Dancing with the vodka t.., p.21
Whispers from the Poisoned Isle (Jekua Book 4), page 21
Balt could tell Alani wanted to ask something else. He had a feeling this was related to Aeiko, somehow. It was obvious that there was something between the two of them, even if neither was acting on it.
Finally, Alani asked, “Do you really think it’s because of the age difference?”
He had told her the morning after he thought that was a big factor in why Niona had rejected him, and only now did it dawn on him that Alani and Aeiko also shared an age gap. Much less than the one between him and Niona, but still. His words must have been rattling her this entire time.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think that wasn’t a part of it, but of course it’s not the only important thing. I don’t even know if Niona is looking for a relationship at all. Or what her usual type is. Hell, I don’t even know for sure that she’s straight! Maybe I made an even bigger ass out of myself than I realized.” That fact had not occurred to him until he was saying it out loud, and it was making his stomach churn. “I’ve never heard her talk about being into anyone, really. But also, she might just think of me as a friend, and nothing more. Simple as that.”
Alani said, “That’s…what I’m worried about with Aeiko.”
“Why?” he asked. He was glossing over the fact that this was the first time she was actually admitting to harboring feelings for Aeiko, since he didn’t want her to clam up again. Let the confessions flow.
“Well, it’s not just the age gap, but also the fact that they’re friends with my sister. I’m worried that they just think of me as Siuv’s sister and can’t separate me from that. Think of me as my own person.”
Balt cocked an eyebrow. “Are you stupid?” he blurted out. “There’s no way that’s how they see you. I know it’s hard to tell, but as an outsider, I can say with confidence that there’s…okay, look, I’m not gonna pretend that I’m sure they have feelings for you. But they obviously adore you, even if it’s just on a friendship level. You two are constantly chatting, and you’ve got big, dumb smiles plastered on your faces the entire time. That’s not nothin’! All the best relationships start out as being good friends. Or so I hear, anyway. Not like I’m some expert.”
“No, you certainly aren’t,” Alani grinned.
“Alright, no need to get fresh,” he said, mock-offended.
“Need I bring up the Lexi Yutaro ordeal?”
“You need not. Never again, in fact. We mustn’t even so much as utter her name.”
That brought a true laugh to her lips. She said, “Well, if you say so.”
“I do. And, I mean…look at this damn thing they made you! No one would do that for somebody they didn’t care a lot about.”
Alani looked down at the soulstitcher, running her fingers across its gleaming surface. She then glanced at him again and said, “If it was their job, maybe they would.”
“It’s explicitly not their job,” he said. “Their job is doing whatever they do with Brine.”
“But what I mean is that they’re interested in technology like this. Not me.”
Balt huffed and furrowed his brow. “Don’t be dumb,” he muttered. “Aeiko thinks you’re great, Siuv’s sister or not.”
A flicker of a smile crossed her face as she continued gazing at the soulstitcher. “Thanks,” she eventually said. Her fingernails tapped against it, once more adding that pleasant clinking to the otherwise silent night. Soon, though, her hand fell away into her lap.
The two of them shared a comfortable silence for a minute or so. Upon reflection, Balt found that he missed these quiet moments between them. There had been plenty of them when they’d been traveling across Totta and Qwi, but things hadn’t really slowed down ever since they linked up with the Daneos in the middle of the Qwisdeep. Their party had only grown from there, now that Aeiko and Brine had tagged along on the pilgrimage. He yearned for the simplicity of just the two of them marching along toward the next Veptilo.
Nothing felt simple anymore, though. And he suspected nothing would until they uncovered what it was the Facet was doing and put this whole mess behind them. If that was even possible.
But for now, he enjoyed his friend’s company.
19
Fruitless Endeavors
It was getting hot in Room 309. It always did when Makénu was running a lot of processes on the various machines hooked up all over the room; they were woefully out of date, and despite the manual upgrades he’d given some of them, they still ran hot and sounded like jet engines when they were working hard. Everyone crowded into that limited space was producing a lot of body heat in addition to the increasingly pungent odor of stale sweat. To top it all off, now that the machines were linked to the Veptilos as well, he felt like he was practically boiling from the inside.
He was staring mindlessly at a computer screen, its glowing pixels illuminating his sagging face, when suddenly the person beside him jostled his shoulder.
“Zeyot!” he swore, catching his breath. For a moment, it had felt like he was about to fall off the edge of a cliff rather than just the edge of his chair. When he came back to reality, he glared at Tate. “What was that for?” he demanded, steadying his voice.
Tate laughed, gawking at him with wide eyes like he was crazy. “Just seeing if there’s still any activity in that brain of yours,” he said, tapping his own temple.
He was a handsome man, with creamy white skin and a bald head with a well-defined jawline, which Makénu always appreciated. In lieu of beard stubble, miniscule spikes extruded from his cheeks and jaw. Sometimes, Makénu wondered if those same spikes were anywhere else on Tate’s body.
“You okay, boss?”
Makénu nodded. “Fine,” he said. “Just distracted, is all.” Oddly, the heat always made him sleepy, and their computers were working overtime today.
