Zero's Return (88 page)

CHAPTER 30 – Shael

You will remember
again.  I promise.

Shael sat up, his heart
pounding, the minder’s words still ringing in his ears.  It had been another of
the dreams of Six Six Five, just as intense as the other ones, and his chest
still ached in terror.  Over near the fire, Joedobbs ga Badass ga Male Model ga
Chiseled Pecs was talking to Alice in hushed whispers, the rest of the camp
sleeping.

“No,” Joedobbs said in
the Earthling tongue, “I’m
not
interested in telling you a sootin’
bedtime story.  Go burning lie down before I knock your annoying ass out.”

“My mommy told me bedtime
stories when I couldn’t sleep.”

Joedobbs ga Badass turned
to scowl down at the little hatchling with the full power of his warrior
glare.  “Do I look like I’ve got burnin’
breasts
to you?”

Alice pouted.  “But my
mommy—”

Joedobbs leaned down to put
his face an inch from the little girl’s and yanked a thumb towards the
blanketed People, obviously in a foul mood.  “Go.  Sleep.”

Pouting, the little girl
did, but not before Shael frowned, wondering what ‘breasts’ meant.  It was the
second time Joedobbs had mentioned them, and he seemed to have been indicating
the fleshy lumps standing out from Shael’s chest, revealed from the descaling. 
The way he had said it, though, had suggested—again—that Joedobbs ga Badass
already thought Shael had given up his tek.

Shael glanced down at his
chest, then at Joedobbs.  He had gone back to polishing his gun at the fire,
and didn’t see Shael sitting up, watching him.  There were distinct differences
between their bodies, now that Shael was looking.  Joedobbs ga Badass seemed
thicker in the upper body, though did not carry the fleshy lumps.  Further,
Shael’s lower torso, just before his coils, was wider—much wider—than Joedobbs’
similar area.

Shael’s eyes caught the
two long appendages beneath his lower torso and his vision seemed to twist and
he got a headache as he looked. 
Coils
, he immediately thought.

But his head burned. 
They looked…like Twelve-A’s.  And Twelve-A was Human.  And Joedobbs had not
only claimed he was Human as well, but he had
also
had two bony appendages
that worked as limbs.  Over time, watching his movement carefully, Shael had
come to the reluctant decision that they had to be legs, and therefore could
not be coils, which therefore meant Joedobbs was not Jreet.

But if they were Human,
did that mean that Shael, too, was…

Immediately, Shael’s
headache came back in full force and he tried to think of something else.

Human
.  The
telepath’s voice entered Shael’s head like a clear, ringing bell, and Shael
flinched and turned.  Indeed, Twelve-A was sitting up amidst the sleeping
throng of People, watching him carefully. 
It means you’re Human.

A Human body,
Shael agreed.

No,
Twelve-A told
him. 
You were always Human.

Immediately, though it
had been something he had come to suspect since weakling-Mike had easily
knocked him down, Shael balked.  Human?  How could that even be possible?  He
was Jreet.  He
remembered
being Jreet.  He remembered his great
victories, his staking of his enemies, his strangling of Dhasha.

Then, unbidden, Shael
once again got a flash of Six Six Five, forced to watch an image of the Black
Jreet, begging her to help the Jreet people by teaching Humans to fight…

Shael’s breath caught in
his throat.  “Oh no,” he whispered.

Sometime within the
minutes he sat there, staring out at the night in horror, Twelve-A got up and
walked over to crouch beside him.

“What the soot are you
doing awake, Pointy?” Joedobbs snapped.  “I’m on night shift.  Get your ass
back to sleep so I can get some shuteye in the morning.”  Again, it was in the
Earthling tongue, not Jreet.

Twelve-A ignored the
Congie completely, focusing on Shael. 
You remember what I said to you as
Doctor Philip shut the lid?

Shael felt a full-body
dread hit him like a wave of ice.  He knew, without asking, that Twelve-A was
talking about something horrible, something buried deep within, something he
didn’t
want
to dredge up.

“Twelve-A, goddamn it!”
Joe snapped, throwing his polishing cloth aside and getting up.  “I
told
you I
only
get to sleep when your lazy ass is awa—”

The Congie slumped to the
ground with a startled grunt and began to snore.

