“What does the Council get in return for keeping their secret?” Jim asked.
“The best assassins money can’t buy,” she answered bluntly. “Zxerah never miss.”
“Merde,” Pierre cursed, clearly shocked by the idea. “A secret Alvian hit squad? And you’re friends with them?”
“More than friends,” she admitted. “I’m a member of the clan. They adopted me and a few other humans they protect. Even the Council doesn’t know the Zxerah have been interacting with humans almost from their first day on this planet.”
“Why would they do that? I mean, what makes them different from the rest of their kind who want to put us in pens?” Jim didn’t know if he believed her. A quick check with his team told him she wasn’t lying.
“The Zxerah value innovation,” she said. “They’ve come to believe that psychic abilities are the manifestation of the next logical evolution of both our species. The Patriarch also believes that by breeding emotion out of his people, they’ve made a giant mistake. He studies these things—population growth and sustainability—and he thinks that unless the process is altered, his race is doomed.”
That idea sank in for a moment while Jim thought about the implications. This could be big—if the Patriarch was someone they could work with.
“You’ve lived with these Zxerah since then? You’ve spent decades with them, right? Can you tell me why nobody ages anymore?”
“Oh, yeah. That was a surprise even to the Patriarch,” Gina said. “He discovered well after the fact that one of the lead Alvian scientists discovered lost Alvian DNA in certain humans she was studying. It turns out all human survivors have some amount of Alvian DNA and it was a simple matter for their geneticists to design a treatment that would turn on the Alvian aging gene that was dormant in us all. The scientists figured it would give them more time to study us, so they disseminated the treatment planet-wide. It was an airborne thing that eventually infected us all. That’s why our aging slowed. We age like Alvians now, and they live several hundred years.”
“If that don’t beat all,” Max murmured.
“Your Patriarch sent you here for something.” Jim brought the conversation back on track. “What did you hope to accomplish?”
“I’ve been sent out from time to time over the past decades. Always in secret and always to advance the Patriarch’s own secret agenda. Most often, I’ve gone out to rescue human women who were being mistreated by their males. I’ve also been used to find other human martial artists and bring them into the Zxerah fold. Seems more than a few remember my face from the Olympics and the ad campaigns that came after. We have a small cadre of human fighters that had some training in martial arts before the cataclysm and have since been taught Zxerah fighting styles. We train hard every day. We’re as good as the Alvian Zxerah and in some notable instances, even better. When the Patriarch realized the difference that made humans better at the ancient Zxerah arts than his own people, he decided on his current course of action.”
“What was the difference? And what’s his course of action?”
“The difference is heart.” Her gaze held his as she made her revelation. “Emotion makes the difference. Too much emotion is not good in a fighter, but the Patriarch believes that too little emotion is just as detrimental to his brethren. His current course of action is to do everything he can to return emotion to his people. Like I said before, some Alvian scientists are already experimenting with such things. It’s the Patriarch’s plan to help those experiments along as best he can from the shadows. More than that, he’s vowed to help protect humanity because he sees no future for his own people without humans too. He believes a blending of our races is what will save them both—eventually.”
“Then why come here? We’re one small enclave, and we don’t get too involved in what goes on outside our complex.”
“Your group is one of many, Jim. There are other strongholds, like this one, scattered around the world. A large number of them are on the North American continent. The Patriarch sent me to try to put you in touch with the others. I’m hoping yours will be the first to reach out to another encampment of humans—if you’re willing to take the chance. Eventually, all the different groups of humans could be organized into a real resistance working in concert with each other, if and when necessary.”
Jim sat back, regarding her steadily. “That’s a mighty tall order, sweetheart. Many of our folk don’t want anything to do with the outside world. A lot of them barely made it here and this place represents safety. Opening it up to others puts them at risk, and I’d hazard to say many of them won’t want to take that risk.”
Gina sighed deeply as she seemed to consider his words. “I see your difficulty. There’s got to be some way to bring you together—at least into communication with each other—without jeopardizing everyone’s safety.”
“We can’t decide something this big in a matter of hours. Maybe not even in a couple of days.” Jim stood and his men followed suit. “I hope you planned on staying a while. We have some guest quarters nearby where you can sleep. There’ll be a guard. Sorry for that, but by your own admission, you’ve been consorting with Alvians. To us they’re still the enemy.”
“I understand.” Gina stood and followed the men out the door and down the hall. Max, Larry and Pierre said their farewells and stayed in the hallway, but Jim followed her right into the guest quarters.
“So what now?”
Gina turned to face Jim—a man she had secretly admired when she was a teenager. Heck, if she were being honest with herself, she would admit to the huge crush she’d had on him. He’d been a hottie then and things had only improved with time. He was tall, muscular and lean in the way martial artists often were, only he carried himself with more assurance than any man she’d ever known outside her own family.
Jim had that indefinable something that made him nearly irresistible. She stacked him up in her mind against her dad and brothers and knew he could have held his own with the men she admired most—both intellectually and physically. He’d been a talented fighter when she’d first seen him in the gym training with her dad. After only a few months of her father’s instruction, he was a force to be reckoned with.
She’d watched him from afar, even though she’d known better. Her dad was the specialist the CIA had sent certain people to when they needed extra training. Only the most gifted athletes and operatives were sent and more failed at the rigorous training program her father subjected them to than passed. Jim was one of the latter. He’d not only passed the months of training, but he’d earned Sensei Hanson’s respect.