The Riven Child
“At some point you either care enough to risk everything to solve the problem or you don’t.”
Asha Norde was in the floral district with Diyan Desh walking off ten days of deep-space travel. The couple were returning from Asha’s annual month-long research trip to Lambda-Iora. She’d done the trip six times now and knew how important every minute off ship meant to keeping spirits up on the return leg to Athos. There was this stop at Hoff Springs, mid-Corridor, and there was a day-long stop at Port Cullen about a week away, and that was it. The rest was weightlessness, fake light, space food, recycled air, and close confines. So the fresh flowers that lined that rear district of Hoff Springs smelled like heaven, a stroke of genius by the clever Hoff resident who decided to start selling greenhouse flowers to passing travelers.
After a delightful meal and a stroll through the marketplace, Diyan and Asha were holding hands, taking in their last thirty minutes on the outpost smelling the flowers, debating which type of arrangement would most brighten their cabin for the stretch to Port Cullen.
Asha caught a look from a vendor she couldn’t quite describe. There was something dark about it—a brief glimpse followed by a quick break of eye contact. It made her uncomfortable, not the welcoming look of a vendor, but something else she couldn’t place. She tugged on Diyan’s hand and quickened her pace down the floral district.
Maybe fifty steps farther down the hallway, they both began to look around them. There suddenly didn’t seem to be any other people around.
They came up from behind. The bag they put over Asha’s head muffled her initial scream as she was pulled up off her feet by someone much bigger and stronger than she. Asha could feel though—she could sense a tremendous skirmish going on beside her. Diyan was fighting them. She began to kick. She couldn’t hear or see anything with her head in that black bag, but she could feel the man who’d grabbed her faltering, struggling to keep balance, and suddenly, she dropped to the ground. Her hands came free, and she took advantage of that split second to pull the bag from her head. She saw Diyan fighting tooth and nail, flailing and kicking at three men, who were struggling to surround him and pull him to the ground. The hand of the tremendous man came down on Asha’s neck, and before she could scream, another man, a fifth, had stuffed her head back in the bag and wrapped her legs in his arms, while the behemoth took her up by the torso and whisked her away.
When she began studying blood, Asha Norde couldn’t have foreseen a future where she would become the galaxy’s expert in any domain, much less anything as complex as that life-giving substance she found so fascinating. On every level it was so positively miraculous, Asha could hardly contain her excitement whenever anyone asked her what she did. They were usually not conversations that lasted very long. Most people thought her passion for blood was either an odd fixation or a morbid fascination with a basic function of life. But the few who stuck around long enough to listen usually had their minds expanded on a topic they’d never thought much about. “Imagine,” she would begin, “having to design a liquid whose job it is to carry oxygen, nutrients, the waste products of cellular death and decay, and in addition to that, at a moment’s notice, that liquid must be able to turn into a gel and then into a solid so that it clogs any holes that open up in the skin, but it can’t ever do it at the wrong time or too aggressively—it has to be perfect. All those things, and not just those things but about a thousand others too. Our blood is a miracle.”
Nobody studied the subject matter more thoroughly. And in her early years as one of the few Hematology researchers in Moses-Mesui, it was often difficult to find avenues to explore that weren’t already fully understood. That wasn’t a challenge unique to Hematology, as many if not most areas of medicine were considered mostly understood. But Asha had such an insatiable drive to find something new that she developed a reputation for chasing shadows. Most of her cases that seemed like mysteries at first ultimately proved to be simple misunderstandings or misreported symptoms that were ultimately easily explainable once the real story came out. As much as her superiors and even her peers found her drive admirable, she was mostly viewed as silly for thinking she could actually find something new in our blood that thousands of predecessors had all missed in the centuries upon centuries of deep medical research. And then, one day, Lambda-Iora. The Miliner that aggregated medical data for the entire system—between both rings, Athos and Iophos—happened to be archiving medical data that had come in from the Letters in a Battery-wide data-sharing agreement. He’d identified an anomaly in a segment of the population out in the Iora cylinders, all of whom shared a common ancestor.
Asha Norde didn’t even wait for approval or funding to study the cluster. She immediately took a leave and bought passage out to the Letters to setup a study on the chance that the anomaly was something worth studying. And when she returned from that first trip out to the Lambdas, none of her colleagues were teasing her for chasing shadows anymore.
Whenever she said there was something special in their blood, she thought it sounded funny, and it certainly didn’t do the situation justice. But there was no better way of explaining it to the layperson. And, she conceded, it probably wasn’t nearly as exciting a discovery for a layperson as it was for Asha and her colleagues, except that their blood clotted slightly faster and had a slightly darker red tint to it than every other human that ever lived in the Battery Systems. But the Iora Cluster made Asha a celebrity in her obscure field, and it secured her a life-long mission along with the funding to direct the study of the Iorans, both the dark-bloods, as they became known, and their red-blooded neighbors. What had happened and how, genetically, epigenetically, environmentally, to alter human blood so drastically for perhaps the first time in millions of years?
The first thought she had following the shock of waking up in a dim, strange room was that there must have been some sort of drug aerosolized inside the bag. She didn’t remember anything after the first few seconds getting carried off. She wasn’t quite sure yet, as she wasn’t finished coming around, but she could have been floating, or it could’ve been the drug still. In the darkness, she thought she saw the outline of a hand twitching as it floated beside her. The fingers clenched and unclenched several times. Her eyes followed that hand, mesmerized. She stared at the hand for what could have been minutes, before slowly, she started to realize that the hand was familiar. It registered in her mind as a gentle hand. She was floating.
Asha took a deep breath, suddenly self-aware but sluggish. The hand, she knew, was Diyan’s. She turned him over, and even in the dim light, she could see swollen patches of his face, his right forehead above the eye. The cheekbone under the left. She couldn’t tell whether he’d been drugged as well or just beaten unconscious. She clung to him for a moment, placing her ear to his chest, not so much to check, but just to hear his heartbeat, the warm comfort of it. She felt awful for a moment for the relief she had at the fact she wasn’t alone in that room.
The ship—not their ship—was moving, in transit, the gentle hum of FTL travel. Asha continued to cling to Diyan, running her fingers through his hair gently. Under his hair on the right side of his head, she could feel a lump where he’d been slugged hard—one of the blows that put him down. She tried to recall details of their assailants. They’d been masked—no features, glasses concealing the eyes. But the clothing ... she paused trying to determine whether there were features that marked out their clothing in any distinguishable way.
When Asha fully came to, she did her best to remember her basic medical training. Any intervention for Diyan, though, would be inaccessible in that small empty room. She let go of him and began to float around the room. There was a sliding door that was clearly shut from the outside. She began to feel along the walls for anything she might be able to pull loose and use as leverage against the door.
