United: An Alienated Novel (24 page)

They were everything.

Later they lay on a blanket of rumpled terrycloth and leaves, their bodies slicked with sweat and their hearts racing too fiercely to count. “Let’s call it a draw,” Aelyx suggested, in part from exhaustion but also because he was certain he’d lost.

“A tie,” she agreed, panting. “You really brought your A-game. My heart’s about to explode.”

“Mine, too.” He glanced at the moonlit bay. “Forget swimming. I’m so weak I could drown in six inches of water.”

“What happened to all your stamina from the colony?” she teased.

“Well, you have to remember this planet is slightly larger than L’eihr. The gravitational pull is a greater strain on my body.”

“Uh-huh, nice try.” She patted his chest and sat up. “Come on. I’ve never been skinny-dipping on Earth, and neither have you.” Before he could ask, she clarified, “This isn’t a ‘bucket list’ kind of thing, so don’t think I’m quitting. I just want to cool off.”

He forced his rubbery limbs into motion, and together they waded into the shallow water, which was freakishly cold. For that reason the skinny-dipping session lasted only long enough to wet their flushed skin, and then they ran back to shore, where they toweled dry and put their clothes back on. After slinging the towels around their necks and collecting the thermos, they started back through the woods the way they’d come.

Cara swung their linked hands between them, her mood lighter than before, so Aelyx didn’t feel the need to fill the silence with distracting small talk. They listened to the summer symphony of crickets and bullfrogs, occasionally stopping to share a kiss, until he heard a noise that made him pause.

“Listen.” He cocked an ear toward the sound. From somewhere nearby, a woman’s voice carried on the breeze. She was crying. More than crying. The despair in her hoarse, choking sobs told Aelyx she might be injured.

Cara patted herself down as if looking for a weapon. “What if Jaxen’s out there? I
did
steal his shuttle, and we never found him.”

She made a valid point. The smart thing to do was continue to the safe house and ask the soldiers to check on the woman. But then another series of muffled sobs broke out. “We’ll be careful,” Aelyx said, and he led the way toward the sound.

They tiptoed over fallen branches and logs, cringing every time a twig snapped beneath their shoes, until they reached a clearing in the woods. The woman, who had gone temporarily silent, made a wet sniffle and drew their attention to where she knelt at the opposite end of the clearing, wiping her eyes with the hem of her shirt. Her gray clothes had camouflaged her into the nearby underbrush, but now that Aelyx could see her outline, he knew he’d made the right choice in coming here.

She reminded him of Cara’s mother, but rail thin and lacking the matronly curves that made Eileen’s hugs so comforting. The full moon highlighted streaks of silver woven throughout the woman’s braid, and even from a distance, he noticed the signature slackening of her jowls that came with age. She covered her face and began crying again, and her whole body shook with the intensity of her grief. Aelyx rubbed a palm over his chest to dispel a sympathy pain. He glanced at Cara expecting to find her features softened as well, but instead she stared at the woman with her mouth frozen in a perfect oval.

“Oh, my god,” Cara breathed. “It’s Rune.”

Aelyx whipped his gaze back to the woman, seeing her with new eyes. She looked nothing at all like Cara. “Your clone? But you said she’d aged to her midthirties.”

“She had.” As if entranced, Cara stepped out from their hiding place behind a cluster of trees and advanced into the clearing. “I thought she was aging a decade every two days, but she must be aging exponentially.”

A twig snapped, and Rune gasped, turning toward them with a hopeful expression lifting her brow, as if she’d been waiting for someone. But when her eyes found Cara, they widened in panic, and she scrambled backward until she met the resistance of a bramble bush.

Cara flashed both palms and spoke in L’eihr. “I won’t hurt you.”

Unconvinced, Rune tugged her tunic free from the thorny bush and pushed to her feet. She swiped at her wet eyes and then crouched with both arms outspread, prepared for battle. She reminded Aelyx of a wounded predator. Any sympathy he’d felt for her promptly died. This woman was dangerous, regardless of her age.

He glanced around the clearing in case this was a trap. When he didn’t see anyone else, he demanded, “Where’s Jaxen?”

It was obvious the clone had understood him, but instead of answering, she picked up a rotten branch and broke it in half. With her stubborn chin lifted, she waved the stick back and forth in a warning to stay back.

“He left you, didn’t he?” Cara asked the clone. “Just like he did to Aisly.”

