THE END OF BEGINNINGS

TWENTY-SEVEN

Moros breathed in the sea air.  He had forgotten how sweet the scent could be, especially during the long spring.  He heard another pair of lungs take in a deep breath of the afternoon breezes.  It was Hasha.  The boy from Agan smiled at his best friend as he exhaled the coastal air.  His grin was as wide and beaming as Moros could remember seeing it.
"You two are an interesting pair," said Ganos Lal.  She was walking between the boys as they followed Geras and his entourage away from the landing pad.
"Thank you...I think," said Moros without being totally confident she was being complimentary.  Moros always loved Ganos for her directness and wit, despite the sting both could wield.
"How did you meet and become such fast friends?"
"You arent' jealous, are you, Scrap?"
Ganos looked at Moros pointedly.  "Not at all.  I'm nothing if I'm not constantly curious."
"Isn't that the truth," Moros quipped, grinning at the girl beside him.
Hasha chuckled before saying something in his own language.  Ganos watched him speak before turning to look at Moros again.  She saw Moros' cheeks flush with a subtle crimson.  He smiled bashfully, looking down at the metal surface under their feet.  "Well, umm...it all started when...I...fell on him."
"You fell on him," Ganos asked, surprised.  "This is how you exercise diplomacy?"
"Compared to pulling limbs out of sockets," the broad-chested Ulref asked, peering over his shoulder toward the teens.
"Thank you, Ulref," said Moros with a beaming smile.  "And, it wasn't something I intended to do.  It just, sort of, happened."
Hasha lifted his arms in front of his chest.  He pushed his fingertips on each hand together, making a bridge from elbow to elbow.  Smiling the whole time, the youth from Agan made the sounds of someone walking.  Then, he suddenly shook and bounced his arms.  His sound effects changed, mimicking the noise brittle wood makes when it breaks apart.  Moros shook his head at his friend's demonstration.  He rolled his eyes at Hasha's impersonation of his frightened shout and the splat of their fateful impact.
Ganos blinked, her gaze unable to leave Hasha.  "Fascinating," she said.
Hasha clapped his hands and laughed.  He pretended to take a bow as they walked.
Ganos looked at Moros again.  "It's good to know you have't lost that youthful grace I remember so well."
"Meh-meh-meh-meh-mehh," Moros said before he stuck his tongue out at Ganos.
She smiled brightly and wrapped her left arm around Moros' right one.  "It's so lovely," said Ganos, "to have that superior intellect back in the city."

*         *         *

Back in the city.  The words circled Moros' mind.  He held his arm out under one of the fine sprays of warm water showering gently down around him.  He watched the crystal clear rivulets stream across his tanned skin.  They dripped steadily away toward the bright, polished floor of the spacious stall.  Life in the city, Moros thought as he watched the beads of water trickle from his fingertips.
It was his first real shower in almost three years.  It was a luxury he couldn't help but enjoy.  Even Hasha had reveled in the marvel.  The dozen, little, orb-shaped nozzles all spraying a temperature regulated, pressurized stream that was barely more than a mist were nothing less than miraculous to the alien teen.  Hasha had called it the rain box.  And, for nearly twenty minutes, Moros, Ganos, and three of the members of the Camrial envoy group listened to the loud and excited laughter of the young Aganni.
All too soon, the spray around Moros disappeared.  With an audible click, the twelve nozzles spaced equally across the ceiling and walls, shut off.  Moros stood motionless for a moment, just listening to the puddle around his feet drain away.  When he heard a small, contented sigh echo back to him from the moist walls, Moros grinned at himself.
A thin, wet panel of glass partitioning off the near-palatial stall from the rest of the lavari slid silently aside.  Moros' bare feet quietly squished on the spongy pad covering the floor.  His shadow stretched across the pale, sea foam-colored surface as daylight poured in through a tall, opaque window.  His skin tingled in the current of warm air circulating around the chamber.  By the time he reached the long counter under a series of softly illuminated mirrors, Moros was already half dry.
He dressed quickly in the clothes Ganos had given to him.  It was a simple set of Lantean garb.  The plain shirt and pants fit him well, not that he doubted Ganos' eye.  She'd even correctly guessed Hasha's size, though he'd refused to wear the shirt.  The replicated materials felt convincingly like they were sewn from actual, organic threads.  Wearing the printed apparel was nothing new to Moros.  But there was no denying he had begun to be accustomed to not.
Images of the far away planet he and his family had been living on flooded through his mind.  Abrupt snippets of detailed memories from that strange and beautiful place wove through Moros' thoughts until that world and the village of Agan was all he could think about.  He looked down at the synthetic clothes he was wearing  His fingers were holding the thin ties on the hem of one side of the tan-white shirt.  A sensation he couldn't quite define was becoming stronger inside of himself.  It was a ghostly, haunting kind of feeling.  The best word Moros could think of as he stared at the string between his fingertips was disconnection.
But from what, he thought.  From where?  Here?  Agan?  When he could find no answer just then, Moros exhaled, frustrated.  He was hoping that some time in Atlantis would either help to distract him from his guilt-laden thoughts, or to find an answer to the questions weighing on his heart.  The first few hours in the city, so far, had failed for either aspiration.
As Moros finished tying the strings on the hem of his shirt into place, soft words teased his ears.  He could barely make them out, or recognize the voice that had said them.  He figured it was likely conversation from the other room of the borrowed suite drifting through the walls and vents.  Then, he suddenly heard the words again.  They were louder now.  The sound made his pulse race and his breath skip.  Moros recognized the voice this time.  He hesitated looking up.  He wasn't sure why.  But when the half-echoed voice of his mother reached his ears again, Moros lifted his head in an instant.
"Moros," she called out.  "Moros look.  Look up.  Look out!"
For an instant, he thought he had glimpsed her reflection in the mirrors.  She had been standing behind his right shoulder, if she had been standing there at all.  In the corner of his vision, a cold, thin shadow was in the opaque glass of the tall window.  Moros pivoted his head sharply.  Where he could have sworn to have spotted a figure standing in the hazy beam of sunlight, there was nothing.  He was alone in the quiet lavari.  That strange feeling of disconnection was still there inside of him.  But now, there was something else, as well.
He knew what it was: a powerful, chilling sensation of dread.  Something was wrong in the grand city.  Moros was certain of it.