Sentinel by Josi Russell

Author:Josi Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Future House Publishing
Published: 2020-10-10T02:47:12+00:00

Chapter 18

The familiar smell of earth and water filled Tesuu’s nostrils as he stood in Ravi’s empty lab. It was nice to be back in the tunnels. It was where Tesuu always felt the safest, even when the spheres rolled by the door on their patrols.

That feeling of security came from Tesuu’s happy childhood in the tunnels. He and his friends had skipped and tumbled along their earthen lengths, had plunged into the water collection pools, had caught the dirtworms that found their groping way through the tunnels’ walls and kept them as pets. It had been a happy place.

Now he tried to focus. The lab had been abandoned since his grandson’s death, and he walked through it with the sense of loss that he had grown so accustomed to throughout his life.

He leafed through a stack of metal plates containing schematics. Some of the other sphere developers had gone through the lab shortly after Ravi’s death, and they had taken anything that they thought might help them better understand what Ravi had done to so drastically alter the controlling sphere’s design. But maybe there would be something here that they had missed, something that Tesuu could find to help.

It was hard not to think about Ravi as Tesuu sorted through the contents of his grandson’s lab. He had always been a serious young Zumiin, and he grew into a serious adult. After Tesuu returned, Ravi had spent hours with his grandfather, probing the depths of his experience with the aliens.

Tesuu had told him the stories willingly. The story of the abduction. The story of the experiments. The story of his grandmother’s death, and the story of the Caretaker, who had finally brought the terror to an end.

And all the time, Ravi had listened. Tesuu had wanted him to hear that he must never give up, that he must always keep fighting. But what Ravi had heard was that there were great wide universes beyond these plains, and they were full of danger.

Tesuu went to the cubby in the wall where he had found the little device he’d shown to Ethan. The cubby was the only disorderly space in the whole of the lab. Every tool, every chip, every etching was in place except in this cubby. Tesuu had only searched a little of it when he’d been here before, and it appeared as if the council had given it only a cursory glance when they had searched.

Tesuu could see why. It almost looked like a garbage hole, the vertical tunnels that went up to the refuse piles above.

The cubby was bristling with crumpled sheets of metal containing diagrams. Tesuu pulled them out and let them clatter to the floor. Behind them, as he remembered, was a stack of family pictures etched onto more flat plates. Tesuu couldn’t help stopping to look at them. Ravi’s mother and father, Ravi and Sasha, Ravi’s parents and their siblings, Ravi and his 15 cousins, Ravi and his own four children.

The Zumiin had, always, four children born from two eggs.

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