Alien Me (24 page)

“We both agree that the Protocol is soon in coming, my lady,” Arlee said, nodding solemnly. “We’re an ancient species and the pattern has been forged from living on hundreds of planets over many thousands of Earth years. Effective human Sworn Assets have become harder and harder to create, and those who are created have more and more flaws. Your ladyship and Lord Sean are proof enough of that. Some Sworn Assets are only able to carry energy for a few years before they burn up. Others have gone mad. That is a powerful sign that our time on a planet is growing short.”

“The Original People will leave Earth because the Sworn Assets aren’t working out?”

“Yes. We must. As the species from which we make our creations evolves, eventually the Sworn Assets become less viable. Then we must begin the Protocol. No one blames you personally, my lady, but the clawman exposed the depth of your feelings for Lord Sean. The fact that you had the strength to take his suffering into yourself and were able to overcome the animalistic human part of yourself showed us that you had become something beyond an Original Person and a human.”

Something beyond? The cold hand of anxiety touched my spine. “Is that bad?”

“It will be inconvenient because now we will have to move on to a new planet.”

“And for humans?”

Arlee became grave. “Once the Protocol begins, all will be decided by the Great Houses and His and Her Majesty.”

Suddenly I no longer wanted to walk along the beach. “Maybe we should get back.”

Arlee did her best to hide her relief. She chatted happily as she stood in the doorway and had her maids brush the sand from her shoes and ankles. The maids seemed to share her distaste for walking on the beach. She was already giving orders to her maids as she walked away about what scented oil she wanted in her bathwater, and once she was dressed, what jewelry she would wear. I heard Judah’s name mentioned more than once. Her betrothal might have been broken off with him, but clearly she cared about how she appeared to him.

Circle hurried ahead of me and already had the footmen filling a tub by the time I got to the top of the stairs. Though she hadn’t said anything, she apparently shared Arlee’s feelings about beaches. Circle, who had proven to be a thoughtful maid, ordered a meal to be sent up to my apartment after my bath. She and the other maid began an animated discussion about what I would wear and how I would be accessorized. I sensed their delight. In their marginalized world, they had found some way to give their life purpose. As I lay in the bath, I could hear them debating over how my hair would be done and which jeweled combs to use.

*  *  *

Sean was sitting by himself in the courtyard when I came down the stairs. I didn’t know whether to join him. Should I walk up to him as if neither of us had ever said any of those things to each other? He saw me. I heard my sister’s voice extolling me to get a backbone, and I went into the courtyard and took a seat. My heart fluttered in my chest because Sean was sitting in a rigid way that made me think he had something on his mind. I didn’t wait for him to speak first.

“Arlee just told me that everyone thinks you and I are really flawed because we feel too much.”

“And they can’t feel at all.” Sean gestured to the palace around us. “Look around. They’ve lost a lot of whatever they were when they came here. Now their whole lives are planned out for them. They think. They think constantly. Their whole lives are all about hiding from an enemy none of them has ever seen. And I just know that Naomi set the clawman on Tardik and me as a sort of test to see how strongly you feel.”

I stared into the fountain. I couldn’t look at Sean. “Sometimes they fall in love. I’ve seen how torn up Judah and Arlee are.”

“Not like us. Their love is more a type of loyalty, not the rip-roaring full-on dive into the waters of the heart and soul that we feel. Look around. Their lives are based on rationalism and a cat-and-mouse game they call hiding from the Tarkwins. They don’t care about us. We’re the kibble on the floor that either gets eaten or swept up and thrown in the cosmic garbage can. And this is for an enemy that no one has seen in fifteen thousand years.”

“You humans oversimplify everything,” Naomi said.

Startled, Sean and I jumped. Beside her stood Sylvan, and behind them was an entourage of more than twenty people, including Judah, Tardik, Arlee, and Leonie. Their anxiety buffeted me in waves. I felt a surge of fear from Circle. Sylvan merely watched me with stony eyes, but Naomi’s were narrow and smug. The entourage parted and a man wearing a floor-length robe of brown and gold came through. He wore no jewelry, not even an ear cuff. No one needed to tell me that he was a missusan. The energy sizzled between us. Whatever this man had in mind, I wouldn’t let him hurt Sean or me. The missusan knew that too. He kept a hostile stare on me. His face was like granite, and I thought that he might have a terrible grudge against me for killing his fellow missusans. I got to my feet as I kept him firmly in my gaze.

