Chapter Twenty-six
Date unknown
Time unknown
Ban-Hezikal, Kalar
TAUTHIN WAS STARING out the suite’s windows when Svetlana approached him. Her hair, damp from a wash in the cleansing pool, fell over her shoulders. Though it made breathing more difficult, she opted not to wear her face mask as she drew near. There was a vulnerability—an honesty—that she wanted to convey. She wanted to show she had nothing to hide.
Wearing one of the many half-patterned, half-translucent gowns that’d been given to her, she crossed her arms and stood by his side. The hues of the setting sun cast a vibrant display of deep reds, magentas, and oranges across the sky. It looked like God Himself had reached down with a paintbrush. Even having seen the Kalarian sunset many times now, it never failed to take her breath away.
Svetlana had barely spoken to Tauthin—at least, in any meaningful way—since his “lesson” to her after their visit to Sélestere. There’d been a strict avoidance at play on both their parts. It made the situation simultaneously easier and harder, albeit in different ways. But there was no avoiding this now. This was something that needed to be resolved. Of all the people she’d met on this journey across the stars, the Bakma leader had proven her most steadfast comrade. Her most honest friend. It was with that thought in mind that she opened her mouth to speak.
Tauthin beat her to it. “Not so long ago on your world, you spoke to me about what you Earthae call love. Do you remember this?”
She did. It was a conversation in Confinement. It may not have been long ago in the grand scheme of things, but in that moment, it felt like forever. But she remembered. “Yes,” she answered him. “We talked about…reproduction.” It would go down as one of the most awkward conversations she’d ever had. For Svetlana Voronova, that said a lot. “And how your, umm…eggs…had been removed from your ovaries, and…all of those things.” Honestly, they were better off forgotten.
“Yes,” Tauthin said, “that is the conversation of which I speak.” The Bakma lifted his chin as he stared out at the horizon. “Do you remember what I told you I knew of the concept?”
Eyes widening briefly as she tried to think back, she shook her head slowly. “Of love? I remember you did not know much. That maybe you did not understand it.”
“Yes. I did not.”
Turning her own gaze from the window, her eyes settled on him. She watched him silently as he continued to stare out.
Drawing in a breath, he said, “I think that I understand it now—so much as one of my species can.”
Her eyes narrowed a touch.
“Days have passed since we last spoke words of significance. I have made a purposeful effort to be removed from you. In this structure at Ban-Hezikal, that has been easy. But in my spirit, that is not the case. I hear the words I spoke to you on the runa legras. They play in my mind, over and over. It angers me that you made me say them.” His deep purple eyes went downcast. “It angers me that I said them. I do not wish to lose you as a friend. You are the first I have ever had.”
“Do you not consider Scott your friend?”
The Bakma grunted quietly. “I do not think of Remata as I do you. If I do not see him again, I would regret the loss of an interesting human that saved my life. But I would not miss him. But you—I grieve the friction that has come between us. I fear I am to blame.” He turned his head to her. “My spirit yearns for reconciliation with yours. I do not care if I was at fault or if you were. I wish to forget it ever occurred.”
Were she not exhausted, his words might have made her shed a tear. As it was, they shimmered briefly and nothing more. Reaching out, she placed her hand on his shoulder. “Oh, Tauthinilaas. What are we doing here, on this world so far away from anything we have ever known?” She looked out of the window. This was not the way she thought their conversation would go, but she would take it. “I have made a mess everywhere I have gone. It is what I do best. I should have stopped the celebration at Sélestere. I should have refused it, no matter what their customs dictated. But after a…after a life of failure and humiliation, a part of me did like it. A small part, but…maybe not so small as I thought. You were right when you pointed it out. Will you forgive me?”
“You know that I will.”
“Then you know I will forgive you,” she said without hesitance. “We can consider what took place history that we will never revisit. We will move on.”
Nodding his head, Tauthin said, “I would very much like that.”
“Consider it done.” Faintly, she smiled and looked at him. “And I love you, too.”
Grunting deep within, he looked down. “So that is what this is. Does it ever stop?”
