Exist Once More by Trisha Leigh

Author:Trisha Leigh [Leigh, Trisha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Author Published
Published: 2016-12-05T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Sanchi, Amalgam of Genesis - 51 N.E. (New Era)

Booth proved my gut instinct right. We found him waiting for us outside the pod where we’d left him over an hour ago, a jumpiness about him that looked wrong on his aged frame.

He’d been in a hurry, mumbling something about being late for a meeting, and had asked only if we’d understood why we were there as he’d slid his cuff back over his bony wrist, and then disappeared with a tight nod as we told him we had.

We hoped we had, at any rate.

Booth was definitely helping us, but we didn’t know why. It could have been because he had never been on board with the Return Project, or it could be that he had been and now regretted his involvement now that things had gone south.

If he was going to help us right this ship amid crashing waves of destruction, maybe that was all that mattered. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that.

“Let’s get cleaned up and then meet in your room before lights out,” Oz suggested.

I made a face. “We only have thirty minutes and the comp didn’t detect any foreign bodies. Let’s just tell Sarah what we found and then you can go change and shower if you want. We’re not that dirty.”

He looked slightly shamed by my assessment, a pink tinge around the bruises on his face. I wondered whether he thought my annoyance was due to the fact that he took so much after his father—but the truth was, they weren’t that much alike.

Oz had always been fussy and quiet, prone to judging other people and preferring to go his own way, but the better I got to know how things were between his dad and him, the more his behavior seemed designed to keep people at a distance for different reasons.

That maybe Oz had never been aloof. Maybe he’d never wanted to keep himself a step removed from the rest of us but he figured that was easier than explaining the cuts and bruises.

My heart throbbed with regret as we strode back toward my room in silence, a couple of hallways apart so no one would think we were together.

The thought that perhaps even Sarah hadn’t wanted to know the whole truth made me feel even worse. We’d all seen bruises on Oz now and then—we’d essentially lived together for almost eight years now—and really, none of us had wanted to dig. To ask. We wrote him off as strange, and obviously clumsy.

But Sarah was supposed to be his True. The one person ever born who knew Oz best, who loved him without condition. The mere thought of someone hurting Caesarion had torn me apart from the inside. I would have done anything to stop it. If it had been within my power to save his life, if doing so wouldn’t have literally destroyed the world, there would have been nothing that could have stood in my way.

Why didn’t

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