The Other Side of Life (Book #1, Cyberpunk Elven Trilogy) (19 page)

“
Medieval? Like the
parchment?”

Anya nodded, though she couldn’t make any
link between the elves’ parchment, and the Dance of Death.

Anya was worried for the elves’ lives. Her
imagination started to run wild.

“
What if Gilbreth has a
room in the Omega unit, that’s made of nothing but pure iron?” she
asked Leticia. The fortifications could be right down to the cement
that held the tiles on the ground together.

“
Maybe he wants the
parchment pieces that the elves have?” Leticia suggested. The
pieces were right there in the train carriage, Anya noticed. Dresan
had brought them in along with the laptop.

“
I’d give up the pieces, in
exchange for their safe return,” muttered Anya. Leticia would have
done the same. The elves already knew what was written on the
pieces they had in their possession.

“
Have faith,” Leticia said.
In moments of truly great stress, Leticia seemed to be able to hold
herself together. It was a trait Anya had always
admired.

Anya thought of Nin. Her heart went out to
him. She had an inkling that he would be feeling a sense of
despair, even guilt—that all the fun and excitement was jarred by
the interruption of this crucial, unforeseen event of Tavia’s
disappearance.

Anya was right.

* * *

Nin and Dresan entered the building through
the window that had been left a crack open. They devised a quick
plan on the spot: they would search the Omega unit, from end to
end, level by level, keeping out of sight. They didn’t know of any
other secret rooms besides the vault in the Omega unit.

“
End to end?” Dresan asked
Nin, who answered by nodding.

Nin and Dresan cleared each level from
opposite ends, meeting each other at an approximate halfway point,
before continuing in opposite directions to get to the other base
point.

The magik mushroom was beginning to wear
off, but Nin sensed some movement from the corner of his eye. He
held up his arm, deflecting a bullet with his arm guard. He whipped
his plasma gun out, taking down two guards that had crept up behind
him. He dragged the two bodies into the corner of one of the empty
rooms, without making any noise—they’d be down for 48 hours.

“
Stefan—you said you heard
something?”

Nin paused behind a water cooler, listening
in on a conversation between some of the guards in an adjacent
room. There was the sound of paper shredding, then crumpling, and a
soft, scratchy kind of rustling—Nin guessed the guards were tossing
wads of paper into a wastepaper basket.

“
Sho’ did,” the guard
growled, as he hit his fingernail against the metal leg of the
chair he was sitting on. “Locked the Janitor’s room with my master
key.”

“
Door was open?”

“
Naw—it weren’t locked.
Went into the ‘V’ room. No sign of nothin’.”

Nin registered the name, Trevor. It was the
night shift’s head guard himself.

“
What’s in there,
anyway?”

Another soft ‘thunk,’ and the sound of some
coins being emptied out of a wallet onto the tabletop. Nin thought
it was pathetic, if they were casting bets on who could shoot the
highest number of paper balls into the basket. Perhaps the day
shift was less boring than the night shift.

“
Bunch of items from one
hundred years ago.”

“
Older than
Gilbreth?”

“
Oh yeah,
way
older.”

There was a round of raucous laughter,
before one of the chairs screeched across the floor. Nin kept close
to the wall. He thought he made out three different voices.

“
Seen his latest
missus?”

“
Kelly?”

“
Yeah. Freak in bed, so
I’ve heard.”

“
She knows I wanna bone
her.”

“
She’s like, what,
nineteen?”

Some of the coins shifted from one side of
the table to another. “And Varian’s ninety!”

One of the guards gave a
loud
tsk.
“Gold-digger, I’d say.”

Nin didn’t think he’d get much out of the
guards’ gossip session. They didn’t speak of the lockdown, the
parchment piece, or Tavia at all.

He made his way, unseen, past several other
guards, all of whom said nothing. Dresan simply shook his head,
when Nin next ran into him.

