Chapter Two

 

Elise shook out the thin blanket in her hands and folded it over, then unfolded it and shook it again. The snap through the air was somehow comforting, as if it was reassuring her that each time that she did it she would remove any dirt that might be clinging to the fabric and would soften the fibers. She wanted it to be the best it could be when the men got there, just in case this was the blanket that Azra was going to use.

“Can you hand me another of the blankets?”

Elise turned toward Lila’s soft voice and saw the woman holding out one slim hand toward her. She noticed that there was a small stack of neatly folded blankets on the table in front of her. Elise nodded, wondering how long she had been standing there with this one blanket in her hands. She lowered it to the table in front of her and handed another to Lila. The other woman swiftly shook it out and folded it before adding it to her stack. Elise could smell the warmth coming from the fabric that came from drying them out in the intense sunlight of the planet after washing them from the one small pump that they had found behind another of the buildings in the compound. That discovery had been a tremendous comfort and reassurance to them. The water that they had brought with them was starting to dwindle and now that the ship had left Penthos they didn’t have access to the water caches any longer. Though she knew that the rest of the group had arrived in another ship equipped with a water cache, Elise couldn’t be sure that it was properly stocked before they left or that there would be enough to sustain all of them for as long as they were on the planet. Finding the pump, though old, outdated, and working only at a small trickle, ensured that they would have access to other water.

“Are you thinking about Azra?” Lila asked.

Elise felt slightly embarrassed to be caught completely lost in her thoughts about her mate. At that moment, she was supposed to be preparing for the group to get back from the battle, transforming the small, empty building close to their main shelter into a hospital. Though she hoped that it wasn’t going to need to be used, it was critical that they had it ready before the men arrived so that if any of them did need care, they would be able to get the treatment and healing necessary as fast as possible. She should be able to focus on that rather than allowing her mind to drift to Azra and how much she had missed him since she had said goodbye to him. If she had known this was going to happen, that in such a short time she would be struggling to keep her emotions under control as she waited to know if Azra got through a battle on a distant and desolate planet, things might have been different.

She nodded and walked out of the building, suddenly needing air. The smell of food cooking in the fire that they had built filled her lungs and she concentrated on that rather than the tears that were threatening her eyes. She stepped up to the cooking pit and stirred the thick stew simmering in a large pot they had found already in place on the pit. It wasn’t too long ago that Elise assumed that it had been more than a century since anyone had stepped foot on Penthos, but now she knew that that wasn’t the case. She could only hope that this compound was as safe and secure as Maxim seemed to believe that it was. While it looked as though it had been some time since it had been used, there were small details that they had discovered, like the pot in the fire, that made her worry that this section of the planet had been used in more recent memory, and that those who had utilized it might return for it before they left.

“It’s alright to be thinking about him,” Lila said as she came up behind her and checked on the loaves of bread that they had rising in the heat that was still high even though the sun was dipping low in the sky.

The evening was rushing in and she could see Lila’s shadow stretch across the courtyard in front of the building, in the light from the torches that they had positioned around the edge of the compound. Though she didn’t like the idea of announcing their presence to the hybrid army, they knew that they needed to be as evident as possible to the men when they were on their way back. With the exception of Maxim, Zyyr, Lynx, and Avery, they didn’t know how to get to them, and if they were separated they needed to have a clear path to the safety that waited them here.

“There’s too many other things that I need to be doing right now,” Elise said. “There’s a huge group that will be here soon, and there are only two of us to get this place ready for them. They will need something to eat and water, and they might…”

Her voice trailed off and she turned back to the food.

“There will be injuries,” Lila said. “You need to understand that.”

The words were stark and the woman’s voice held more strength and insistence than Elise had ever heard in it. She turned toward Lila, put off by the seeming lack of care and concern in what she had said. She didn’t know how to respond, and suddenly she felt even more alone. Dropping the spoon that she had been using to stir the stew onto a stone platter beside the pot, Elise turned and rushed back into the building that they were outfitting as a makeshift hospital.

Her hands shook as she took up a sheet and spread it over one of the tables to create a bed. She was repeating the process on the other bed when Lila stepped into the room. Elise grabbed a threadbare sheet and started ripping it into long strips, the force that it took and the sound of the fabric tearing was a release for the frustration and fear that she was feeling.

“I’m sorry,” Lila said as she took a step toward Elise. “I didn’t mean that to hurt you.”

