Chapter 2
The things Johar tells me over the course of the next hour are enough to push me to the edge of what I can comprehend.
When he has finished, I am glad that I don’t have to deal with my erased memories on top of it all. He somehow managed to load Hazathel, Shazuul and me on to the space glider without anyone questioning his actions. He was able to do this, because he turned me off under my father’s watchful eye, and then erased my memories of what had just happened. When Father saw that everything had been completed to his satisfaction, he gave Johar the order to bring me to him. Johar used this chance to take all three of us to the space glider and to get under way. The ship, in which my father is heading towards Earth, is flying towards the blue planet from the opposite side, so the course that Johar set did not arouse any suspicion initially. The agreement was that our ship would dock with it somewhere in the middle over Earth. As long as we don’t land, my father will not realize that we are going against his exact wishes.
“When will we change course, so we can land? And where, exactly, is our destination?” I want to know.
“We will start our approach in about one hour,” Johar tells me. “With a little luck, they will not realize that something is amiss until we are already on land. I will fly the glider underneath the shields, so we can stay invisible to control.”
“That will never work,” I object. “The defensive net is much too dense for even a small ship like ours to slip through unnoticed. Someone will see us.”
“Normally, yes,” Johar agrees. His eyes are flashing with confidence. He is really enjoying this deception! “But if there is, say, a distraction, at the right time, it could work.”
“The distraction wouldn’t be coming from your old friend Carson O’Hare, by chance, would it?”
“That is a distinct possibility,” Johar admits. This is something I really need to clarify further with him, but we just don’t have the time right now. We will be starting our illegal approach in just under twenty minutes, and will land somewhere outside of New York. I weigh which questions are more important – those about Johar’s connection with my father, or why we are still on the hunt for Cassie Burnett.
By now, Johar is lying next to me on the small cot, and one of his long legs is dangling off of the edge. He isn’t letting this uncomfortable position bother him, and I enjoy every second of feeling his body against mine. Everything that has happened over the last few days and weeks seems crazy – but the fact that I trust Johar is probably the craziest thing of them all. I am sure that I will find the reason for my trust and also for my love for him in my memories, but I still don’t want a logical reason for it. For now, it is enough that it just is this way.
Johar is the one who makes the decision about which question is important for me, while I am still searching for an answer. “We have to find Cassie before your father can get his hands on her,” he begins.
“Cassie, or her children?” I ask, so he will keep going. Trusting or not, it would still be nice to have a few answers, at least.
“Her children,” Johar answers, keeping his eye on the digital clock while he is talking. “You know that they are from different fathers, but that they are exchanging genetic information, now, even before they are born. We think your father wants them so he can have the basic building blocks for a race of super warriors, and we need to prevent that from happening.”
“Who are we?” I dig deeper. My life seems to consist only of questions, the majority of which is unanswered. I don’t ask why this would be such a bad thing, as I would have just a few weeks ago, when I was still 100% convinced of the superiority of the human race. At first, I think that Johar will refuse to answer, but then he continues on. “O’Hare is one of them. Hazathel, too.”
“I could have figured that much out, myself,” I interrupt impatiently.
“I have been part of a group of people for a long time now, whose members are mostly from your father’s lab,” he explains, after all. “We … will not and cannot pretend to be blind, mute and deaf any longer, while the humans are trying to subjugate the entire universe.”
“Aren’t you exaggerating just a little? I mean, come on: the whole universe?” I laugh incredulously, but my machine-human remains deadly serious. “We are talking about humans who rarely live beyond 120, and only then, when they receive permission to use life-prolonging methods. Those permits are only granted in extreme cases. Most of the crew members, on a manned space ship, can’t even live long as long as a journey to the end of the galaxy would take. To say nothing of the universe.”
“Mara, you know only a fraction of what your father lets you see,” Johar says. He sounds sad and touches the memory stick in his pocket. There is Cryo-technology, where you can freeze humans for as long as you want to and then wake them up again. And as far as life-prolonging measures go – how old do you think Ruthiel really is?” He says the name with hate, and his eyes look as if they have stopped seeing. I have learned the lesson that my father is a monster, but this Johar, who wants to get rid of my father, is close to becoming a monster himself. He still has his humanity, but this mission is dangerous. “He is about 250 years old,” he tells me triumphantly.
“So? Then just let them play around, those humans, with their megalomania,” I try to bring a little reality into our conversation. “You know what has happened, before, to every person who has become more and more powerful. Who was always increasing the area they controlled; their empires went under when their time was up. Think of the Romans, the Egyptians, the Carthaginians …,” I list them, but he interrupts me.
“We cannot let it come to that. You know Ruthiel. You know, personally, how cruel he is. He let you believe that you were not only a human, but also his daughter. He is absolutely ruthless and he walks over dead bodies to make the human race dominant,” Johar is speaking quickly, because we only have a few minutes until we reach the point where we are going to change the glider’s course. “I have seen what he does to humans who, in his opinion, are not fit to live – not just personally. He has no mercy, neither for humans, nor animals. Just think about the fact that he crossed animals with humans. The Betanians we met were the survivors. I have seen enough things to give me a lifetime of nightmares. And that,” he shakes his head emphatically,” I cannot tolerate. I don’t want to, either.”
“Are you sure that you are not just out for personal revenge?”
“No,” he says openly.
I grow cold.
“I am going to kill your father, if it’s the last thing I do.”