The Exiled Earthborn (18 page)

Maston considered the question.

“Your … companion shows promise,” he said. “I cannot say the same for you.”

Mind games. It was almost too obvious. Was Maston really going to try to pit them against each other like this? Lucas had to repress laughter.

“Yeah, I bet she does. She’s killed more Xalans than you, I reckon.”

Maston looked amused.

“I very much doubt that.”

Lucas pressed.

“You’re training her now, huh? Did you do that?” he motioned toward her purple bruises.

“She failed to correctly block a number of my strikes.”

“Or maybe you just like beating on women?”

Maston turned red and stepped toward Lucas who met his gaze and didn’t back away.

“Training is over for the day, boys. At ease,” Asha said, parting the two of them. Maston turned and stormed off without a word. Lucas couldn’t stand this new version of Maston, which was, in effect, the old version of Maston. He’d completely shut down the side of him mourning for Corinthia. At least publicly.

As he rounded the hallway corner, Lucas turned to Asha.

“Seriously?”

Asha rested her head against the wall.

“Yeah, yeah. Well, it wasn’t my call. And besides, he may be a dick, but he knows his shit, that’s for sure. After seeing him fight, I’m glad he’s on our side.”

“I’m not so sure he is,” Lucas said. “I don’t trust him.”

Asha cocked her head.

“Because he’ll try to kill me, or try to sleep with me?”

Lucas was surprised to hear her correctly vocalize his thoughts.

“Either. Both. Who knows with him? He’s got a past so dark it’s illegal to even talk about it.”

Lucas relayed what he knew about Vitalla to her, and she listened intently.

“Interesting,” she said. “I’ll see what I can dig out of him when he’s not yelling at his henchmen to beat the shit out of me. Or doing it himself.”

“Say the word and I’ll knock that smug smile off of him.”

Asha looked at him sternly.

“I can handle myself, thank you very much. And I’d be careful with how many of his buttons you press. Earthborn or not, I can see him trying to take your head off someday soon.”

“He can try.”

Lucas couldn’t focus his vision as he drifted in and out of consciousness. He was being carried somewhere, and he could hear voices around him.

“What the hell, Wrev? You weren’t supposed to kill him.”

“He told us to go as hard as we could.”

“Which would
obviously kill him!
”

Lucas felt liquid dripping down from his ear. He couldn’t move.

“Those
were
the orders,” came another voice. Axon.

“You do realize he’s not tank-grown like us, right? There’s no way he could keep up with one of us going full tilt, much less two.”

Lucas was trying to remember what had just happened. His memory was jumping around like a skipping record.

“He’s tougher than he looks,” came the first voice.

“I don’t care. It’s my job to ensure he’s alive and that’s pretty damn hard to do when I have to deal with bullshit like this. And you can tell the Watchman I said that!”

It was Kiati, her shrill voice raised in a yell Lucas had never heard before. Images began to swirl in his head. The ring. Two opponents coming at him with furious, terrifying intensity. They were out for blood, and lots of it.

Lucas tried to speak, but could barely move his lips.

“Shut up,” Kiati said sharply, recognizing the gesture. “It’s too dangerous for you to even be awake right now.” She turned a dial and Lucas blacked out entirely.

A dream found him. A familiar scene buried in his mind. Everything was hazy with the colors distorted and constantly shifting. This was no pod vision, but a memory nonetheless.

He was lying on a tile floor, clad only in a towel, several inches shorter and a few dozen pounds lighter. His head was throbbing. When he sat up, he felt the blood drain quickly downward, threatening unconsciousness. Looking around he saw lockers, showers, and her. He blinked.

“Wh-what just happened?”

The girl before him was slowly coming into focus. She had wavy blond hair with bright blue eyes. Her lips parted to reveal an ivory smile.

“You
are
alive. That’s good. The nurse should be coming down soon.”

Lucas rubbed his forehead with a skinny arm. He realized that he was naked under the towel draped over him and quickly wrapped the end of it around his backside.

“The nurse? What happened?” he said, disoriented.

The girl laughed.