“Why is he here?” Sean asked. “No one has the right to harm us.”

“He has the only right,” Sylvan replied, clearly unhappy as he looked at me. “This missusan has invoked the Right to Challenge. He may do so because you drained his three colleagues without authorization from His and Her Majesty. The Right to Challenge is a sort of missusan’s duel. You can drain him or he can drain you. One or both of you will be extinguished in the end. And Lady Darcy, if you are extinguished, the House of Picard will relinquish Lord Sean to us.”

I felt the slow burn begin in my hands. I could sense this missusan’s resolve. He wanted to kill me and take all my sweet human emotions, something more precious to him than all the treasures of the Earth. He seemed aware that draining me wouldn’t be like anything he’d ever experienced before. I sensed in this missusan a cold and terrible rationalism and an intense desire to win. Beside me I could hear Sean arguing with Naomi and Sylvan. As the missusan stared at me, I felt his lust for me, for my soul, to possess what I had inside me and what I had taken from others. Beside me Sean argued vigorously that I had never been trained as a missusan and that this duel wasn’t fair. In that Sean wasn’t quite right. I knew that something inside me had changed since being scourged by the clawman. Under this missusan’s menace it opened up inside of me like a blooming rose. I didn’t fear this duel.  I stepped forward. He threw off his cape. Both of us held out our arms wide at our sides, bowed our heads, and then brought together our fiery hot palms. They snapped with energy, his red, mine purple. The missusan came toward me as if to shake my hand. We grasped palms.

The surge of energy overwhelmed me. I groaned and dropped to my knees. I felt then that this was a very old missusan, full of hundreds of Earth years and fragments of countless souls. I stayed on my knees and let his energy pour into me. I knew that he meant to defeat me by frightening me with his power. It didn’t work. He had badly miscalculated me. When the energy poured in, I held it like a magnet draws nails. When he tried to pull it back and my energy with it, I opened the door to the pain the clawman had given me. I let him have it all, mine, Sean’s, and Tardik’s agony, fear, and despair. The flood totally discombobulated the missusan. He had no idea what to do. His certainty became uncertainty and then confusion and fear and unadulterated panic. He recognized his mistake right before he fell over dead, dropping like a log. When I got to my feet and opened my eyes, I was surprised to find that I was on fire from head to toe, though I wasn’t burning. I drew the energy in and the flames went out.

Sean ran up to me and pulled me into his embrace. “Are you all right?”

I pushed a little of the energy into him and let him taste it.

He grinned. “You’re all right.”

I looked at Naomi and Sylvan. “Lord Sean will become a permanent guest of the House of Beck. I invoke that as my right.”

Sylvan seemed stunned, but Naomi looked at me with something like hatred. She pointed to the dead missusan. “Take that to the lava,” she shouted at the footmen as she spun on her heel and stalked away. Sylvan and his entourage, standing in a long row like birds on a wire, gaped at me in shock. Finally they began shuffling out, but they weren’t watching where they were going and kept bumping into each other. One tripped and fell over a potted plant.

Sean kept an arm over my shoulder. “How did you know that we have rights?”

“I saw it in the missusan’s mind before he died. Strangely Naomi and Sylvan weren’t forthcoming with us about them.” I watched the footman picking up the body. “That missusan had been waiting for someone he thought worthy of taking over for him. He had drained many missusans over the years, and those missusans had drained many other generations before them. He never told anyone that he had the ability to keep parts of those who came before him in his memory. Through him I saw Shizanna. Shizanna is real and the sight of it was one of his most treasured captured memories.”

“You sound as if you regret draining him.”

“I do, but I also know that to him this was like a suicide. I sensed that he was surprised at my strength. To him it was an honorable death.” I shivered. “He had generations upon generations of the memories of others who had killed. When life doesn’t matter anymore, what’s left?”

