Chapter 3 #2
Cleo had her medical scanner in full operation.
Its soft beeping filled the brief silence.
Her expression grew more alarmed with each reading.
“Maya, your neural activity is off the charts,” she said, managing to keep her voice calm and professional.
“I’m seeing patterns I’ve never encountered before—massive spikes in areas of the brain that shouldn’t even be active.
We need to get you to a medical facility immediately. ”
“Yes,” Zurian said quietly. He’d moved closer during our conversation. “She’s a conduit. The neural activity you’re detecting isn’t a malfunction—it’s a psychic bond forming.”
“A what bond?” Zara’s voice cracked with excitement and terror in equal measure.
“Are you saying Maya is psychically connected to an alien intelligence? The energy readings I’m getting support that.
There’s definitely some kind of active neural network forming in the crystal matrix.
But the power levels involved… This should have killed her instantly. ”
Savair’s ship landed with whisper-quiet grace. The clearing was getting crowded, and I noticed that the Destrans who emerged from those ships looked on edge. Their skin colors on their faces shifted through patterns of orange and red—warning hues that spoke of serious danger.
Lord Savair approached with calm observation, but I caught the subtle tension in his posture. “Is it safe to move her?” Savair’s voice carried the authority of someone accustomed to making decisions.
“It has to be,” Cleo warned. “This is too much for her body. You there.” She pointed to me. “Can you pick her up?”
I gritted my teeth and shifted my hands from Maya’s shoulders to her back and legs.
My own legs felt jiggly, as if the muscles had forgotten how to work, but I found my strength and lifted.
She was light in my arms. Beneath the suit, her body was soft and pliant.
She struggled to keep her head up as I adjusted my hold on her.
“What is this entity?” Savair asked as everyone made way for me to carry Maya away from the crystals.
I shook my head, frustrated by the incomplete impressions flooding my awareness. “I can’t understand what she’s trying to tell me.” Not true, but I wasn’t about to announce some rubbish about me being the newest Destran lord.
Savair raised one dark brow. “She?”
“It’s a Sola,” Zurian said. “I will confirm with my own Sola when I return home, but the energy, the need for connection, and the sensation I have here…” He touched his chest. “Indicate what this is.”
“I feel that, too.” Scaron’s eyes narrowed on the crystals. “It could be why our Solas chose this seemingly random moon to settle our people on.”
Savair’s lips thinned. “Let’s get everyone to safety. Then we can evaluate.”
Maya gasped and went rigid in my arms. “I can feel fragments of her memories,” she gasped, her voice strained. “She’s ancient—older than all of them. She’s been sleeping here since before your people found this world.”
The assembled lords went very still.
“That’s impossible,” Scaron said. “The oldest recorded Sola is barely four thousand cycles old and they are from the planet Destra. Nothing could survive in dormancy for that long.”
Cleo’s medical scanner began beeping more rapidly, its tone shifting to the urgent rhythm that indicated critical readings.
“Whatever’s happening to her, it’s accelerating,” she said, panic creeping into her voice.
“Her brain activity is spiking beyond safe levels. We need to break this connection before it kills her.”
Another pulse of energy surged through the crystalline formations, this one strong enough to make the nearby transports’ systems flicker. Zara yelped as her atmospheric readings spiked into the red zone.
“The energy output is becoming unstable,” she said, backing away from her equipment. “If this continues to escalate, we could be looking at a catastrophic release that affects the entire region.”
Zurian stepped forward. “Quickly now. To my ship.”
“My Sola is the closest,” Scaron said, nodding toward the Sola cluster in the distance. “Take her to my med bay. Wyn will know how to treat a human.”
I nodded, recognizing the name, Wyn, as Scaron’s mate. She was a medical doctor and treated all the humans who either lived in or visited the city. There was no better place to take this female than to the human physician.
Cleo and Zara hurried back to their transport as I carried Maya to Zurian’s ship, which was the largest of them.