“Dr. Norde,” a voice came into the room, along with a blank floatscreen that lit up the small space, giving her the first good look at her surroundings.
“Who are you? Why have you taken us?”
“Do you know what this is?”
The floatscreen displayed a still image of a large rounded box.
“Is that a short-term stasis box? A pill box, no?”
“That’s correct. If you attempt to escape from the room or cause any sort of trouble whatsoever, we will put you and your companion inside it for the duration of your journey. We don’t want this experience to be any more difficult than it needs to be. Please comply.”
“Diyan is hurt. Do you have medical supplies? Is there a doctor who can look at him. I’m a researcher, a hematologist. I’ve never treated a head injury.”
“Sit tight, please, doctor. Your companion will be fine.”
“Why have you—?”
The floatscreen flashed off, and as it did, Diyan began to moan.
Diyan didn’t properly come to for some time after he began to wake. For Asha, she wasn’t sure he was with it until he attempted to smile through his swollen lips and said, “How do I look?”
“You shouldn’t have fought them like that,” she replied, shaking her head.
“If there had only been three, I’d have taken them.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You’re lucky to be alive, Diyan.”
“I wasn’t going to just let them take you, Asha.”
“You’re not a fighter. That’s what I love about you.”
“Everyone’s a fighter if they need to be.”
“You didn’t stop them, and now you got snatched up as well.”
“What would you have thought of me if I’d have just stood aside with my jaw open, Asha? And now you have company on your side adventure. Any idea where we are?”
Asha was nearly in tears. Diyan’s voice was weak, and even in the dim light of that little room she could see him wincing through each pained word.
“We’re on a ship,” she replied. “They haven’t said where they’re taking us.”
“A mystery ride. How fun.”
“You shouldn’t joke about it, Diyan. This is serious.”
He turned his head toward her as though to display his swollen face in full view. His point was clear enough.
“Best to keep our spirits up,” Diyan said after a moment.
“Does it hurt?” she asked, raising her hand toward his face, reluctant to touch him.
He couldn’t help but laugh. “It hurts, Asha. Yes, it hurts.”
“Where? What can I do.”
“It hurts right about here,” he replied, circling his head with his hand. “Also here,” he continued waving his arm over his entire torso. “But mostly here and here,” he said, pointing to each fist. “I feel so sorry for those five men who made the mistake of ganging up on us.”
“Oh, Diyan, I’m proud of you.” Asha did her best to float in beside him gently. “I’m grateful you’re here with me.”
“We’ll get through this together, Asha. Have faith.”
There was no further contact through the floatscreen. Asha recounted the conversation to Diyan as he came around further. There was nothing in the room that gave away the time, and there was no window so that no clues about the space the ship was traversing could be descried. They jumped several times, sometimes multiple hops right upon the other. The only clues to the time were the number of meals that got deposited through a door slot and the slow progression of Diyan’s bruises, purpling and yellowing and diffusing across hours and days.
It might have been a week. Close to it.
Without warning, the lights flicked on full blast, blinding Asha and Diyan. Both instinctively raised their arms to block the light and closed their eyes. It was in that moment that several men came flying into the room.
Asha couldn’t see what was happening, but she felt herself getting pulled in by one of the men before the darkness came back. Her arm and her head were both partially inside the bag again.
“Don’t fight!” she heard one of the men shout to Diyan. “Stop fighting or we’ll split you two up.”
“Stop, Diyan! Stop, please,” she said.
She could hear the scuffle settle as the men pulled down her arm, and the bag went fully over her head again. What little sense of orientation she’d had was now fully gone.
A few moments later, she felt her hands being bound and then pulled slightly forward by one of their captors. Then she felt a touch at her ankle, another set of hands grasping her lower leg—bound together like hers, Diyan’s hands, she could tell by the gentle touch. She nearly began to cry at the thought that she could tell it was him and that a simple loving touch, even in those circumstances, could bring such a depth of comfort. He squeezed her leg ever so gently, just to let her know it would be all right. No words.
They were pulled forward together for quite a distance before they were finally separated. Asha could tell he was there, though, still in the room with her.
Their captors placed her in a seat and belted her in. Then, the unmistakable forces of flight shook her body. Gravity returned. A destination.
Again they were led by their captors, Diyan now following along behind, pulling slightly on her overshirt, and that too, as they were led along, was comforting.
There was another vehicle, an elevator, several long corridors, turn after turn, until finally, they were sat down in a room. A hand pressed down on her shoulder, signaling unequivocally that she was to stay put in that chair.
Minutes later, in a sudden shock of bright light, the bag came off her head.
Asha breathed deeply. She wasn’t prepared for the veil to be lifted so suddenly. She instinctively put her hands up over her eyes as she recoiled from the glare.
“Take a moment,” a gentle male voice said to her. “I understand you’ve had a traumatic experience.”
Asha got her first glimpse of a captor’s face, and it was not at all what she was expecting, a gentleman in his early sixties by her guess, with a short, well-groomed beard and soft eyes smiling back at her apologetically. He swiveled in his chair and delicately lifted the bag from Diyan’s head. None of the men who’d taken them were in her line of sight, but she couldn’t see behind her, so she didn’t dare get up from the chair. The thought, though, brought escape to mind, which she thought better of after feeling the weight of her legs after weeks of spaceflight. Even an older man like that could easily get the better of her, she decided.
“Oh, dear,” the gentleman said when he got his first look at Diyan, whose face in that light looked almost as bad as it had before the swelling went down. Now, the bruises were bright purple and yellow in proper light. “We certainly did not sanction that.”
“I’m sorry?” Diyan replied.
“No, sir. It is we who should be sorry. It was never our intention for anyone to get hurt, least of all one of Dr. Norde’s friends.”
“He’s my partner, not just my friend. We’d like some answers.”
“Certainly. Yes. Yes,” the gentleman replied. “First let me get your hands free. I want you to understand that you are our guests here, Dr. Norde.”
She laughed as the man turned his attention to her hands, loosening the strap that had bound her wrists together for the transfer.
“Funny. I feel much more like a prisoner. A guest is free to leave, no? I think we’d like to go home right away.”
“Complications,” the gentleman replied, smiling again apologetically. “I promise you both you’ll go home safely, but it will take time.”
“Prisoners then,” Asha stated.
“I can certainly understand how you would feel that way. Especially with the injury to your partner, Mr.?”
“It’s doctor, actually,” Diyan replied. “Dr. Desh.”
“We weren’t expecting you to have an escort. The people we hired to transport you here, Dr. Norde, they were overzealous in the way they took you both. No one will lay an unkind hand on either of you while you’re with us. You have my word on that.”
“With you where?” Diyan asked. “We’re in the Protectorate somewhere, obviously.”
“It’s better that you don’t know exactly where you are.”
“Better for who?”