Elise tossed the bandages to the table and looked up to stare at the other woman incredulously.

“You didn’t mean it to hurt me?” she asked. “So, your idea of comforting me is to point out that they are going to be horribly wounded, and I just need to get my mind around that?”

“That’s not what I meant by it,” Lila said. “It’s not that I want you to think that there are terrible things happening or that they are all going to come back hurt.”

“Then what?” Elise asked. “What could you have possibly thought that I was going to think when you said that?”

“You are from Earth,” Lila said. “From what the Nyx 23 crew and the human mates of the Denynso warriors have told me, there hasn’t been a large-scale war on Earth in a long time. Certainly not during your life. The only warfare that humans have seen has been on other planets or in very small, isolated battles. Even those are technological wars. They are distant, impersonal. War is different on Uoria. Our kind, even those who have never seen battle ourselves, live with the scars passed down through generations that have known what it is to look into the eyes of the person in front of them on the battlefield and watch the life drain away from them as they feel their last breath on their skin. You can’t understand what is happening out there because it hasn’t been something that has been a part of your existence. I know that in your heart you don’t want to think about the fact that they are fighting as ferociously as they are, but you need to remember what you’ve already seen. You need to remember what Kyven and Emerie went through. What happened to Nylek. What happened to Zyyr. That has to be what is in your mind when you think about what they are going through and what will have happened when they get back here. That is the only way that you are going to be able to be prepared. If you think that everything is going to be fine and that there is nothing for you to worry about, it will be much harder for you to face the real aftermath of a battle. That can cost lives.”

Elise drew in a shuddering breath. She knew that Lila was right. She couldn’t let herself remain buried in the denial that she had surrounded herself with like a protective casing. It felt comforting in a shallow way, but it also kept her from processing the reality that she needed to accept before she would be able to be any benefit to Azra or to anyone else.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she admitted. “I’m a flight attendant.”

Lila shook her head.

“You are the mate of a Denynso warrior. You have been since birth. That makes you so much more than anything that you have ever thought of yourself. None of us really know what to expect here. All we can do is prepare ourselves in the best way that we can, and hope that it is enough.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Then we figure out what else we need to do, and we do it. Life is different now, Elise. You don’t have someone planning and scheduling your every moment for you anymore. You aren’t living for other people or to fill some expectation. You are just…living.”

“I don’t know if I know how to do that,” Elise said.

“You do,” Lila told her. “You just have to find it.”

Elise concentrated for a few moments on tearing another sheet into long bandages and then looked back up at Lila.

“You know, the most impulsive thing that I ever did was fall in love with Azra.”

“What do you mean?” Lila asked.

Elise looked toward the door that was still standing open, staring out into the dancing firelight around the courtyard. She thought of all of the times that she had stood inside the ship staring out of the windows, wondering what else was out there beyond the repeated, back and forth trips that she took as she traveled for work. Never could she have imagined that it would have been like this.

“My life was set. It was a routine. I knew what I was going to do, when I was going to do it. I had plans months and even years in advance. Then I was assigned to a trip picking up passengers from Uoria and bringing them to Earth. It seemed so exotic and exciting. I was used to the usual leisure destinations and the long cruises, and I had never been to somewhere as far or as unique as Uoria. Especially with what happened to the last attendant who interacted with the warriors.”

Elise could see the look of confusion on Lila’s face and had to remind herself that this woman was not human. She wasn’t from Earth and didn’t have the same experiences or thoughts that she did. It was a strange realization and one that she knew would take time to process. Though there were things about Lila and the other Mikana that clearly differentiated them from humans, Elise found herself less and less cognizant of them the longer that she spent with them. Being near other species was something that she was accustomed to after the years she spent traveling on the ships, but there had always been distinct separations between them. She considered each of them different and often found herself interacting with them in the way that she thought that she was supposed to based on what she had been taught about each in her training and what she thought that she knew about them. In her brief time with this group, though, she had realized just how ridiculous that was and how skewed she had allowed her perceptions, and the behaviors that they dictated, to become.

“There was another flight attendant, not too long ago, who went to Uoria. She was on the shuttle that brought a couple of the women from the University program to the Denynso.”

“What happened to her?” Lila asked.

Elise shrugged.

“No one really knows,” she said. “She volunteered to be a part of all of those trips and seemed to really enjoy them, though every time that she came back, she seemed different for a few days.”

“What do you mean different?”