The energy diminished as I stepped into the main cabin and the hatch closed behind us.
I held Maya close, although I could have put her down.
There were couches and even a soft, plush rug in the main seating area.
But no, I held on to her as if letting her go would hurt both of us.
Who knew? Maybe it would. Whatever was happening was the strangest thing I’d ever experienced, and it didn’t look like the lords had too many answers, either.
The flight to Scaron’s med bay was fast. I barely noticed it. I was surrounded by Destrans the instant the ship landed and they escorted Maya and me to one of the clean, white rooms of the medical bay. There, a human woman with warm brown eyes greeted us.
“Scaron briefed me on what happened,” she said, then gestured to a narrow bed with a gel mattress that glowed a gentle shade of blue. “Put her here so I can get her vitals and see what we can do.”
I placed Maya on the bed and reluctantly broke contact. What if the entity flooded her again and I wasn’t able to stop it? What if this…Sola was unstable enough to want vengeance for being alone for so long?
A hand dropped onto my shoulder as I stepped away to allow Wyn and her team to get to work. “Out there, you said, ‘I’m not your lord.’ What did you mean by that?” It was Scaron who asked, and based on the intensity of the lord’s gaze, there would be no squirming out of answering him.
Panic sliced hard. “Nothing. It was chaotic. I don’t know what I was talking about.”
“Are you sure?” Scaron asked slowly. “If this Sola has chosen you as her lord, you must accept. Solas cannot survive without a lord symbiont.”
Savair and Zurian also turned their eyes to me, and I felt an unpleasant weight settle on my shoulders. The burden of responsibility, of other people’s lives depending on my choices. The same weight that had crushed me when I’d failed to save Pira and Jorik.
“I’m not lord material,” I said aloud. “No Sola would choose me. If she said that, she was confused. Mistaken.”
“Solas do not get confused,” Scaron said bluntly. “And they are never mistaken. I’d think very carefully about what this Sola communicated to you before dismissing her words.”
Annoyance and refusal rose up in my chest. “Like I said, it was chaotic. I couldn’t understand it all.
Her words were garbled, mixed up.” I looked down at Maya’s pale face.
She looked momentarily at peace here, despite everything that was happening to her.
I thought about Pira and Jorik, about the weight of failure I’d carried for ten cycles.
About the long routes through empty space, the careful isolation, the way I’d convinced myself that staying away was the same as keeping people safe.
Zurian stepped closer, his expression grave. “Well, she didn’t intend to connect with a human. That is a certainty. And this human is likely to die without intervention.”
“And you think I’m the one to intervene?
” I snapped. “I was departing the moon, my sensors showed an energy spike with a human signature, so I turned around to check it out. I found her there. That’s it.
That doesn’t automatically make me a Destran lord.
” It was unthinkable, honestly. I winced, feeling a familiar tightness coil in my chest like cinched ropes.
The fear of failing again, of making the wrong choice, of being responsible for someone else’s pain.
But underneath that fear was something else, and it was the same pull that had drawn me here in the first place.
It was the sense that this was where I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to do.
Savair pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Summon the rest of the lords,” he said quietly. “This is about to get extremely complicated.”
As those words were uttered, another surge of energy slammed into me, causing me to gasp and stumble and all the alerts on Maya’s bed to explode in warnings.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the onslaught as hands and arms came around me, leading me somewhere, then pressing me onto a gel bed myself.
I pushed hard against the presence in my mind, mostly to repel it from Maya, who was too vulnerable for this, but also to protect myself.
The Sola so wanted to burrow into my head.
I wouldn’t allow it. I was a transport pilot, nothing more, and thinking myself more than that would doom both the Sola and any Destrans who chose to live inside her.
But as my muscles tensed and my head ached, I couldn’t help but feel like my old life was about to burn away like paper in a flame.
I hoped I could hold onto myself. I hoped I wouldn’t regret stepping in to save that human, because I sure wasn’t someone who had any business leading anyone.