Each time Nin looked at Dresan, when they
crossed each other’s way at the halfway mark, he felt less and less
certain they were going to chance upon anything related to Tavia.
They knew it was against the odds, that they’d find Tavia in the
building. Still, they held on to a sliver of hope.

Nin and Dresan ended up exiting via the
ladder on the top floor, which led up to the rooftop. They timed
their movements according to the degree of movement of the security
cameras, which they already knew the locations of from previous
trips to the Omega unit, and hid against one side of the roof’s
partitions.

“
No sign of her,” Dresan
confirmed, in a dejected tone. He really was hoping they’d manage
to find her, or something that would lead them to her. “Did you see
or hear anything?”

“
Only some gossip.” When
Dresan turned to look at him, Nin added, “Some guards were passing
their time. Male bonding session.”

“
No mention of
Tavia?”

Nin shook his head. “Just
Kelly—Gilbreth’s…lady.” Nin would have punched the daylights out of
the guards if they had been talking about Tavia in the same way as
they did about Kelly.

Nin had been wondering about Varian
Gilbreth. He was considering breaking into Gilbreth’s house. It
might provide some clues as to what the man knew of the Elven
race.

Nin’s distress filtered through clear,
methodical rationalizing, as he gathered all the details which
might add up to something more certain.

He remembered the parchment piece in his
wrist device, and brought it out to let Dresan have a look at it.
They crouched, staying close to the floor, to remain undetected by
any guards on patrol in the outdoor walkways of The Gilbreth
Institute.

“
Redroot and diamond dust,”
Dresan muttered in a low voice. As he read it, a faint shimmer
seemed to go over the words he was reading. They looked at each
other—the glimmer that had gone over the parchment was not a
product of their imagination. “One part moonshine; one part
Elvenhumankind.”

He listened, in grave silence, as Nin told
him about the pure iron in the sensors of the vault.

“
Do you think they’re…in on
it?” Dresan asked Nin, in all seriousness.

Nin pulled his brows together. “Who?”

Dresan gestured with his head toward the
tree in the compound. “Anya. Leticia.” Dresan paused, not knowing
if he should feel bad for doubting them. Maybe the elves had
allowed something to slip through the cracks. He added with a tense
note in his voice, “Leticia’s boyfriend?”

Nin rubbed the back of his neck, squirming
unnervingly for a moment or two. “What about the boyfriend? Who is
he?”

“
Julius,” Dresan replied,
thinking back to an earlier conversation with Leticia. “I only got
his first name. He’s a student at their university…I was chatting
with Leticia for a bit, before you entered the Omega unit.” He
wondered if he should have pressed her for more fine points. It
hadn’t occurred to him then. “It just seemed a
little…strange.”

“
What are you talking
about?”

Dresan tried to put a finger on it.
“Something wasn’t right with Leticia. There was this sense of her
being…somewhere else…like she’d had too much Coca tea…except we
didn’t give her any.”

Nin sat back, coolly facing Dresan. Half of
him didn’t want to even consider the notion—that Anya and Leticia
had something to do with Tavia vanishing, or that they did know
something about the missing piece, and had helped an
overseer—Gilbreth?—capture a real, live elf.

The other half of Nin loathed admitting that
he knew Dresan could be right. Tavia may have been kidnapped, and
might be held hostage, unless something even more sinister had
befallen her. He tried to banish that thought quickly from his
mind.

“
Redroot,” Nin repeated the
word from the poem, thinking his thoughts aloud. “That’s the root
from the tree, Bloodstar.”

“
Diamond dust.” Dresan
pointed to his crystal pendant. The little particles swirled inside
the pendant, when he gave the crystal a light shake. They had
always called the ice particles “diamond dust,” without knowing
there was anything special to it.

“
Moonshine…” Nin held up
his own pendant, to the light of the full moon above. “A sliver of
a moonbeam.” When he angled the pendant correctly, the moonbeam
pierced through the core of the pendant, much like the way a ray of
sunlight converged through a magnifying lens, to focus on an
intense point where all the light was concentrated. The focal point
of midnight, moonlight, and magic, was much brighter and stronger
than a common moonbeam.

