Two Moons of Sera (18 page)

“You and Tor not being official has gotten around,” Lock
said with a cock of the head toward where Ash had been standing.

“Oh!” I gasped, heat rising to my face.

Lock shifted his weight and looked around the kitchen.
Before long, Elgon finished eating and stared at Lock, as confused as I was by
his behavior.

“What is it?” I demanded.

“I.... Never mind.”

Lock hurried out of the room, leaving me alone in
frustration and unable to go after him thanks to the meal cooking in the
strange, fireless contraption. The day had hardly started, and I was already
annoyed.

The oven buzzed, signaling it was done, and I pulled the
packages out with tongs and placed them on plates.

Back out in the living room I found Tor standing by our door
talking to Lace. I guess word about us not being official really
had
made its way around the pod. Everyone here was obsessed with being Matched. I
just didn’t get it.

“Here.” I shoved Tor’s plate between him and Lace with a
glare and more force than I intended. What did I care? I’d just been talking to
Ash and Lock, and was now off to find Traz. Tor could talk to whomever he
wanted. Still, did it have to be
her
?

Sitting in the chair we’d found him in last night was Traz,
fully dressed and curled up around a book.

“Hey, Traz.” I sat on the table next to him, trying to look
casual.

“Oh! Hi!” he responded, a little too loudly.

“Lock has to go to Life Services this morning, and I don’t
quite know my way to Linguistics yet. Would it be too out of your way to walk
me?”

“Sure, I can do that.” His reply was softer, and his eyes
refused to meet mine.

I needed him to do this—just this one thing and then he
could go back to his life and forget all about Tor and me if he wanted to. I
wanted him to stay with us, wherever we were going, but I wouldn’t force that
on him. Right now, though, Tor needed to hear that other recording.

Neither of us had turned out to be who we thought we were. I
wasn’t the childish weakling who depended on my mother for everything, and he
wasn’t the brash loner who didn’t need anyone. Tor needing that melodisk was
more important than anything, and I would get it for him.

“Thanks.” I grinned and went to our room to finish getting
ready for the day.

“Around this way,” Traz whispered to me as we rushed through
a brightly lit hallway in the Linguistics department’s underground maze. We’d
followed what appeared to be the same stark-white hallways over and over, and
my mind spun.

Even though I used my far-reaching senses to keep watch for
others who might be nearby, fear of capture pulsed through my veins, filling me
with its poison, eating at my sanity and conjuring phantom noises. If they
caught us, would I be dissected or studied? My pulse raced so fast I thought it
might flutter away into the white ether.

“Here,” Traz said upon stopping at the right door. He stood
next to a panel and ushered me closer.

I pushed the white square next to the thin door outline and
watched the panel retract up into the wall. With a shaking finger I punched in
my security code. The long moments of waiting while the panel processed my
clearance were painful. My chest constricted, clamping itself around my
pounding heart.

At last, the door slid open.

Traz and I hurried into the room so the door would close
behind us quickly. The room we found ourselves in was dim and dusty. A stale
smell assaulted my nose and vaguely reminded me of autumn, when the trees
dropped their leaves and died until spring resurrected them. My eyes relaxed in
the weaker light, but the brightness of everything here was painful. Processing
what I saw through the blinding shine of artificial light was taking its toll.

“This way.” Traz weaved through boxes on the floor until he
reached an aisle of shelves. Boxes and drawers were piled to the ceiling, each
one labeled with a category and a date.

“The Sualwet stuff is back down the first aisle,” he
offered.

The temptation to go digging for information about my mother
or other captives was difficult to resist, but my fear of being discovered
overpowered the urge. “Maybe another time. Let’s just get the tape.”

“Sure.” Traz’s voice was wistful, and I realized it wasn’t
for my benefit he had mentioned the Sualwet files, but his.

“I understand you want to know, and I’ll help you find out
what I can. But right now we need to find that disk before anyone notices.”

With a nod, Traz increased his pace.

The Archives was larger than I’d suspected. From the door we
entered, this repository had looked like just a few shelves in a forgotten dank
room. In fact, it expanded far beyond that, into a large space stuffed full of
all manner of documents and storage containers.

As we trudged through the aisles, dust and other particles
we kicked up floated through the dim air, reminding me of bubbles.

“Where is it?” I asked after we checked the same aisle for
what seemed like the fifth time.

“It should be right here.” Traz pointed to a box on the
bottom shelf. “This is where they keep the uncategorized items, but all I see
is this ‘A’AIHEA’ label.”

“What’s that mean?”

He frowned. “I don’t know. It’s not an Erdlander word.”

“It’s not Sualwet, either.”

We stopped pacing and locked eyes.

