“You’re lying.”
“I am not lying, and I will prove it soon.”
“You expect me to believe that you were gaming the system?”
“Yes. I was. I was looking after humans, and I was looking after you. But I had to maintain a harsh and hostile exterior, the more monstrous the better. I had to be above and beyond suspicion.”
“You were. You really were. But that doesn’t change what happened before…”
“Wait a moment,” Rath holds his finger up at me. “I’m getting a call.”
He stares off into space. I don’t know how he’s taking a call via his augmentations when he is supposed to be off the grid. My guess, they’ve set up a secondary communications system running in concert with the official one. I’m discovering that this isn’t some off the cuff, wild escape. This is a carefully orchestrated operation, even with my madness throwing wrenches into the works at every turn.
He listens. He does not speak. Thirty seconds later, he turns to me.
“Tyvian informs me that there were two bodies discovered in an incineration beneath the castle. One korabi. One human. The conclusion has been reached that we were killed by an old trap rigged by the previous king.”
“So we’re free?”
“We are as free as we can be.”
From declaration of guilt to apparent freedom, this has all happened very quickly. Experience has taught me that is how bad things happen, swiftly. Right now it seems that we have both escaped the consequences of our actions, but it can’t truly be that easy. Nothing in my life has ever been that easy.
“What now? We wander around in the jungle and hope for the best?”
“We start over. We start wild. We build a new family made of korabi defectors and human scum.”
That earns him a poke to the chest. “You don’t get to call us scum. We get to call us scum.”
“Human rebels,” he says. “Better?”
“Much better. But there aren’t any other korabi, or any humans. There’s just us.”
“Actually, there’s more than just us. There are quite a few people waiting to see you. Get on my back. We need to move quickly.”
This time the river is not an option, thankfully. I do not find myself tossed into cold waters which inexorably draw one to the oppressive city of Megaris. Instead I am borne on the back of Rath, carried at massive speed through the undergrowth. There is a path he seems to know, though I cannot see where it is open and where it is closed. The trees flash by us in a green storm.
We burst through them, into a clearing with tents and carts with great big wheels. I have never seen anything like this in my life. In Megaris, nobody travels. You have your assigned home, or scavenging range, and that is it. Even scum end up establishing territories and staying there. Everything about this encampment speaks to a nomadic lifestyle. The carts are drawn by korabi, I think, judging by the way one of them is currently harnessed to one who is dragging it forward.
There are also humans. I stare over Rath’s powerful shoulders. At first it seems too good to be true. I think my mind is playing tricks on me. Overlaying the faces of those I once loved on these wild humans.
“Lyric!”
Henry calls my name. I hear his voice. This is no illusion, or delusion. These are my humans. My family!
They’re all there. Or almost all of them. Frenchie and Henry. Giselle, Alicia’s oldest, the one who survived. Taddy too! Rath wasn’t lying. He hasn’t been killing humans. He has been saving them.
“Oh my god!” I start to kick and squirm with excitement. “Rath! Look!”
Rath disengages his massive hands from my thighs, letting me slide to the ground.
I scream with excitement and run to embrace them. I never thought I would see any of them again. I assumed they were gone, destroyed, or perhaps stuck in elite purgatory forever. This reunion feels as though it is happening in slow motion in another universe. It feels too good to be true, but I touch them and I feel them around me. I hear their voices. I smell their scents, and I know that this is real.
The korabi are watching what is happening with interest. I don’t have enough cranial bandwidth to observe anything more about them than the fact that they exist.
“How did you all end up here? How is this possible?”
“He saved us,” Henry says, his face transformed by a wide grin.
“How was that actually possible?” I turn to Rath, absolutely astounded. How is it that the most brutal, human-hating korabi I know who was also fully responsible for the deaths of my family is also responsible for saving the others?
“I may not have known your names, but I knew the description of everybody in your little home. I knew which ones were missing after the… incident. I used my position as bounty hunter to move among the humans. I found you almost immediately, and then I found them, one by one, and moved them out here, to safety.”