Chapter 32 Elanie
I hadn’t left my hut. Barely left my bed. Inexplicably, the days marched on, my internal timing system collecting seconds, minutes, hours. It didn’t matter. Time didn’t matter. Because everything had stopped the day Sem left.
Sunny told me once that love could feel like an icepick through the heart. Now that my entire existence had been reduced to hugging my knees to my chest while crying into my pillow, I knew it wasn’t an icepick. It was a laser blast. A claw drill. A supernuclear bomb.
Aside from Gol, who’d encouraged me to leave the hut, to move on, as if that were possible, and Grover, who’d started looking at me like I was a lost cause, Mal was my only visitor. He brought clean clothes, even though I didn’t wear them. He brought food and drink, even though I didn’t touch them.
I missed Sem. I missed him so much I’d started hallucinating.
Every night, after all of Thura went to sleep and I didn’t, I heard him.
I heard his slightly asymmetrical footsteps, circling, pacing.
One night, I swear I heard him sing, some barely-there melody rising through the floorboards of my hut.
I was losing my mind. Unraveling. Glitching out. Maybe that’s why today felt so different. Maybe I’d finally shattered so thoroughly there was nothing left to break.
A blizzard had raged outside the terradome, but today, blue sky shone through the skydome above me while sunlight streamed in through the open windows.
A tree outside the hut had just begun to blossom, its tiny orange flowers smelling like clove and citrus.
Grover snored at my feet, and I shifted under the covers, rolled over, and contemplated getting out of bed.
Sem was probably back on the Ignisar by now, or at least well on his way. He’d get back to his work, his life. Maybe he’d even forget about me. Maybe he’d move on, find someone new. Someone who wasn’t so complicated. Someone he could read and understand.
What was I going to do? Spend the rest of my days stuck in this hut, missing him so much I could barely breathe? Was that my fate?
Sitting up, I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and wondered what Sem might tell Sunny or Chan or the twins.
What he might tell the captains. Would he tell them the truth?
If so, would they even believe him? Because it was a fairly unbelievable story.
Almost absurd. An icy planet in the middle of nowhere.
A hidden community. Two beings who otherwise would have never found their way to each other…
If he did tell them and they believed him, would they try to come for me? Would they send—
My hands dropped from my face, my heart plummeting from whatever shadow it had been trying to hide behind in my chest. Stars above. What was wrong with me?
Even if Sem decided not to tell them the truth so that my life here could remain a secret, which was probably what he’d do, there was no way the captains or, dear gods, the twins, would ever let him get away with it.
They’d question him until he gave something up.
They’d subject him to psychometrics and truth scanners.
They’d run reverse navigation on the pod.
They’d never stop until they found me. And then they’d come, likely bringing Imperion warships along with them.
Even though nobody knew who or what he was, Golgunda was an infamous name.
A word whispered in hushed tones across the KU, associated with stolen bionics and sabotaged vessels.
A word Sem knew. A man he could describe and a hidden commune whose location he could pinpoint.
Gol would never have let Sem leave. Gol would never let anyone leave.
Sem was either already dead or still out there, alone and freezing, while I’d been lying in bed believing every word that big green liar had said to me.
Sem was right. Thura wasn’t a good place and Gol wasn’t a good man. And maybe I wasn’t a good woman either. One taste of freedom, and I’d turned my back on the most important person in my life. Why? Why hadn’t I listened to him?
Someone had to know where Sem was. Someone had to have seen something. Gol hadn’t gotten rid of him all on his own. Someone had to have helped—
“Of course,” I blurted out, startling a frantic shriek from Grover when I shot to my feet.
Throwing on a clean set of clothes, I bolted from our hut.
Not wanting to be seen, especially by Gol, I ducked behind huts and darted between trees, searching for the telltale glint of sun off titanium.
I found it at the perimeter of the bioshield.
Mal was hunched over a terradome generator with over four feet of fresh snow banked against the transparent barrier behind him.
“Elanie,” he said once he noticed me heading his way, his lips widening into a grin. “You are out of your hut!”
Charging up to him, I grasped his arm. “Where is Sem?”
“Sem is gone.” He peered down at my hand when I squeezed. “Like Gol said—”
“Mal, please. I know he didn’t go back to our ship. Where is he?”
“I do not—”
“What did Gol do to him? Is he still here somewhere? Is he…” My grip on his arm tightened until titanium creaked. “Is he still alive?”
