit to bring her here.
When they had arrived at the rock formation, the woman had followed him, keeping her distance but following him nonetheless. He knew she was worried he wouldn’t be able to handle the climb on his own, and though he never would have admitted it, he had shared that worry. But he had made it, stopping a couple of times to rest, the woman always trailing a discreet distance behind. She had hung back when they had reached the door, showing no surprise whatsoever when he revealed the opening handprint. She had been here before, and knowing Jaddo the way he did, she must have earned the right to be here. So he had beckoned her inside, secretly glad of the company. He knew what he was going to find.
Brivari’s heart sank when he saw how many appeared compromised. So many, he thought sadly. We’ve lost so many. A quick count told him they still had four viable sets, down from six, plus one extra Rath hybrid. The rest would have to be disposed of, a distasteful task that Valeris had always handled. Now that task fell to him. He walked to one end of the row and began rearranging the pods, sorting them by viability. The woman headed for the other end where one set glowed brilliantly, a sight for sore eyes.
“They’ve all split into fours,” she commented as she walked past. “Only some of them had split the last time I was here.”
Brivari was silent. The last time he had been here, none of them had split.
“These still look good,” she continued, squatting down beside two sets at the opposite end of the row, one brilliantly glowing, the other somewhat less so. “In fact, this one looks better. It wasn’t glowing this brightly the night we rescued them.”
Brivari stopped. “The night you rescued them?”
“Jaddo made it to our house and collapsed the night you rescued these…the night you were caught,” she explained. “Whatever drug they’d given him made him sleep for a long time. He did manage to tell us where they were, though, so Dee and David and I went out and got them. We brought them back to our house until Jaddo was well enough to bring them here.”
Brivari resumed his sorting. Not only had Jaddo not made it back to the pod chamber, but he apparently had not been able to find a suitable hiding place for the hybrids. Things must have been bad indeed for him to voluntarily seek the help of humans. And he’d noticed something else—the door to the Granolith chamber had been hidden by a wall, smoothed over as though the door had never existed in the first place. The handprint lock on this chamber would accept only the genetic codes of the Warders and the Royal Four; why would Jaddo feel the need to further hide something already so well hidden?
“So,” Brivari said gravely, as he pulled one of the blackened pods in front of him. “It seems we are in your debt once again, Emily Proctor.” He ran a glowing hand down the length of the blackened pod, the human woman recoiling as black, viscous fluid spilled onto the floor carrying with it a tiny, curled figure no bigger than his human hand and obviously dead. A Vilandra hybrid.
The woman stooped to examine it, carefully avoiding the swirling pool of blackened gestational fluid snaking across the floor. “Poor thing,” she whispered.
“Spare your pity. It is her fault we are here at all.”
“Whatever she did, it looks like she paid for it,” the woman commented.
“We have all paid for it,” Brivari said bitterly. “Her family. Her entire world. And you,” he added pointedly.
He readied another pod for disposal, and as he did so, the Vilandra hybrid collapsed into a thin layer of dust that floated on top of the black lake of fluid for just moments before dissolving into it.
“Dust,” the woman said wonderingly. “Dee said it was dust, not ashes, but I didn’t understand.” As she spoke Brivari slit open another pod. More black fluid gushed out, along with another hybrid which collapsed like the first.
“Is this what happens to all of them when they die?” she asked, watching closely.
“They were engineered that way,” Brivari explained shortly, reaching for another almost dead pod, “so no one can study them.”
“But this happened to your people too when they died. Does that mean you were… ‘engineered’ that way?”
Brivari ignored her. There was no need for her to know the answer to that question. That was always the problem with spilling some of your secrets. Those you spilled to always wanted to know more, often more than you were willing to tell. Jaddo knew this, which made his willingness to share privileged information all the more inexplicable.
“There’s more to it than just rescuing the pods, isn’t there?” Brivari said, as he slit another one open. “Something else went wrong, something that would make Jaddo willing to bring you here.” He looked up at her as another dead hybrid spilled onto the floor. “What happened?”
“A lot,” she answered quietly. “An awful lot. I…..” She broke off suddenly, staring to her left.
“What’s wrong?”
The woman knelt in front of one of the pods she had rescued with a look of concern on her face. “What is that?” she asked.
Glancing in her direction, Brivari said, “What is what?”
The woman was still staring. “Its head was glowing. Is that supposed to happen?”
Brivari looked up sharply. Abandoning the dead pod he had been opening, he hurried over to where the woman crouched beside….Oh, God. It was a Zan hybrid.
“What did you see?” he demanded, kneeling beside her.
“Little glittery specks of light,” the woman answered, unfazed by his abruptness. She was probably used to it by now.
“Are you sure you weren’t just looking at the gestational fluid glowing?”
“ ‘Gestational fluid’?” the woman repeated. “Is that the goo they’re floating in?” She shook her head. “That’s not what I saw. This was something on the baby itself.”
“Where on the fetus?”
“On its head,” she said pointing to the hybrid’s tiny head. “There were little dots that flashed on and off. They’re gone now.”
His breath catching in his throat, Brivari caught the fetus floating in the pod between two hands and studied it. There was nothing there now. Nothing at all.
“Are you sure you saw this?” Brivari asked in a husky voice.
The woman nodded. “I’m sure. Is....something wrong?”
“No,” Brivari whispered. “If you truly saw what you think you saw, then everything is right.” As he spoke, the Zan hybrid squirmed unhappily in his grip.
“He doesn’t like you holding him like that,” the woman commented.
“He never did,” Brivari said, releasing the fetus which seemed to wrench itself imperiously from his grasp.
Brivari returned to work on the dead pod with a heavy heart. He had let himself hope….he shouldn’t do that. It was just that he so badly wanted a sign that things would work out right, that all this anguish wasn’t for nothing.
“You know,” the woman said slowly behind him, “if you really mean to bring them back and restore what was lost…you’re going to have to forgive them first.”
Brivari glanced at her briefly before resuming his task.
“I can’t.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'll post Chapter 11 next Sunday.
*Runs off to fix Chapter 16*