Twelve-A hadn’t even
taken his eyes from Shael. 
Remember?

Shael swallowed, hard. 
His hands were shaking, his heart was hurting, his throat aching.  His mouth
felt dry, and at the same time, he was sweating all over.  It felt like a dam
within his mind was about to burst, strained beyond capacity, and it was about
to sweep him along with it.

“I’m scared,” Shael
whimpered.  His body felt like he were dying of cold in the frigid ice-crusted
mountains of Welu.  He couldn’t stop shaking.

Twelve-A reached out to
touch his shoulders with his slender fingers, steadying him. 
I’m here. 
Nine-G’s here.  Joe’s here.  You’re safe.

“But,” Shael whimpered. 
“I’m Jreet.”

I’m sorry,
Twelve-A replied softly. 
You’re not.

Shael flinched.  Twelve-A
had never lied to him.  Twelve-A
didn’t
lie.

And, in that moment, the
dam, even then stretched to capacity, burst in his mind, flooding his brain
with sensations and images that left him gasping, clawing at the earth in front
of him to stay upright.

“They wanted to make Six
Six Five into a Jreet.”  Suddenly, it felt as if Shael’s throat constricted,
allowing nothing but a whisper.  “They wanted to make
me
into a Jreet.” 
His heart was pounding out of control, now, and it was hard to see through
tears.  Everything was rushing back, everything, and it left him breathless,
feeling as if his confident, self-assured world had been swept away, replaced
with a world of pain, terror, fear, and the unknown, leaving him no anchor, nothing
he could hold onto.

Then Twelve-A’s arms
wrapped around her and he lowered his chin on her shoulder.  Totally
overwhelmed, Shael closed her eyes and cried.

They sat like that long
into the night, until Shael’s heartbeat had slowed and the awful images of her
past were obscured by a haze of numbness.  Then, as the shock fell away, she
began to feel humiliation that she had been so thoroughly convinced of
something so ridiculous.  Humiliation and
anger
.  Many times, she had
heard Doctor Philip talking with his superiors.  Many times, he’d had her
‘demonstrate’ for them her ‘warrior prowess,’ allowing her to smack around a
‘weakling lieutenant,’ but now, looking back, she knew their grins and snickers
for what they really were.  A human girl, thinking she was Jreet, and a
lieutenant who was being paid not to fight back.

They used me
, she
thought, utterly shamed to the core. 
They looked at me like I was an
animal
.
 
The shame and total degradation of that knowledge was so great that she had
trouble breathing.

Only after she had
stopped sniffling did Twelve-A finally pull back.

Remember what I asked
you, when he shut the lid?
Twelve-A asked again. 

Shael thought back to
those final moments of fear, when Twelve-A first spoke to her.  She couldn’t
remember anything he had asked—all she could remember was her terror.  She said
as much.

I asked you if you
wanted me to kill them,
Twelve-A said, meeting her gaze, his blue eyes
intense in the firelight. 
I need to know your answer now.

Shael felt her eyes
widen, her gut sinking at the idea that Doctor Philip could be alive.  “I
thought you killed them already,” she whispered.

I mean the rest of
them,
Twelve-A said. 
Humans
.

Shael balked.  “
All
Humans?” she whispered.

Things like what they
did to you are not new or uncommon,
Twelve-A said. 
They hurt each other
as easily as opening their mouths.  They’re selfish.  They’re cruel.  They
think about only themselves, and take when they should give.

Shael swallowed, hard,
still feeling that burning humiliation in her stomach that she had been forced
to think she was Jreet.  “What about Joe?” she asked softly.

Twelve-A hesitated,
looking uncertain. 
He’s like the rest of them.  Broken inside.

Shael felt a rush of
sympathy, knowing exactly how that felt.  “Then fix him,” she whispered.

Twelve-A gave her a long,
careful look. 
I can’t fix them all,
he said softly. 
Mike was proof
of that.

“You don’t need to fix
them all,” Shael growled, remembering Joe holding her as she cried, his strong
arms braving a mind that could crush him to dust to give her the solace she
needed on the mountaintop.  “Just fix him.”

Twelve-A considered. 
And
kill the rest?