“Sem left.” His brows angled down, then up, his hydraulics whirring as they pitched down again. “He did not want to stay in Thura. Gol helped him leave.”
“I know that’s not true. I know Gol didn’t let him leave. If you’re my friend at all, you’ll tell me what really happened to him.” My voice wavered. “Please at least tell me if he’s alive.”
Mal’s mouth opened and closed as I let him go. And then he swayed from side to side, his knees bending and straightening, fingers playing an invisible piano.
“What are you doing?” I really couldn’t handle another bionic glitching out right now. “Are you malfunctioning?”
His jaw clamped shut as a strangled, digital noise resonated from his throat.
“Mal, calm down.” I grabbed his swaying shoulders. “You need to breathe.”
He gasped through an inhale, then wheezed it out.
“Good. One more,” I instructed, breathing with him.
Finally seeming to settle, he met my stare. Then his shiny round head dropped between his shoulders. “It is useless. My generation cannot lie, our programming forbids it. And I have not yet learned how to bypass the coding without turning into a fidgeting hunk of metal.”
“That’s what that was? That swaying and jerking? You were trying to lie?”
He nodded. “But I cannot. I cannot lie, and he will find out. He will decommission me.”
“Who? Gol?”
Mal jerked a finger to his lips. “We must be quiet, Elanie. He has eyes and ears everywhere.”
“Where is Sem?” I hissed. I no longer gave a damn about Gol’s eyes or ears, because Mal knew where Sem was. “Tell me where he is, or I swear to every single star burning above the terradome, I will start screaming.”
His eyes dimmed, flickered. “No. Do not. He will decommission both of us.”
With a vehemence that bordered on intimidation, because there was nothing I wouldn’t do, no tactic I wouldn’t exploit to find him, I ground out, “I don’t care. If you know where he is, you have to tell me.”
Mal’s knees started bouncing again.
“Mal!”
“He is alive,” he admitted.
Relief took me to the sand, a sob breaking free as tears filled my eyes. He was alive.
Sinking to his knees to join me, Mal said, “I rarely go where Gol keeps them.”
“Them?”
“Sem is not the first non-bionic to go missing. There have been others. Many others. Gol does not like them.” Mal pointed a finger to the ground. “So he keeps them here. Beneath us.”
The planet tilted. Beneath us… The footsteps. The singing. It had been him all along.
“How do I get down there?”
“You cannot.” Mal snatched my hands. “Elanie, you cannot go down there. Is it not enough to know that he is alive?”
“No.” Rage swelled inside me, bubbling over. “It’s not enough. Not even close. I have to get down there. I have to save him.”
“Impossible,” Mal said. “It is impossible.”
So was surviving a crash landing. So was catching foot-eels. So was a bionic falling in love with a Portisan.
“It is not impossible,” I insisted. “Because you can help me. You are a good being, Mal. I know you are. You can’t be okay with what Gol is doing here.
Once we free Sem, we can all leave together.
We can take you back to my ship, where you’ll be treated fairly.
” That wasn’t necessarily true, was it? “Or at least better than you’ve been treated here. ”
“No.” Mal’s head whipped back and forth. “I cannot leave. I can never leave Thura. My family. My brothers and sisters.”
“Are they still here?” I asked. “Where—”
When his finger pointed to the sand again, a breath rushed out of me. This was why Mal allowed Gol to treat him the way he did. Why he kept Gol’s secrets. “They’re down there too?”
“I do not know, and Gol will not tell me. But I think so. I can feel them. At night, when it is—”
“Quiet.”
We shared a silent moment, then Mal said, “Gol will never let us find them. I have tried. He only lets me stay aboveground because, out of all my siblings, I was the only one too scared to argue with him when he demanded we live in Thura as servants.”
It was surprising, the way anger built, becoming heat, becoming a fire that fueled me.
Despite all his grandstanding, Gol was no better than anyone else in the KU, assigning himself as the arbiter of who was or wasn’t free.
“I’m sorry, Mal. I didn’t know it wasn’t your choice to have the life you have here. ”
“I do not mind.” He smiled for my benefit. “It is not bad work. And I get to stay close to my family. I do not want to live without them.”
Rising to my feet, I reached out a hand to help him up. “I understand,” I said. “That’s why we’re going to get them out. Sem, your siblings, everyone.”