“Yeah, well, you might want to wake up,” Tate said, turning back to his own screen to continue typing in calculations and code. “Lots to do, not enough time to do it.”
Truer words had never been spoken. Madelaine was expecting far better results than what they had been seeing all day. In fact, Makénu would be hard-pressed to call these results at all. He felt like little to no progress had been made, despite the fact that they had introduced a second Veptilo to the proceedings.
She was not going to be pleased when she showed up later that night.
That wouldn’t be for a while yet, so they had time to reconfigure some settings and try to make something happen. Makénu didn’t like their chances, though.
“Could you take a look at this?” came a voice from behind him.
He swiveled around in his chair to face Risia, one of the organization’s freshest recruits. She had her silver hair tied up in a cute bun on the top of her head. When it came to a person’s hair color, Makénu was never sure if it was dyed or if it was naturally that color due to strihova.
Risia was clacking away at her keyboard when he joined her at her desk a moment later. “What is it?” he asked, peering over her shoulder at the cascade of text on her screen.
She pointed at a block of numbers, her fingernail gliding across the screen, leaving behind faint smudges. “Does this look right to you?”
Makénu read over the output, shaking his head more and more as he read. “Not really,” he said.
In truth, he didn’t know exactly what they were looking for with this data. None of them did. Not even high and mighty Madelaine Bloom knew what they needed to achieve their goals, considering nothing like this had ever been done before. The closest anyone had gotten resulted in mass deaths, so they at least knew they did not want to replicate that.
All he knew was that whatever they’d been doing for the past two hours had not gotten them anywhere, so clearly something was wrong with the data. He was damned if he knew what that was, though.
That was what frustrated him the most. Hours upon hours spent in these hot, smelly labs with almost nothing to show for it. Just a bunch of fools floundering together, trying to achieve the impossible and being berated by a crimson-haired woman if they failed.
And they did fail. A lot.
That frustration was fun, on occasion. Sometimes Makénu relished in the challenge of it all. Right now, however, he was tired.
He had nothing for Risia, so he returned to his own desk and let her toil away at her work. In moments like these, he felt like a fraud. Ostensibly he was the leader of this team, but most of the time he could offer no real guidance. He was like that lighthouse standing tall on the town’s coast. Useless.
The day was stretching into night, and a few of the Facet’s scientists had gone home a few hours earlier. Makénu had ducked out for an hour to cook and eat dinner at home before returning to the lab. He needed a short break from everything where he could just sit in silence while he ate, but he didn’t mind staying late at the lab. It wasn’t like there was anything he particularly enjoyed doing at home. Especially now, with Tano—
He tried not to think about it too much. About the accident. About Tano. It tore at him, though—ripped him apart inside every time he forced himself to stop thinking about his son.
As he sat there at his desk, listening to the inane clattering of Risia’s long fingernails against her plastic keyboard, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking back to that day so many weeks ago.
It felt like a lifetime now, but it was only in the last season. The middle of Summer, sometime. Not knowing for sure the date on which it happened made him feel like a bad father. He was a bad father; he knew that already. That was an immutable fact. No real father would have let something like that happen to their child.
What would Adam think, if he knew what Makénu had done to their son?
Maybe he did know. Maybe he had witnessed all of it from the afterlife.
It had been a day like any other. A day just like today. Started off with a light swim in the ocean as the sun peeked out over the horizon. Tano had dried himself off with a ratty towel as the two of them walked home to change before Makénu went into the lab for the day.
“Can I come with?” Tano had asked him, his voice high-pitched like a cartoon mouse. Whenever they’d watch a movie together, Tano would always say he couldn’t wait to grow up and have a deep, booming voice like his favorite heroes. He wanted to beat up bad guys too, and when Makénu would tell him that violence wasn’t the answer, he’d blow raspberries at him.
“Sure, if you want to,” Makénu had replied that day. Stupid. In retrospect, it was the worst decision of his life. He couldn’t have known, though; Tano had accompanied him to the lab countless times before. It was a day like any other day, so what could the harm be?
At the lab, they shuffled into Room 302 to begin the day’s work. Tano waited while Makénu brought the group’s single Veptilo in with a gravi-lift. He oohed and awed at the sight of the lumbering crystal just like he always did. And, like he always did, he rushed forward to run his palms across its matte surface.
“Hey! What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Madelaine barked at him.
Usually, she was not around so early in the day, claiming that she had more important business to handle elsewhere. Madelaine always said she had something more important to do in some other place, so Makénu could see why she was always so high-strung and dramatic. He did not envy her position.
At the shrill snap of her voice, Tano jumped back from the Veptilo before his skin touched it. His head jerked to look at the tall, slender woman.
Makénu leapt to his son’s defense. “He wasn’t going to mess with it,” he said quickly. “He just gets excited. He likes how it feels.” It was an innocent enough explanation.
Her lips curled into a phony smile behind her plastic mask. “He has done this before?” she said in her smooth, sultry voice. Even when her words dripped with venom, she made them sound appealing.
