Disciples by V. S. Holmes

Author:V. S. Holmes [Holmes, V S]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: V. S. Holmes

6

“I don’t know why this is so important to them. To any of us, really.” Lin slumped at the round table in the kitchen. She had not sent a report to the Promise since she spoke to Dar almost a week ago. A quiet rebellion. A useless rebellion.

“It’s where we’re from.” Dan offered. His tone told her he knew she was being stubborn.

She pursed her lips. She did get it. It was their history. As much as she felt her people and terrestrial humans were far from the same, the tug of genetics was there. But she had never felt so alien, and it flipped her world on its head. “We’re from Odyssey. Even if you refuse to acknowledge it.”

His morning-bleary eyes were fixed on a faded map of the world pinned to the wall beside a bulletin board of workers’ safety fliers. If his gaze wasn’t inching over every border and mountain range she would have assumed he was lost in thought. “All of us, I mean.” His brows curled together for a fleeting moment, as if he looked on something sacred. She supposed, for him, it might be.

A poorly scaled image depicting the relative size of all the planets in their solar system was pinned on the other side of the board, each sphere squeezed beside the next. Earth was a blue-green pea tucked into the foreground. She wondered for a moment where the Odyssey would fit on the scale.

Shrill beeping interrupted whatever sanctity the moment held. Lin peered at her wrist com.

“Bently?”

“No, it’s Emilio Sepulveda.” She shoved herself to her feet. “Sounds like an argument.” As much as she hated the stillness of surveillance, she enjoyed the puzzle. Each recording of audio or scanned digital communication was a piece of a puzzle, an image forming in real time.

The computers hummed into glowing wakefulness. Why is the computer picking up fear? She double checked the read out. Her wrist-com hadn’t been wrong. The readings were for the head of The Founders, and fear was high.

She pressed the headphones over her ears and turned up the volume. It was inside, and a small room by the muffled sound. Emilio’s rumbled Spanish came in clear through the tapped cell phone.

“You don’t understand, Bastian. You can’t stop them from discovering it—they already have. They’ve taken readings, they’ve found a body, for God’s sake.”

“If it’s too late why did you bother to threaten them on the road? You’re getting more cowardly by the day, Sepulveda.” The second voice was the scrape of gravel, a bitter tone that belonged to Bastian, Emilio’s second-in-command.

Threaten? Lin scanned the files from the past week, but nothing came up. At Dar’s request, she had run their voices through Emotion for the past week. Stress levels were high, and lights flickered for each subset of anger, exhaustion, excitement. But never fear.

Even when Nel called about the results Dan sent her, her voice never wavered into anything but frustration.

“Bas, stand down. We did not make it this far with rash decisions and guns.

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