“No,” she said, a breathy laugh escaping as she looked at the sunset again. “I am afraid it is a threshold that once you cross, there is no going back. We are in it for the long haul.” She paused. “But it is a good thing. It is the greatest thing. You will not want to live without it.”
Outside, the sunset dipped lower—the orange hues giving way to magenta and red, casting their colors over the pink landscape. The wetness on its surface caused the faintest of reflections. It was just detectable enough to be beautiful. Svetlana would have loved to spend the rest of her time with him simply admiring it. But there were things to discuss.
Drawing a breath, she dipped her head and began. “Our situation has grown more complicated.”
Tauthin looked at her, expression genuinely surprised. “How is that possible?”
After a quick glance behind them to ensure no one was listening, she leaned closer to him and whispered, “Akàziendi is a Kalareim.” Tauthin’s eyes widened. The Bakma leader had already heard about the Kalareim after Svetlana’s debriefing. He knew they were Kalarael with darkened eyes. But he didn’t know Akàziendi was among them. “She is something they call a tasharin. It is a Kalareim inserted into Kalarael society—like a spy.”
“But her eyes?”
“They have means of disguising them that the Kalarael do not know about. It is complicated. I will explain it later.” That part wasn’t important, now. “What matters for us is what she told me—and the offer she made.” Tauthin’s bony eyebrows lifted. “She said Tributurian, their leader, may assist us in capturing the Zone Runner at Winduster…but with a condition.” There always was one. “We must take a portion of the Kalareim to Earth to establish a colony.”
Immediately, Tauthin grunted, an expression Svetlana recognized as a sign of mockery. Turning his head toward the window, he said, “Does she think that Earth is uninhabited? Its surface crawls with Earthae from one hemisphere to the next. Where does she expect her people can colonize?”
“All those things, I told her. She did not care. She said that compared to being outcasts on their own planet, having to deal with a new world would be welcomed—even if they had to live in a cave, or a jungle, or some island. It is worth it to them.” She looked away. “I do not like to say it, but I think I understand. Am I crazy for saying that?”
Tauthin looked her way briefly before following her gaze toward the horizon. For several moments, the Bakma leader said nothing. “No,” he finally answered. She returned her gaze to him, and he continued. “It is easy for me to imagine their plight. Were I afforded the chance to start anew on a new world, I would take it—regardless of the risks.”
It hurt her to hear that. He’d had that chance. It was Svetlana’s doing, not Tauthin’s, that they were on Kalar. Had the Bakma leader been in the captain’s chair, he might already be at his new forever home, on some distant planet far, far away. “I took that chance from you,” she said solemnly.
“You did not.”
“I did. I am sorry.”
He released a huffing sound—the closest the Bakma species came to sighing. “The choice to come to Kalar was yours alone to make. Were it not for you, I would have remained chained to the wall of the Zone Runner. You are responsible for what freedom I now possess. It is far more than I ever experienced before I met you.”
Svetlana opened her mouth to reply—but he spoke again first.
“You should accept Akàziendi’s offer,” Tauthin said. Svetlana turned to him. “If the Kalareim wish a new chance on your world, give it to them. We can deposit them in a remote location, away from your cities. A secret place. It will not be easy for them, but that does not mean it is worse than where they are now. They will have peace, and that is what matters.”
She huffed a single, sad breath of laughter. “Peace. Fighting weather, the elements, animals. Gravity. That does not sound peaceful to me.”
For several seconds, Tauthin remained silent. Dark purple eyes on the ever-fading sunset, he finally addressed her again. “Did I ever tell you about the first Earthae I killed?”
Brow furrowing, she looked at him—her silence answering his question.
“It was many cycles ago. I cannot tell you where on your planet I was, but it was not one of your cities. It was a place that many of your species live, surrounded by trees and small, constructed habitats.”
She realized in that moment that there was no Bakma word for neighborhood. That concept was simply unknown to them. But it felt like that was what he meant.
The Bakma continued. “Our orders are always to disrupt—to prompt a response from your warriors. I believe that these were the first years of EDEN’s existence. It took them a long time to arrive.”
It sounded like it. EDEN’s initial rollout was anything but smooth.