“…only a few times,” Makénu replied, knowing that he was sinking deeper into the quicksand. He didn’t see what the big deal was. It wasn’t like his kid was going to destroy this ancient crystal just by rubbing his hand on it for two seconds.
That was not the answer Madelaine was looking for. Her unsettling smile stretched further across her face, her perfect white teeth in stark contrast to the rich red lipstick on her full lips.
She said, “I see. I see.” She took a few steps toward Tano, then squatted to look at him face-to-face. That day, instead of one of her usual short pencil skirts, she was wearing incredibly tight white-and-blue plaid pants.
Tano looked at her, not sure what he had done wrong. He knew that Madelaine was his dad’s boss, though, and that she had to be respected. Unlike the Facet’s members, Tano had not yet come to fear the woman’s wrath.
Madelaine tilted her head and spoke with a condescending singsong quality, like she was speaking to a puppy. “We can’t be doing such things,” she began. “This is not a toy. You see, little one, this is the future. This is what will save us. You don’t know it, due to being a small creature with an undeveloped brain, but we need help, here. This island is tainted, and this crystal will purge it of that poison. Do you understand?”
Tano shook his head. He was ten years old. He had no idea what in the world she was talking about.
“He just—”
Madelaine immediately cut Makénu off by raising her hand and clamping her fingers together like a closed mouth. She didn’t even say anything to him, instead still addressing his son.
“We’re trying to create a better world here, little one. You’ve always lived this way, so it’s normal to you. Sometimes I wish I was like you, actually, living in blissful ignorance. Unfortunately, I’ve been blessed with knowledge and gorgeous thighs. But that’s beside the point. There was a time, before you were born, when people like me didn’t have to wear masks to live here. There was a time when people came and went from the island without a care in the world. There was a time when your daddykins wasn’t falling apart.” Her smile widened even more, then she said, “There was a time when your other daddykins wasn’t sick. If we still lived in that world, he could be taking care of you today and you wouldn’t have to be lugged to work.”
Makénu watched his son, waiting to see what his reaction would be at the mention of Adam. If Madelaine made Tano cry, he would have to step in. Maybe he should anyway. But Tano seemed fine, and he did not want to anger the woman further, so he remained quiet for the time being.
Madelaine tilted her head the other way, then continued. “The Facet is going to right the wrongs of the rest of the world. We’re going to do what should have been done a long time ago.” She gently placed a hand on Tano’s left shoulder and squeezed, making him wince. “We’ll put them in their place, cure our beautiful island, and look great doing it.”
She stood up straight and clapped her hands together, the sudden loud noise making Tano jump.
“So, you understand why this beauty is so important now?”
Tano nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” he said softly, clearly embarrassed by his behavior. There were only a couple other people in the room besides them, but all eyes were on him and Madelaine.
Madelaine clapped again and said, “Excellent.” Then she walked over to Makénu. “Keep your little Romproar in line, hmm? You are welcome to bring him in, but let’s not let him barrel through the lab with wanton abandon.”
“He won’t,” Makénu assured her.
“Good. Well, get to work, everyone. No time to waste if we want to restore our island to its former glory!”
With that, she disappeared out of the room, her high heels clacking against the hard floor as she traipsed down the hall.
Once her footfalls had faded away, Tano dashed over to his father and clung to him. “Sorry, Dad,” he said, his voice muffled as he dug his face into Makénu’s chest.
“You’re fine,” Makénu told him, running a hand through his son’s messy hair. “Ms. Bloom just doesn’t want you to hurt yourself, is all. She just gets a little worried about things.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No, no, you’re not in trouble. Maybe you should stay away from the Veptilo for now, though. Just until Ms. Bloom calms down.” He knew that his son touching the crystal posed no real threat, and that Madelaine would not be returning to Room 302 until way later in the day, but there were cameras set up all over the lab. He didn’t want to risk her checking in on them and find his son loitering near the crystal.
So he got to work with his colleagues, trying to unlock the secrets of the Veptilo and its deep connection to the Vept.
Madelaine had only hinted at it when speaking to Tano, but they were aiming to open their own connection to that other, magical world in order to gain its immense power. The Facet believed that if the remnants of mana that leaked into their world were already so powerful, then it stood to reason that accessing pure mana from the Vept itself would grant them unbelievable strength. Everyone in the Facet wanted to do something different with that strength, but they all wanted it.
The way the Facet had discovered they could even potentially access the Vept in the first place was tragic, but Makénu tried not to think about that too much. He lent that incident no space in his mind beyond his efforts not to repeat those previous mistakes.
The rest of the day proceeded like every other day before it had. It truly was not special in any way.
Until it was.
Tano had spent the day playing a game on Makénu’s old linkpad over in the corner of the room. It was disconnected from the internet, but it still had a few non-online games downloaded onto it that he loved to wile away hours playing.
Meanwhile, Makénu and the others were readying their machines and the Veptilo for the latest round of testing. They had run through their routine processes several times already that day, and had been making a few tweaks over the past two hours. Makénu wasn’t particularly convinced that this would be the one to get them to the Vept, but he figured that it would at least provide them with some useful data to go off of.
