The Way Back (Champions of the Crystal Book 4)

Chapter 5: Pygmalion

They followed a silent Mara, trailed by a watchful guard, up a steep staircase and down a long hallway. After they'd made a couple of turns, Scotty said quietly in English, "Why'd you do that, Rina?"

"Verisimilitude," she sighed. "I just didn't expect him to hit back."

"A little too real?" he said. "Well, you deserved it. He probably meant it."

"Nonsense."

"How do you know?"

"Because," Sabrina said, "they don't have peasants on Praxatillus."

The guard shoved the blunt end of his pike into her back in an unmistakable command to stop talking. Scotty grimaced, then telegraphed a question by nodding toward Mara, raising his eyebrows, and gesturing with his right hand as if turning a key in a lock. Sabrina nodded slightly, and he spread his hand out as if to show there was nothing in it. She shrugged, and he looked away with an irritated grunt.

Well, I'd tell you if I knew! she thought at him. But I've never tried to bring back an amnesiac Miahn's memory before. She could tell Scotty wasn't in a mood to wait and see how events unfolded—if indeed he ever had been, she added to herself with a glimmer of amusement.

Sure enough, a few moments later, Scotty began humming. At first Sabrina thought he was just trying to be irritating on general principles, but then she recognized the tune. It was the Praxatillian planetary anthem, "The Trees Stand Forever." Yes, he was definitely trying to jog Mara's memory.

But Mara walked on, unaffected. Sabrina was puzzled; this shell of a person was the most inert being she'd ever met, utterly passive and non-absorptive. She was almost Mara's exact opposite. How could mere amnesia result in such a radical change of personality? There ought to be fire and passion and willful stubbornness, not this meek acceptance and obedience. Could Mara have been damaged in more than her memory by whatever Varla had done to her? Or was this the Crystal's way of preserving her, suppressing her personality so that she could survive?

Sabrina was pretty sure Ford had been lying about the Crystal killing Miahns to protect itself, but she couldn't be certain. And how would the Great Crystal define death, anyway? She knew it held the mental imprints of nearly all the Miahns who had ever existed; they never ceased being part of the community that made the Miahns who they were as a race. Could the phase shift somehow have separated Mara's body from her real self, which was anchored to the Crystal?

If that's true, there's no way out of this except to knock us back into phase with Praxatillus. She wondered if she could somehow get Scotty free to try to figure out how the phase shift had been accomplished, while she worked on Mara. Well, she would have to try. It depended on how heavily the hatcheries were guarded.

She could smell the hatcheries long before they reached them. It reminded her disturbingly of the smell Netros' corpse had given off, something that grated against her primal instincts, making her hair stand on end. No wonder Mara had named it as the most unpleasant part of the palace.

Sabrina caught a glimpse through a window that told her they were a story above ground level, which was as high as the palace went, she thought. It was hotter and drier up here, and when Mara opened the door to the hatcheries, a blast of heat nearly suffocated them. She saw why as soon as she stopped coughing and looked around; the ceiling was made of glass, intensifying the heat.

Wide, deep troughs lined the walls, some filled with sand, others with vegetation. Sabrina surmised that the sand hid Stanosian eggs, buried like sea turtles'. But she had to look carefully at the others before she realized that tiny forms were writhing around in the leaves.