Chapter 10 #2
If only I could blame my parents or the sect leader for my predicament, that might ease my guilt and disgust at myself, but I was not a child who sought to avoid responsibility by shifting blame.
I had made a hundred choices over the past four months, all of them inexcusable.
And worst of all, I had known that all along.
I certainly did not deserve Elena’s kindness or forgiveness, much less her affection.
I had escaped a hell of my parents’ making only to make my own.
Forux growled, but the sound was distinctly different than the warnings I typically heard from him. Less threatening and more like a scolding. A reminder that it was Elena who needed my attention, not myself and my regrets?
I took her much-smaller hand in mine and squeezed. Even unconscious and far removed from whatever danger she had faced, she smelled of fear.
My song rose again in my throat. This time, I did not try to hold it back.
The low note filled the medical bay. Elena exhaled with an audible sigh.
The little furrow between her brows vanished.
The scent of fear faded, taking with it some of my own apprehension.
I might have called my song miraculous were I not still a man of science who had made the physiology of true mates my new area of expertise after Elena’s arrival at Nova Cal.
With a quiet chuff, Forux relaxed his ears and tails, rested his head on his paws, and appeared to settle in for a bedside vigil.
It took an enormous effort for me to let go of her hand and leave the medical bay. With each step away from Elena, my feet seemed to weigh thirty kilograms each.
I will return soon, I thought, though I was not sure if I was reassuring Elena or myself.
I stopped at the weapons locker for a plasma gun on my way to the roof stairs. When I passed the lift, the lingering smell of Elena’s blood and burned flesh made my stomach wrench and fury flare.
As the roof hatch opened, I emerged cautiously onto the landing pad. Other than faint traces of Elena’s blood and burns, I neither smelled nor saw anything out of the ordinary.
The roof over the imaging lab, where Elena preferred to stargaze, was a very different story.
The air nearly crackled with the aftermath of what I would have thought was a direct strike by lightning if I did not know better.
I found no damage to the grass or Elena’s bedroll.
And despite the size of the earlier korae, the sky showed no sign of any such activity now. The night was eerily still.
I crouched to pick up Elena’s abandoned bedroll. Her scent permeated its outer fabric and inner fill. Without thinking, I pressed the bedroll’s headrest to my nose and inhaled. Beneath the more recent smells of pain and fear was that pure joy of Elena, and I drank it in.
The scent of her cascaded through me, soothing hurts endured over years of isolation and before that, mistreatment, ostracism, and abuse. The wonder of it was nearly incomprehensible.
For a time, I lost track of where I was, what I was doing…even who I was in the tidal wave of comfort and peace. Finally, I let out a deep, shaky breath and rose.
The scent of ozone abruptly increased. I became suddenly aware of my own relative vulnerability on this wide expanse of roof.
Warily, I turned back toward the ladder that led to the landing pad.
A tendril of red plasma peeked over the edge of the roof.
Peeked? I scoffed at my own word choice. Plasma in any form did not peek.
Slowly, the tendril rose into view. It was about a meter long and very bright in the darkness. Was it the same tendril I had seen in the forest two days before, or another similar in appearance? I could not tell.
As before, the fact that what it was doing was impossible did not stop it from doing it.
It hovered a meter above the grass and about four meters from me, close enough that my skin buzzed and prickled with a sensation akin to powerful static. My feathers and wings fluttered uneasily and uncomfortably.
Slowly, the tendril dipped until it almost touched the grass, then raised again.
Another slow dip, and then a third. With every movement it made, I felt as though I had lost my grip on reality.
But this was no dream, and I did not think it was a hallucination.
These movements seemed deliberate. A form of communication?
Even from a few meters away, the plasma’s intense heat hurt my skin. If it came closer, I might be burned.
Wait—had this tendril caused Elena’s injuries? I let out a low growl.
The tendril crossed the roof in less time than it took me to blink and vanished over the side of the building.
I dropped Elena’s bedroll and launched myself into the air in pursuit.
The tendril darted across the clearing toward the forest, where it could easily have lost me in the trees.
Instead, it turned away from the tree line and zipped under the station’s platform to the other side of the facility.
I gave chase, and it darted into the sky, zigzagging closer and then away from me.
I caught an updraft, soared above the tendril, and watched its movements as it zipped back and forth around Nova Cal, but not away from me as if trying to escape.
Realization dawned: by all the gods, it was playing.
My worry and anger over Elena’s injuries collided with a much different set of emotions: wonder and amazement, with shock and disbelief mixed in.
