Prologue

Eight Years Ago – Kaimoan City, the planet Evevron

 

Awn clutched her son to her chest as she skidded to a halt. Damn. She’d been so close, could see the spaceport behind the wall of warriors clad in black body armor. Her husband had said to meet him at the ship. Maybe he’d made it. Please, let him have made it.

Hult stepped forward, gesturing for Awn to hand over the child. The vertical slits of his pupils had almost disappeared in the intense sun. “Is the boy infected?”

Awn bared her teeth, the grit of Evevron’s amethyst sand blowing into her mouth. She spat on the cracked dirt. She would love to sink her sharp enamel into Hult’s smug face. He thought this would stop them. But Awn’s connection to the source wasn’t the same as the others. Capturing her did nothing to stop the spread.

“Well? Is he?”

“No.” Awn was glad of it. She’d hoped her son would become one with the others, but they hadn’t had time. But now that she’d been captured – at least he wouldn’t be executed alongside her.

Hult wasn’t a monster. He thought of Awn as a criminal, but he wouldn’t hurt a non-infected child.

They marched her to the lab, down in the cavern, past the waterfall. She felt the connection inside her reaching out, trying to find her husband, trying to find the rest of the people she loved. All she got back was terror and anger and dread.

In the lab, they’d arranged five cryostasis pods in a ring. Everyone knew that cryostasis didn’t work. Awn’s heart sank. No one had ever been able to overcome the issues with cell revival. The researchers who’d brought Awn into this whole mess – unwillingly, mind you – just used them to store experiments long term.

The new set of researchers wanted to preserve her, study her. Try to find a way to cure the galaxy of what was insider her. As though it were an evil to be eradicated. Not a beautiful way to connect all creatures in the galaxy, the one true way to peace.

The young medic approaching her with an analgesic gun looked as terrified as Awn felt.

“I’m sorry,” he said, glancing at the soldiers behind her. “They’re not giving me a choice. I promise, it won’t hurt. And I’ll stay with you the whole time.”

A dull rhythmic thudding came from four of the capsules, in perfect unison. With horror, she realized that the sense of anguish that had been protruding into her mind came from inside these pods. Her husband was in one of them, being pumped full of the fluid that would replace his blood to minimize the damage of freezing. The slow process would take hours. And it was happening while he was awake.

But this had gone far beyond just the five of them, the first on Evevron to be infected. Some of the infected had gotten offplanet. Their five bodies’ deaths meant nothing, since what they had become could no longer be contained.