“Everyone, Dr. Desh,” the man replied. “Especially you two. The appearance of an abduction was necessary.”
“Appearance?” Asha said.
“Well,” the gentleman shook his head. “Yes. That appearance should also be maintained. It is almost impossible for an outsider to get permission to enter our territory through proper channels, and for reasons that I hope will make sense to you shortly, we couldn’t risk being denied permission or wait for it any longer. We have a very sick child we need you to treat, Dr. Norde. A little girl.”
“You don’t have Trasp doctors?” Diyan asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “You have to pull two from the astral corridor on their way through? She’s not even a clinician. You know that, right?”
“We know who she is, Dr. Desh. These are complicated times. In an ideal galaxy we’d have come to see Dr. Norde on Athos months ago.”
“She has a blood disorder, doesn’t she?” Asha said.
Diyan looked over at her and shook his head. He knew that tone. On principle, he’d have preferred to tell these Trasp to float in the depths. And if it were any old sick child, he might be able to talk Asha into it, provided there was someone else qualified to treat the child without their doing it. But not if blood were involved. There wasn’t anything in the universe that could stop Asha from diving into a rare hematological case.
“Yes,” the older gentleman stated. “It’s a most unusual presentation. None of us have been able to make any sense of it, even with your publications to guide us, Dr. Norde. We couldn’t risk you crossing the border of your own volition. They’d put you to death. That’s why we hired those mercenaries to smuggle you across. Under interrogation, now, even if you’re found, the authorities cannot hold you accountable for being in our territory unlawfully. We’ve breached the laws, not you.”
“Where’s this child?” Ahsa replied.
“We’d like to get you two fed and cleaned up first. Then I’ll give you a full report. I’m Dr. Leyere. Again, I’m so sorry for the methods we were forced to adopt in bringing you here. From this point forward, you’ll both be treated with the respect you deserve.”
True to his word, Dr. Leyere treated Diyan and Asha with the respect a visiting specialist would be afforded. Though he didn’t wish to restrict their movement in any official way, he did ask that they respect the risk the community had taken in bringing them in. To where, he wouldn’t say, but it was clearly not a major planet and probably not an outpost that was originally part of the Protectorate. Dr. Leyere was obviously not Etteran, and no other regions would have had such limitations on freedom of movement. That left only one possibility. There were hundreds of small systems that the Trasp had gobbled up in the early years of the war to solidify their boundaries. Many such Indies began the war with no particular hatred toward the Etterans nor love for the Trasp. Asha’s first guess was that this was one such outpost. But she whispered to Diyan in a quiet moment that it only took one loyalist to make their presence known to higher powers in the Protectorate, which they agreed would be the worst-case scenario for all parties.
The dinner wasn’t elegant by Athosian standards, but it certainly hit the spot after weeks of space food, including numerous days spent in captivity where nerves hindered any chance of enjoying a meal. Even in similar—albeit much more comfortable—captivity, Asha found herself surprisingly drawn to Dr. Leyere’s manner. She saw many similarities between him and Diyan, that clinician’s drive to exhaust all avenues for his patient. Abducting an Athosian hematologist and bringing her across wartime boundary lines was perhaps the most extreme version of this instinct she’d ever come across, but as he laid out the case in detail, Asha dwelled less and less on their situation and more on the child’s.
The Riven baby, Annen, was nearly two now. She’d presented as a completely normal baby until her bloodwork identified markers the doctors had never seen before. They didn’t identify any similar cases until they came across Asha’s publications about the Ioran Cluster. And initially for little Annen and her parents, this genetic abnormality was a mere curiosity—perhaps something to observe and study as she grew. To that point, Asha hadn’t identified any associated pathological presentations in the Ioran Cluster apart from the peculiar dark appearance of their blood, so the doctors here didn’t anticipate any abnormal complications as Annen Riven grew.
At eight months, though, the baby threw her first clot. Her mother, Liis, luckily happened to be nursing her at the time and was observant enough to notice that her left eye suddenly wasn’t tracking symmetrically, so she rushed little Annen to the doctor immediately. That initial presentation resulted in the first of twelve surgical interventions to date.
Dr. Leyere expressed the frustration of many physicians in such difficult cases, being on constant watch for the recurrence of dangerous symptoms while feeling powerless to treat the root cause of the disease. That root cause, he explained to Asha and Diyan had manifested in the baby’s left lung. It was easily missed in utero and in early imaging of the healthy child, because the imaging reflected a typical anomaly that occurred in roughly one in every hundred healthy people—a horizontal fissure of the left lung. Initially, it wasn’t prominent. But when Dr. Leyere went looking for the source of the clot, he found that the normal anomaly had grown more pronounced, and indeed seemed to be trying to mature further into a minor lobe of its own, yet because it wasn’t part of the human body’s typical design, this micro-lobe, as Leyere described it, competed poorly for blood flow. Thus, baby Annen’s blood tended to pool and thicken there and occasionally, she would generate and throw a sizeable clot. The Rivens were vigilant and had been issued a Windsor to monitor the child round the clock, and still, Leyere reported that he’d had to surgically intervene once every several months to deal with an acute thrombus.
“Why don’t you just remove the offending area of the lung?” Diyan asked. “It’s a simple enough solution.”
“Yes. Only, I’ve resected the baby’s lung twice, Dr. Desh. And here’s the real curious thing. Each time I’ve taken out little Annen’s superfluous lobe, it grows back. And each time, it’s grown back larger. And each time, the clots have grown more frequent. So you see, that’s where we are now, with no other avenue to explore than the possible connection to Dr. Norde’s blood anomaly in the Ioran Cluster.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that out there, though,” Asha replied. “Every last one of the Iorans is perfectly healthy.”
“How much have you explored their pulmonary anatomy, Dr. Norde?” Leyere asked. “We suspect it might be similar and in the absence of a pathological presentation, it could easily be missed as normal population-wide anatomical differences.”
“That’s a curious theory,” she replied.
“Not nearly as curious as spontaneous tissue regeneration in the lung,” Diyan said, shaking his head.
Asha looked over at him and smiled, and when he looked back, he knew he’d been caught. He was just as fascinated now as she. There would be no room for complaining—at least not about being there. How they’d gotten there was another matter entirely. On those grounds, Diyan still had plenty of cause to complain.
Liis Riven was holding little Annen when Dr. Leyere took Asha and Diyan to meet the family. Asha let it be known that she wanted Diyan by her side throughout their time on the outpost. Wherever she went, Diyan would go to. It wasn’t just his presence but also his clinical instincts. She’d gotten better interacting with patients during her time in the Ioran cylinder group, but her work was more taking blood samples and tests and explaining what she was looking for to healthy subjects. She had little experience treating any sick patients, much less a baby.