“
Elvenhumankind,” Nin
finished. “Someone’s out for our blood.”

He looked once again at the
title of the missing piece:
ilfirin.
It was the Elven word for
‘eternal life.’

Nin pointed to a small circle at the bottom
of the illustration. Dresan squinted at the swirl, before making
out the design within the circle. He could make out three
numbers.

“
2, 1, 7,” said Nin, his
voice moving to a tone lower. “Gilbreth’s time of birth and
password.”

Chapter 13:

Nin and Dresan returned to the train
carriage, and decided it was safer to return to The Velvet
Underground, where they would have access to a few more materials
they had gathered in the past on Varian Gilbreth and his institute.
They’d also be further away from the precinct. No one was aware of
how many potentially hazardous rooms the entire complex contained,
rooms that could be supercharged with pure iron ions that were
invisible to the naked eye.

Dresan, Leticia, Nin, and Anya moved in
single file, wordlessly, when they passed through the passageway
which linked the train system to the elves’ underground abode. To
Anya, the tense, chilly atmosphere was asphyxiating. The icy winds
of Helli’sandur were tolerable compared to the freezing over of
easy interaction amongst trusted friends and teammates.

Nin seemed to be in a cold spell. He was
wondering about Leticia, how she’d account for her earlier
whereabouts, when she hadn’t been able to join them. Why hadn’t she
been around? Did it even matter, to know the reason?

Anya touched the back of Nin’s arm, in a
comforting gesture. He seemed to shrink away—“Don’t touch me,” was
the message his body language conveyed. His response cut deep,
which made Anya realize she had fallen under Nin’s spell harder
than she ever intended. He could weave magic with his words, and
charm the birds out of the trees with his persuasive, urbane
charisma. She was caught in his web. A web not necessarily made up
of lies, but which was still going to be difficult to untangle
herself away from, if it was at all possible in the first
place.

Nin and Dresan hastened to Tavia’s room,
where the computers were set up. They looked worried, a look Anya
had not seen across their faces before. They switched on all the
computers and appeared to be frantically searching for something.
Anya guessed they must be looking for potential places to look for
Tavia. If they had any clue as to where she might have been taken,
they were not giving it away. Anya and Leticia both felt that their
presence was no longer needed, or wanted.

“
Can we help,” Anya
ventured, trying desperately to get Nin to look at her
again.

But he only answered coldly without even
looking up, “No, we’ll take it from here.” He added, “You’ve done
enough.”

Anya could only wonder what he meant by
that. Did he suspect them of sabotage? How dare he, she thought to
herself, but noting the intensity of the situation, she and Leticia
decided it would be best to just leave.

Anya and Leticia shuffled back to the stone
church. Anya kicked a pebble on the way back, along the abandoned
train tracks, which brought forth a small cloud of dust. She
watched the dust disintegrate, as the minute individual grains of
sand settled back onto the ground. It paralleled her sentiments on
the entire night’s events. Things had gone as planned, only to fall
to pieces right at the end, into nothingness.

A spiral staircase in one corner of the
stone church led to the rooftop. Anya and Leticia settled there,
the same way Nin would go to his special place in Helli’sandur.
Anya sat, wrapping her arms around her knees, watching the two a.m.
skyline of Zouk City, two miles away in the distance—bright little
lights of a city that never truly went to sleep.

“
I have this unsettling
feeling in my gut,” Anya confided to Leticia. “I don’t know why.”
There wasn’t anyone to blame for the misfortune. Not to her
knowledge.

Leticia was alone in her own zone,
crestfallen, almost. “I’ve got something to tell you, Anya…”

“
Hmm?”

“
I was going to tell you
earlier…” Leticia’s tone was weary, and pained. She closed her
eyes, resting her head against one hand that was propped up on her
knee. “But you were just about to go…then you and Nin, and Tavia,
were already on the way to the compound…”