Kane

After five days of recovery, I’m finally well enough to get out of bed. I need Piper’s help and a pair of crutches, but I can walk. My mate hasn’t left my side for a moment. I can never even begin to repay the debt I owe her. Every time I look at her, I’m filled with warmth.

We enter the main hall.

“Welcome back!”

A chorus greets us. Zorans of all colors, red, green, blue, and their mates, and little ones, so many names it’s hard to keep track of it all. I can’t help but get emotional. I’ve known nothing but pain and hate, and these people welcome me into their very home…

Egon hugs me tightly.

“It’s okay, brother,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you. All of you. I don’t know how to ever thank you.”

“Join our fight,” Sarah Granger says. “We need your help.”

“Can’t he recover first?” Piper chimes in.

“Of course,” she laughs.

That must be the Sarah Granger my mate told me about. The leader of this pack. The blue Zoran standing to her side must be her mate; and the baby-blue boy peering at me from behind her legs must be their kid.

“We have much to talk about,” Egon says.

“Can’t it wait?” Miah says. “He just got up!”

“It cannot,” Egon growls. He places his arm on my shoulder and guides me to a different room. We sit down across from each other, and he pours us both some cuhla.

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay,” I say. “Again, I feel I must tha—”

“Stop,” Egon says. “You never have to thank me, Kane. Never again. You’re family”

I gotta ask. “Do you mean, literally?”

Egon throws his head back and laughs. “No, not literally, though I wouldn’t have minded that at all. No. What do you remember?”

“Bits and pieces. I remember seeing you. In a battle. With blood everywhere. And… human bodies.”

I look over my shoulder. In the other room, our mates are enjoying a cake. If they knew what crimes I’ve committed, would they still want me here?

“You remember correctly,” Egon sighs. “But it is not your fault.”

“I don’t understand.”

Egon looks like he’s in a great deal of pain, and it takes me by surprise. My heart is racing, and my palms feel sweaty. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for. I want to hear about my past, I want to know who I really am. And yet, at the same time, I’ve never felt more frightened. What if I was better off not knowing?

“I’ll try to clear it up for you,” Egon says. “There were four of us. You, me, Torin and Marcas. We were elite soldiers, serving the Zoran Admiralty.”

“That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Why I’m such a good fighter.”

Egon smirks. “You’re not just good, Kane. You’re the very best. Even among us four, you were always the greatest.”

“I wish I wasn’t,” I growl. “It’s only gotten me into trouble.”

The emerald green Zoran nods. “Yes, Piper explained to me what happened on Vagreon… once again, you mustn’t blame yourself.”

“How can I not? I did those things. Willingly.”

“You were misled. Believe me, I know what that feels like. Here, you’ll need another drink before I continue.”

I knock the cuhla back. The sweet drink warms my insides, and dulls the pain.

“It all started when we landed on Deasun II, one of our training sites,” Egon continues. “We discovered a massacre. The entire planet had been poisoned by the Onyx Corporation, a human company that mines planets for their resources. The indigenous population had been decimated.”

“That’s horrible,” I say.

“I haven’t even gotten to the horrible part yet,” Egon sighs. “The four of us, we were unsure of what to do. You wanted to take this public straight away, but I thought that there must be some kind of explanation for this. The human must have made some kind of mistake. I couldn’t imagine they’d commit such crimes willingly…”

Egon looks up and smiles wistfully. “I was hopelessly naive. I contacted the Onyx leadership, and we arranged to meet them at Pazar, a space-station. Does that name ring a bell?”

I shake my head.

The green Zoran pours himself two more drinks and knocks them both back. When he looks up at me, his eyes are filled with pain.

“They gassed us, Kane. We got there, and were in a waiting room, and they pumped some kind of chemical in there, some kind of… rage-inducing experimental biological weapon. All four of us… we lost our minds.”

He needs a moment to collect himself before he can continue. I’m too stunned to say a single word.

“When it was all said and done, we killed dozens of humans with our bare hands in our blind rage. The humans arrested us, we were sentenced for crimes against humanity, and all Zorans were banned from Earth. They used as proof that Zorans were wild animals, and a danger to the galaxy. That, my friend, is what you remember.”

I sink back into my chair, dumbfounded. It’s even worse than I imagined.

“These people,” he says, gesturing at Zorans and humans in the other room, “these beautiful people, they saved us. They fight, they resist, because they believe in us. They rescued me, and now they rescued you. It’s our fault — no, it’s my fault that all of this is happening. If I had listened to you, all of this tragedy could have been averted.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s not your fault. Onyx did this. To you. To me. They should be feeling guilty. Not us.”

“You are right,” Egon says. “But it doesn’t feel that way. The guilt…”

I nod. “I feel it too. We should use that guilt to drive us, to let us strike at our enemies.”

Egon reaches out and grabs my hand.

“You haven’t changed one bit, Kane. Not a single bit. It’s good to have you back.”

“It’s good to be back, Egon. I still have one question, though…”

Actually, I have a million questions, but one at a time.

“How did I end up on Vagreon if we were captured by the humans?”

Egon smiles mysteriously. “You’re going to have to ask Kazim that.”

I get up and walk into the other room. “Kazim,” I say, “Why was I on Vagreon?”

He looks up in surprise, his mouth full of cake. “You should ask Daruk.”

I turn to the golden Zoran. “Daruk?”

He nods at Turnon. “Ask him.”

Turnon points the finger at Dost. “He’s your guy.”

“What the hell?” I growl, growing frustrated.

“I’ll tell him,” the woman called Ava Payne sighs. Her belly is round; I wonder how Piper would look like if she were to carry my child…

“We tried to free you, but we failed. We damaged your transport ship, but also took enough damage that we had to abort our rescue mission. Your ship crashed. We nearly killed you. We’re sorry, Kane. We feared we may have lost you… and so we’re extremely happy that you’re alive and well.”

I nod slowly and let this information sink in. “So the crash, the fire…”

“That was our fault. Collectively,” Ava says, eying everyone in the room.

“And my memory loss…”

“Also our fault,” Kazim says. “It was never our intention, of course.”

“If you hate us, we understand,” Turnon says.

I shake my head. Hate? How could I hate them after all the love they’ve shown me?

“I don’t blame you,” I say. “Not one bit. You tried to help. That’s all that matters to me.”

“We do feel guilty, though,” Dost chimes in. “Life on Vagreon can’t have been easy.”

“It wasn’t,” I say. “Not by a long shot. However, I did meet Piper there, and that makes it all worth it.”

All the women in the room ooh collectively.

“Why can’t you ever say something that sweet?” Aria says, softly hitting her red husband on the shoulder.

“I have other talents,” Dost grumbles.

“I need a moment to take this all in,” I say.

“Take all the time you need,” Kazim says. “You are our guest here.”

“I don’t want to be a guest. I want to be part of the team. I want to help. I want to make things right.”

“Right now you’ll help us most by resting, Kane. I mean that. Rest. Recover. You need it. Consider that an order.”

That’s one order I can follow.