Annen was undersized. It was clear the constant medical interventions had taken their toll. But she was ruddy-cheeked and returned an easy smile when Asha said hello. Liis had her head covered over in a tight white bonnet that looked as much a medical choice as clothing selection.
“Isn’t she precious,” Asha said to Liis.
“We’re so grateful to you for coming,” Liis replied, teary eyed.
It became clear to Diyan and Asha that the Rivens weren’t aware that their presence wasn’t exactly voluntary, but the bruises on Diyan’s face seemed to give away something to Baiar Riven, who was standing beside his wife.
“Looks like maybe you had a tough trip,” he said to Diyan.
“Always could have been tougher,” Diyan replied, smiling to the young father. “Is she your only child?”
“Our third,” Baiar replied. “Her brothers are with my parents right now. That’s not a problem, is it? I imagine you’ll be wanting blood from all of us.”
It struck Asha that Baiar had a curious tone about the way he’d said it.
“I suppose if we do need samples, you won’t be too hard to track down,” Diyan replied, doing his best to smile through the bruises that were still fading from his cheekbones.
“For now we just wanted to meet Annen,” Asha said, smiling at Liis and then down at the baby.
“Dr. Leyere says you’re one of the greatest experts in all of the Battery,” Liis replied. “On blood, that is.”
“It is my area of expertise, yes. We’ll have to take a closer look, but from what Dr. Leyere has told me Annen has a rare type of blood that I’ve been studying. Hopefully that will help us get to the bottom of all the problems she’s been having.”
“It’s genetic, you think?” Baiar asked.
“Well, perhaps. It’s a little early for us to think anything yet. We’ve just arrived.”
Baiar began to rub his chin. “I see.”
He took another long look at Diyan as though trying to piece together the circumstances by which these two visiting doctors had come to be in their city. For his part, Diyan couldn’t help but examine the face of the child and then Baiar, scanning back and forth, looking for similarities and differences.
“Still lots of questions to be asked and answered,” Dr. Leyere interjected. “The good news is that we have the best team we could hope for.”
“And a precious little patient,” Asha said, picking up Annen’s little hand and shaking it, a wide smile on her face. “We’re going to do our best to make you all better again, aren’t we, Dr. Desh?”
“Absolutely right,” Diyan agreed.
They met together for several more minutes before Asha declared that they would contact the family as soon as they needed something from Annen or the rest of the family. That statement appeared to come as a surprise to the parents, as though they’d expected something more definitive from the meeting than a hello. Diyan explained that they needed a bit more time to dive into Annen’s history before choosing a course of action, an explanation that seemed unsatisfying to them both. But Baiar seemed to have better understood at least something of the circumstances under which the visiting doctors were present.
“We’re at your disposal, doctors,” he replied. “We’re grateful.”
Dr. Leyere gestured toward the door and remained with the family for a few minutes while Asha and Diyan spoke to each other in hushed tones just outside.
“You think paternity?” Diyan whispered.
Asha shrugged. “It’d be stupid to not rule it out. You’d have to guess that such a mutation has occurred twice in the history of millions of years of mammalian evolution and that this mutation occurred spontaneously a thousand light years apart within a few decades. Or infidelity. Which do you think is more unlikely?”
“I can’t imagine they’ve had a lot of visitors passing through from Iora,” Diyan said, “given the trip we had across the border.”
“It’s possible it’s a few generations back, but if I were betting, I’d wager on an Ioran in the bloodlines.”
“We just test everyone then,” Diyan stated. “No discrimination, no awkwardness, no defensiveness, no suspicions. Just everyone in the family out to cousins and second cousins, great aunts and uncles.”
“More data’s always better,” Asha agreed. “We should cast a wide net.”
What Leyere gave Asha, in her mind, was limited. She had little doubt he must have thought as she and Diyan did—to check for all the possible genetic markers she’d published in her work, not just in Liis and Baiar and Annen, but in the extended family as well, possibly the community writ large. But it was almost as though the files he’d given Asha had a moat dug around them, cordoning off this community from the prying eyes of the outsiders.
Leyere had given Asha and Diyan a corner suite in what seemed to be the community’s main medical compound. They still had a very limited picture of the community itself, the city around it, or even the type of outpost. They were reasonably certain it was a planet and not a cylinder or space-wheel—sternwheels, she thought the Trasp called them—but Asha and Diyan’s exposure had still been very limited. Leyere was keeping them away from prying eyes, and he was keeping their prying eyes away from them. All this made sense in the context of the war. None of it made sense in the case of Annen, the reason they were there.
“I need access to a much broader set of genetic data,” Asha told him after she and Diyan had thoroughly gone through the case files. “You’ve read my publications, so I know you’re familiar with the type of work I do. I need to look for markers in the extended family and the community.”
“The less information we give you to solve the problem the better,” Leyere replied. “That’s for similar reasons as the abduction. You should be supportive of that plan to every extent you can, Dr. Norde. The less information that can be extracted from you on debriefing, the less danger you two will be in. That’s for our protection as well—everyone’s protection really.”
“If we can’t help solve the problem, then the risk you’ve taken bringing me and Diyan here will have been completely fruitless.”
“We take a risk with each bit of information we put before you. Every minute you spend with us is an additional exposure to information that could endanger everyone. We’ve made that calculation with our eyes open, weighing the pros and cons with the life of the child as our primary concern, Dr. Norde. We’d like you and Dr. Desh to do your best to do more with less first. We’ll expand your access as it makes sense to do so, but we expect at minimum that you’ll both be debriefed by Athosian intelligence. If our government learned of that, it would be very bad for our community, especially certain individuals in it. That’s the floor for the potential fallout, you understand.”
“We know you’ve taken risks, Dr. Leyere, and we respect that. But I’m going to need access, and I’m going to need help aggregating the genetic data. I’m good at what I do, but a human mind can’t process the three billion base pairs in our genome and recognize patterns.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he replied. “Understand, that the decisions about access aren’t mine alone. I’m the one you see, Dr. Norde, but I have not acted on my own. It’s important that you are both quiet and patient.”
“And the child? What if she throws another clot while we’re being patient?”
“These are all factors being weighed. I assure you.”
“We’re all in, Dr. Leyere. Diyan and I have accepted the risks.”
Leyere, nodded yet didn’t quite look back at Asha directly. “What I spoke of before—the risks—that was the floor, Dr. Norde. I’d like to avoid talking about the potential fallout if we let you go and the enemy gets hold of either of you. I understand you Athosians are not a wartime people.”
“When in the Protectorate, I guess,” she said.
“Please,” Leyere answered. “Patience.”
It took Asha three days to make a convincing enough case to Leyere that she was allowed to examine genetic data for the extended family and certain community members Leyere’s team had already decided were significant. Relationships were defined within the family, but names and identifiable traits beyond what the genes could tell were redacted. Asha tried to explain that this was not how she worked. She needed an AI, preferably her AI, or at the very least another Miliner. She also wanted all of the observational data the Windsor collected while observing the Riven child and the family’s behavior.
