Page 90 of Splintered Shadow
Ghost nudged her hand.
She loved him, too.
“My schemes put your life in danger. I owe you a debt of honor now. Name your prize,” Baris said. “If it is within my power, it is yours. If it is not, I will make it happen.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you still wish to return to your home?”
“No,” she said with absolute certainty. “Earth’s not home anymore.”
She risked a glance at Vekele, still glowering. That was okay. She knew the truth. He wore an icy mask to hide his feelings from those who would use them against him, but he could not hide from her. He watched her with the intensity of a bird of prey, waiting to swoop down. He was the owl; she was the mouse.
Rubbing her arm, she somehow felt the needles that tattooed her years ago.
She reached for his hand, intertwining their fingers. “This is my home now. I’m staying.”
Vekele’s expression warmed. “Are you certain?”
She knew what she wanted. “Luca said he could use my phone to reopen the wormhole, but he needs… something technical.”
Baris summoned Luca. The man arrived in an instant, out of breath from running. “Your Majesty?”
“The princess’ device. Can you open a wormhole with it?”
Luca paled. “No…not by itself. I’ve determined it operated as a network. However, triangulating the location of anomalies will help me determine the origin point and the, um, correct frequency. It is like a key to unlock the wormhole, if you will.”
Baris did not interrupt, which Luca must have interpreted as permission to continue. He explained, “Network satellites and sentry posts, theoretically, still record, but they do not broadcast. The data is there, but I need to manually download it in person. It’s labor intensive but fascinating.”
Sarah knew what she wanted. It had been a half-formed idea for days now, but the more she thought about who would miss her, the more she realized she couldn’t be the only one.
“The thing is, every one of those anomalies is a phone with a person attached,” she said, explaining her real concern. “It wasn’t just my phone that opened the portal. There are more phones than people on Earth, and we’re talking eight billion people. Even if the portals happened to one percent of the population, that’s so many people. Lost. Alone. Desperate to go home. And that’s not even considering the people left behind, whose loved ones just vanished.”
Baris regarded her skeptically. “What is it you want, Sarah?”
“Help me rescue those people and send them home.”
“Eight million people,” he said in a tone of disbelief.
“Eighty million, actually,” Luca said. When Baris tossed him a sharp glare, he added, “Your Majesty.”
Correcting the king’s math wasn’t a choice she would have made, but it was a choice.
“How do you propose to do this?” Baris asked.
“Two methos. One, we look for anomalies. That’s how Vekele found me. I was super lucky that he found me, but what about the others? That’s how we get the media to spread the word about possible human survivors. It’s been a month that they’ve been on their own, on alien planets. Who knows if the planets are hospitable to humans? Maybe they got lucky, and someone helped them. We need to find them and send them home.”
“A search and rescue operation.”
“Yes. It’s a big ask,” she said. “Once we have the data to open a wormhole, we can reuse it, right?” She tossed a look at Luca, who agreed.
“It would take no extra work to reopen the portal,” Luca said.
“Even if we can’t send people back to Earth, we can offer them refuge,” she added.
Baris looked unconvinced. She gave her most winning smile.
He sighed. “Very well. Vekele, you will carry out your mate’s mission. Collect the necessary data. Investigate the anomalies. Locate survivors. Take Luca, since this is his doing.”