“No,” Rune yelled in a voice raw from crying. “He’ll come back for me. I’m his perfect match—not you. Me! We were made for each other. He said so.”

The tender way Cara looked at Rune reminded Aelyx of the time she’d found a stray puppy on their walk home from school during the student exchange last fall. Even though she was allergic to dogs, she’d wrapped the animal in her sweater and carried it from door to door until she’d found it a home. Then she’d broken out in itchy, red welts that’d lasted a week.

All of a sudden Aelyx knew exactly what she was thinking. “No. Absolutely not. We can’t take her with us.”

“I didn’t say we should.”

“But you’re thinking it.” He pointed at the clone. “Elire, you can’t trust her. She’s dangerous. Jaxen trained her to fight. To
kill
. Even if this isn’t a trap, which it very well may be, she’ll murder us the minute we let our guard down.”

Cara bit the inside of her cheek and made that pouty face, the one that told him her heart had taken command of her brain. “Have some compassion.”

“Compassion?”
He indicated the bruises on her face. “She attacked you!”

Cara folded both arms and turned to study the clone. “Try to see it from her point of view. All she knows are the lies Jaxen told her. He created her to be his partner, and to make sure she loved him, he filled every single role in her life—father, teacher, lover, friend. Jaxen is her whole world, and he abandoned her in the middle of nowhere. She probably has no idea why he left, or what’s happening to her body. All she knows is she’s alone and afraid.” Cara sighed, and her eyes misted over. “Try to imagine how she feels.”

Aelyx pinched his temples and tossed aside the thermos, because he was going to need both hands to catch the clone and relocate her to the safe house. He knew Cara wouldn’t be swayed by logic, and truth be told, her speech had stirred an inkling of sorrow within his chest.

A very small inkling.

“Fine, we’ll bring her with us. But only if you agree to keep her under watch.”

Cara smiled, eyes glittering. It was like the puppy all over again. “She’ll never leave our sight. I promise.” She kissed his cheek. “Thank you. You won’t regret this.”

Groaning inwardly, Aelyx stalked toward the feral replicate of his
l’ihan
and prepared to take a beating with the stick in her hand. “I already do.”

Chapter Sixteen

B
e careful not to break her hip,” Cara told Aelyx as he readjusted his hold on the clone, who was slung over his shoulder, kicking and thrashing like a rabid wolverine. “She’s almost sixty, I think.”

Aelyx slid her a glare while Rune used both fists to hammer his lower back. “My bruised kidneys say she doesn’t feel a day over twenty-five.”

“I love you for this by the way.” Cara gave him an encouraging thumbs up and winced at the six-inch gash Rune had opened on his cheek. “Remind me to disinfect that. The rotten branch she stabbed you with was probably crawling with bacteria.”

“Will do,” he said tersely.

All of Rune’s grunts and swears brought the safe house security team to the backyard, where Cara had to explain to a red-faced sergeant why she’d pulled a second Houdini act in one night. She omitted the R-rated details from her story, focusing instead on the clone. “She’s been working with Jaxen,” Cara said in English, which Rune didn’t understand. “But he dumped her. If I can convince her to trust me, maybe she’ll give us some intel about him.”

The sergeant ducked down just in time to dodge a boot to the face. He pointed at the ground while retrieving a pair of cuffs from his utility belt. “Drop her there,” he told Aelyx.

“Gently,” Cara interjected.

The sergeant threw her a sharp glance. “I’ll contact Colonel Rutter and see how he wants to proceed. Until then, tell her if she makes a move against any of my men, they have orders to shoot her.”

Cara took one look at the fury in the upside-down blue eyes staring at her from over Aelyx’s shoulder and decided she’d better stay to help. “You go ahead and disinfect your cut,” she said to Aelyx after he’d set Rune on the lawn. “I’ll wait here with her.”

He charged away, mumbling something about a puppy.

Once Rune’s wrists and ankles were shackled together, Cara sat down beside her. The restraints didn’t subdue Rune’s spirit. If anything, she fought harder, tugging against the metal cuffs until she fell sideways in the grass and couldn’t right herself. Cara took her clone by the shoulders and heaved her into a sitting position, then yanked her hand back when Rune snapped at her with her teeth.

“Enough,” Cara shouted in L’eihr. “If you don’t calm down, I’m going to give you a shot of the same drug I used on Jaxen. Is that what you want?”