“The first Earthae I saw were not warriors. They were a male and female from a residential habitat. Earthae young were with them. I was alone when I entered their structure. They wore the same frightened expressions that I have seen often during my many missions to your world.”
Svetlana found her eyebrows arching sadly. “What happened?”
“I killed them. It is what we are trained to do. There are no civilians in warfare, and so I did not hesitate. I even killed one of their sub-creatures.”
She didn’t know what that meant, and she had no desire to ask. The thought of Tauthin mowing down a scared family was enough to make her feel ill. She didn’t need him to confirm what kind of family pet he’d killed, too. Angling her head, she asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because if the Kalarael view the Kalareim as we were taught to view the judged, then the Kalareim will never have peace so long as they are on this world. They will be hunted. They will be slain, male, female, and young alike. The Kalarael will feel no remorse in doing so, as I felt none when I destroyed those first Earthae—and all Earthae since. Even today, I feel no guilt. I eradicated what I believed at the time was a pest—even if it was wrong.” He faced her. “If you use your status as an Incarnate to bless a campaign against the Kalareim, you would be no different from the Khuladi who blessed our campaign against Earth.”
At those words, at that understanding, the hair on Svetlana’s arms stood.
“You must not do this,” he said. “If the Kalareim offer you a way to leave this world, you must take it. If in doing so, you offer a portion of them to flourish on a new world, it is all the better.”
“Tauthin, I don’t trust them,” she said plainly. “I don’t trust…” She looked away. “I don’t trust anyone on this world—not even the ones whose eyes tell the truth.”
Grunting, he half-shook his head. “It does not matter if you trust them. Trust me. In the story of your species, I am a villain. Do not be the villain in the story of the Kalareim.” He leaned closer. “Accept Akàziendi’s proposal. See what support they can offer. At this stage, the best thing we can do for all parties involved on this world is to leave—preferably quickly, before the Kalarael make further demands of you. You know that they will.”
“Ugh.” She rubbed her hands up her face and leaned her head back. “This is a disaster.”
Tauthin angled his head. “May I offer an alternative viewpoint?”
“Sure.”
“This is an opportunity,” he said.
Parting her fingers, she peered through them as he spoke on.
“I have done many vile deeds as an instrument of the Khuladi, few of which I have felt remorse over, despite recently acknowledging their malevolence in my spirit. If this is an opportunity to do something redemptive, I for one would like to take it.” His deep violet stare remained on her. “You are my captain. You are my lady. What you decide is what I shall do. The choice, ultimately, is yours.”
Right back to where she’d begun—the recipient of Tauthinilaas’s humility. He’d acquiesced to her when she asked for the captain’s chair on the Zone Runner. He acquiesced to her, still. Of all the complexities she had dealt with since being taken in the Zone Runner, it brought a measure of comfort that the dynamic of their relationship stayed the same. She determined herself to never take advantage of it. Drawing in a breath through her exposed nasal cavities, she gazed out of the window at the endless runa legras. “For their goddess to betray them…that will be a hard thing for the Kalarael to overcome.”
“Fortunately for all of us, you are not their goddess,” Tauthin said. “You are an Earthae they have taken captive. These walls are beautiful, but they are a prison.”
His words were true. How she hated to hear them.
“All this time you have been here, your planet has waged a war. Your friends have likely wondered where you are. I do not know how much time has passed since we took you, or if our times have even correlated properly. We have operated the Zone Runner as best we could as a skeleton crew, but there is no guarantee that we did so at the level required for negligible time dilation. It is possible that months or years have passed in Earth time.”
Months or…years? Color drained from her face.
Upon noticing it, Tauthin lowered his voice. “There is a reason space is traversed in instantaneous jumps. Motion is the enemy of time. Though we moved little while in the Zone Runner…we did move, with no navigator to assist us. I do not know the impact that will have had.”
What if we have been here too long, already? She turned to look out the window. What if I return to a home I do not recognize? What if everyone I ever knew is—
Tauthin placed his hand on her shoulder.
She turned her head back to him.
