The Other Side of Life (Book #1, Cyberpunk Elven Trilogy) (18 page)

Nin swung his head back, looking up to the
ceiling and stretching his neck from side to side, and then all
round, before they started going up the ladder. He was back on full
alert, having survived a room saturated with the fatal element of
pure iron.

“
Are we meeting Tavia?”
Anya asked Nin as they were halfway through the secret
passage.

“
I told her to go if we got
stuck,” Nin replied, unapologetically. There was always a reason
behind his instructions. “I’ve been trying to get an update from
Dresan, but the connection’s been cut since the second lockdown
warning came on.”

Anya hoped he had an actual plan to get them
out of the building, if Tavia had indeed gone off first. But for
the most part, Anya was glad to see some life returning to Nin
already. While they were still in dimly-lit surroundings, which
prevented her from seeing if some color had returned to his face,
his movements had regained their characteristic light, firm step.
He seemed ready to defend or attack, which was more favorable than
being weakened right down to the bone.

“
One step closer to getting
out of here,” Nin whispered over to Anya.

Anya and Nin placed the discarded CPUs in
their former positions when they reached the janitor’s room. Anya
was just about to take a step forward to unlock the door, when Nin
grabbed her hand. She saw why, and felt her blood start to congeal,
when she saw some shadows moving alongside the lower edge of the
door.

“
Step back,” Nin whispered
in the lowest voice he could, to Anya, stepping in front of her. He
drew one of his laser pistols. This time, it wasn’t due to a fake
call or the presence of sentinels.

Outside, a guard had drawn his own weapon,
and had one gnarled hand around the handle of the door. The bruises
and scars on his hand and face were tokens from his glory days as a
former boxing champion.

Anya realized with horror that she and Nin
had forgotten to lock the door behind them. They had been too
elated at having gotten into the janitor’s room safely. There was
nothing to stop the guard from opening the door, at any
millisecond.

Anya prayed that there was only one guard,
and that Nin would be faster with pulling the trigger. She hated
how unfair it was. Nin’s laser gun would only stun, or erase one’s
memory, at most. The guard’s bullet could cost Nin much more.

“
Report to the main
square,” a voice came over on the guard’s walkie-talkie.

The order was too muffled for Anya to make
out the message. She was fighting back images of a bullet hitting
Nin, or anyone she was close to, for that matter. Anya thought she
would die too, if she ever had to watch a friend spend the last few
moments of their life, lying in her arms.

The guard grunted when another order from
his superior came in. A squeak against the polished floor indicated
that the guard had swiveled on his foot. Nin and Anya heaved a
momentary sigh of relief once they heard the guard’s receding
footsteps.

“
Lucky us,” Anya whispered,
bumping against Nin’s frame, when he stayed in place as she took a
step towards the door. It felt safe, against his body. He smiled,
before opening the door, ever so thankful that the hinges of the
door didn’t creak.

Nin had arranged with Tavia earlier, to
leave one of the windows on the ground floor a crack open. The
window was down the corridor, and down some stairs, at the other
end of the open space. Nin and Anya hurried over to the window. The
chilly draft of night air that trickled in let them know that Tavia
had gone through with the instructions.

Nin lifted the window once he had checked to
see there were no stray guards lurking around outside. Anya never
felt so exultant before, to be able to run, as she and Nin made
their way back to the compound, keeping close to the edge of the
building, watched only by the stars high above in the night sky.
They were free! They had made it out alive, together!

“
Let’s go,” he said to her,
as he grabbed her hand.

They hid behind a hedgerow, upon reaching
the garden compound. They exchanged a tight hug. They both enjoyed
the thrill of adventure—and fed off their growing love for danger
and excitement…and each other.

Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him
as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped
would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing
than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial
romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on
the outside. It seemed to be the only kind of love that the
citizens of Zouk City knew and spoke of.