“It’s hard to explain,” Elise said. “She was just different. Distant. Not quite angry, but something close to that. It would linger for a few days after she returned, and then she would go back to normal. Then one time, we just didn’t see her again.”

She could see the look of shock on Lila’s face.

“She didn’t come back from Uoria?”

“Oh, she came back,” Elise said. “But not to work. No one is completely sure what actually happened, but she was sent back locked in a pod and disappeared. The official word of the company was that she had been relieved of her responsibility after an issue during that last trip, but we knew that there was much more to it than that. The University was extremely touchy about the program with the Denynso. If she did something to offend them, there could be very serious trouble for her. It was well-known that there were government agencies involved in the exchange program and that there have been conflicts with Earth before. The last thing that either group would want is for a human woman to show up and cause an issue with the warriors.”

“So, what do you think happened to her?” Lila asked.

“I’m not sure, but I know it’s more than just her leaving her position and going off to do something else. If that was the case, we would have heard about it. Someone would have seen her or at least talked to her. You don’t just disappear when your job ends. If I had to guess, I would say that the Denynso got in touch with the University to tell them what she had done and when she arrived back on Earth they handed her over to the government agency overseeing the cooperation between the two planets.”

“What would that mean?” Lila asked.

“That would depend on what really happened,” Elise said. “If it was something serious enough, she could have been sent to a prison facility on Earth or even one of the intergalactic prison colonies.”

“Prison colonies?” Lila asked. “Isn’t that what was here? I thought that that is what caused the problems with the human crew.”

“The colony on Penthos was illegal,” Elise explained. “At the time, the cooperation agreements were very new and some of them were still being designed. The idea of punishment for criminal behavior and the expected treatment of species on planets that were overtaken by others was hotly debated. It was one of the most pressing issues of the agreements and part of what had taken so long to get all of them formally settled. Most people believe that is part of why Nyx 23 was kept a clandestine mission. They didn’t have the intention of revealing any of their work until they had found the evidence their intelligence told them that they would, and were able to put the steps into place to begin resolution. Unfortunately, that’s not how it happened. Instead, everyone found out about it because they went missing.”

Elise felt a chill go through her. Her entire life she had heard about Nyx 23 and the tragedy of their loss. Coming up with reasons that they had disappeared and stories of what had happened to them was a popular pastime for many people, and there had been countless books and raving demonstrations based on the conspiracies that grew out of these discussions. She remembered sitting at the top of the stairs when she was a child, peering down through the spindles at the party her parents were hosting. She was supposed to have been asleep hours before, but Elise couldn’t sleep when she knew that there were adults filling the home and talking about the wondrous and interesting things that she never got to hear about. Though much of the conversation had been dull at first, soon the direction of the conversation shifted to Nyx 23. It was a favorite topic of her father, though she never understood why. He had his own strong opinions about it, including a harsh condemnation of mission control for not reporting them missing sooner or being more upfront about the mission itself.

Elise had heard all of these thoughts before, but that night there was something new. A man who she had never seen stepped into the conversation and presented the idea that the team didn’t die on Penthos or go off track and disappear into deep space where their ship would be destroyed by the environmental forces. That had stopped the conversation, creating a tense, uncomfortable silence that settled over the room.

“What if they lived?”

It was a question that had seemed so mundane, and yet so impactful. Every other conspiracy theory that she had heard up until that point, even in just the small snippets that she had been able to glean from listening in on conversations, were dramatic and complicated, sounding outlandish even to a child. There were people who believed that the crew had, in fact, returned to Earth and been integrated into other scientific programs to watch how the story of their mission spread as a means of researching meme theory and use it as an instrument of population control. There were others who felt that the crew themselves had been a different species who had come to Earth generations before and hadn’t been able to leave because of travel restrictions, so they came up with the idea of the mission to allow them to leave and return to their home planet without detection. Still more tried to convince anyone who would listen that the mission had never happened at all, and that the entire story was a complex and intricate cover for another tactical move, using the images of people who had died in other missions or who had been sent to prison colonies to serve life for crimes that the government didn’t want to admit.

That one question, though, was different. It was simple and straightforward. That made it at once more plausible and more unbelievable. Elise remembered that the adults at the party had quickly shut down that train of thought, dismissing it as quickly and easily as they had accepted more ridiculous concepts, and soon after that the guests had left and Elise had snuck back to bed before she was caught. She had thought about that question for many months, waiting for the next party that may give her the opportunity to hear more from that unknown man. But it never came. She never saw that man again or heard mention of his theory. Soon, the thought seemed to leave her mind and she didn’t contemplate it again. Not until now.