“It’s infuriating,” she told Diyan in a moment of particular frustration. “I need to see the whole picture, and I can’t see it this way. It’s like looking at one tiny island and trying to decide what the whole world looks like.”
“We have to do what we can, Asha.”
“Why are you taking his side again, Diyan. The sooner we figure out how to help this girl, the sooner we get to go home.”
“Leyere’s not wrong about the risks. I, for one, hope that the charter keeps our disappearance quiet. The last thing we want is for it to become common knowledge in the astral corridor that we’ve been abducted by the Trasp. I’ve heard stories about the Etterans and the lengths they’ll go to.”
Asha scoffed. “We can’t control that. This we can control. And then we can go home and deal with the consequences later.”
“And if those consequences mean it won’t be safe for you to travel to Iora anymore?”
Diyan could tell by the look on Asha’s face she hadn’t considered that possibility.
“I suppose we’d have to send assistants to do the work there.”
“Even in Moses-Mesui we won’t be beyond the reach of the Etterans, if they’re motivated enough.”
“What’s your point, Diyan?”
“My point is that it’s best we know as little as possible, just as Leyere says. The best case is if we can figure out a way to help this child with minimal information.”
“If they come for us, they come for us. I don’t understand how they’ll know either way what we know or don’t know.”
“Exactly. You don’t know. These people, the Trasp, or the Etteran Intelligence division—they don’t know genetics. But they know their business. You better believe Leyere is being advised by some people who know these things we don’t.”
“Stop making sense, Diyan. I don’t need you to make sense right now. I need you to say, ‘I know, Asha. This is so stupid. We could do so much more if they’d just give us the information we need.’”
“I can’t say that now,” Diyan replied, smiling. “You’d take my head off if I so obviously started patronizing you, but in an hour or two, don’t be surprised if I change my mind and begin to see things your way.”
It took another two days for Asha to successfully petition Dr. Leyere for more data and an AI partner to help aggregate it. As soon as Diyan and Asha saw their new partner, an embodied Nayla, they understood why Leyere was so hesitant to give them access to their AI. It was all but official confirmation of their presence in the Protectorate. The Trasp had access to Maícons, Kayellas and Boggses, but Nayla was hardly ever seen anywhere but Trasp space. Asha and Diyan were certain that if the community had any other AI, they’d have been given access earlier. This also gave them some indication as to the size of the outpost—one AI meant a much smaller population than any of the major outposts.
Within hours, Nayla and Asha were making good headway in tracing the genetics of the dark-blood mutations back through several generations. Baiar’s paternity hadn’t been in question since the first day, when Leyere shared the immediate family’s genetic profile. Things got complicated, though, as Asha attempted to pick up the origins of the mutation here at this mystery Trasp outpost. Without her full database to compare the mutations against, Asha couldn’t fully rule in or out an Ioran progenitor sneaking into the gene pool several generations in the past—sometime before the start of the war, most likely.
“We need more data, Dr. Norde,” Nayla declared to Asha after two days of picking apart the familial data. “A clearer outline of the exact progression of the mutations must be known if any attempt at remediated transcription is to be made.”
Asha hadn’t made a determination as to any attempt at treatment, but she made sure the Nayla repeated that declaration to Dr. Leyere.
Diyan, similarly was working with Dr. Leyere to examine the tissue that the elder surgeon had removed from Annen Riven’s little lung. Initially, Diyan had expected it to have properties more like a tumor than clearly differentiated lung tissue, but he was surprised to find, just as Leyere had reported, that the tissue bore far more resemblance to ordinary lung tissue than tumor.
He was, alternatively, exploring two ideas he hoped would shed light on the problem. The first informed the second. He wanted to observe the tissue growing. He needed to determine whether its growth followed more along the lines of the well-understood process of human liver tissue self-regeneration or was more like the process of lizards re-growing their tails.
Diyan had a clinician’s mind. And, he thought, he had the simplest solution if the tissue could develop into fully functional lung tissue—keep surgically removing the section and allowing it to regenerate until it grew large enough to develop normal blood flow. Essentially, let the extra lobe develop—even to the point of removing some healthy tissue to encourage the development of a third lobe. With proper blood flow, the clots should stop.
“How many times would we have to cut the baby?” Leyere asked him. “The Rivens will probably want to know that.”
“If it means having a baby that lives long enough to grow into a healthy child, it could be the solution.”
“Thus far the clotting has increased as the size of the lobe has, Dr. Desh.”
“Perhaps only because the area of poorly vascularized lung tissue has grown. It may better differentiate as it grows. This is why we need to watch the tissue grow in vitro. We’re going to need quite a bit of the baby’s blood to start. And, if you have the means to synthesize more of it, we can do more experiments.”
When Diyan and Asha met with the Rivens again, the young parents were not encouraged by the avenues the visiting doctors were exploring. Diyan’s intervention seemed both extreme and barbaric while also striking Baiar as too speculative to take such tremendous risks.
Baiar struck both Diyan and Asha as clear-eyed and extremely intelligent. They almost wondered if he wasn’t some sort of medical professional himself, but that hadn’t been shared with them. Liis had more of a mother’s reaction to the suggestion they cut open her daughter’s lung repeatedly.
The meeting did not end well. Asha kept her composure in front of the family, but she was not a clinician. That she lost control of her emotions in front of Dr. Leyere wasn’t a bad thing to Diyan’s mind. Asha went to sleep that evening in Diyan’s arms utterly dejected.
When they woke the following morning, though, Leyere had granted access to Asha and Nayla to explore the outpost’s entire genetic database dating back ten generations.
Diyan and Asha worked constantly over the next several weeks, he trying to understand the biological mechanisms by which young Annen’s pulmonary tissue regenerated and differentiated, she trying to put together a comprehensive genetic tree for Annen’s direct and indirect ancestors. A picture began to come into focus, but to Asha’s mind, it was always going to be an incomplete picture. She told Leyere over and over again that she needed her database as a larger point of reference, and, she insisted, she needed her Miliner to aggregate the data. As brilliant and helpful as their Nayla had been, the Trasp AI had only superficial knowledge about the Ioran cluster. And Asha had no knowledge here of the environmental factors she and her team had been investigating out in the Lambda-Iora system.
And, in a moment of frustration, she told Leyere she needed as much here as well. They were eating dinner in the small flat Leyere had outfitted for her and Diyan. That flat, their laboratory space, and the corridors between were as much as the two of them had seen of the outpost.
“You know the risks that identifying our city would pose to the entire population,” Leyere told her.
