Witness [A First Contact Romance]

5. Lumiea

Lumiea

Year -20 (L.D.)

There had been a great many years before Liberation Day when Aeryn only wanted one thing. She'd felt born for it and sacrificed everything in her life for it. Everything. Her home, her family, even her language.

Back then, she hadn't yet discovered who she really was. What she had really been training for.

So twenty years before Liberation Day, when she shuffled forward in a tight line of fellow students, her heart was leaping within her chest. Aeryn had waited her entire life to take this one step. No, not waited. She'd fought, bled, and defied all manner of odds for this. When she took hold of the handle of the air bus and looked down to the crispness of the teal grass beneath her, she expected the moment to feel impossibly dynamic.

Instead, the trainee behind her sighed in her ear and nudged her, leaving her feeling entirely rushed.

Aeryn stepped foot on the grounds of Iyla for the first time and followed the line of trainees, unable to savor the moment her dreams had become reality. But with each step she took toward the famous marble pillars supporting the dome where her peers gathered, it felt more real.

The distant city rose on the horizon like white and gray mountains. The training grounds were far from the city limits to give them plenty of room to work without jeopardizing any civilians or property, but this was the closest that Aeryn had ever come to a skyscraper in person. There'd hardly been time for sleep, much less travels, as she studied and worked to make it into this program.

"Look at that." A girl walking alongside her stared overhead at the airbuses waiting to enter the arrival zone. Patches of shadows fell over them as they walked beneath the vehicles.

Everything was new here. Back home, Aeryn had lived in a small town that didn't even have an airbus. When she'd left to study bioengineering, she'd moved to a city that had its own fleet like the rest of the civilized world, but they hadn't had a single skyscraper there. Hundreds glittered on this horizon.

Incredible.

Aeryn joined the recruits who had come from all over the planet to enter the program. She knew no one. Out of all the students in her hometown, only five had been accepted in the prestigious schools that trained students to come here. And from that school, Aeryn had been the only one in her year to make it. It had been the second home, the second family, that she'd had to say goodbye to in her short seventeen years.

No sense in feeling sorry for herself. The wonder of Iyla had made her sentimental. Aeryn stared at the ribbed ceiling of the dome and studied the details of the architecture while waiting for the introduction proceedings to begin. Nearly an hour passed after she'd arrived when the students crowding in to join beneath the enormous dome slowed to a trickle.