“Yeah, that
would
be a moment to forget, I’d say.” She swept a dangling strand of hair over her ear as she knelt next to him. She wore a crimson-and-white Salem Sun Devils cheerleading uniform and had similarly colored ribbons in her hair.

“What are you doing in our locker room?” he asked, looking around.

“Nope,” she said, slowly moving her head from side to side.

Lucas saw a curious absence of urinals and began to scramble to his feet.

“Oh shit.”

“Whoa there,” she said, holding her hands out as she rose with him. “I don’t think you should be walking yet. That was quite a hit.”

Lucas felt the lump on his head. The girl realized he needed a full explanation.

“The football guys ran in here and tossed you on the ground,” she recounted. “You tried to sprint out of here, but you slipped on the wet floor and rammed your head into that locker.”

She pointed to one nearby with a large dent in it.

“The other girls all ran out of here screaming, but I figured someone should make sure you weren’t dead.”

“Uh, thanks,” Lucas said, uncontrollably red from embarrassment. As soon as she said it, it all came flooding back to him. The yelling, the struggling, and him being thrown naked into a room full of cheerleaders who were about to head out for practice. This was literally his worst nightmare.

He looked around for any additional clothes he could throw on to cover his bony frame, but there weren’t any. This wasn’t his locker room after all.

“Why’d they do that anyway?” she asked. “Aren’t you
on
the team?”

“Yeah,” Lucas said, shifting uncomfortably. “But I’m a freshman, so … you know.”

“On varsity?” she said, taken aback. “
Puh
, you’d think you’d be their hero. None of their sorry asses ever made varsity their first year, I’ll tell you that. They’re just jealous.”

“I doubt that,” Lucas said. He could hear water dripping in the shower stalls behind her. She put her finger to her lip, considering something.

“If you want, I can get my brother to kick their asses for you.”

“Your brother?” Lucas asked.

“Captain of the hockey team, could bench press any one of them.”

Lucas smiled sheepishly.

“Nah, that’s okay. I can fight my own battles.”

The girl put her foot on a nearby bench and retied one of her shoes.

“Then you should. They won’t stop. Not unless you stand up to them.”

Lucas scoffed, but found he was surprisingly at ease talking to this girl, despite the present circumstances.

“They’re all twice my size, what am I supposed to do?”

“Hit the biggest one as hard as you can. That should be enough.”

Lucas smiled and looked down at the pattern of the tile.

“Alright, but if I die, I’m blaming you.”

She looked over at him.

“You know, you better go get suited up or you’re going to be late,” she said.

“Oh right,” Lucas said, forgetting he still had a full day of practice with those miserable assholes ahead of him. He turned to leave, then stopped himself.

“Thanks, uh, for staying,” he said.

“No problem. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Lucas.”

“Sonya.”

When he opened the door, it wasn’t the hallway of Salem High. It was a vacant abyss that forcefully pulled him from the entryway like he was being sucked into a black hole. He was flung out into the darkness, which brightened until it was a blinding white.

10

He shuddered as he woke. Though he was no longer sleeping in the Xalan pods, they seemed to have altered his unconscious state long after the fact. He’d had a few dreams like that one recently, memories real yet unreal, but almost verbatim how they’d happened in his own life, no matter how many years it had been. That was the first time he ever met Sonya, and he found tears in his eyes when he blinked. It was strange to see her so young again, the girl he fell in love with who years later would be his wife. Who years after that would be dust in a crater in Portland. He shivered again.

Lucas could hear yelling, though it felt like his ears were stuffed with cotton. As the room came into focus, it was Asha screaming at Kiati, who in turn was screaming at the sorry-looking pair of Wrev and Axon, still coated in much of his blood. Lucas saw a three-clawed hand pass over his face and, mustering all his strength to turn his head, found Alpha working on his wounds, beads of sweat dripping down his tough gray skin.

Maston. Maston had done this. To teach him a lesson, to send a message, or some combination of the two. It was Lucas’s last thought as he drifted back into blackness. He would pay.

He would pay.