“You assumed those risks, though,” Asha replied. “We could be tying our minds in knots looking for the key to the puzzle in the genes when an environmental trigger could be as plain as the nose on your face if only we were allowed to compare this place to Lambda-Iora.”
“More likely it’s a complex interplay between both,” Diyan added. “And we’ll stand little chance of understanding the full picture if we don’t look at the full picture.”
“That’s a harder sell than the databases,” Leyere answered. “You have seen a tiny corner of our little society here. I assure you we are not free from zealots, and it would only take one to see you outside these walls.”
“Nayla could be our eyes and ears,” Asha said. “We wouldn’t need a grand tour.”
“Sharing genetic data with outsiders is a transgression. Sharing stellar geography with outsiders is espionage of the highest order.”
“You know,” Diyan replied, an obvious frustration in his tone, “I’m getting sick of pretending we don’t have telescopes in Dreeson’s System or accurate star charts that were taken a century ago. We’ve been abducted into a war zone and asked to solve a problem we can’t solve without all the pieces. Five? Six weeks now, we’ve been here? And the whole thing seems like a game the longer you and your people string us along. About the only people who have more right to be angry about than us it are the Rivens.”
“There are still things about this situation you don’t know,” Leyere stated.
“That is exactly my point! Exactly my point.”
“At some point you either care enough to risk everything to solve the problem or you don’t,” Asha added. “I think we’d like to go home if the answer is no.”
“You’re going to hate my answer,” Leyere replied.
“Yeah, we know,” Diyan said. “You’ll take it under advisement.”
“We have families too, Dr. Leyere,” Asha stated.
He looked down at the table and sighed.
“Yes,” he finally said. “Yes, I know you do. For now, all I can say is good night.”
Three nights after that contentious dinner with Leyere, five men stormed into Asha and Diyan’s flat in the dead of night demanding that Diyan get dressed and follow them. They wouldn’t tell Asha who they were or where they were taking Diyan, and when she demanded to speak with Leyere, the only answer she got was that he was indisposed.
Asha was left alone. Their door was locked from the outside. She couldn’t go back to sleep and couldn’t stop thinking that somehow something must have happened, that they’d been found out. She spent every minute of those long hours dreading the possibility that she might be separated from Diyan. Her mind immediately began to spiral. She didn’t want to do any of this without him.
It was almost six hours before Diyan returned. By then Asha was sitting in a chair she’d pulled out, just opposite the front door. She was balled up with her legs in her arms, her eyes fading. She looked up at Diyan as he entered.
“The baby threw a clot,” he declared, shaking his head. “For now she’s stable. Leyere is a capable surgeon, but it’s only a matter of time, Asha.”
“They didn’t tell me anything. I was so frightened. I thought they’d taken you.”
“Yeah. They didn’t tell me either until I was already in the theater. Come lie down with me. We’re not going to work this morning.”
He took her hand, and as she got up, she grabbed him around the torso and squeezed as he embraced her. Then they walked off to bed again in each other’s arms.
Asha and Diyan spent a long morning together in bed, followed by a slow brunch. Afterward, they spoke for a long while about going home—what would come after, however things ended here in this place, wherever they were.
The medical staff seemed to be giving the couple their space after the eventful night. It was an unexpected visitor who disturbed them first by pinging the door.
When Asha looked on the viewscreen she was surprised to see the Nayla standing outside.
“Dr. Norde, I was surprised that you did not appear for work this morning. We had discussed today’s agenda, much of which I was able to forward without your attendance. However, I have questions, especially in light of Annen’s latest complication.”
“Thank you for checking up on me, Nayla. Diyan and I were discussing our work here. It’s been a long discussion, but we’ve decided that we will not be doing any more work until we speak with Dr. Leyere about the direction of the project.”
“I see. Shall I continue with the agenda items we discussed yesterday, to the extent I can proceed?”
“By all means, if that’s what the medical staff requires of you. I suggest you take your direction from them until further notice.”
“Thank you, Dr. Norde. I’ll do just that. Is there anything else I can help with while I’m here?”
“Please inform Dr. Leyere of our position as soon as possible.”
Nayla bowed and excused herself. It wasn’t more than a few minutes before the door pinged again. Leyere entered, looking nearly as apologetic as that first time they’d met in that shower of blinding light, that moment he’d slipped the bags off their heads following their abduction.
At first, he didn’t speak when they sat. Diyan offered him tea, and he accepted. To Asha’s eyes, he looked just as beleaguered as Diyan had the night before.
“I feel terrible about everything,” he began. “The people I answer to are giving up hope that we’ll be able to help Annen before it’s too late.”
“How is she?” Diyan asked.
“Responding well so far. We’re grateful for your help last night, Dr. Desh, and to you, Dr. Norde, I do apologize for the way you were treated. Some of our people don’t know how to behave, and they are not taking into account the toll this is taking on you both. They never should have left you alone like that.”
“I appreciate your saying that,” Asha replied.
“I don’t exactly know what to tell you,” Leyere continued. “If it were just me, I know what I would do, but it’s not just me. It’s community leaders and other medical advisors. The outpost is a little larger than I expect you believe. The biggest barrier right now is the uncertainty. I believed when I lobbied for your presence here that we would be able to find a solution together. The fact that solution hasn’t materialized so far makes it increasingly more difficult for me to convince the people who have taken these risks with me to take even more.”
“We should have been given more access sooner,” Asha said.
“It never would have been allowed,” Leyere replied. “And now no one knows what to do.”
“You could send us home,” Diyan said. “If you’re not going to give us what we need to do the work, then all the risks you’ve taken are moot.”
“Of course, I’m sure you know it’s not as simple as that.”
“Do you intend to make prisoners of us, Dr. Leyere, in perpetuity?” Asha asked. “The wheels turn slowly in Athos, but they do turn. The university will come looking for us, and they will approach the government.”
“That point has occurred to us.”
“What did you come down here for?” Diyan asked. “I think you know where we stand now. We’re not doing any further work under the current conditions. So unless you’ve come to inform us of a change of those conditions, I’m not sure how much we have to discuss, Dr. Leyere.”
“Today, actually, right after I finish speaking with you two, there will be a meeting that decides what further steps we should take regarding you both, regarding the Riven child—the whole situation. I intend to lobby to continue trying to save the child, to give the two of you everything you need to keep you working.”
“You know what we need,” Asha said.
Leyere shrugged. “Within the realm of possibility.”
“What we need is possible.”
“Let’s say I can convince them. I need to know two things from you, Dr. Norde. Can you heal this child? In a perfect scenario, can you do it? And my second question is what that scenario needs to entail?”
Asha took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and began to rock in her seat, a peculiarity Diyan was familiar with when she was thinking deeply.
“The second question is easier to answer,” she replied, her eyes still closed. “You send us back to Athos with all the data—the entire genetic database as well as the environmental survey data we’ve requested. I’d need my Miliner, and we have specialized equipment and experts in genetic therapy whose knowledge far outstrips mine. I’d need to be home in Moses-Mesui to do it.”