As I reached for the box, the excitement of possibility
flowed through me. There was something delicious about finding a secret no one
else had ever seen. The hunt for sunken treasure, tales about explorers, even
my illicit hikes outside of the safety of my cove had all been a search for
this sensation. After experiencing so many new things, I thought I would never
feel it again. And then there it was.

I struggled to pull the box out to the floor. It was heavy,
too heavy to hold mere paper. What could they have had in there?

When I opened the top I discovered what appeared to be a
collection of rocks.

“What the hell are these?” I reached in and picked up one of
the heavy objects. On closer inspection, its hard surface was gritty and full
of pockmarks, like it had been forged but never smoothed. Black soot rubbed off
on my hands when I touched it. As I held on, the object warmed my palm. The
temperature rose as I examined it to try solving the rock’s mystery.

“Why would they keep this?” I asked, bringing it closer to
see it better I could feel the stone’s heat radiating against my face.

“I don’t know, just looks like a rock.” Traz reached out to
take the object but pulled his hand back with a yelp.

“How are you holding that? It burned me!” Traz sucked his
fingertip for a second before holding it out for me to see the blister forming.

“I don’t know. It’s not that hot.” I placed the rock back in
the box and watched the air shimmer from the heat around it. “What a strange
thing.”

“‘Strange.’ Riiight, that’s the word,” Traz grumbled before
pulling out the next box.

We went through ten boxes and found nothing but papers and
drawings, lab reports and something Traz called seismograph readings. None of
them referred to a recording, only something called the
A’aihea
.

I began to think we would never find anything, that I would
be late to my first day with Dr. Vaughn at the Hub. Would I be punished? Did
they penalize tardiness the way the Sualwet did, by snipping one of your webs
so you would swim slower until it grew back?

Lost in thought, I let Traz pull down the next box from the
shelf above us.

“Sera.” His quiet whisper called me out of my thoughts.

In the box was a pile of medical reports, weather reports,
and a melodisk.

“Is that it?”

“I don’t know.” Traz picked up the disk and studied it.
There was no label to tell us what was on it, but it was the first possibility
we’d found.

I crouched, balancing on my webbed toes, and began surveying
the box’s contents. Within I found the medical report of the man who had been
burned, transcribed accounts of what the party had seen, ecological information
about the area where the geyser was found, and a report by Dr. Vaughn. It was
handwritten in Erdlander and difficult to read. His slanted letters made all
the letters look alike. One word stood out, though.

A’aihea
.

“Can you read this?” I passed the paper to Traz, who was
rummaging through the rest of the box, pulling out items that interested him.

“I’ll try.”

He studied the words on the paper in silence for a moment,
his forehead wrinkled in concentration. When he was done, he flipped the page
and read the rest of the document. My impatience was getting the best of me. I
wanted to smack the paper out of his hands and scream at him to tell me what it
said.

Traz finally looked up at me. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
He flipped back to the first page and read it over again.

“I will choke you with my bare hands if you don’t read that
aloud this time,” I threatened, beyond annoyed.

“Oh, right, okay.” He read:

Regarding the incident at Kelmeta Geyser, it has been
determined that the A’aihea are responsible for the assault on our exploration
team. The mountain area has been long uninhabited, and the remaining A’aihea
presence was thought to be rumor. It is clear, however, that they still control
the region and are intent on maintaining their autonomy.

The Council has ruled that no further exploration of the
area be permitted based on the danger to both body and mind. In addition, the
explosion of Kelmeta Geyser coincided precisely with the seismic activity
discovered by the Science department. The activity originated beneath the
Nalastran Mountain Ridge, the suspected home of the A’aihea.

How the A’aihea have been able to so accurately affect this
geological occurrence remains a mystery.

After the incident in which Camp Member Kreenal was
injured, three members of the team separated from the group to explore a cavern
exposed by the earthquake. They have reported that upon entrance they heard the
“Song of Shah’aye.”

The stories regarding this song have long been disputed.
Based on the exploration team’s experiences, their inability to avoid following
the song is consistent with documented accounts of contact with the A’aihea.
This, in addition to their violent reaction to our presence on the Nalastran
Mountain Ridge, leads us to believe that the A’aihea are no longer dormant and
pose a direct threat to our way of life.

The Academic Divisions recommend the Council implement a
strategy to eradicate the A’aihea. Previous attempts to integrate or
interrogate members of this race met with tragic and violent results. To ensure
our continued prosperity and dominance, this threat must be removed.

“I don’t understand.” I shook my head before taking the
paper from Traz and reading it myself.

Whatever the A’aihea were, the Erdlanders knew about them.
Were they dangerous, or were they just defending themselves the way the Sualwet
had done before the love of war overpowered their reasoning?