That tendril of plasma was some form of life.
Everything I knew was against it, but my instincts told me it was true. In addition to the evidence of my own eyes, I had a gut feeling. My world turned upside down yet again.
For two years, I had studied every aspect of the korae—or at least, I thought I had. I had never seen this behavior, and surely neither had anyone else in the centuries visitors and scientists had come to Hyderia.
The implications were as jarring as the epiphany that the plasma was somehow sentient and, of all things, playful. The korae, or perhaps this species of korae, had chosen to reveal itself to us. But why?
What did I have to analyze? Hyderia had no imaging arrays that captured the roof or the area immediately above it. There had never been a need. All our equipment was trained on the upper atmosphere forty kilometers above and higher. Everything that had just transpired was not recorded.
If I contacted anyone with the claim the conservation world of Hyderia was home to sentient korae, I would either be mocked as I had mocked Elena, or the planet would be flooded with researchers of every kind. The latter consequence seemed far worse than the former.
This felt like a private, confidential revelation—something we had been chosen to discover, when no others had apparently been so trusted.
The tendril darted toward me several times and then away, clearly teasing or baiting me to give chase. Before I could plan my next move, my wristcomm beeped with a signal from the medical bay.
When I tapped the device, the computer’s dispassionate voice said, “Patient is experiencing cardiac arrest. Please return to the medical bay.”
My own hearts seemed to freeze in my chest. To hells with this tendril—Elena needed me now.
At full speed, I dove straight for the facility’s deck and landed hard on my feet. My momentum sent me skidding forward and I nearly crashed into the exterior door. I slapped my palm to the scanner, muscled my way inside as the door slid open, and ran for the medical bay.
The fact I heard no alarms from the bay, as I would have expected given the emergency, did not process until I had already reached the doorway.
The sight inside the medical bay caused me to skid to a stop for the second time.
A meter-long tendril of green plasma hovered about three meters from Elena’s bed.
The smell of ozone seared my nostrils, but this tendril’s power felt much more muted than the one I had just seen on the roof.
Almost as startling was that Elena was sitting on the side of the bed, still naked but wrapped in a thermal blanket, and very much not in cardiac arrest.
Her burns remained pink, so the equipment had not completed its healing, but she appeared alert and no longer in agony. I began breathing again after a quick glance at the diagnostic screen confirmed that at least the damage to her heart had been repaired prior to the interruption.
Her hand rested on the bedside control panel. She must have sent the signal to summon me. Forux sat on the bed beside her, growling, his teeth bared at the tendril. The scene looked very much like a face-off. Anger and protectiveness as much as anything drove me to approach.
“What do you want?” I grated at the tendril.
Elena stared at me, then back at the tendril, her expression a combination of shock and confusion.
“Who are you?” I said when the plasma did not move. “Can you communicate?”
The tendril dipped slowly once, like the red plasma on the roof. Was this a form of communication? Or simply movement?
I approached the invader, putting myself between it and Elena. “Please move two times if you can understand me.”
The tendril dipped twice.
For one of the few times in my life, my jaw dropped.
Elena slid from the bed and made her way unsteadily to my side, holding her thermal blanket in place with one hand. Worry and irritation made smoke puff from my nostrils.
“How can we learn to communicate with you?” she asked the plasma.
The tendril extended delicate threads as fine as Barmian spidersilk toward Elena. She flinched away from their crackling heat.
In a flash, I leapt between the plasma and Elena and spread my wings to block her from harm. My feathers ruffled with fury and protectiveness. “You will not hurt her.”
The plasma retreated. Its threads moved across the floor, searing something into the metal tiles. Then the tendril zipped around us and out the open medical bay door.
I chased after the plasma, but by the time I reached the doorway it had vanished from sight, leaving only the scent of ozone in its wake.
When I returned to the medbay, Elena was standing over the scorched floor. I joined her and stared at the marks. Across the metal, the tendril had drawn a series of swooping, almost elegant symbols that could only be some form of language.
The korae of Hyderia were not only alive, but intelligent.
For only the second time in my life—the first being the moment I recognized Elena as my true mate—I stood rooted in place as disbelief, awe, shock, and wonder clashed with trepidation and the stomach-lurching sensation of being utterly at a loss.
Elena wrapped her blanket more tightly around her upper chest, turned to me, and put her free hand on her hip.
“You,” she said, her voice tight with pain and suspicion, “have some explaining to do.”