Planet Origins by Lucia Ashta

Author:Lucia Ashta [Ashta, Lucia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Awaken to Peace Press
Published: 2017-03-31T06:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

If I’d anticipated that both Dolpheus and I would be able to breach the force field and gain access to the inner lair of my father’s splicing empire, I might have thought past this step instead of flinging myself forward just so that I could make some progress toward rescuing Ilara, if only through momentum. I might have given more effort than I had toward elaborating a sensible plan—though Dolpheus and I had tried, you know that, but it was possible that we hadn’t tried enough.

In planning, I might have imagined that it would be a good idea to place ourselves precisely in the position we found ourselves in right now: hidden from sight, able to overhear whatever conversation was held within the lab.

It would seem that Dolpheus and I inadvertently found ourselves in an ideal situation. There were no papers lying around on any of the lab’s immaculate surfaces. There was no sign announcing, in big bold letters, whichever of my father’s secrets would endear me to the King. There was a blank wall that hid the programming unit that controlled the many aspects of splicing. I knew this from the last time I was here. It was where I had, by chance, discovered a trace of Ilara’s transfer off planet. It was only because whomever the King had commanded to move Ilara off O wasn’t as savvy with processing units as I was, or as father or Aletox were.

The trace that I found was faint, nearly unrecognizable for what it was. The King’s servant, or whoever he was, hadn’t been entirely devoid of skill. He’d done a competent job at covering his steps. However, as soon as I saw the glitch, the piece of code that wasn’t supposed to be there, I knew it was about Ilara in the same way that I’d known that she was alive before I received any external confirmation of the fact. When it came to Ilara, I just knew things. There was no good explanation for the knowing, it just was.

That earlier exploration, searching for a sign of Ilara on my father’s processing system with near desperation, had taught me that it wouldn’t be worth my time to bother with it now. I probably would have anyway—bothered with it—because the hunger for news of Ilara hadn’t been alleviated with the confirmation that she lived. If anything, it had intensified. I’d try anything. I would scour my father’s system, looking for anything that might interest the King, even though I suspected I’d encounter exactly what I had last time: string after string of zeros and ones that looked like nothing meaningful unless you knew what you were looking at.

I was cold, near the point of shivering already, in a frigid metal drawer intended to contain the dead, or the near dead which to me was somehow worse. I was surrounded by bodies that appeared lifeless. My dearest friend lay in another drawer, likely wondering why he’d insisted on joining me on this mission.

Still, I couldn’t help but ponder whether our circumstances were unexpectedly fortuitous.

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