“I sense your concern,” he said. “Do not let it consume you. Time and space are a delicate balance, but while we are here, on Kalar, it will remain relatively synchronized. Just the same, I feel it is imperative that we act as quickly as we are able. The sooner you can make your decision and—”
“We are doing it,” Svetlana said. Nodding her head with finality, she drew in a breath and looked at him. “We are doing it. We are getting the help of the Kalareim, we are taking that Zone Runner, and we are getting off this beautiful, terrible planet and returning to Earth. And we will take some of them with us.”
Tauthin bowed his head and grunted. “We must make sure that we have all the things you came for, primarily the information about the Khuladi.”
He was talking about the full-body scans that the Kalarael had taken, not just of the Khuladi, but of the Bakma, Ithini, and canrassi, too. All of it would be helpful for her to bring back to Earth. “I will tell Akàziendi tonight. She will report it to Tributurian, and we will see what happens.”
“You are making the right choice, Setana.”
“You led me to it.” She turned and took several steps away. “I must win my fight with Kraash-nagun. If we are to do this, it means we will not be gaining the Bakma from Winduster. It is highly unlikely we would have time to both free them and take the Zone Runner. Speed, I believe, is our ally.” She sighed. “Then again, I do not know what Tributurian will say. He may have his own ideas. He may reject this plan altogether. There is nothing we can do but see—and go about our business as if nothing unusual is happening.” Turning back to him, she said, “Thank you, my friend. You have always been a wise counsel to me.”
Tauthin’s violet gaze was steadfast. “That you call me friend is all the payment I need. Let us never allow emotion to endanger it again.”
“Let us never.” Stepping toward him, she opened her arms to give him a hug. “An Earthae custom. It is time you learned it.”
Opening his arms awkwardly, he allowed hers to wrap around him. When she gave him a squeeze, he put his around her back. The motion was rigid. It was not the kind of thing a Bakma would ever do. But as the seconds passed, bit by bit, his shoulders relaxed. He gently squeezed her in return.
“Appreciate these moments, Tauthinilaas. They are all too seldom.”
Holding her for a moment longer, he said, “I do, in ways you cannot comprehend.”
A second later, the embrace was released. Offering the warmest of smiles, she reached out to touch Tauthin’s cheek. Turning away, she returned to her space in the chamber.
Only when she’d crossed the room did Tauthin take his eyes off her. Turning back around to the window, the Bakma’s dark, violet lenses watched the last hues of sunset fade—until it, too, was completely out of view.
* * *
A short while later
Kraash-nagun was preparing his floating cot for slumber when Tauthin’s footsteps approached. Even without eyes, the blinded elite recognized the Bakma leader’s heavy steps. Angling his head in Tauthin’s direction, he waited to hear if the Bakma leader would speak.
“Soon, you will duel Setana,” Tauthin said quietly, but firmly. “When you do so, you will lose.”
Rasping loudly, Kraash-nagun said, “Are you a fool? I have worked with Ei`dorinthal for days. His eyes are like mine, now. My skills have not diminished since my time with the Khuladi. She has no chance to defeat me.”
Several long seconds passed before Tauthin spoke again. “That is not what I meant.”
Across the elite’s face, a new expression crept over him. His bravado slowly faded.
Tauthin said nothing more. He stepped back from Kraash-nagun’s sleeping space and turned to walk toward his own.
* * *
For the remainder of the evening, Svetlana thought on her conversations with Akàziendi and Tauthin. She thought about the ramifications and the likelihood that Tributurian would accept the offer. As soon as she saw the violet-skinned tasharin return to the chamber, she quietly pulled her to the side to share her decision. Akàziendi’s eyes brightened blue upon hearing of it, and then she quickly departed to presumably relay the message, by whatever means she possessed to do so. Svetlana didn’t see her again that night.
By the time Svetlana lay atop her floating bed to sleep, she felt as mentally drained as she had at any point during this journey—something that said quite a lot, considering all she’d been through. Having led one rebellion on the Zone Runner, she was on the verge of leading another one. She could only hope—and pray—that this one would end with less bloodshed.
It did not take Svetlana long to fall asleep, exhausted from making each hour of those thirty-three-hour days count. But she knew that each hour of each day was important. Each one brought her closer to her ultimate goal. To her escape. To her reunion with Earth.
It was about time.