“Did you know?” Elise asked.

Lila looked at her strangely.

“Know what?” she asked.

“About the Nyx 23 crew,” Elise said. “Did you know who they really were?”

Lila shook her head.

“You have to remember that the humans had been locked in place by the Covra for more than one hundred years when the Denynso found them and released them. The Mikana hadn’t had any interaction with them since before they were locked and had long been distanced from the Denynso. By the time that the warriors came to our kingdom to ask for help, no one was still alive who had engaged with them. Some of the elders remember their parents and grandparents talking about them, and even going out to look for the settlement after their interaction stopped, but they never found them.”

“But wouldn’t they have told your kind? Wouldn’t they have talked about where they came from and what had happened to them? Maybe the Mikana would have been able to help them and get them back to Earth.”

Lila shook her head again.

“No,” she said. “The Mikana and the humans didn’t connect until well after their arrival on Uoria. By then, I suppose the group had settled into place and felt that they had their home.”

“Or they didn’t trust you,” Elise said.

“Why would you say that?”

“They didn’t know that Uoria even existed,” Elise said. “They didn’t know anything about your kind, even less than they knew about the Valdicians. How would they know that they could trust you, or that you weren’t a part of the group that caused them to crash?”

“We helped them,” Lila said. “The Mikana living in the kingdom at the time taught them about Uoria and how to find food, build their settlement better, everything. How could they think that they were cooperating with a species trying to hurt them?”

Elise shrugged.

“I’ve never been through what they have, so I can’t guess what they were thinking or going through.”

They women fell silent and Elise walked back out of the building to check on the food. The bread was ready to bake and she tucked it into the dugout oven near the blazing fire. Her ears strained for the sound of the men approaching, or even the drums, anything that would tell her that something was happening beyond the wall of the compound.

“Did knowing about the other flight attendant make you worry when you met the Denynso?”

Elise glanced over her shoulder and saw Lila standing beside the pot, distributing the finished stew into a large tureen so that she could start another batch. There was a level of forced levity in her voice as if she were trying to make the question that she asked less serious.

“I guess a little,” Elise said. “But at the same time, I knew that it was her that did something wrong that caused whatever happened to her, not them. All I knew about the Denynso was that they are fierce, violent warriors. There were rumors that these men are insatiable, and that some of them are so powerful and even ruthless toward women that they avoid them all together until they have a partner. That was intimidating.”

“I suppose you didn’t know about their mating tradition?” Lila asked.

It was said playfully, a gentle tease from another woman who was in the same position that she had been, falling in love with a man outside of her species who was known not just for their fierce fighting, but also for their intense devotion to their mates.

“I didn’t,” Elise said with a laugh. “But there was something about Azra. As soon as I saw him, something inside me changed. It was like I somehow knew that there was something special about us.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

Elise started toward the pump to gather more water for the next batch of stew and Lila felt into step beside her with another large pitcher in her hand.

“It all happened so quickly. I couldn’t believe how strong my feelings for him were or how much I was longing for him. Finding him in that ship and bonding with him was so impulsive, so unlike anything that I had ever done. I knew that it wasn’t a smart choice. We only had the short time from when we left Uoria until we arrived on Earth. I had to continue on with my work and had only a brief time to spend with him. I was worried that that meant that I was going to lose him so soon after I found him, but he reassured me that that wasn’t going to happen.”

“Of course not,” Lila said. “He is totally devoted to you. As a Denynso, he’s been waiting for you his entire life and will love you with unimaginable depth and passion every day of your life, whether you are standing right beside him or are a galaxy away.”

Elise filled the containers that they carried and they started back toward the fire. There was an ache forming in the base of her throat as she poured water into the now-empty pot and heard the hiss as it reacted to the heat from the fire beneath. She felt her shoulders drop as a long sigh escaped from her lungs.

“It seems so unfair,” she said. “I have spent every day that we’ve been apart thinking about when we would finally be able to be together. I have wanted so much to be able to take care of him the way that his mate should. To cook for him. Make sure his home is clean and ready for him when he gets home. I thought that it would be months until I was able to even begin doing those things for him. Now here I am, taking care of him the way that I’d been dreaming, but these are the circumstances that brought me here.”