Close Remembrance (The Krinar Chronicles 3)

He grinned. “Our full names are generally only used at birth and at death. Do you still want to hear it?”

“Of course.” She imagined something totally unpronounceable. “What is it?”

“Nathrandokorum.”

“Oh, that sounds kind of nice,” Mia said, surprised. “Why don’t you use it more?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just the way it’s been with us for a long time. Full names have become nothing more than a formality. I doubt that anyone besides my parents knows that I’m called Nathrandokorum.”

Mia smiled, shaking her head. Some parts of the Krinar culture were strange indeed.

They walked some more, and then Mia remembered her recent conversation with her former roommate. “Do you think we might have a chance to visit New York soon?” she asked. “I was talking to Jessie, and it would be really nice to see her . . .”

Korum smiled, looking down at her. “Of course. If you want, we can go the next time you have a day off. Unless you want to go for longer?”

“No, a day would be perfect. I guess sometimes I still forget that we can just pop on over there whenever we want.”

His smile widened. “We definitely can – especially now that most of the Resistance has been captured.”

“Where’s Leslie?” Mia asked, remembering the girl who had attacked her in Florida. “Is she here, in Lenkarda?”

Korum shook his head. “No, she’s in our Arizona Center.”

“Is she . . . all right?” Mia was almost afraid to know the answer. The Resistance fighter had teamed up with Saur – the former apprentice from Saret’s lab – to try to kill Korum in Florida. Now she was in K custody, about to be ‘rehabilitated.’ From what Mia understood about the process, the end goal was to change that part of Leslie’s personality that made her a danger to society (or to the Krinar, as the matter may be). Rehabilitation – or mind tampering – was the most advanced branch of Krinar neuroscience, and Mia was just starting to learn about it at the lab.

“I assume so,” Korum said, his expression cooling. He obviously hadn’t forgotten the fact that the girl had pointed a gun at Mia and almost gotten her killed by Saur.

“Could you find out for me, please?” For some reason, Mia felt responsible for what happened to Leslie, even though the girl had attacked her. Still, she couldn’t help remembering the terror on Leslie’s face as she was led away by the K guardians. However misguided the fighter’s intentions were, she didn’t deserve to be mistreated, and Mia sincerely hoped she didn’t get hurt during her rehabilitation.

Korum hesitated, then nodded curtly. “All right, I will.” His jaw tightened, however, and Mia could see that he was thinking about the beach incident again.

To distract him, she squeezed his hand and gave him a big smile. “Thank you,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

“Of course, my darling,” he said, his expression visibly softening. “Anything to make you happy – you know that.” And bending down, he brushed his lips against her mouth in a brief kiss.

“So what are the guardians, anyway?” Mia asked when they started walking again. “Are they like your police?”

“Something like that,” Korum said. “They’re a cross between soldiers, police, and one of your intelligence agencies. They enforce our laws, catch criminals, and deal with any kind of threat from humans. Our society is so homogenized at this point that we no longer have war on Krina, the way you do here on Earth. There are still some regional rivalries, of course, and there are always a few crazies who disagree with the way things are done by the government, but we don’t have the kind of conflict that would require a standing army.”

“So you guys managed to invade our planet without an army?”

Korum laughed. “If you want to think about it that way. Most Krinar males who came to Earth received military-style training because we were expecting some resistance. But no, we didn’t need a big army to control Earth; all we needed was our technology.”

“Of course.” Mia tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice. Loving Korum the way she did made it easy to forget that she was doing the equivalent of sleeping with the enemy – even if the enemy didn’t actually intend her planet any harm. It was only during these types of conversations that Mia was unpleasantly reminded of the fact that the Krinar forcefully took over her planet . . . and that the man who loved her did not necessarily have humankind’s best interests at heart.

“Trust me, Mia, it was better this way,” Korum said, as though reading her mind. “Your government had no choice but to accept the inevitable, and that helped minimize the bloodshed. It would’ve been far worse if there had been a full-out war between our people.”

Mia’s mouth tightened, but she nodded, knowing he was right. There was no point in resenting the Krinar’s technological superiority; in a way, it did make their invasion as painless as possible. The fact that they invaded at all was a different matter, of course – but Mia didn’t have the energy or the inclination to fight that particular battle. Working with the Resistance once was enough.

“Can I ask you something?” Mia said, thinking back to those crazy days when she was spying on Korum. “I don’t get one thing about the Keiths’ plans. Even if they were successful in getting all the Krinar to leave Earth, wouldn’t your people have come back with reinforcements? I know you said they were going to kill you, but what about all the others? Are you the only one with the means to go back and forth between Earth and Krina?”

Korum shot her an amused glance. “No, of course not. My company has the most advanced ship designs, but the Krinar have traveled to and from Earth long before I was even born. I think the Keiths were hoping to control the protective field.”

“The protective field?”

He nodded. “Up until a dozen years ago, space travel was largely unregulated. Anyone could go anywhere, as long as they had a ship to take them there. Now, however, we have a shield in place to protect Earth from unauthorized travel – the same kind of shield we recently put around Krina.”

“There is a shield around Earth?” Mia looked up at him in surprise.