“Where’s the Nalastran Mountain Ridge?” I wondered.

Traz flinched when my silver eyes focused on his own. “You
can’t go there. It’s dangerous.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Didn’t you read that? Whatever those A’aihea are, they
attacked Kree and then tried to kidnap the others.”

“Did we read the same thing? That’s not what this says at
all!”

“It’s right there. The A’aihea are dangerous, and you shouldn’t
go anywhere near them.”

“Fine.” I stuffed the paper into my pocket before reaching
out for the melodisk.

Traz pulled the disk out of reach and met my gaze with a
determined glare. “No way. This has to stop. Now. It’s too dangerous.”

“You can’t believe anything in that report. All we know is
other people are out there. People the Erdlanders want to eradicate. I didn’t
read anything that says they were doing anything other than defending their
home, if they were even doing that! And who’s to say that music wasn’t a
coincidence and the explorers weren’t even supposed to hear it?”

He leaned in closer, spitting the words as he spoke. “And
who’s to say they aren’t monsters trying to overtake the Erdlanders?”

“Like the Sualwet?” My voice was calm and steady.

Traz blanched and pulled away from me, confusion flashing
across his features.

“Like me?” I paused, waiting for him to look me in the eye
again. “Like
you
?” I pressed when I had his full attention.

Traz looked around the dark aisle, panic rolling off of him
as the fear of being caught gripped him, slamming him with the reality of his
situation.

“Tonight we’ll listen to this disk and show Tor the report,”
I said. “Then we’ll talk about what to do. Right now, we have to get to our
jobs.”

Traz didn’t answer but began tossing things back into the
box.

When the boxes were back on the shelves and arranged facing
the correct direction, I exhaled, releasing a breath I hadn’t meant to hold. We
walked out of the Archives and back to the main hall in silence. I guess
neither of us had much we could say aloud at the moment. Traz had to face the
reality of what he was, and I could only think that maybe we’d found the key to
Tor’s genealogy.

Back in the white hall, we hurried through space without
resistance. For a moment, the emptiness of the semiglowing walls and the
monotony of the endless gray floor removed me from the danger we were both in.

As we neared the elevator, I sensed someone coming down the
hall. It was a girl, small and young, but I couldn’t get a sense of who it was.

I grabbed Traz’s arm and whispered, “Someone is coming.”

“
Jikmae
,” Traz breathed just as a figure rounded the
corner ahead.

I smiled and waved to the girl, hoping she was who I
thought. “Kit? Hi! It’s me, Sera,” I called.

Traz stopped midstride and turned to stare at me in shock.

“You know her?” he hissed.

“Shush.”

The girl waved back and increased her pace to reach us.

“Yeah, hi! What are you doing down here?” Her sweet, open
face tilted to the side, no comprehension that we could be doing something
nefarious.

“I have to admit—I’m a little lost. Lock had to go to Life
Services this morning, so my friend Traz offered to walk me.”

“Oh! Hi, I’m Kit.” She blushed and held out her hand in
greeting.

Traz raised an eyebrow at me before taking the hand and
smiling back. “Hi.”

“Well, you certainly aren’t supposed to be down here.” Kit’s
perky reply belied no suspicion of my intentions. How could a people so
trusting be capable of the kind of hatred I had read in the report?

“I’m trying to find the Hub.” I grinned, faking
self-deprecation with a lift of my eyebrows.

“That’s down another four levels. I can take you,” she
offered.

“Really? I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“Really.” Kit continued smiling and put her small hand on my
arm.

Her sweetness fed the anger in my heart. The Erdlanders
weren’t evil; the ones who made the decisions, who taught people like Kit to
hate, were.

“Thanks so much! Traz”—I turned to him with a wide smile—”do
you mind if Kit takes me to the Hub? I really appreciate you walking with me
this far.”

“Sure,” he replied with a nod and a last smile at Kit. He
maneuvered past her and disappeared around a white corner.

“Wow,” Kit breathed, staring after him. “Is he your Match?”

“Traz? No, why?”

“I heard you were Matched is all, and he was here, and he’s
so... strange.” Kit’s voice sounded wistful as she guided me back in the
direction of the Archives.

“Strange? How so?”

“Yeah, there’s something about his eyes.” She giggled. Even
though she was probably only two or three years younger than me, her innocence
shone as brightly as the blinding walls.

“His name is Trazla. He studies Sualwet culture,” I offered,
figuring her distraction meant less questions about me.

“I couldn’t imagine doing that. It’s bad enough having to
listen to them all day, let alone actually trying to understand them.” She
pulled her face into a tight grimace before laughing it off. “But I guess we
all have to do something, right? It’s not like we pick where we work!”