Anya indulged in a few moments of grandiose
projections of Nin. She thought he could be larger than life, do
all sorts of crazy, fantastical things, and get away with it
all…without even lifting a finger, if he didn’t have to, or want
to. Was it her fault that he happened to be so dashingly handsome
too?

Nin gazed back at Anya in a similar way. He
liked that Anya didn’t whine, or sit around waiting for things to
happen. He liked that she wasn’t all talk and no action. One of
Nin’s biggest secrets (which he wasn’t even aware of himself) was
that he had always wanted, almost desperately, to fall in love with
someone he could call a best friend.

“
Could you be the one?” he
asked with his eyes.

Anya waited for Nin to make the next move.
The glint of his wrist device reminded her of the parchment piece
that was in it. She couldn’t wait to see what the piece would
unravel.

Nin tugged on the wire on his earpiece,
untangling some strands of his hair from it. “Dresan said Tavia’s
waiting for us outside.”

Nin and Anya quickly surveyed the compound,
but found no sign of Tavia.

“
She must be downstairs,”
Nin said in a low whisper, as he led Anya to the tree he had the
key to. He remembered telling Tavia to go, if he and Anya got into
any trouble. Maybe she’d taken off once the second unplanned-for
lockdown activation came on. It might explain the incoming feedback
too, which temporarily blocked off the communication with
Dresan.

Dresan and Leticia were chatting and
laughing about their shared penchant for electronica music, when
Nin and Anya came down the stairs, and into the train carriage.
They had been keeping a careful watch on the trio’s movements, from
the safety and comfort of their underground station.

“
Well done!” Dresan said as
he exchanged a quick, tight hug with his Elven leader, before
giving him a high five. They looked so much like people on the
street that way. Anya wouldn’t have guessed they came from vastly
different backgrounds.

“
We were flipping out when
you were in the vault,” Leticia said to Anya, holding her friend’s
hand tightly, overjoyed to see she was safe. “I said several Hail
Mary’s that you’d be able to escape.”

Dresan was halfway through querying Nin
about the second lockdown, when Nin gazed around. He stopped
listening to Dresan and asked, “Where’s Tavia?”

Dresan took a step out to the side, as he
looked behind Nin’s shoulder. “I thought she was with you.”

Nin stared back at Dresan, straight in the
eye. “She wasn’t outside the building.”

Dresan frowned before immediately reaching
for his laptop. “According to the screen…she’s still outside.” The
earpiece could detect their exact locations within a certain
distance—Tavia was apparently in the garden compound, near the very
hedgerow Anya and Nin had been just minutes ago.

“
I’ll go up and get her.”
Nin turned and headed off toward the stairway.

“
We looked,” Anya said to
Dresan, baffled. She felt a nauseating sense of dread threatening
to engulf her again. A knot formed, deep in her gut. “There wasn’t
any sign of her.”

Then where is she?
was the question nobody dared to ask, apart from
Nin who had done so a few seconds earlier.

Nin took the stairs two at a time, all kinds
of thoughts racing in his mind. He had no idea about the iron
elements in the hexagonal vault, until he stepped in—everything had
been going well up to that point. The iron particles troubled him.
It said something about Varian Gilbreth’s knowledge on elves and
iron. Why would a person go to such great extents? Weren’t ordinary
sensor lines sufficient enough, to safeguard the vault?

Nin made a dash for the hedgerow, when he
stepped out of the tree’s door. The coolness of the night air on
the back of his neck was like a cold caress from the fingertips of
Death. He could still see some of the guards streaming back in
various directions into the Omega unit.

Nin didn’t know if she was inside. The
guards didn’t seem to be in a rush. There was almost a sense of
annoyance in the way they shuffled back into the Omega building,
like they had been called out for a briefing that was essentially,
a waste of their time. That wouldn’t be likely, if an intruder had
actually been caught.

“
Where are you, Tavia?” he
muttered under his breath.

This was the first time anything like this
had ever happened. This wasn’t even supposed to happen—elves were
wiser, better, and could outsmart and outdo the average human in
most cases. That’s what they had been told since the dawn of
time.