“I figured as much,” Dr. Leyere replied. “And to the first question?”
Asha exhaled. “Yes. I believe I could heal her. With the help of some colleagues, we could develop a genetic therapy within a couple months.”
“How confident are you of that prospect?”
“I said yes,” Asha replied.
Leyere looked over at Diyan, searching his eyes as well. Dr. Desh simply nodded.
“Very well. I am going to go make the case that one little girl’s life may very well be worth the charge of treason. After last night, I feel surprisingly good about it. But I am an older man, and there are far younger necks on the line than mine. Again, I’ll have to ask for your patience, and regardless of what the outcome is in all of this, I’m humbled by both of you, your brilliance and your efforts. We truly have been honored by your presence here these past few weeks.”
Asha and Diyan spent a quiet afternoon together, reading and playing chess. It was the first time in ages they’d sat like that, quietly enjoying each other’s company with no certain plan for the following hour, the following day.
They went to bed early and were uncertain of the time—though it felt the dead of night—when they were awakened by the door pinging again. It was Leyere, and from the look of him, they could tell he hadn’t been to bed yet.
“Sorry to disturb you at this hour,” he stated. “If you two will indulge me, I have something I’d like to show you.”
He waited just outside the door for several minutes while the couple got dressed. They emerged a bit bleary-eyed, but no less so than Leyere himself.
After about a hundred meters, it became apparent to Asha and Diyan that he was taking them off their usual path to the laboratory—to new territory. He noticed them noticing.
“The city is sleeping,” he whispered.
They took his cue and stepped lightly, their lips sealed tight for the walk.
After about five minutes progressing through various empty concourses, they entered a lift together and emerged on the rooftop of a fairly tall building. The cityscape around the building was mostly below them but impressive compared to their small expectations. That city, though, paled in comparison to the sight of the sky—or at least what appeared to be the sky.
Asha and Diyan were not novice travelers. They’d both seen significant cosmic backdrops, perhaps most notably “The Six,” a well-known stellar cluster near Kappa-Nira they’d visited on their previous trip out to the Lambdas. This, though, topped them all.
From what she could gather in a brief glimpse with her naked eyes, Asha surmised that they were on a planet’s surface, likely inside the crater of an atmosphere-less rocky body, with a clear, dome-like structure enclosing the crater. It seemed to make the sight of the sky more prominent to the eyes, magnified somehow.
The star system was a trinary, composed of what looked to be a yellow giant orbiting a pair of red dwarfs. Further across the sky, a rare, deep-green inner gas giant was orbiting the trinary closely enough to be shedding gas. It was venting a great stream of matter toward the suns, a spectacular display of stellar beauty, like a fine ribbon of red light that spiraled into an uncertain cloud. The bright mist seemed to diffuse to a gravitational point somewhere near the stellar system’s center of mass.
Asha’s eyes tracked across the sky.
“How is it not daylight?” Diyan asked.
“The dome has multiple layers,” Leyere answered. “One of which is a liquid infused with a cocktail of substances that filter the light as well as the stellar and cosmic radiation. To survive here, we have to be very careful about managing the environmental factors you both have been asking about. There’s no possibility of radiation exposure here. We may as well be living in the center of the planet—safer even. The planet is tidally locked to the suns, so we need our night to be artificial. The dome at night transitions to one giant shaded lens.”
“It’s stunning,” Asha declared.
“We believe our little home is the most beautiful vista in all the cosmos,” Leyere replied.
“This is Sareah,” Diyan said. “I know this system. You were an Indie, weren’t you?”
“A long time ago, yes. This was a different place then. A much different city.”
“I imagine you’re showing us this for one of two reasons,” Diyan said. “Either you’ve decided to share everything or you’ve decided you can’t let us go.”
“It was a very contentious meeting,” Leyere stated, nodding his head. “We framed and reframed the question over-and-over for hours. The question was ultimately whether the life of one little girl was worth risking our own lives further and possibly the lives of the entire outpost if the Etterans somehow got their hands on all the information we’ve chosen to share with you. Partly, we decided, as you told us often, Dr. Norde, that we’d already mostly made the decision by bringing you here. The celestial beauty is one reason this is a special place. But I think even that falls short of the character of our people. I’d like to believe, and I made this case, that if we’re not willing to risk our own lives to save our children than what we would be saving by not taking the risk would be less.”
“And the consequences be damned?” Diyan asked.
“I think we’re hoping we never have to find out, Dr. Desh, but, yes, that’s the idea now.”
“What does that mean?” Asha asked.
“It means a lot of things. We’re going to give you what you need, though, Dr. Norde. It won’t be straightforward exactly. We’ll need your cooperation. But we’re going to send you home with all the data you require.”
Asha didn’t quite know how to feel. Leyere’s manner was far more sullen than she’d have expected given the news. Most importantly, it meant that there was some hope for the child they’d all been working so hard to save. Personally, though, it meant that she and Diyan would be going home.
“That’s excellent news,” she replied, pausing and waiting for Leyere to explain further.
In the dim light it was difficult to tell, but she thought he caught the meaning of her inquiring look.
“I had hoped for many reasons we could get this done together. For your sake I imagine the end will be quite anticlimactic. We’ll have a means by which you can contact us when you’ve come to a solution. That will be the extent of it, though, Dr. Norde. Perhaps someday if this God-forsaken war ends, if all goes well, you’ll be approached when you’re my age by a woman of your age with a story of a brave Athosian hematologist who saved her when she was small. But I highly doubt there’ll be any resolution for you. And we won’t get any second chances at this if your solution falls short.”
“I don’t suppose our sense of resolution matters much to the child or her parents,” Asha said.
“We’ll have our challenges on our end as well,” Leyere replied. “But none of that is for you to worry about.”
“What do you mean?” Diyan asked.
“It’s a mix of people here on this outpost. Some of us are descended from earlier residents—Indie grandparents and forebears. The Rivens are Trasp, though, not overly so, but they do lean quite Purist in their ideological persuasion. An extensive genetic edit will be a heavy lift to convince them to allow, if that’s the solution.”
“I presume you’ll be persuasive when the time comes,” Diyan replied.
“I imagine Annen’s prospects will be the most persuasive factor,” Leyere said, shrugging.
“I could have a word with them before we go,” Asha offered. “Convince them that Annen is not her blood and not her lungs and not her fluky genes. She’s a beautiful little girl.”
“As much as I would welcome that help, Dr. Norde, I’m sorry, but that can’t happen. From this point your time here must resemble your arrival much more than the past several weeks. There’s also the matter of the data we’ll need to smuggle out with you. We have a means, but neither of you can know about it.”
