Diana Fenton
She was sedated. She wasn’t meant to be conscious, but she was. She might not have been able to move her body, but she didn’t need to. Everything she required was condensed into her senses as if that steady incoming stream of data was being provided to her by the superpowerful scanners of some heavy cruiser.
So much information struck her, it felt simultaneously as if she would drown under it and yet be lifted up on its wings to a higher place.
It was impossible to describe what was happening to her. Because it was impossible to focus her attention long enough to recognize that something was happening to her and not to other people.
Diana Fenton could see things. She could hear things and read things and understand things she should not be able to. Though no one in the room spoke to her, they didn’t need to. She could see right through their minds to what they were thinking. She knew what was happening. So she understood her father was alive and that Sampson had survived too, but her dad’s aide had died during the blast and that his private guards had been mortally injured.
Diana knew that the Academy had no clue how Sparx had gotten that rifle and no clue how he’d managed to program it to get through the command building’s seemingly impenetrable shields.
She also understood that they had every intention of removing her from Academy grounds and taking her to some facility off-world.
She knew, yet she did not understand. For while all these facts swam in her mind, the people providing them remained blind.
Here they were throwing resources at taking her somewhere safe when they needed to stop and accept everything was about to change.
They were days from war.
The Force was coming.
The Force was coming.
“Her BP has elevated. Heart rate’s shot up, too. More sedatives,” a doctor commanded.
She felt something being injected into her neck. Her body became even limper, but it did nothing to her consciousness. Diana knew that even if someone managed to drug her body into the deepest of slumbers, her mind would not follow. For her mind now had a perspective beyond its mere flesh.
The doctors seemed satisfied once they sedated her.
She wanted to scream at them that this wasn’t important. Keeping her quiet and calm and safe was goddamn irrelevant. They needed to call the fleet. They had to get ready.
It was coming. And it wasn’t going to stop.
The war was at the Coalition’s door, but they were too distracted to see.
Tears started to spill down her cheeks. It didn’t matter that she was sedated. Her mind pushed through.
She heard someone give a startled gasp. “Why are her eyes discharging? That should be prevented by the sedatives.”
“That’s not ordinary discharge. She’s crying,” someone pointed out somberly.
“How?” another asked.
Because some tears had to be cried, she tried to answer them.
These were tears for everybody who would be lost. Souls were about to be torn from their bodies and worlds were about to be ripped apart. The Coalition would be shaken to its core. And yet here they stood, and here they did not understand.