Sean grew somber. “You didn’t take him just because you could?”

“I took him because he would have killed us.” I pulled away from Sean. “You can’t say stuff like that to me, like I enjoyed it. I am what they made me.”

“I’m sorry. That came out wrong. We both are what they made us.”

His apology didn’t ring true to me because I was still furious with him for saying it. Judah and Arlee came back into the courtyard after the footmen had taken away the old missusan’s body. Sean gave Judah a long look. The tension stretched between them like a slender wire before Sean strode off. I sensed Judah’s determination to carry out his role as my betrothed, to make sure that no one could question his devotion to duty. Arlee’s pretty eyes were watchful and tense.

“Have a seat,” I said. I lay on the chaise lounge and waited for them to sit down. “Did seeing that freak you out? I mean, did it scare you?”

“I told Naomi you would defeat the missusan,” Judah said, his gaze still alert.

“Did she believe you?” I asked.

“She did.”

“I don’t understand you people or your bizarre customs,” I said with some heat.

Judah gave me a cool smile. “Our traditions have kept us alive and well for thousands of Earth years.”

“Alive isn’t the same as living.”

“Humans have the luxury of not being hunted by the Tarkwins.”

“No. Humans are being hunted by you.”

Judah’s eyes flashed at my words. Arlee felt the change in his energy and shifted in her seat, alarmed.

“What do they look like?” I asked, relenting slightly. “The Tarkwins, I mean.”

“They are humanoid.” He replied reluctantly, as if he were divulging a secret. “They are so odious that I would say they are more like a human than one of us. Original People have been known to go mad at the sight of them. When they come to a planet, their ships fill the skies with fire and explosions. Those who aren’t killed in the invasion die later of starvation or exposure.”

Arlee gave a pretty shudder. “Enough of sad history. Let’s lighten the mood. Lord Judah, tell Lady Darcy what you and Lady Leonie were doing.”

He turned to me, delighted by the change of subject. “My lady, the Lady Leonie is something of an expert on ancient technologies, and when I told her how foolish young humans were plaguing you on social networking websites by posting calumnies, she was quite outraged. She immediately reprogrammed several of the websites so the names and contact information of everyone who posted those lies are now visible. We also added a few of our own postings so that it will seem to the human law enforcement authorities that the men who tried to kill you and Lord Sean were motivated by the vicious postings on that website.”

“Seriously?” I asked, laughing.

“We did, my lady. Lady Leonie made sure all anonymity was lost except for those postings made by your Approved friends. We used a powerful encryption so that it will be at least two Earth days before the humans will be able to remove the websites from visibility.”

I laughed long and hard when I thought of the ramifications of Leonie’s actions. “I will thank Leonie.”

Arlee smiled. “If your sister would skip her yoga class and drive to her male companion’s dwelling, she could meet the loud and boisterous woman with whom he has been having liaisons.”

My jaw dropped. Riley’s hot boyfriend was cheating on her? “How do you know?”

“Lady Leonie’s knowledge of ancient technologies is thorough, my lady. Your sister’s companion has a security system with cameras, but he never bothered to change the password that the system had when it was installed. Lady Leonie was able to access his system with no effort. The Picards are much more interested in ancient technologies than we are. Leonie’s had much to teach us.”

“Leonie studies ancient technologies?”

“Among her other interests, my lady. The Original People have learned from every species we’ve encountered in time out of mind as we’ve moved from planet to planet. Each has taught us something. Each has enriched us. And all have taught us lessons of survival.”

“What have you learned from humans?”

“That will studied by scholars on the next planet.”

“Will you be sorry for what will happen to humans when you leave?”

Judah frowned slightly. “We Original People are advanced enough to understand the way of the known universe. The same way the Tarkwins had dominion over us, we have dominion over humans.”

The cold logic of his words chilled me. “Human ethics teach that each individual has a right to live.”

Judah looked grave. “Of course, if the species is the strongest one out there.”

“Does a species like the Original People feel a sense of responsibility to those who are weaker?”

“Not when our existence is being threatened, my lady,” Arlee said.

I tried again. “This planet wasn’t made for you. It’s not yours.”