“I don’t understand,” Asha said.
“You will when the time comes,” Dr. Leyere assured her. “Our people are working on it. When everything’s ready, you two will go. I don’t imagine we’ll see each other again. This ...” he said, gesturing toward the celestial show above them, “... this was not supposed to happen. This is my quiet way of extending a trust you both have proven worthy of, and the best thank you I can offer on behalf of our people. A sight no one else outside the Protectorate has seen in over half a century.”
“It’s breathtaking,” Asha replied. “I hope someday we’ll meet again under brighter circumstances.”
“Such a joy that would be,” Leyere answered. “Best get you two back down to your flat. It’s going to be a journey home, a road that won’t entirely be free from small sacrifices.”
The three doctors parted when Leyere escorted the couple back to their flat. Asha and Diyan had hardly shut their eyes it seemed when the door pinged again. Two masked gentlemen entered with two coffin-like boxes trailing them into the room. The couple were made to understand that they’d need to ride inside the pill boxes for at least the first leg back. Asha asked whether they could be together, a request the gentlemen acceded to, but, they were told, they couldn’t transfer the couple to a larger box until they got to the ship. They’d have to go under first, there and then. But they would wake up together, the gentlemen assured them.
“Everything will be taken care of, Dr. Norde,” their escorts promised them both, over and over.
It was taking an awful lot on faith. But, Diyan assured her, Leyere hadn’t ever lied to them. He’d promised they were going home, and Diyan believed him. What other choice did they have?
Similar to the bag back in Hoff Springs, Asha only remembered taking a few breaths inside the pill box before she passed out.
She regained self-awareness aboard a transport ship in a private cabin, which the floatscreen revealed was a small commercial carrier on its way back to Athos from Port Cullen. Diyan was slightly behind her in coming to, but as soon as he did, he reported the same experience—lights out in the pillbox until that moment. He kissed her cheek and whispered, “We’re going home, Asha. I am so proud of you.”
She squeezed his hand and leaned in as best she could as they floated together. It was still a long enough journey to take their time processing everything that had happened.
They still had no idea how they were supposed to have carried the data they needed to cure the Riven child. But at that moment, that was the least of their concerns.
By the time they arrived back in Moses-Mesui, Diyan was irritable and slightly feverish. Within hours he developed a sharp pain in his abdomen. When he visited the clinic, they were quickly able to diagnose the problem as a small tumor in his appendix.
Dr. Leyere’s last words came back to Asha as they were waiting for a surgical appointment. “Small sacrifices,” she said to Diyan.
“It’s a very rare presentation,” the surgeon said.
“If you don’t mind,” Diyan replied. “I’d like to have the tissue forwarded to my lab. I’d prefer to biopsy the sample myself.”
The surgeon thought the request was peculiar but saw no reason to deny it.
There were officials waiting for their story as Diyan received treatment. The investigators had gone through the couple’s belongings, which amounted to the clothes on their backs and their biometrics confirming their identity.
Diyan’s appendix, that small sacrifice, contained a tumor that was composed of coded base pairs that Asha’s Miliner was able to unravel and translate within several hours. The dataset contained the entire dataset relevant to their work on Sareah—the genetic database, the environmental information they’d requested, and even their instructions for making contact again through an intermediary at Port Cullen.
Both Diyan and Asha were given space by their colleagues following their traumatic experience out in those wild territories of the Western Battery.
With Miliner’s help and the confidence of two trustworthy colleagues Asha had shared their real experience with, they were able to develop a gene therapy they expected would cure the Riven girl.
Over that time, government officials grew increasingly frustrated by the couple’s reticence, even to the point that several interactions grew almost hostile. The Athosian government certainly suspected something, but they had no clear picture of the couple’s true experience beyond the fact that they’d disappeared at Hoff Springs and resurfaced again weeks later—seemingly magically—at Port Cullen. And on debriefing, they’d both shown signs of evasiveness, but weren’t suspected of any crimes, and thus, were under no official obligation to reveal what had truly happened to them.
By the time their own government officials had grown tired of pestering them, the Riven girl’s treatment instructions were already long gone.
And, just as Leyere had told them, that was it. What they had left was an open-ended question about a child they had no business ever knowing about, a child they’d come to care about deeply, and whose prognosis they fully expected they’d never know.
The following year, Asha’s hopes of finding out Annen Riven’s fate took another blow when the university decided to re-structure her field work in the Ioran cylinder group. They directed Asha to remotely instruct the local doctors and researchers she’d been working with on-site to complete all of her subsequent follow-up field work. The Athosian government also restricted Asha and Diyan’s travel status to the inner systems, ostensibly for their own safety following an unresolved status on their abduction’s open investigation.
Each year that passed, as the anniversary of their fateful trip through the astral corridor went by again, both Diyan and Asha remembered and wondered, though they’d long since lost hope of a resolution.
On the night of their fifteenth wedding anniversary, absorbed in the daily dramas of their work, their own children, and the peaceful passing of their lives on Moses-Mesui, the couple were approached by a teenage boy who called out “Dr. Asha Norde?” by name.
When Diyan and Asha stopped, the boy came close and flashed them an awkward smile.
“This is going to sound strange, but this odd-sounding guy with an accent just came up to me outside Mercy Circle and offered me a hundred D-Cr if I would find you, hand you this box of chocolate, and take a picture with you as proof.”
They looked at him skeptically, having no idea what to make of the boy. Sareah had long since become a nearly-forgotten memory for both of them in their busy lives.
“Would you mind?” the boy said. “Just a picture. It’s already on my balance sheet, just awaiting confirmation. That’s a lot of money for me. And you get the chocolates. It’s not any trick.”
“What could go wrong?” Diyan said, smiling. “Good luck to do a good deed for a young man on our anniversary.”
“Oh, congratulations,” the boy said genuinely, smiling.
He stepped between them, posing as he handed the box to Asha, snapped the picture with his eyewear, and thanked them before departing wearing a wide grin.
On the top of the box, two words were scrawled out by hand in ink: “Small sacrifices.”
They searched their memories for a moment, before Diyan placed his hand over his lower abdomen. Asha’s jaw dropped.
There in the middle of the causeway, Asha Norde’s hands began to shake so wildly that she couldn’t open the ribbon, handing it to Diyan instead.
Inside, above the chocolates on the inner box liner was a picture of a smiling raven-haired girl several years older than their eldest daughter, and just as bright-eyed. Below the girl’s picture was the following inscription:
Annen Riven, eighteen healthy years and counting. Joys, blessings & eternal gratitude from our family to yours. May we someday meet again on our cosmic journey.
More "Dark Blood" with Nik Hein! Check out Nik's story here: https://youtu.be/KyqXhCchqyw 🚀🚀🚀
The other author you mentioned would be in notes, I guess that's not on Substack ?