Shael thought about it. 
She thought about how they’d hurt her, how they’d humiliated her and given her
no compassion at all for her terror.  She remembered the brutality, the mental
agony, the death.  She thought of Colonel Codgson and his mind games.  She
thought of Doctor Philip and his dispassionate face as he locked her into the
machine.  She thought of the soldiers, calling her ‘robot’ and ‘automaton.’ 
She thought of the techs, wiping up blood. 

Then she thought about
Doctor Molotov, giving her Charlie. 

“They’re not all bad,”
Shael whispered.

Twelve-A’s face strained,
and as she watched, tears began to reflect the firelight against his eyelids. 
I
know.

“Then just keep the hurt
away,” Shael said.  “You can do that, right?”

Twelve-A shuddered and
blinked, shedding the drops that had been welling in his eyes.  Softly, he
said,
I can do it for the People.

“Just keep everyone at a
distance, like Joe’s been telling you to do,” Shael insisted.

Twelve-A dropped his head
to stare at his slender hands. 
I can do it for the People
, he said
again.

Shael watched the anguish
in his face.  “But not you.”

No.
  He didn’t
look up.  For long minutes, they sat like that, facing each other, with
Twelve-A refusing to lift his head.  Then the minder stood, still refusing to
meet her gaze. 
No, not me.
  And then, without another word, he went
back to his place with the People and lay down.

Shael turned to glance at
the Congie’s limp form beside the fire, still snoring.  He had saved her life,
back when she had been too blind to recognize it, and she had done nothing but
hurt and scorn him in return.

“So…” Shael said softly,
glancing back at Twelve-A, “you can fix Joe?”

Twelve-A was silent for
much too long. 
I can make him stop hurting,
he finally said.

And, to Shael, knowing
Joe was someone who had risked his life to save her time and time again, who
had helped her when she could only mock him back, that was enough.

#

Sister.

Shael flinched and opened
her eyes.

The fire was dark. 
Beside it, the Congie continued to sleep where the minder had left him. 
Twelve-A and the others had gone back to bed, leaving Shael alone.  Shael, who
had decided to stay awake to watch the fire and guard camp so Joe could sleep,
had instead fallen asleep against a log, the day’s events too much for her.

Sister Jreet,
the
voice came again.

Immediately, Shael thrust
herself into her war-mind, wrapping it around her as a shield as she sat up,
tense.

What she saw in her
second sight made her gape.  The stars were surging around her, moving in
rolling waves of galaxies.

No
, Shael
realized,
not waves…
coils…

The entire camp was
wrapped in sliding, twisting
coils
.  Coils the color of the night sky,
thicker than she was tall, surrounded them, the starry blackness twisting
against itself as the coils slid against each other, with the fire and its
sleeping charges at its core.

Sister Jreet, we have
a message for you,
the voice said again.  Shael twitched, realizing that,
unlike Twelve-A’s mental voice, which sounded from all sides, this mental voice
had a direction, and it was coming from directly above her head.  When she
looked, the undulating, starry blackness coalesced into a diamond-shaped head
many times more massive than any Jreet she had ever seen.  Its eyes were larger
galaxies within the star-specked head, whose twinkling pinpoints seemed to
change color with the movement of the coils.

The Black Jreet
,
Shael thought, stunned.  Immediately, she remembered the little bed, the Black
Jreet on the screen, asking her to save Humanity…  She frowned and pulled
herself straighter.  “Twelve-A?” she called, frowning.  She glanced at her
friend.  He still slept soundly.  “Twelve-A!” she hissed, keeping one eye on
the gigantic apparition.

He can’t hear you,
Sister-Jreet
, the starry void told her.

“Twelve-A!” Shael
shouted, fighting a rush of panic.  “
Joe
!”

The great mass of starry
coils slipped closer, all but swallowing Shael in their embrace. 
Sister
Jreet, hear our warning.  Within a turn, you shall have met Seven Sentinels. 
You already share a fire with the Horned Sentinel and the Sentinel of the
Vaghi.  In your travels, you will meet five more—the Void-Sentinel, the Hunted
Sentinel, the One-Eyed Sentinel, the Sentinel of the Rock, and the Golden
Sentinel.  Combined, their actions now will determine the success of your new
race.