He searched the perimeters of the compound
from behind the line of shrubs, till he slowed down and looked on
the surface of the ground. He’d go on his hands and knees to comb
the ground for any clues, but he didn’t need to.

What he found was Tavia’s clear earpiece,
which had been cast onto the grass.

Chapter 12:

Nin crouched on the ground, thinking hard,
feeling despondent at the same time. His cousin was missing, and
nobody knew where she was, or what had happened to her. He felt
somehow responsible. What had gone wrong, and at what point, aside
from the second lockdown? It could have been Varian Gilbreth’s form
of a diversion, a kind of payback for having trespassed into his
secret vault.

Everyone on the team—Nin, Tavia, Dresan,
Anya, and Leticia—had been in danger from the moment each agreed to
be a part of the midnight operation. Whether it was of free will or
coercion, Nin had always taken a certain level of pride and
enjoyment in the concept of “them” going against “the authorities.”
It was what made leaving Helli’sandur and a life of meaningless
luxury worth it. Now, he questioned the very ideal that he had so
closely adhered to.

Dresan came up to the compound. He had told
Anya and Leticia to stay behind, where it would be safer for them.
He moved stealthily to join Nin, careful to remain unseen. He got
the message when he saw the clear earpiece in Nin’s palm.

“
We could spread out,”
Dresan said to Nin, with a blunt edge in his voice. He too, felt
somehow responsible that Tavia was missing. “I tried contacting
her,” Dresan tried to explain, his voice sounding strained, “but I
couldn’t get through. I thought—”

“
You and I should check the
Omega unit,” Nin interrupted, not rudely, but out of a sense of
urgency. “Maybe one of the guards saw or heard something.” And just
maybe, they might overhear some of that information.

In the train carriage, Anya and Leticia
discussed the events that had led up to Anya and Nin’s entry into
the vault.

“
I heard Tavia tapping on a
metal banister,” Anya related to Leticia, who nodded.

“
We could hear it too,”
Leticia said. “She seemed to be a little impatient, on the second
round of tapping.”

Anya could still hear the metal clinks, and
the Elven melody Tavia had sung. It was strange, how she had goose
bumps then, and now. In the first instance, it was the beauty of
the language that had thrilled her. This time, the little hairs on
her skin stood on end due to fear. The possibility of an atrocious
outcome was too much to handle.

“
The last thing we heard
her say was, ‘I’ll be waiting here for them.’” Leticia had been
making sure the correct fake security tapes were playing on the
targeted screens, as Dresan concentrated on coordinating the
movements between Tavia, Nin and Anya. “She was hiding behind the
staircase…she went forward…and then she went out into the compound.
We thought she did that to escape a guard that entered the open
space.”

It was ironic Tavia had been the one to find
herself in trouble. Anya had assumed all along that she and Nin
would have had the most amount of risk to face, since they were the
ones who would be committing the larceny. She felt safer and more
secure then, as compared to now when they realized Tavia was
missing.

Just then, she remembered the photo she had
seen in the vault. She wondered if Leticia knew anything about
it.

“
There was a photo of
Julius’s father, in the vault,” Anya started, wishing she had taken
a photo of it on her cell phone. “He knows Varian
Gilbreth.”

Leticia frowned. She hadn’t met Samuel
Lycata many times, or heard any mention about Gilbreth either.
“Jule’s never mentioned him before. Gilbreth, I mean.”

Anya was sullen. She wondered what Varian
Gilbreth really knew about the medieval parchment pieces he had in
his collection. She was sure it would explain the pure iron
particles embedded in the red sensors. Worse, she wondered if
Julius’s father, or Julius himself knew anything about the
parchment. She felt a sudden trepidation go through her body.

“
Where was the photo
taken?” asked Leticia.

Anya could remember the caption. “Croatia.”
She didn’t know what the rest of the country looked like, or where
it was on a world map. Anya continued, when Leticia raised an
eyebrow. “They were standing in front of a medieval fresco.”