Do No Evil (Aeon Trilogy Book 2)

Chapter 5

Nick Lal blinked as the darkness receded. His eyes came back into focus. A face was looking down at him. A face he recognized.

"Laura?" he exclaimed, forcing himself to speak despite the sense of danger that nagged at his confused consciousness. "What's going on?"

"I came to see if you've recovered."

His eyes widened in fear as he recalled images of black-clad invaders pouring into Sanctuary. "Why did you come now? Get out of here, we're under attack!"

As he thrashed in panic, he found that he was lying on his back in a bed. The lights above him were dazzling, making it hard to see his surroundings. He tried to sit up, but he was fully restrained. Even his head could barely move. "What's going on?"

An expression of motherly understanding came across Laura's face. "Shh." She smoothed his hair. "Vinicius, don't worry, that's all past. The attack on Sanctuary was over two weeks ago. Of course you don't know, you don't remember that. I'm so sorry."

"Two weeks? What happened since?" He glanced around the room again. From the bits he could see from his position, it was a clinic of some type. His vision seemed distorted and out of scale, like he was looking through a fisheye lens. Everything was too small.

He realized he and Laura were alone. "Where are Kobus and -" he remembered and whispered her name. "Abril! Abril is dead!"

"Yes," said Laura, putting a reassuring hand on his face and leaning in close. "And so is Kobus. I'm sorry, Vinicius. But the important thing is that you're alive."

Nick swallowed and took a moment to process the deaths of his two friends. "Why am I still alive? The last thing I remember was, I was in my sarcophagus, and we came under attack. I don't know who it was. Government? Reverend Cruz? ... Abril, she was on the roof, testing satellite reception with her new antennae. She died-"

Laura stood up and looked into the distance, her beautiful features twisted by anger. "Abril didn't just die, Vinicius. She was murdered. So was Kobus. You armed yourself and fought bravely. But then, somehow, you were captured."

"I recall coming out of the ether, lowering my sarcophagus, intending to help Kobus. But my memory stops as soon as I stepped out of my tube. And it seems like you don't know much beyond that..." Nick paused, nonplussed. He'd noticed his voice sounded deeper than normal. A full octave deeper.

Laura looked back down at him. Nick realized that her anger was directed at him.

Laura waved a hand at an unseen holovision projector and three dimensional footage of Nick's last meeting with his former lover Sarah began playing in the air above him. Laura had always been furious that Nick had, in her view, lowered himself by dating a mere human. But Sarah had died in a violent riot in New York months ago, leaving Nick broken hearted and Laura openly contemptuous of his grief.

The scene that Laura was playing on the holovision depicted the last time Nick had seen Sarah. On a frigid winter afternoon, they had had an argument, and Nick had left Sarah stranded on a street corner in Manhattan. Within hours, she'd been caught up in the street violence. Nick himself had nearly died when rioters invaded his penthouse on Central Park West. He'd barely slipped out of the apartment in time, and had then fled through a collapsing police cordon at the 86th Street transverse of Central Park.

"What's the point of taunting me with this?" asked Nick bitterly. He feared that Laura had discovered he'd been hiding the necklace Sarah had given him. If so, she had no doubt confiscated it, and his last connection to Sarah was lost. But why was Laura bringing up Sarah at a time like this? "This has nothing to do with what happened at the haven!"