Panic flashed in Rune’s gaze, and she curled up against the wood siding, shaking her head. Cara realized with a tug of guilt how traumatic it must’ve been for Rune when Jaxen had awoken and reacted to the drastic changes in her face. Knowing him, he had probably run away without a word. Telling Rune the truth would’ve made it too real for him, and Jaxen always took stellar care of number one.

“I’m sorry he abandoned you,” Cara said, more gently. “He’s a terrible person.”

Rune narrowed her eyes. “He told me you’d say that.”

“Because it’s true. Have you ever seen him do anything kind?”

“He was kind to
me
.”

“To anyone else, though? Even Aisly?”

Rune let the silence answer for her.

“Did he say why he left?” Cara asked.

More silence.

“Because I’ll tell you if you want to know.”

That piqued Rune’s interest. She flicked her gaze down and up again, hesitating for several beats before she finally nodded.

“It has to do with how you were created,” Cara said, and she explained how the cloning process worked. She used Aelyx as an example, describing his gestation in the artificial wombs and his upbringing in the Aegis, a sort of boarding school on L’eihr. Then she defined the meaning of a year and did her best to clarify the natural progression of time. “But Jaxen didn’t want to wait eighteen years for you to grow, so he used something to make you develop faster. But it worked too well, and now the aging won’t stop.”

A look of horrified comprehension crossed Rune’s face, and she glanced at her wrinkled hands.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Cara quickly added. “Jaxen ran away because he knows he made a mistake and he doesn’t want to face it. Plus his thinking is impaired by—”

“He’ll come back for me,” Rune interrupted, but her gaze faltered when she spoke. She tucked her hands into her lap, out of sight. “I won’t tell you anything about him, so leave me alone.”

Cara’s first instinct was to press the argument, but then she remembered how she’d felt after her worst breakups—the embarrassment and the hurt, and, more than anything, the need to keep it private. The only friends she’d wanted around were Ben & Jerry. “All right,” she said. “I’ll come back and check on you later.”

Inside the house, news of Rune’s arrival had caused quite a stir. Aside from Mom and Dad, who were asleep upstairs, the group huddled around Aelyx and listened to him recount the same story Cara had told the soldiers.

Elle dabbed at Aelyx’s injured cheek with a cotton ball soaked in antiseptic. As Cara entered the living room, Elle noticed her and said, “You did the right thing. That poor girl.”

Troy snorted and gave Cara a look that made his feelings clear. Then Elle caught him, and he quickly transformed his sneer into a grin. “Yeah, that poor, poor girl. You’re a saint, Pepper.”

Elle wasn’t fooled by Troy’s innocent act. She chided him with a glare, but she followed it with a wink that made his whole face turn scarlet, which was so adorable Cara couldn’t bring herself to be angry with him.

“Whether you agree with me or not,” Cara told him, “Rune is here now, and we’re going to treat her with compassion.”

“While keeping her in shackles,” Aelyx said out of the corner of his mouth as his sister affixed a Band-Aid to his cheek.

“Right now she’s a hundred percent Team Jaxen, but if I can change that, maybe she’ll tell us what he was up to in all those fertilizer plants and why the Aribol want to separate us. I think that’s the key to saving ourselves.”

Larish yawned and peered into his empty coffee mug. “I’d also be interested to learn where he keeps his Nova Staff, because it’s not in the shuttle you stole from him.”

During the chaos, Cara had forgotten about the staff. “He still has his hovercraft, too.”

“But it won’t fly him off this planet,” Syrine pointed out. “If he wants to escape the Aribol fleet, he’ll have to come for one of the shuttles.”

Since Cara had taken Jaxen’s shuttle before he’d tattled on her to Zane, she doubted that was the case. “He probably arranged a pick-up point for when the Aribol arrive.” The bigger question was whether he’d done it before or after abandoning Rune. “I have to find out what the clone knows.”

“Before she ages into dust,” Aelyx added.

“Right. I should probably make another pot of coffee.”

Two lattes later, Cara sat at the kitchen table brainstorming ways to befriend her clone while Aelyx and the others snored from the living room. She’d already visited Rune twice, once to ensure she didn’t need a sedative, and again to relocate her to a cot in the basement after Colonel Rutter had given the all-clear to hold her prisoner inside the house. Both times, Rune had fixed her gaze on the floor and refused to say a word, even when Cara had offered to bring her something to eat. Rune had simply curled up on the cot and faced the wall.