The next day, Lucas waved away the narcotic medication that was keeping him in a constant haze. He was tired of a fogged head and wanted to embrace the pain that plagued him. He never wanted to forget how this moment felt, as he lay in complete and utter agony. Every muscle and bone screamed from underneath his skin. Through careful breathing and almost zen-like focus, Lucas pushed away his body’s cries. Asha, Alpha, and even Kiati pleaded with him to accept more painkillers, but he refused. He could feel the scratches of the microscopic nanobots sewing his bones back together and mending torn tissue. His blood ran rich with healing compounds that would bring him back from the brink. In tune with every fiber of his body, through the constant pain, he felt himself healing, hour by hour, day by day.

After hearing the laundry list of his injuries read out by Alpha with scientific precision, Lucas was sure if this were back on Earth, he would have never made it back to his former state. But here? There seemed to be no such thing as an irreversible injury. Silo showed up to visit one day and talked him through the time he’d had his arm blown off by a proto-nade. There was a thin line running down his shoulder where they grafted on a new one, grown from his own cells in a matter of weeks. By comparison, Lucas’s healing process looked downright simple.

Six days. That’s all it took for Lucas to pluck the wires from his body, stand up in the med bay, and demand to start training again. Maston hadn’t come at all the past week to witness his handiwork, and Lucas was determined not to let him win. Accompanied by his training contingent, the eleven of them marched with Lucas to the CIC where Maston stood gazing out the viewscreen. He turned with that same sickly smile he always wore when attempting to make Lucas’s life hell.

“Let me guess,” he said. “After your recent … training accident, you wish to be put in cryosleep for the remainder of the journey?”

Lucas had to suppress a burst of rage when he’d heard the words “training accident,” but managed to speak calmly.

“Actually,” he said, keeping a civil tone that mirrored Maston’s, “I look forward to completing the program.”

It very obviously caught Maston off guard.

“There is no way you would be physically able to continue after your ordeal.”

Alpha spoke from a few feet away near the commander’s chair.

“You underestimate both the healing regimen I prescribed, and the tenacity of the individual in question.”

Matson pretended not to hear him.

“In your absence, your companion has made great strides in her training. You are behind.”

“I’ll catch up,” Lucas said, his blood starting to boil.

“You can’t,” Maston sneered. “Axon, prove my point.”

“Excuse me, Watchman?” Axon said confused.

“Show the Earthborn that he is not ready for Phase Two.”

“But sir, he just got out of the med bay minutes ago.”

“And he and his …
doctor
,” he jerked his head toward Alpha, “claim he’s all put back together again. Now
show me
or I’ll put you out an airlock for insubordination.”

Axon looked uneasily at Lucas as the rest of the group spread out around them. His eyes apologized in advance, but Lucas didn’t care. His blood had dropped in temperature about forty degrees. He flexed his hands and clenched them into fists. Tiny wounds where tubing had entered his veins were still red between his tendons. He’d been fighting Axon long enough to know what his opening would be. A calamitous swing from the right followed by sharp uppercut with his left. Lucas had been floored by either blow many times. But not today.

“Hit the biggest one as hard as you can
.
”

The behemoth lunged at him with the familiar combo. Lucas ducked under the haymaker and immediately shifted right to avoid the incoming uppercut. He then dodged three lightning quick jabs that pummeled the empty spaces over each of his shoulders and avoided the heel kick at the tail end of the pattern. As Axon wound up for another punch, Lucas shifted to his back foot. The swing missed his nose by a quarter inch and was so forceful that Axon stumbled two steps forward in its wake. That was all Lucas needed.

Lucas pushed off his legs and drove a straight right directly into Axon’s jaw. His eyes were vacant before his feet left the ground and he crashed to the deck with a thud, all three hundred-plus pounds of him almost leaving a crater. Every pair of eyes around them widened, including Maston’s. Axon didn’t stir. Lucas’s hand was on fire, and he was fairly certain he’d rebroken a pair of fingers. He walked to stand over Axon who was now blinking his eyes, unsure of what had just happened. Extending his left hand downward, Lucas helped pull him back to his feet.

Maston’s voice wasn’t so gleefully malevolent now.

“Report to the training chamber tomorrow,” he said coldly. “Perhaps you’ll be of some use to this unit yet.”